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
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twig. This week in Google, paris Martineau is back. Jeff Jarvis is here. Well, he's not exactly here, he's in his garden, but we'll explain, coming up, what Google's rivals want to do to Google. It might not be the best thing for everybody else. Jeff Jarvis gets in trouble on Xcom what's new about that? And a brand new job for Paris. We're pretty proud of her. That and a whole lot more, including Mark Zuckerberg's seven-foot statue of his wife coming up next. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twig.
This is Twig this week in Google, episode 781, recorded Wednesday, august 14th 2024. But, officer, I'm a podcaster. It's time for Twig this week in Google, a show where we cover Google and everything surrounding Google, which is the entire universe. She's back and I'm so glad. Not that we didn't love our other hosts, but we missed you. Paris Martineau. Reporter for the information. Hi, Paris.
0:01:11 - Paris Martineau
Hi, I missed you guys too.
0:01:13 - Leo Laporte
Did you have fun in the nation's capital?
0:01:16 - Paris Martineau
I did. It was really lovely actually. Did you give our regards to Uncle Joe? I you know. I found him and I told him the podcast is watching. He said that didn't really make sense and I was like that's fair.
0:01:31 - Leo Laporte
You were at a conference, a journalism thing.
0:01:34 - Paris Martineau
I was not exactly a journalism conference, but I was at a conference about like ending online exploitation by the, the national center of uh, sexual exploitation, and it's really interesting. Actually they have become a. It's like a small non-profit organization and over the last couple of years they've become a huge thorn in the side of big tech because they are behind bills like cosaSA and things like that. So it was a big activist organization of people kind of advocating for bills like that. Like it started the first day I was there with a rally on Capitol Hill to, you know, get Congress to yeah 91 to 3,.
0:02:23 - Leo Laporte
The Senate voted for COSA.
0:02:25 - Paris Martineau
Yeah to yeah. 91 to 3. The senate voted for cosa. Yeah, and it ended with them going through the halls of congress and meeting with representatives of the house to advocate for cosa in the house. So it was a very interesting.
0:02:35 - Jeff Jarvis
You should have tripped them, you should have stopped them, you should have that's jeff jarvis uh, he's looking young, we've got a really good camera.
0:02:44 - Leo Laporte
Jeff is uh, jeff's verizon. Uh, it won't be back till tomorrow. It left and it says I went out for a pack of cigarettes and it's not coming back till tomorrow. So jeff is on the phone.
0:02:55 - Paris Martineau
Hi, jeff well, actually, no, I'm in zoom, oh, but I'm a hot spot jeff's got a complicated assortment of things going on to bring him here to us today, and we're all very happy for that we're just really turned off the call into zoom feature for some ungodly reason just to spite you, I would assume yes we just never imagined anybody would need it.
0:03:19 - Leo Laporte
Okay, we'll, we'll fix that, and I am.
0:03:23 - Jeff Jarvis
I went through great machinations to find the phone number and I called in and said nope, you're on Google Workroom, you can't do that.
0:03:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's probably what they said. Well, anyway, we're just glad we could get you from his home. Actually, he's now outside in the patio, which is nice, and a beautiful day in the garden.
0:03:43 - Jeff Jarvis
It is Lovely.
0:03:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I am up in the attic, as I promised you. Last week we closed the studio. You should see it looks like a war zone in the studio. It's just like stuff scattered everywhere Hamburger wrappers, everything. Just scattered everywhere.
0:03:57 - Paris Martineau
Just loose hamburger wrappers. A cartoon character stumbled through there. Yeah.
0:04:03 - Leo Laporte
It's like a scene out of Fallout, but I think the attic came out pretty nice. Do you like it?
0:04:10 - Paris Martineau
It's great. Walk me through some of this stuff behind you. It's so cute.
0:04:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, I could have taken but I did not all of my goodies. This is where you'll sit.
0:04:22 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I like the egg chair.
0:04:24 - Leo Laporte
Is that where?
0:04:25 - Paris Martineau
you sit to have, you know, have a quiet, contemplative moment.
0:04:29 - Leo Laporte
I contemplate my navel in the egg chair. That's, believe it or not, the old Dr Evil chair. You try to find your navel.
0:04:35 - Paris Martineau
Wait, really yes, like you bought it from the set.
0:04:39 - Leo Laporte
Bought it, I own the set. What do you mean? Bought it, oh own. This said when he bought it. Oh brought it. Yes, I brought it, no, no like you the doctor. Oh, you mean the chair from your office you referred to as the doctor. It's not from the movie I, that's why I? Was surprised.
0:05:00 - Paris Martineau
I was like that would be crazy if I turn it around you might recognize it, oh yeah, and then I like all the hats in the corner too I brought as many actual books.
0:05:08 - Leo Laporte
I got rid of most of the hats and I still have a hat rack there, a hat rack there, a hat rack there. I have far too many hats, but you never know. You never know when you're going to need a hat, right, is that that's?
0:05:20 - Jeff Jarvis
true, in the old days, when he had visitors in the studio after the show, they would come and take pictures with him and then they would put on Fez.
0:05:28 - Paris Martineau
I do remember this.
0:05:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah or a picture with Leo. What I didn't know, and I'm kind of surprised to learn, is I had hundreds of Fezes. I didn't realize that because they were in all different locations. Oh, I like your cowboy hat.
0:05:42 - Paris Martineau
Thank you.
0:05:42 - Leo Laporte
It's the closest hat I have whenever someone mentions well now you're making me want to get a fez out, all right, well, this we've done this exact scenario before we've done this bit before we've done this bit before I was wearing the cowboy hat, you were like I've got to put on a fez.
0:05:57 - Paris Martineau
Jeff also has a fez. I hate, repeating I did, yeah, yeah did I put on the hot dog hat.
0:06:02 - Leo Laporte
I hate repeating myself.
0:06:03 - Leo Laporte
I did, yeah, Did I put on the kepi though this is the more modern face.
0:06:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's really good. Yeah, Ataturk invented this, Anyway, yeah, so I took some stuff Like. This is Jammer B's Mac 128K the original Mac. He donated that to the set, which was nice. That's beautiful. This mixing console behind me is not the same exact one, but it's a duplicate of the one that I started in radio using in the old days. That's how we had a broadcast with proper modulation.
Yes, that's a howard stern joke with proper modulation and the nixie clock. I brought from the old studio, the same with the altair and the the Pi, dp, and I tore this medallion the twit medallion was behind me in my office. I tore it off the wall. I was concerned. I thought it might be made of drywall, but it's not, it's solid wood, that's awesome.
Yeah, it's nice, it was glued on, I pulled it off Anyway. Yeah, we kind of built a little cozy little place up here and I'm actually very happy I have all the buttons, although Benito is, as always today, running the board. He will continue to do that, so anyway, yeah, I think you should keep that hat on the whole show.
0:07:21 - Paris Martineau
I do think I should. I mean it's precarious. It's a hat for a cat.
0:07:30 - Leo Laporte
So I'll see how long it can stay on my head. That's funny because I have let me get it a hat for.
0:07:34 - Paris Martineau
I have a fez for a dog, a fez for a dog and a hat for a cat, I can match you oh, that's really good, it's hard when you move your head while talking, like I want to do.
0:07:51 - Leo Laporte
I need the strap should be longer because I can't. Can you stretch? I'm not going to stretch the strap out because I need it to get Well. Unfortunately, at this point it's a noose strap. That's not a very good look, is it? But yeah, isn't that I?
0:08:10 - Paris Martineau
have a question though how far back is the stuff behind you? Is it like a trick of the camera where it looks really close A?
0:08:17 - Leo Laporte
couple hundred miles.
0:08:18 - Paris Martineau
Oh wow, here watch, you can watch me go back. It seems much closer than that. Okay, that's about as far as I oh okay. Actually, that's farther. That's farther, yeah, that is farther, yeah, because whenever I try and put something cute right behind me or something, it's always either too close or too far.
0:08:34 - Leo Laporte
You have to have some depth. And then this camera is carefully designed to be slightly out of focus for the background, see, it's slightly out of focus. Out of focus for the background, see, it's slightly out of focus. But if I get out of it, if I hide my, actually it's looking at my eyes. So if I hide my eyes, it gets in focus right? No, if you had a pair of eyes behind you.
0:08:57 - Paris Martineau
What sort of camera?
0:08:58 - Leo Laporte
is that. Fancy. In fact, we should get you one.
0:09:01 - Jeff Jarvis
We got a new camera, a Brio MX Brio, and you're looking so good, jeff. It's doing such a good job.
0:09:10 - Leo Laporte
I think you look younger, don't you think? 20 years younger. No, the Brio's good. That's what Lisa uses on her computer. That's the high-end Logitech. But I got these three Sony FX30 cameras. Recommendation of Alex Lindsay from Mac break weekly. He's the king of streaming. So I have three shots. I have the single, I have the wide, which shows you more of the studio, and then, when I get, when I want to beg for money for club twit, I have the closeup.
0:09:44 - Paris Martineau
So you can play a Sarah McLachlan song and look deep into the camera.
0:09:48 - Leo Laporte
These poor, poor podcasters. They'll live on the streets unless you join Club Twit. The whole idea here is to give me the flexibility to actually have a guest, so at some I don't they sit in the doctor evil chair. Yeah, they would sit. Yeah, I'd have to move it a little closer and stuff, but yeah, that's the idea. So if you ever come out to visit, have we? We've never met, have we?
0:10:16 - Paris Martineau
No, we haven't Not in person.
0:10:19 - Leo Laporte
We might when you come in New York in two, three weeks. Yeah, we should do a meet up, jeff, you could come too yeah, jeff, you'd be allowed to.
0:10:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Are you going to do a show that week from New York?
0:10:32 - Leo Laporte
no, no, no, that's called a vacation where you don't work but we need to do the show you are not on vacation you must show up. I shall be on vacation September 5th through the 22nd we can't meet on Wednesday evening no, it would probably be a Thursday or Friday. What days work for you? We should? Do a Thursday because Friday is like a party she goes out with her young friends.
0:11:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Friday, I'm flying to Croatia what that?
0:11:08 - Leo Laporte
where is that vacation, or is that yeah?
0:11:10 - Paris Martineau
uh, I'm gonna go um to dubrovnik I love it.
0:11:14 - Leo Laporte
It's beautiful, you will love it yeah, it'll be really cute croatia is gorgeous.
0:11:20 - Paris Martineau
Thank you going with friends uh, my parents actually are going. My parents, oh wow.
0:11:26 - Leo Laporte
She still likes her parents enough to vacation with them, Of course. By the way, thank you, Joe, for the best badge ever. Warning some objects may be further than they appear.
0:11:37 - Paris Martineau
I like that. It looks like Leo is falling.
0:11:40 - Leo Laporte
I can't show you because I don't have that capability, but if you're in the club, it's in the Discord. That's why you should join the Discord, anyway, good, so let's do it Thursday before you go to Croatia. It's set in stone now.
0:11:55 - Paris Martineau
Fantastic.
0:11:57 - Leo Laporte
Okay, and now we just have to find a venue, and then I think we'll have a great time.
0:12:02 - Paris Martineau
I feel like the city of New York might have some.
0:12:05 - Leo Laporte
There might be a what we want. We're looking for somewhere that kids can come to, because occasionally people bring their children so that means it has to be food Bryant Park. We should just have it in the park.
0:12:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's a very New York thing to do.
0:12:20 - Leo Laporte
All right. Do I have to get a permit? No, how many people are going to be there? A hundred, oh well maybe I would just say officer, I had no idea.
0:12:33 - Paris Martineau
Officer, I'm a podcaster. You don't understand.
0:12:36 - Leo Laporte
I'm a podcaster. I thought there'd be two people here, Me and Officer. You don't understand.
0:12:41 - Paris Martineau
I record a podcast. The rules don't apply to me. I'm above the law.
0:12:46 - Leo Laporte
Okay, we have stories we should talk about, although this is much more fun. Google is about to be broken up, if the DOJ gets its way. They've said now, by the way, that is a good line and I'm going to use it in New York, but, officer, I'm a podcaster. I think that's a really good. That's a really good line. The DOJ says that they're going to ask the judge for a breakup. Now what would it be? I guess it would be search, it would be YouTube, it would be Android. These would all be separate companies.
0:13:24 - Jeff Jarvis
And companies. Two different companies in and out, Supply side and demand side.
0:13:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and that's, by the way, the biggest and they didn't even address this the biggest conflict of interest is Google both buys and sells ads Like that's crazy. So you know, if anything happens, it's going to be a while I don't know if it's going to make any sense.
0:13:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it's going to be a long while and the stock market is going to do it Cool. I'm talking to the town today.
0:13:59 - Leo Laporte
I look, but it's not like it had a huge reaction to the report. Well, and I think the market understands that this is not for a long time. Let me see. Here's the. Yeah, the price didn't change that much. This is inter-day, so let me look at the five days. Yeah, see, there was a big drop at the beginning of the day at 9 o'clock when the market first heard about it and that big sell-off, and then it came back a little bit, although you know what? That's a pretty, that's a big downfall from july uh, a month ago, when it closed at 192 bucks, is now 162 bucks. That's a that's a pretty big sell-off.
0:14:39 - Paris Martineau
not that the market is all that matters in this stuff, but I'm surprised didn't even get a bump from its little event the other day.
0:14:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, the other day was just yesterday Jeff and I covered it and it is very possible that it was already baked into the price right, Because there was no surprise to the surprise.
We're going to talk about that in a little bit. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. Some of the things that are an issue, of course, for Apple and Firefox and Samsung. We talked about this last week. They get big payments Apple $20 billion a year from Google to be the default search engine on iPhone. Then that was one of the main things the DOJ and the judge agreed was illegal. Google is using its monopoly, its monopoly power and its vast resources to preserve its monopoly, to keep anybody else from entering the search market by buying one might say bribribing Apple, samsung and Firefox.
0:15:47 - Jeff Jarvis
I wonder with conservative courts whether that stands.
0:15:51 - Leo Laporte
It's going to go to the Supreme Court, of course.
0:15:53 - Jeff Jarvis
It is. It is so, leo, you mentioned last week that your thought was to open source the index which Business Insider wrote about it's if they thought of it, you thought of it first.
0:16:05 - Leo Laporte
No, I didn't. I think I was quoting them because I don't want to take credit for that, because because people are mad at me for that people mad at one of us online. I'm shocked uh, I can't remember what their objection was to open sourcing it. I think somebody said it just makes everybody equally bad. It doesn't solve the problem.
0:16:33 - Paris Martineau
It is. Bloomberg had some interesting reporting on this DOJ story this week. They wrote divesting the Android operating system, used on about 2.5 billion devices worldwide, is one of the remedies that's been most frequently discussed by the Justice Department attorneys, according to some people, which I was surprised that that is something that they are strongly discussing and considering. Say that again and considering. Say that again. One of the things that, uh, the justice department attorneys are considering as a remedy is making google get rid of the android operating system or spin it off. That way, if they break it up.
0:17:19 - Leo Laporte
That's the thing that most encouraged a competitive world with apple yeah, I agree, and this is, this is the peril of this. These companies are so big and there are so many consequences. As I said, firefox would probably be out of business if they forbid these, these payments. This is from bloomberg a couple of days ago. Us considers rare antitrust move, breaking up google, and this is because they won in court. Now judge meta uh will have to. Mehta, by the way, has no, no relationship, no relation, mark zuckerberg. Judge meta has to set a date for another trial for the penalty, but at that point, that's when the doj says well, here's what we want, your honor. It says the government will likely seek a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were, et cetera, the case against Google. Those are the $20 billion payments to Apple, et cetera. The most likely units is, according to Bloomberg, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google's web browser, chrome. Does that really?
0:18:23 - Jeff Jarvis
hurt Google either of those? No, let's just talk that through right, it doesn't. Android exists somewhere. People use phones. People still like to use google search and google features, wherever those phones are. Now, they can't be accused of tying it to the operating system and we're all going to want to use it. I will, uh, our chrome.
0:18:44 - Leo Laporte
It's not really a business well, in fact, if you, if you think about why, why does google have android and chrome? One reason only you have to understand what google's business is. It's not search, it's advertising. So all of google's other products, besides advertising, are designed to get you to see google advertising. So they want the browser because then you know you can see more Google advertising. They want Android because what do you do?
Nine-tenths of the time you're in the line at a grocery store or anything else, you're looking at your phone, so they want your phone. This is the most valuable real estate in the world is your phone home screen, and you can go on and on on. They want youtube for advertising purposes. So all of they're all the same. I don't think and here's the thing I don't think if you got google to sell off chrome or sell off android, that would impact it, because people would still be using chrome and android and you'd still be seeing google ads. So I think what you really have to do is what you said at first, jeff, which is break up the ad business, at least in the two.
0:19:52 - Jeff Jarvis
But this case is not about the ad. That's the upcoming FTC case and this case is about the paid-for search program.
0:19:59 - Leo Laporte
Well, Meta ruled that Google illegally monopolized? Well, this is the ruling. Was they illegally monopolized the markets of online search and search text ads? Remember it was about text ads. So it is about ads.
0:20:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, but stop right there. It's text ads. It's not all of the programmatic advertising where they have buy side and sell side. So that's not part of this. They have buy side and sell side.
0:20:25 - Paris Martineau
So that's not part of this Another point that Bloomberg mentioned is, quote another option would require Google to divest or license its data to rivals like Microsoft's Bing or DuckDuckGo. Judge Mehta's ruling found that Google's contracts ensure not only that its search engine gets the most user data 16 times as much as its next closest competitor but that data stream also keeps its rivals from improving their search results and competing effectively. I do feel like that would have a notable impact on their business if they had to level the playing field with competitors and license their data to their rivals.
0:21:02 - Jeff Jarvis
No, that was kind of the Leo fix last week, yeah.
0:21:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, out of sync in our discord says the harm in this is that Google's practices keep people from having a competitive web search option, but none of these proposed remedies fixes this, except for perhaps licensing the search index. He says and I think you might not be wrong that they're just trying to destroy Google because they don't like Google, because Google's too big.
0:21:31 - Jeff Jarvis
It's very politically popular to go after Silicon Valley right now.
0:21:35 - Leo Laporte
I agree with the premise that Google's too powerful. I agree with the premise that they use their monopoly to buy and sell ads. So they've juked the ad market, uh, unnaturally. This is exactly why you have antitrust, because it's not a free market.
0:21:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's not what this case is.
0:21:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Um this is.
0:21:58 - Jeff Jarvis
This is like Microsoft in the old days it's always going to be five steps behind. Right Yesterday's war.
0:22:04 - Leo Laporte
Right, well, we'll watch with interest. I mean, it's kind of moot at this point. They have to have another trial to determine the remedies, and then there'll be an appeal and an appeal, and an appeal, and we're, at least I would say, three years out, if not five.
0:22:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, Plus, you might have a new president who comes from California.
0:22:22 - Paris Martineau
And a new mix of a Supreme Court, which is probably where the case will end up eventually.
0:22:28 - Leo Laporte
So it really is up in the air.
0:22:30 - Paris Martineau
It's like, yeah, but I do think that this I mean the climate that we're in politically and socially is really relevant here, and this is what we're also seeing with, you know, bills like COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, and all these different efforts to kind of stick it to big tech in some way or another. Often they don't make sense. Often they seem, if you peer into the details, like they won't work, but the reality is they're being driven by a surge in tech animus that is going to produce some sort of result, be it like legislatively or politically or socially. At a certain point, this is going to spill over into something. I think it just remains to be seen what the exact result is.
0:23:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, to get back to COSA, that's exactly what happened. The 91 senators that voted for COSA didn't agree on why. I mean Marsha Blackburn says, because the internet spreads transgender propaganda. It's for all different.
0:23:35 - Paris Martineau
I mean, and now it's technically COSPA, it's not even COSA, it's the. Kids.
0:23:39 - Leo Laporte
Online Safety and Privacy Act. Is that the House's name.
0:23:44 - Paris Martineau
No, as part of it going through the Senate, they combined COSA the Kids.
0:23:49 - Leo Laporte
Online.
0:23:49 - Paris Martineau
Safety Act with COPPA 2.0, and they call it COSPA, which is you know. I was on the Hill last week and was sitting in the room while some of these activists were meeting with like House representatives and their, their staff, and even some of them were like which one is it? Now I've fully forgotten. It's hard to keep track. So I think that everyone is struggling a bit, which is, uh, makes things even more complicated when you're talking about a bill that would affect that would be the biggest tech regulation we've had in decades at that conference?
0:24:25 - Leo Laporte
was there, uh, optimism that the house would pass it? I mean yes, yeah, I'd say, it hasn't even been brought up for a vote though right in the house, right, I mean it hasn't, but they're also in august recess right now.
0:24:39 - Paris Martineau
It's not gonna happen this session early yeah, and part of it is. I mean, I asked the CEO of Nicosi, kind of the leading sponsor of the event, like what do you think? Because I'd heard that there have been like rumors, I think from even Punchbowl News reported that they spoke to one like house aide and they had said that among like the speaker of the house, the current Villavcosa is like dead in the water. This was a couple of weeks ago though though.
0:25:06 - Jeff Jarvis
So who knows?
0:25:07 - Leo Laporte
what's changed since then?
0:25:09 - Paris Martineau
but I asked what do you think about that? And she's like yeah, honestly, we've been so focused on getting it through the senate, we haven't had much time to focus in the house, and now all systems go on trying to convert people in the house. I think they already have a couple dozen co-sponsors for the bill in the house and it seemed at least as I was taught like following around people. Everyone this group spoke with seemed fairly convinced by it.
0:25:33 - Leo Laporte
It's easy you go into a member of congress and say, well, you wouldn't want to be the one who voted against this and didn't protect the children. Right, you care about kids, don't you? And I mean regardless what the staff tells the member of congress, because it doesn't, by the way, it doesn't protect the kids. That's our, our position. It doesn't protect anybody, it just makes a mess of things, including and we had shoshana weissman on on sunday on this week in tech. She uh writes for um r street, which is a kind of a conservative lobbying group, but one of the things she writes a lot about is age verification doesn't work, can't work.
And ultimately it's a huge privacy violation for adults, so it's a non-starter. And the other thing she said is in her opinion and I think, the opinion of a lot of people. And the other thing she said is in her opinion and, I think, the opinion of a lot of people it doesn't pass. The First Amendment issues the courts would inevitably throw it out, but nobody cares. And I said, well, are members of Congress and the Senate voting for this because that gives them cover? They don't care, they don't want it to pass, but they don't want to be the ones seen to vote against protecting the children. And she said, no, no, they really believe in it. But it's pretty obvious that the First Amendment challenges alone would torpedo it.
0:27:16 - Paris Martineau
I think that it's really interesting because it seems to be something that is almost divorced from logic. It is, I mean, the perfect combination of the oh won't you think of the children? Moral panic with this long simmering now at a boil, rage against technology companies, and you have all of these senators or representatives who have to sit there and listen to these awful stories from parents who've had terrible things happen to their kids and they end up finding it very compelling. It seems like a easy cause to like rally people for.
I um, one of the people who spoke at this conference was the attorney general of new mexico, raul torres um, who's one of the many attorneys general who's sued a bunch of, who sued Meta for things relating to this, and I was asking him I was like oh, like what led you to, in your first year here as attorney general, go after a company like Meta?
He's like well, he had previously, I guess, focused on child sexual abuse material and things like that. And he's like and so I was looking for a kind of similar targets like that he reached out to third party organizations to kind of get some data on it. He's like oh, the place where the most of this is being shared now is on meta, and so he's like, of course I'm going to go after this huge tech company. It's very politically expedient to do that, especially when you have the data to back it up. This huge tech company. It's very politically expedient to do that, especially when you have the data to back it up. So I think it is kind of interesting because we are in a moment where, even if the logic isn't there as to the way these bills are written, people are so in their feelings about it that it is difficult to stop this ball once it has started rolling.
0:28:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I think you're really right, paris. I'm really glad you're doing policy stuff now, because it would be fascinating to compare notes. In my trips to Washington and Sacramento. What I see is staffs who are trying to bring sense and logic to this stuff and they just beg people like you or me to say give me another idea here, give me another alternative, give me another way to think about this, because their bosses are going to come out with one pat line Well, you don't mean you want to be against children, you don't mean you're against copyright, you don't mean you're against news, and that makes it easy for them and the staff is caught in the middle. And I've found the staffs are smart and are trying, but they've got a really hard job.
0:29:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, staffs are smart and are trying, but they've got a really hard job. Well, it just shows you nuance doesn't do well in Congress, apparently, god no, politics and nuance don't go together. Of course they don't, because the voters don't get nuance, don't have time to get nuance If it doesn't fit in a 30-second ad.
0:29:43 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I wouldn't blame them. I'd blame media if they're playing the media.
0:29:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, sigh, let's take a little break and come back. We have so much to talk about the Google event from yesterday. I'm going to give you a little. I have a couple of things I want to do. One is go through some of the photographic features that they're adding to Pixel phones, and I'm really curious how photographers are going to react to this, because already you have people saying, oh, ai is going to cause huge problems. And now you've got this where you've got AI in every phone and every picture is really a kind of a hybrid of a photograph and AI, so we'll talk about that. Of a photograph and AI, so we'll talk about that. We'll talk about the new Google intelligence and the voice, the uncanny new voice that they're using. Actually, it's pretty canny. Lots to talk about Schools banning phones, a Florida firm losing 2.9 billion personal records of Americans and Canadians, including social security numbers Whoops, yeah. And why Hellman's mayonnaise may be the key to nuclear fusion All that and more. I'll throw that one in if things get slow Coming up on this Week in Google.
It's great to have you back Paris, and I'm so glad that you're up on this COSA thing. It's great to have you back paris, and I'm so glad that you're up on this cosa thing. We will, uh, because this is a big issue and we're going to talk a lot about it yeah, uh, and we're going to watch with interest.
It's funny. All the people who are knowledgeable about tech are all against it. The but? But it's the people who are in fact in charge, or not? So we've got this real conflict here. It's not the first time. The Coast has been on the ballot for years. Now. Jeff Jarvis is also here on his phone from his patio.
0:31:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm waving right now, but you can't see me.
0:31:47 - Paris Martineau
I can feel it.
0:31:47 - Leo Laporte
At least we can hear you. You know, we should explain that Jeff's Verizon Fios is out for 24 hours.
0:31:56 - Paris Martineau
I believe it'll come back before the show. I believe in the power of technology.
0:32:01 - Leo Laporte
That's because you're also on Fios.
0:32:03 - Paris Martineau
You have to believe. If I stop believing in Fios, it will stop working. Hey, if I could get Fios.
0:32:10 - Leo Laporte
I would be thrilled. We're, of course, on Comcast, because there's no choice and because Comcast has been going up and down a little bit here. We just ordered Starlink, which I hate to give Elon even a penny, but it's a good solution. So we're going to have Starlink up on the roof as a failover, because we cannot not produce these fabulous programs for you. Maybe there are those who disagree with that, but we feel like we've got to do it. Our show today, brought to you by our great sponsor, 1password. They had such great news. A couple of months ago, 1password acquired one of our favorite sponsors, collide.
I've always loved Collide K-O-L-I-D-E You've heard me do the ads Because Collide was security that puts users first, that lets users be part of your security team, your employees, the people that you are, as an IT professional, trying to keep safe that you need them to work with you right. Well, now 1Password, which is kind of one of the kings of authentication, together with Collide, have provided a fantastic solution. They call Extended Access Management. It's more than a password manager. It's more than an Okta validator of devices. It's everything you need See. Here's the question If you you need See here's the question. If you're an IT professional. Here's the question for you Do your end users always use company-owned devices?
They never use their own laptops. They never bring their own phone to work, do they? They always use apps that you approve. They never run Plex or something else on their company-owned laptops. Of course they do. Of course they do. So how do you keep your company's data safe when the data is exposed to all these unmanaged apps sitting on these unmanaged devices? That's why you need 1Password Extended Access Management. It's the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, all these apps, all these identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, that every device is known and healthy and that every app on that device is visible and approved, or at least you know what it is and it's up to date. It solves problems the traditional IAM and MDM just can't touch.
If you think of your company's security, as like the quad of a college campus, you've got the nice brick paths between the buildings, the ivy-covered buildings. They're the company-owned devices. That's the buildings, the IT-approved apps, that's the paths, the managed employee identities. Those are the people walking peacefully, politely and properly along the paved. But then there's the paths that people actually use. Right. They cut through the grass because it's the shortest point from building A to building B. So you got these dirt paths. Every quad has it. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non-employee identities like contractors. You got to let them in.
But most security tools don't even know about them. They work on the happy brick paths and all the security problems are happening on those little dirt roads. That's why you need 1Password Extended Access Management and Security for the way we actually work today, available now to companies using Okta. But here's the good news. This is why the Collide 1Password merger is such a great thing, coming later to Google Workspace yes, jeff, and Microsoft Entra, so more people can use this great solution. Check it out. Find out more at 1passwordcom slash twig that's 1, the number 1,. P-a-s-s-w-o-r-dcom slash twig 1. Password Extended Access Management. You want this thing. Trust me, you really do. We're so glad that they are a sponsor of this Week in Google.
0:36:09 - Paris Martineau
All right, all right, right back we are with I forgot for a moment that jeff was what he was young, good looking, jeff jarvis, and uh, and they and the actually handsome and young, very smart, no, it's me, I've got a beard to rival Jeff.
0:36:30 - Leo Laporte
You also have a tiny cowboy hat.
0:36:32 - Paris Martineau
It's true, it's fallen somewhere.
0:36:34 - Leo Laporte
So do you care? I mean, I know Jeff does, because he uses a Pixel phone, but you're an iPhone user, right, I think?
0:36:41 - Paris Martineau
I am an iPhone user, yeah.
0:36:43 - Leo Laporte
As am I. Although I have a Pixel phone, this is a Pixel 8. Yesterday, Jeff and I watched I thought a fairly good presentation from Google, Not perfect, they did it live.
0:36:56 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say, didn't Jim?
0:36:58 - Leo Laporte
and I fail multiple times, yeah, three times for one guy. What was he asking, jeff? I forgot it was some simple thing.
0:37:05 - Jeff Jarvis
He was trying to take a picture of a concert calendar and then have it figure out the connections between that and his personal calendar.
0:37:13 - Leo Laporte
When he could go see this performer Right, and when it failed it just went. It's the same thing, it just sat there we were all used to this.
0:37:25 - Paris Martineau
I saw he had to switch phones.
0:37:26 - Leo Laporte
He's had to switch phones and then he was very you know what. He was so relieved. A lot of credit to this guy, because when something fails twice now you have to make a decision Do I throw this whole demo out or do I take a chance and do it a third time? Because it's bad if it fails three times. It's really bad. To his credit, he did it and and it worked the third time. I mean, I wasn't like, oh, I gotta buy that right. But you know, okay, I was just, we were, at this point rooting for him. I think there are other things that it does. I think that that maybe you want you want to do the photography first, or do you want to do the voices first, whichever, but I also don't want to forget these screenshots too. Oh, jeff and I actually kind of grokked that feature, tell us about that.
0:38:22 - Jeff Jarvis
So we all take screenshots of things, whether it's something on our phone where it's a catalog or a menu or an appointment, and now you can use the AI to both store and categorize those screenshots. But the AI can also read those screenshots and use the information in a way that you would then ask it to.
0:38:46 - Leo Laporte
Do you do that, paris? Are you like Jeff, that you take screenshots of stuff you want to remember?
0:38:51 - Paris Martineau
Yes.
0:38:52 - Leo Laporte
Okay.
0:38:56 - Paris Martineau
I today screenshotted instructions on how to beat the spider matriarch in auto mode in Baldur's Gate 3. And did I look at it once while I was actually doing it? No, but it brought me peace to know that it was there.
0:39:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, imagine if you could use that feature all the time and those screenshots become a database of all the information you want to keep track of.
0:39:14 - Jeff Jarvis
See, like your photos, it becomes another window on your wall Right.
0:39:18 - Paris Martineau
Or your email, right, so it's more than just searchable. Like in my iPhone. I could search, like whatever I could search the word spider matriarch and it would pull up that screenshot.
0:39:33 - Leo Laporte
You're saying that I could do something even better with it.
0:39:34 - Paris Martineau
That's pretty good. I didn't know you could do that. Yeah, you can search in text and have been for a while so that's one of the features.
0:39:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Jason's example, from having been there and watched it, is that there was a uh, a pre-sale and a sale date, and somebody wanted to put the reminder of the actual sale date in their calendar, and so it figured out which was which the sale date bigger and uh then did as asked wow, oh, that's cool, so it's using ai, it's more than just ocring the text in the image it's using AI.
0:40:05 - Leo Laporte
It's more than just OCRing the text in the image. It's using the AI to understand it and then you can query it in a way that is useful. That's pretty good the other thing is I take pictures.
0:40:16 - Jeff Jarvis
One of the things I take most pictures of the most boring thing I can is whiteboards.
0:40:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, perfect, and I can imagine what it would do with that. So I think this is what's cool about what Google's doing and Apple's somewhat doing this too which is, instead of using AI to write stories or have a conversation with you or draw weird images of Jeff in the swimming pool, I which I'm not admitting that I did or or denying that I did you can, I tried, I wanted to have a really good image for you, but anyway, you can.
What was I now? I've lost track. I just have that image in my head.
0:40:57 - Jeff Jarvis
I think this makes AI a lot more practical.
0:41:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, practical and useful, and Apple did the same thing, by the way, at WWDC they really focused on real world applications of AI and I you know I loved that. One of the first things they showed was having Gemini listen to your phone call and then synopsize it for you so that after a phone call, you have phone notes for every call you make. Now I don't know anybody makes calls anymore. If you did, that'd be really useful the other question we want.
0:41:30 - Jeff Jarvis
We want to ask uh kathy gillis on is in two-party recording states whether that would be a violation, because it's not recording it in audio but it is recording the substance of I would assume I don't know.
0:41:49 - Leo Laporte
I had the same reaction I went well yeah, because I mean it, because it's not recording it, so I think it bypasses that law. It's just afterwards, like your assistants listening in and at the, and we would be legal. Wouldn't it not be legal, jeff, for an assistant to be on a phone call with you and then write notes so that you had this because it's about technology, so that law had to come once.
0:42:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh my god, you could record my voice.
0:42:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, probably technology specific actually the, the genesis of the law is kind of funny, because you would think that somebody is recording a call, would know they're recording a call. In many states that's all that's required and I think it comes from wire. It's related to wiretapping. Yes.
0:42:41 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, because I mean at least one party In New York. It's a one-party state. Right so my question, though, is what's happening on the back end? Is that audio like? Is the transcription happening on locally on your device, or?
0:42:56 - Jeff Jarvis
is it being sent somewhere? That's the beauty of the chip. There is one presumes I don't know that that's the right question, because so much more of this could be done locally.
0:43:04 - Paris Martineau
If it is going somewhere to then be summarized, then I think that would run afoul of two-party consent, because then some version of the Then you're actually recording it, yeah. Yeah.
0:43:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you have to just send it off to the AI in the cloud. It's very-. Anyway, it's a but you agree, it's a useful-. I mean for you especially-. Yes, it's very useful, huge feature, right.
0:43:30 - Paris Martineau
I don't know it makes me nervous, like you might be held to your promises I know you said you're gonna come to the ski ball tournament. I have the notes like my source calls anyway, just for my own note taking purposes. But I keep it on kind of a local device that I don't connect to the internet. I would feel uncomfortable with having potentially sensitive calls being connected to some.
Yeah, I would need to understand more about how it works I also kind of the first point that comes to my head, which may or may not be, uh, I mean, it's definitely not something most people would have to consider, but I would be concerned about the potential legal implications of this, like down the road, like, for instance, for me, a journalist, I think. Sometimes I get threatened with lawsuits based on what I'm reporting. Um, so far I've never actually been sued, knock on wood. But a part of that is, you cannot destroy any material, and so my worry is what if I get one of these notes sent to me about a call that somehow transcribes something wrong or gives me a slightly inaccurate summary because it doesn't understand the context of the words, and then that becomes admissible in court if I'm sued and it spins something in a negative light inadvertently, like that's the thing.
0:44:47 - Jeff Jarvis
That, on the other hand, you also want to record, you want, you want records of things, and it makes it easier to get those records.
0:44:56 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, but on the on the third other hand, for us three handed people, I could see it potentially being something that you know police would go after for you know, in discovery with people you know police would go after for. You know, yeah, in discovery with people you know more and more.
0:45:12 - Leo Laporte
Your phone is is a record of everything you do, some of it very private. Yeah, that's why police want to get into your phone, so, rob? So what if?
0:45:21 - Paris Martineau
you know, if your police, instead of just pulling your call logs to try and potentially bring me for crime or something like that they got your a description of all of your calls.
0:45:31 - Leo Laporte
This is really, in a nutshell, what everybody was concerned about with Microsoft. Recall same idea. Right, it was recording. Everything you did is screenshots. If hackers got it or law enforcement got it, it was a violation. So this is. Rob in our discord says here's the instructions from Google. He says it is on device. When in a call on the Pixel 9, you tap the more overflow menu for call notes, google will disclose to all parties that you are recording. Oh, isn't that interesting. With the screen noting that it's in progress, calls have to be longer than 30 seconds After you hang up, it will take a moment for the call notes to generate the summary which will appear in the Recents tab with a tap letting you view the full transcript and listen to the audio. So it is recording it, and this is all powered by on-device Gemini Nano.
But it has to be two-party cassette, two-party cassette, and it is a recording as well as a not-in-line.
0:46:25 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
0:46:27 - Leo Laporte
But it's on-device I device. I mean more and more we need protection for these devices because, yeah, I mean everything's in here and if you're a reporter and you're using this as your notepad, or even a politician.
0:46:40 - Paris Martineau
I mean think about everything that's happened in the last couple of weeks with the trump campaign and the iranian cyber attacks that I think they tried to target people on both sides of the aisle as well, Like from what I recall. I could be wrong or out of date. I think Roger Stone may have been one of the points of weakness in there and it was a personal. I think it was something to do with an email attempt.
But imagine if you had. Suddenly one of the things you'd be worried about is a description of every call you ever made was also potentially up for grabs for hackers. That would be bad Wow.
0:47:16 - Jeff Jarvis
But I'm figuring their risotto recipe on the right is probably just rice-a-roni.
0:47:21 - Paris Martineau
That's true.
0:47:26 - Leo Laporte
All right, so I thought that was a nice feature, the screen cuts feature is a nice feature.
These are all very practical uses. Here's what Google says in their keyword blog about the new photo features, and this is a little more controversial Take stunning photos and videos with upgraded lenses. Okay, that's not controversial. The only lens I think that's upgraded is the 5X telephoto lens, the 48 megapixel. The others are just improved with better computational photo capabilities.
The 9 Pro Fold 1799 has an ultra-thin advanced triple rear camera system. Traditionally, folding phones do not have great cameras, so I think they want to improve that. They also talked about improving video and also giving some of these AI features to video, including HDR video, which I thought was kind of cool. This is the new HDR Plus imaging pipeline Capture high quality videos of special moments with super res zoom video, so it's zoomed in on those puffins from a great distance. 20x super res zoom in night sight video or video boost. They did something Google rarely does, which is compare their night sight shots with Apple iPhone 15 pro maxes night shots. Although I don't know if it was a fair comparison, I think you could probably look how much this zooms in.
0:48:46 - Paris Martineau
That's really really really cool. And you know you can't get close to puffins because they're mean sons of see. Those puffins are probably talking about the privacy implications what the hell is that person?
0:48:58 - Leo Laporte
hey, stop taping us, get out of here, two-party consent two, hey, uh, I don't know what's going on in this picture. Uh, she's leading him through a flower shop by the hand, this was just the lighting.
0:49:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, yeah. Okay, it has two different images and it takes the shadows. It's called HDR. It's still photography. It's also in video now.
0:49:20 - Leo Laporte
It's nice to have that in video. Yeah, ai upscaling to give you videos in 8K. Nobody wants 8K videos Be in the picture, even when you're taking it. This is so weird. So you take a pic, you take an image, and then somehow you get in the image and take another one, maybe you, maybe you swap with somebody else yeah, and now. Yeah, she left the woman on the left left to take a picture of the woman on the right, and now you have all three of you in one photo.
0:49:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Jason showed me a demo that they did today where the first image. It's a button you hit for this purpose add me. The first image is frozen. And when the person goes in, let's say you're taking a picture of four people. The fourth person does something, but the original image of the three people doesn't change.
0:50:14 - Leo Laporte
And you can see where they are. Somehow Some ghost image must appear on the screen so you know how to get in that shot.
0:50:26 - Paris Martineau
I'm curious how do you?
0:50:27 - Leo Laporte
make sure that the person's standing in the same spot that you were. Well, that's what.
0:50:29 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm saying, you take the picture such that you leave them room yeah, there are going to be a lot of really funny and creative uses.
0:50:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, this this will be very weird, including pictures of the same person three times over yeah, the great thing was with the demo that we saw yesterday with leo and I is when the one woman leaves to go take the photo, she's in the picture twice right? Her body right right, it's, it's an out-of-body experience kind of image, that that's the most fun actually to me this is one that's more controversial.
0:50:59 - Leo Laporte
Make edits easier with reimagine, with in magic editor, so you can use ai image generation on top of an image to make it completely different. We've seen this before.
0:51:13 - Paris Martineau
I feel like I wonder what this is going to do for the tabloid industry.
0:51:18 - Leo Laporte
You can't trust any image ever again.
0:51:21 - Paris Martineau
The whole industry that is like they'll pay you 20K if you get a photo of Kate Middleton out and about or something. How do you ever do that again when someone can?
0:51:34 - Jeff Jarvis
do this, it's too easy, I go back to my favorite story when I put this in the book. One of the photos we know of Abraham Lincoln is his body on slave owner John Calhoun his head on John Calhoun's body Right. This goes way back.
0:51:53 - Leo Laporte
The photographer using scissors in this case, did the edit because he thought Calhoun looked more presidential than skinny old. Abe Lincoln. Yeah, this has gone on forever, but what is the historical precedent, jeff, right? I mean, for the most part, we've trusted photos, and photos aren't that old, they're only a couple hundred years old.
0:52:15 - Jeff Jarvis
When I was at the Association of Internet Researchers, all these philosophers there laughed Like we never know what reality is Right. There's nothing new here.
0:52:26 - Leo Laporte
Right, you remember who was it? Uh, that was fooled by. Oh, it was um are you talking about arthur conan doyle, the arthur conan doyle, the author of the sherlock holmes stories, believed in fairies because there was a famous picture two little girls took of clearly cardboard, cutout fairies in the forest. I don't know, leah, those could be real and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for the rest of his life, believed in mysticism and fairies all because of this clearly doctored photo. I mean, it wasn't even well done. I'll see if I can find it.
0:53:04 - Jeff Jarvis
If you want to believe in Tinkerbell, then there is a Tinkerbell.
0:53:08 - Jeff Jarvis
But with photos, even angles can fool you. Even a real photo taken from a weird angle can fool you.
0:53:14 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, we've seen this all the time. We've seen videos. What was the video of? The woman at the Academy Awards ceremonies and her mother disappeared behind her.
0:53:22 - Paris Martineau
Remember that, and famously, there was that whole period where Mark Zuckerberg went on his tour around America and staged all those photos to make himself look like six foot tall, when he's really a short king.
0:53:36 - Leo Laporte
So this is the very famous Cottingley fairies picture. I don't know those look like real fairies to me, taken by a nine-year-old and a 16-year-old.
0:53:45 - Jeff Jarvis
I believe, leo, I believe.
0:53:47 - Leo Laporte
This is back in 1917. The pictures came to the attention, according to wikipedia, of writer sir arthur conan doyle, who then used them to illustrate an article on fairies that he'd been commissioned to write for the strand magazine. Doyle already a spiritualist, I guess was enthusiastic about the photographs and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomenon 1917. So I guess the precedent it's just wild. Uh anyway, so now you could do it even better with the ai. You could fix composition and editing with the auto frame and magic editor. So that's a outpainting right. So you're going to take an image and you're going to expand it to better frame a photo. It can even suggest a wider view of your image using generative ai to fill in the blanks around the subject. Again, this is the kind of thing that makes some people photographers chiefly crazy. Night sight in panorama and said looked like the pan. They did a demo. I don't have to try it, but they did a demo of the panorama that did a really nice job.
This is, you know, something we've been getting better and better at, and it does it at night as well, right, zoom enhance straight out of Blade Runner. Even after you've taken a photo, zoom center enhance. All of our CSI dreams come true. It's true. But do androids really dream of electric sheep? Get kids to look at the camera and smile with Pixel 9 Pro. Folds made you look. Now this is hysterical and you need to use this on your ski ball team I think they will really like that oh that's so cute and then you have a funny picture of them so, uh, you know
0:55:41 - Paris Martineau
they are kind of captivating. I'm not gonna lie. You can't help but smile I would have loved to see what the test focus groups for this were like they just had to have groups of unruly kids and be like which one's the best.
0:55:56 - Leo Laporte
They must have had at least one that the kids ran screaming Right. No, make it stop. So the Verge and others have somehow gotten access to these devices and have started giving us reviews, but I think this is one where I wouldn't jump on it, uh, unless you uh, did you buy it?
0:56:19 - Jeff Jarvis
did you buy it?
0:56:19 - Leo Laporte
no, paul ferratt did. I was surprised. I it's hard for me to just, you know I it's hard for me to justify it. The good news is, trade-ins mean that it would only cost a couple hundred bucks, because here's my Pixel 8, xl, pro XL, and so I could use this to trade in. But that's the good news. The bad news is I already did it once to get the fold, so I don't know. I did it with Google Fi, we'll see. I won't trade in the fold. I'll keep the fold and then trade in the Pixel 8 and see if I can get a good deal, maybe you can.
0:56:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I saw some reference today. I tried to see if you could get up to $300 gift cards if you bought through Amazon. I couldn't find that Everybody's competing.
0:56:59 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's find out. I'm going to go to figo and I'm gonna go shopping on google fi and let's see what should I get? The pixel pro xl, and which color do you like? By the way, that was one of the features. It comes in porcelain. I like the hazel myself.
0:57:19 - Paris Martineau
Obsidian hazel, just gray yeah yeah, there's white white is porcelain, obsidian is black gold that was popular like six years ago no, come on you.
0:57:33 - Leo Laporte
If you would have some respect for me as a man to own a pink phone, wouldn't you say, wow, he's. He's very confident in his, in his masculinity I would say okay 256 gig. We talked about this jeff. I think that is enough. So that's 11.99 but no guys.
0:57:53 - Paris Martineau
Is that enough? Yeah, but wait putting all your photos I have something to trade.
0:57:57 - Leo Laporte
See that I have something to.
0:58:00 - Paris Martineau
I don't want device protection. The way it's phrased makes it I got. I got something to trade. I'll tell you what I got to trade.
0:58:05 - Leo Laporte
I got something to trade. I'll tell you what I got to trade.
0:58:08 - Paris Martineau
I've got 12 to 24 chickens.
0:58:09 - Leo Laporte
A Pixel 8 Pro Best Buy will get a $200 gift certificate. Is my phone in good condition? It's in the best. Oh yeah, only $270. What? Okay, maybe they, I don't know. That's not a huge deal. If I had the trade in now, I'm paying a lot. Yeah, I'm not going to do that because it's a $1,200 phone. So I'm really still paying over 900 bucks for the thing. Forget about it.
0:58:48 - Paris Martineau
Forget about it.
0:58:49 - Leo Laporte
Forget about it, forget about my old, my old six oh yeah, what do you get for the trade-in on that? Two dollars, I don't know and a stick of gum just a wisp of smoke, just a sense.
0:59:04 - Paris Martineau
You get a sense of accomplishment. Back is what you get.
0:59:07 - Leo Laporte
All right, ladies and gentlemen you're watching this week in google. We actually have google. You get a sense of accomplishment. Back is what you get. All right, ladies and gentlemen, you're watching this Week in Google. We actually have Google Stories here. That's in honor of the return of the wonderful Paris Martineau from the information.
0:59:18 - Paris Martineau
I'm just such a big Google head, you know.
0:59:20 - Leo Laporte
She's a Google head.
0:59:21 - Paris Martineau
That's what they say.
0:59:23 - Leo Laporte
Martineau.01 on the signal if you've got a scoop. And Jeff Jarvis, I didn't take the card when I moved.
0:59:32 - Paris Martineau
I don't know what you're actually devastating, leo.
0:59:35 - Leo Laporte
That's really sad I have to go back and get the card. He's the town night professor of journalistic integrity emeritus at the craig newmark. Do you have the craig? Graduate school journalism at the city university of new New York and the director of the Townite Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Thank you, benito, save the day. Can I get that printed up on a laminated card?
1:00:03 - Paris Martineau
Do you even own a printer at home?
1:00:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we have two which we don't need. Why two? Yeah, we have two which we don't need. Why two? Yeah, I got a laser printer right here, the one that they say everybody has but nobody talks about the Brother laser printer, and then that's black and white. And then Lisa actually has a very good color HP multifunction because she needs color.
1:00:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I got a question for you. We have a I think, 18-year-old Canon copier and it's wonderful because you can do more larger and you can shrink and you can do all kinds of things and it's a plain old copier. You can't buy a copier anymore. Everything is made digital. You cannot.
1:00:40 - Leo Laporte
I'm impressed.
1:00:42 - Paris Martineau
Keep it, you're probably the only man alive who could copy their own butt right now.
1:00:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because I can't do that.
1:00:53 - Paris Martineau
I have a multifunction but if I sat on it, that's what the kids are missing out on in our tech enabled day. They don't know that you could put your bare butt on the copier and let it roll.
1:01:02 - Leo Laporte
How do you know that? I was a child, okay, okay uh, um, do you, do you know who the key operator is for it? Jeff, see if, if you get that little issue, you know that error, error 53 contact key operator you're you're done. Is there a xerox machine repair guy in the?
1:01:26 - Jeff Jarvis
area. Well, actually, yes, we had to have somebody come out. Oh to uh, do a cluged repair of it.
1:01:32 - Paris Martineau
Keep it going was it like an old timey man and grayscale it's like a typewriter.
1:01:38 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the it's, I think the son of a typewriter repairman I don't get many calls for these devices much anymore.
1:01:45 - Paris Martineau
Let me see if's a cobbler in my neighborhood that like he's in the tiniest little shop you ever oh yeah, all cobblers are in like shops, they don't need a tiny shop, barely the width of a door. You he clearly has to scramble over piles of stuff to get back there. He looks like he's out of a miyazaki film.
1:02:04 - Leo Laporte
I'm just like wow, what a life. But all they don't need a lot of machines.
1:02:07 - Paris Martineau
They have a hammer, some nails and a thing that spins real fast and he's got like and they're done 47 boxes of random stuff and you go in there and it kind of smells like shoes it smells like you could pass out because of the chemicals and they only take cash and you gotta scream over whatever's going on, we have that guy too fantastic even though there's a lot more room in petaluma for shoe cobblers it's only in a tiny
1:02:35 - Leo Laporte
but uh, they're all in the little tiny hole in the wall places because they don't need more and they're jammed with shoes, right, yeah, and they know where your shoes are, it's true, but don't forget your tag, because they won't give it to you without your tag. So here is the Wall Street Journal, the wonderful Joanna Stern who, before she became big shot at Wall Street Journal, used to come on our shows all the time. This is going to happen to Paris too, jeff. She's going to become some big shot and we'll never hear from her again.
And her Pulitzer.
1:03:08 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and I'll be fighting with you on Twitter, jeff, along with the rest of the journalists. Yes, Jeff made some enemies this week, oh did you, Jeff?
1:03:17 - Leo Laporte
You want to share that?
1:03:18 - Paris Martineau
Oh, jeff, jeff went wild.
1:03:22 - Jeff Jarvis
What were you doing, jeff? Go down the rundown under my section at the very bottom, so you're copping to this huh, all right, let me go to this.
1:03:34 - Paris Martineau
Jeff's angry thread has millions of views. He got multiple back and forths with prominent journalists so many that I lost count.
1:03:40 - Leo Laporte
What line, Jeff? What line?
1:03:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Only a half dozen journalists. Everybody else honest to God. And David Fulkenblatt said, said from npr. You can't have that opinion.
1:03:52 - Paris Martineau
Yes, I do that's the one I saw, and the thing is, I do have to commend you. You responded in depth to every single one of your haters so should I read the poster.
1:04:02 - Leo Laporte
It's a very long thread so let me start with the initial tweet.
1:04:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Right is Is this the first one. This is an answer to Margaret Sullivan, oh so I should go to the first one. No, no, no, no, no no.
1:04:14 - Leo Laporte
Start here.
1:04:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Headline there.
1:04:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so this is Margaret Sullivan's. Kamala must speak to the press. Press hates it, new York Times hated it that Joe Biden never gave him the official interview, and now they're mad because Kamala is a little busy right now running for president and they haven't done the interview, and so this is, jeff says, your response. What press the broken and vindictive?
1:04:52 - Leo Laporte
Can I read it in your voice? Sure, sure, you should do one of the voice modulators while you do it, though. Oh yeah, wait a minute, let me see which one would Jeff be? What press the Fulgham and the Dictative Times, the newly Murdochian Post Hedge Fund newspaper, hosts? What are the CNN or NPR? Murdoch's fascist media? No, she can choose many ways to communicate her stance with others outside the old press. Is this too creepy?
1:05:20 - Jeff Jarvis
It is. It's pretty creepy Plus it's not very understandable. You know I'll do it like this.
1:05:27 - Jeff Jarvis
So she can choose many ways to communicate with her stands, with others outside the old press and with the public. Director old press.
1:05:34 - Leo Laporte
You're gonna emphasize old press old press can and should be bypassed. Kamala must speak to the press. Margaret sullivan oh, that's the headline. Yeah, um, so you're just basically saying it's fine, this is the modern times. She's got other ways of communicating.
1:05:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Black press, Latino press, LGBTQ press, all the others.
1:05:57 - Leo Laporte
But I think okay, so I'll just play devil's advocate here. If you're running for national office, it is not inappropriate for you to give interviews to the press so that they can ask you the hard questions, right?
1:06:15 - Jeff Jarvis
and that you are put on the spot what you're going to have is you're going to have political reporters asking you, as they do with her, uh, about, from, about other things. They don't actually ask policy questions. Well, that is one of the problems, isn't it?
1:06:28 - Leo Laporte
with the horse race coverage of elections. These days they don't really care about. Well, what are you going to do about unemployment or inflation or whatever? What they want to know is well, do you hear what Donald Trump said about you?
1:06:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, that's what they've been doing on the grabs.
1:06:43 - Leo Laporte
They're trying to turn it into Twitter is what they're trying to do.
1:06:46 - Jeff Jarvis
So what I'm saying is, and she just did an interview with Essence- that's great.
1:06:51 - Leo Laporte
So there's a national magazine.
1:06:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Go to LGBT Press, Community Press. I said podcasts in there. I said go to a podcast Plus. Howard Stern did a phenomenal interview with Joe Biden. Do Howard Stern? There's all these other places. She doesn't need the press. The press needs her.
1:07:09 - Leo Laporte
It's also the fact that she's been the candidate for two weeks. Give her a moment. So the Times and probably the Guardian would say well, no, you should come to us first. But I agree with you, I think you're right.
But I also would say again, maybe playing a little bit of devil's advocate that they do act as a proxy for the american people and as a proxy for the american people, they might have a right. I mean, they might have a, she might have an obligation to speak to us she has the obligation to speak to people.
1:07:42 - Jeff Jarvis
but first is she can get her policy across on her own. On friday she's going to do an economic policy talk. She's going to get it across in her own way and she can communicate directly through social media and in all kinds of other ways. This idea that only certain big places can ask tough questions through it no, I pissed off exactly six reporters who dared criticize me. I saw Including Margaret Sullivan who said six reporters who dared criticize, including Margaret.
1:08:10 - Leo Laporte
Sullivan, who said Margaret was great. He might be right, which is interesting.
1:08:21 - Paris Martineau
I think people got a little upset not realizing you were talking more about old press instead of. I think many people interpreted your comments as saying she should avoid all press. I think obviously your comments of samara, but I think also, like I don't know, she should give interviews to a bunch of places. But that's me speaking as a journalist, not me speaking as a campaign advisor. Probably the politically expedient decision would be to not talk to anybody. But I think that if we want to make to foster a culture where we are getting back to the sort of established uh norms of our political discourse, it should. We should ideally exist in a world where every leading american presidential candidate does multiple lengthy interviews with both big old establishment newspapers and new media things. I think there should be.
1:09:09 - Jeff Jarvis
You had me in there until the end of that. Well, the big old establishment. I say screw them, screw them.
1:09:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, if I were the?
1:09:15 - Jeff Jarvis
I have given up on big old media. I really have.
1:09:17 - Leo Laporte
Paris nailed it, though. This isn't about eschewing big old media. The campaign advisors are saying Kamala, you don't need to. There is no upside to you giving an interview that you may get caught in some gotcha moment or asked a tough question you don't want to answer. Your best bet is you're riding high. Give the interview when you have to.
1:09:38 - Paris Martineau
Keep doing the brat memes, you know whatever yeah.
1:09:42 - Leo Laporte
And I think that that is you know, this is the problem with the political class in general, that that is how you win elections, but it isn't necessarily good polity.
1:09:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Somebody who's running for national office should speak to the public and get asked the hard questions. It's the problem of the press. Look at what the New York Times did today. I also screamed about headlines today. We had a great economic report, and so the New York Times well, but she also has big problems, Right? Because?
1:10:12 - Leo Laporte
you know what Happy News doesn't get views, and you've got to.
1:10:16 - Jeff Jarvis
They're being paternalistic and misogynistic and racist and I don't think she should go anywhere near the big guys. And what comes out to me, leo, what I said to David Polk again, is you're the media reporter and here you are with the biggest media story of a lifetime right under your nose, which is the hostility. If you look at the retweets of my tweet, it is amazing. It is phenomenal what people are saying and what it's bringing out, and this is not conservatives. It pissed them off. No, no, no, no.
It's the opposite People agree is not conservatives. It pissed him off. No, no, no, no. It's the opposite. People agree with me.
1:10:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, a lot of people agree with you. Good, all right.
1:10:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah.
1:10:55 - Leo Laporte
But remember and you probably were four years old, paris, but remember when Bill Clinton played the saxophone on a senior hall, the mainstream media was incensed and thought it was demeaning and stupid. But Clinton Mainstream media was incensed and thought it was demeaning and stupid. But Clinton was quite right. It helped him win the election because it made him personable and human.
1:11:14 - Jeff Jarvis
You know what was worse, leo, what MTV and Clinton. Remember what that question was? No, I don't Reefs or boxers. Yeah so the presidential candidate of the United States was asked on MTV News reefs or box boxers and old media was just oh, but it was a very humanizing moment. It was a funny humanizing moment. I don't remember his answer and I don't really want to know his answer. Um and now?
1:11:39 - Paris Martineau
literally. Harris was asked I'm forgetting by who uh, what's your favorite curse word? And she said it starts with m and ends with uh no, she said uh not uh, right, she said not, not her.
1:12:01 - Leo Laporte
You know what?
1:12:02 - Paris Martineau
that was a great answer I did think it was a good answer you cannot win on that question, but that was.
That is a very interesting way to answer it, with a little bit of a dog whistle right yeah, I um agree with your point, jeff, if you're talking about, I think, what is best for the candidate, but I also think that you know it's easy to fall into the uh routine of they should be doing a lot more to lift up Harris, because the comparison, the person on the other side of the aisle is Trump, but also people should be asking tough questions and not painting everything in a totally rosy light if it is the person who could be the leader of America.
1:12:47 - Jeff Jarvis
But I trust you. I would rather Paris, I would rather have you ask her about tech policy from the information than I mean. I would also like to have her on the fence, but there's a lot I won't name names here, but there's a lot of tech reporters on, let's say, the Wall Street Journal. I don't want them talking to her about it, I'd rather have you.
1:13:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, meanwhile, getting back to Joanna Stern, in the Wall Street Journal, she picked the pink phone and there she is, and these are very kind of classic Joanna Stern shots. Look at that. Every other publication has a picture of the phone. Look at that. Every other publication has a picture of the phone. This one has a picture of the phone, with Joanne prominently featured.
So she interviewed Rick Osterloh, the hardware guy at Google, the guy who led the keynote yesterday and talked about the voice, and she said you have 10 different voices and she chose the cheery and energetic Ursa, which remember, jeff, I liked the best too. She says it reminded me of Monica Geller from Friends. Okay, but the headline of the article is Google's Gemini live AI sounds so human I almost forgot it was a bot. And that's a little concerning. Google's Android chief, rick Osterloh, told Joanna Stern the voice assistant was designed to impersonate humans, but he doesn't want anyone getting romantic with it, which, by the way, means he really wants you to get romantic with it. That is, that is, he's putting the idea in people's heads.
1:14:34 - Paris Martineau
Oh boy.
1:14:35 - Leo Laporte
It's straight out of her. I like the sound. I really did. Let me see, by the way because we want.
1:14:43 - Jeff Jarvis
We want people to get married.
1:14:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, I don't go that far. Here is another fun picture of joanna. Oh yeah, she's showing off the pixel buds. I thought I couldn't figure out why they had a picture. She's got the pixel out, just hanging out with the pixel buds. Okay, I guess you know. After walt mossberg, god, this is what bugged me about kara swisher too. Look at this picture of her thumbs upping with. By the way, her foot is on rick osterloh's foot because it's generated by ai, oh, good lord, that's. Oh, you know what this is.
1:15:20 - Paris Martineau
This is that thing we're talking about yeah, it says.
1:15:23 - Leo Laporte
No, joanna really didn't step on rick's toe, she just was mispositioned in the photo.
1:15:28 - Jeff Jarvis
She also used the flash on Rick, but not on herself.
1:15:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, Look at that. Either that or Rick is even whiter than Jeff Jarvis.
1:15:37 - Jeff Jarvis
But Rick has his thumbs up in the photo she's taken.
1:15:41 - Leo Laporte
It's all fake because Right, it is fake because he doesn't have his thumb up in this picture. Hey, this is all just garbage, fluff, this is not the kind of material you'll see here on this week in Google. How do you like my ear?
1:16:09 - Paris Martineau
Yeah these are never going to center images of ourselves on this week in Google. Never we'll center a photo of jeff from years ago.
1:16:15 - Leo Laporte
We don't care uh, okay, all right, all right, uh, back to uh. Back to the news. What do you think of elon musk suing advertisers? How do you like that?
1:16:31 - Paris Martineau
I think that the acronym for the organization, garm, is really fun to say is my first garm on now.
1:16:40 - Leo Laporte
That's the funniest thing.
1:16:41 - Paris Martineau
So I do think this also sorry, no, no please I do think that this speaks to why we need anti-slap laws yeah nationwide which is specifically um, I'm not sure where else it is, we at least have it in new york we have it in california if you file a frivolous lawsuit. The anti-slap laws will make it so that the legal fees end up being paid by the person who filed. What founds eventually is found as a frivolous lawsuit.
1:17:09 - Leo Laporte
Here's the problem with that. People like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, et cetera, et cetera, can afford to pay slap fees. It's not a big deal for them, so it's no punishment right. I mean better them than Garm.
1:17:24 - Paris Martineau
It would at least help. Like Garm has had to cease operations as soon as this lawsuit was filed, they ceased operations Instead. It's because we're not going to be able to afford the cost of litigation. We're obviously going to go through it, but we don't have the money to continue to operate our organization and fight this lawsuit.
1:17:43 - Leo Laporte
So you think if there were any slap laws, they could continue to do the fight? If there were any slap laws?
1:17:49 - Paris Martineau
I think it would at least be more feasible.
1:17:52 - Leo Laporte
It wouldn't slow Elon down, but at least it'd give them.
1:17:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, Mr Free Speech got rid of these advertising critics.
1:17:59 - Leo Laporte
He famously a year ago said go F yourself to advertisers. And then when they did he got so miffed he sued them.
1:18:09 - Jeff Jarvis
And he would lose on that case.
1:18:10 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know, not everybody agrees he would lose. You know he's using antitrust law. He's saying that advertisers like and he includes CVS, health, mars, orsted and Unilever colluded to boycott to do an ad boycott on X. And of course, trust law says you cannot collude to set prices. I don't know if you can't collude for a boycott, I don't know it's the good housekeeping.
1:18:39 - Jeff Jarvis
seal of approval collusion.
1:18:41 - Leo Laporte
Right.
1:18:42 - Jeff Jarvis
If it says we as an organization said this is okay and that's not. And if you want to run according to our rules, here's our suggestion.
1:18:54 - Paris Martineau
The law stands for the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, and this is from the Axios article. It was created by members from the World Federation of Advertisers in 2019 to set standards around brand safety for digital advertisers. So what happened here is when Musk fired a bunch of engineers from Twitter, changed a lot of the content policies and said a wider variety of content that had previously been kind of pushed to the fringes or blocked from being on Twitter would now be able to be on. X Garm was like hey, advertisers, we're saying that Twitter might not be a safe place for your ads to be. Your ad might end up next to p*rnography or inflammatory content, and then that is what potentially led to a number of advertisers deciding to stop advertising on Twitter.
1:19:53 - Leo Laporte
And that is what Musk is saying is a legal collusion.
This is a normal practice. Almost all the contracts we sign with advertisers say you know they have a list of things we can't do to protect their brand. You know I can't do the show naked God help us. Protects more than does the brand. Um, I, I don't know, I don't have the contracts in front of me, but there. But this is normal practice to to have clauses in there to protect the brand against being they don't want to be next to content that is deemed reprehensible. That reflects badly on the brand. So that's really sop. That's completely normal. By the way, interesting sideline to this uh, he sued in the northern district of texas, which is usually considered pretty friendly. Uh, in a case like this, the judge reed o'connor, longtime member of the federalist society. Uh, and a Tesla investor has recused himself and in fact, there have been questions about judge forum shopping in order to get this judge. But interestingly, not only does he have Tesla stock, he also has Unilever stock.
So, I think, probably makes sense for him to step back, and he did something that you don't see happen as often as it probably should. I don't know what the status of this lawsuit is. It seems, on the face of it, that Elon is just miffed and is just you know.
1:21:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, he told them to go after themselves.
1:21:25 - Paris Martineau
Yes. And then they did yes, I believe something that happened this week was uh, numbers were reported that twitter's advertising or just general revenue is down to.
1:21:35 - Leo Laporte
I want to say it was somewhere around like two billion yeah, it's half what it was before he bought it.
1:21:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, well, here's my fantasy unsurprising my fantasy is the election is over. Elon had his fun. He did what he did. He either wins or he loses, and then he's bored with Twitter and somebody decent can buy Twitter.
1:21:55 - Leo Laporte
Who would? Who would you would? Maybe Steve Jobs widow Lorraine, lorraine Powell jobs and her Emerson.
1:22:02 - Jeff Jarvis
My fear is, somebody just better or worse could buy it Right.
1:22:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you don't want, jeff. Do you want Jeff Bezos to buy it? By the way, nobody's going to buy it. It's encumbered with all sorts of lawsuits, including the one from the former chairman of the board for $20 million, saying Elon never bought my stock as he promised to do when he took it private. And then Elon has now moved out of their San Francisco headquarters. Unclear whether he ever paid rent at all.
1:22:29 - Paris Martineau
Moved out of their San Francisco headquarters, unclear whether he ever paid rent at all or settled any of those legal fights over people sleeping at work. I would not want to buy.
1:22:39 - Leo Laporte
X, unless Elon indemnified me and said don't worry, I'll handle it. Of course you can't trust Elon anyway. No, you can't. How about the interview with Elon and Donald Trump?
1:22:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Don't call it an interview. It was an ad.
1:22:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, actually Elon says it was a conversation, not an interview, because interviews are so boring it took 45 minutes for the conversation to get off the ground. Elon lied, as everybody says. He lied saying it was a DDoS attack, where the Verge says a number of employees privately told them no, no, no, no, it's not a DDoS attack. The rest of Twitter was fine. But I mean, you know, what Elon should have said is so many people want to hear this conversation that it's brought the servers down, but he doesn't want to admit that the servers are fragile, which I don't know the lady lies and says that a billion people have heard, I think trump said that even though the number was on the screen 1.1 million still plenty of people listened um.
Is that an example of what kamala should do?
1:23:44 - Jeff Jarvis
elon has said he'll interview kamala no, because that's not a journalist, that is a sycophant. Um, she needs to go to somebody who has some chops, so no well, I would.
1:23:59 - Leo Laporte
I would like to say we offer our fantastic attic studio and it's incredible, dr evil chair to vice president if she'd care to do an interview. Questions provided by Jeff Jarvis, I might add.
1:24:16 - Jeff Jarvis
You know what everybody suggests, everybody suggests.
1:24:20 - Leo Laporte
Besides Lawrence O'Donnell, howard Stern.
1:24:24 - Jeff Jarvis
The other one is hot ones.
1:24:27 - Leo Laporte
And she should go on that. Honestly, I would like her to go on Fox.
1:24:29 - Paris Martineau
Honestly, I do think hot ones would be great for them where she eats hot wings for either, honestly, I mean, it's just such a popular show. I don't watch it, but I it. It is the sort of thing joe rogan's popular.
1:24:43 - Leo Laporte
Should she go on, joe rogan?
1:24:45 - Paris Martineau
no the.
1:24:47 - Leo Laporte
The hot wings thing pisses me off. Here we work so hard, so hard to provide good content for you, and if I'd only thought of trying to poison people with hot sauce, I could be huge well, leo, it's not that, it is that it is do they ask a?
1:25:05 - Paris Martineau
much broader audience, do they? I mean, is it like a?
1:25:09 - Leo Laporte
really good show, or is is the? Is it like a car wreck, where you just want to see how long people can go? Well?
1:25:13 - Paris Martineau
no, no, I think my understanding of it. I haven't watched it so I can't speak to specifics, but my understanding is that it's like celebrity guests people want to hear. They're a bit thrown. It's not your normal canned answers because they're eating progressively spicier hot wings. They're a bit more real. They are questions that are not your typical interview questions.
1:25:32 - Leo Laporte
There's more to it than that, because there is strong evidence that when you do that, when you ingest a huge amount of capsaicin and throw your body into shock, then the endorphins kick in to protect you, and at that point it's basically truth serum.
1:25:46 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean that is kind of the whole pitch of the show. Yeah, uh, yeah a brief uh sojourn back to musk and trump a sentence no one wants me to say, but I'm saying anyway. Um, something I thought was really interesting about the show that was written. That was quite interesting.
It was a newsletter by max chafkin at bloomberg about the interview and he's covered um musk for like close to 20 years he had a really interesting take on this, which is that throughout the interview, well, elon was very deferential to trump, even in uh on certain subjects that were quite unexpected.
Trump kind of talked down to him about climate change and specifically insulted electric vehicles repeatedly throughout the interview, and Max Trafkin wrote as someone who's covered Trump for close to 20 years, I found his deference to Trump a little jarring, but it makes sense as a political calculation. Musk has backed himself into an ideological and financial corner, transforming himself in recent years from a centrist businessman who is popular with both libertarians and liberals into a right-wing influencer and provocateur unafraid to traffic in racism and conspiracy theories. This has arguably broadened Tesla's appeal among very conservative consumers, while alienating what had been its core constituency. Musk's plan to reinvigorate the carmaker of stagnant sales depend on untested and still somewhat fanciful technology Robo taxes with taxis which, in turn, depend on winning regulatory approval, and Trump is the anti-regulation candidate. I thought this was just such an interesting take on a moment in this conversation I had totally glossed over, and really speaks to the broader political moment that Musk finds himself in.
1:27:37 - Leo Laporte
Does Max impute a motive for Elon, like he's playing 3D chess?
1:27:46 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think that's a little bit chess. I mean, I think that's a little bit. My personal take is I don't know if it's all that conscious, but I think that part of it is that he now has taken a position that you can't really back down from, which is that he is this kind of trolley provocateur that appeals to far right circles and is betting on a political climate where regulation is no longer in vogue and he's going to do everything to continue to uh, hang out with those people it's also his horrendous treatment of his daughter oh yeah, she has briefly come out on and I think that matters.
1:28:33 - Jeff Jarvis
The other angle in this, if I may also go back to screen here, is Trump's slur. It was very noticeable and comedians commented on it. One USA Today column, I think, said he was Daphne Duck on drugs.
1:28:52 - Leo Laporte
But mainstream, everybody heard it, everybody knew okay, I'm gonna weigh in on this because on the last twit uh somebody wrote it sounded like leo had uh just received dental treatment and was still under the influence of Novocaine and was lisping and we had screwed up the processing and I knew there was something wrong when I started the show. This is Twit and it stayed that way for two and a half hours. It is really easy in a streaming platform. You saw the pictures Trump's talking into a phone. He might have been slurring, but he might not have been, and it's very easy for processing to give the wrong impression.
1:29:41 - Jeff Jarvis
So unless you were in the room and heard him, well, then Trump put out then, after having accused Kamala of having AI'd a new verb for the crowd, now he's AI'd the audio to put on a new version.
1:29:53 - Leo Laporte
But my point is that media well, maybe he maybe put out the correct version how do you correct? Slurring well, you can use ai no, I, I I'm not gonna knock him, I do think it's also.
1:30:07 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I did see quite a few mainstream media outlets cover it, like I think you even pointed out. It was on msnbc I know, everybody pointed it out.
1:30:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Finally, they did a day later yeah in fact kurt anderson was on complaining about what I'm saying. He said I'm not wanting to attack the new york times, but he was appalled. They wrote a huge story about this and didn't deal with it directly no, it was definitely in the.
1:30:33 - Leo Laporte
They had a whole new york times story about the technical difficulties and also it was slurring yeah that could easily have been an audio problem and not an actual problem, so I don't know see if he keeps doing it. See if it continues. Yeah, um, we. Uh. You're watching twig this week in google, the show that's supposed to be about google with jeff, but never is with jeff jarvis.
1:31:02 - Paris Martineau
Hey we've talked a little bit about good well, actually a lot of google today and paris more no, defending us.
1:31:07 - Leo Laporte
One. One more Google story, sad story. Susan Wojcicki has passed away, 56 years old, really young, so young. She was the YouTube CEO, but she was really much, much, much more than that to Google. Susan Wojcicki's mother correct me if I'm wrong on this, jeff, but I think it was her mother, esther, correct?
1:31:39 - Jeff Jarvis
me if I'm wrong on this, Jeff, but I think it was her mother, Esther, who owned the garage that they rented to a couple of young guys from Stanford, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to start Google. Yeah, I think it was Esther's house, but I think it was Susan who made the connection.
1:31:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because in Sundar's note to Google it said Susan's journey from the garage she rented, but I always thought it was Esther Wojcicki. The Wojcickis were kind of amazing. Her sister, of course, founded 23andMe, and wasn't her sister involved at one point with who? Larry or Sergey? Larry or Sergey, one of them, wojcicki, was, I think, the 17th employee at Googler, at Google, at Googler. She was a googler. She is not just the former ceo of youtube. She retired a couple of years ago now. We know why she was ill, but she also persuaded google to buy youtube, seeing the value there. She was responsible for so much of Google. Adsense was hers. She really built the modern Google and was also and I never met her, maybe you did, jeff, but she was also I have universally considered a great person. Are you listening to the hot ones? What's going on? Not just as youtube ceo, she retired due to health reasons. She championed the youtube acquisition, recognizing its potential. Are you listening to the hot ones? What's going on?
1:33:16 - Paris Martineau
I think that that's you, that's me. It's coming from, chief twit it's. It's coming from inside the house. The call is coming from inside the house. I am scared how was that?
1:33:31 - Leo Laporte
okay, sorry about that, I don't know.
1:33:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it was my phone it was okay that's exactly what I just said it's like it quoted me.
1:33:45 - Leo Laporte
All right, well, anyway. Uh, it's a very sad story. So now you're breaking up a little bit, jeff, but tell me your experience meeting her oh no, jeff we're losing you.
1:34:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I met her obnoxiously at Davos. So I met Susan at Davos, where I watched all one, two, three. One, two, three, 1, 2, 3. Do you hear me? No?
1:34:16 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, you're slurring.
1:34:18 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, there's something wrong with you.
1:34:20 - Leo Laporte
We've got to get you to a hospital.
1:34:22 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, this has to be the way you're talking.
1:34:24 - Leo Laporte
Raise your arms. Can you raise both arms?
1:34:27 - Paris Martineau
Are you smelling toast, Jeff?
1:34:31 - Leo Laporte
I think it's better now Go ahead. You met her at Davos. We did hear that.
1:34:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I met her at Davos. When I watched her offer to a room full of news executives to introduce them to YouTube creators so they could learn something about video and the Internet and they all scoffed. They thought they were a parable. And then I watched her a couple times at vidcon with her uh, you know it's there and it was great the the respect he had had for those creators. He really, really created a lot at youtube that put the creators forward.
1:35:03 - Leo Laporte
And first she was working at intel. Uh, when she met, the boys rented the garage of her Menlo Park, california home for 1,700 bucks a month. This is from the Washington Post. That's where PageRank was born, was created and she went to work. One of the earliest hires, employee number 16, company's first marketing manager. She helped launch and grow ventures like AdSense. Get this list of things. She started Google Analytics, google Books, google Images, the Google Doodle. She pushed for the acquisition of YouTube in 2006, became its CEO in 2014.
1:35:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Nothing that Google has killed. That all still exists. That's a good point. These are all the profit drivers for Google.
1:35:53 - Leo Laporte
These are all big money makers for Google. Well, maybe not the Google doodle. I don't think that makes any money.
1:35:58 - Paris Martineau
No, the Google doodles rake it in. I feel like Culture, capital, goodwill.
1:36:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Anyway, and a phenomenal family, esther, her mother taught journalism at Palo Alto High. Her mother, uh, taught journalism at palo alto high and uh, her father um was?
1:36:15 - Leo Laporte
I think yeah, he was chairman of the physics department at stanford and for me jeez I mean, this is a very high-powered family.
1:36:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah so two years ago susan left for what we know now is health. A year ago she lost her son to an overdose, a. A year ago she lost her father and now Esther has lost all three in a period of a year and I just feel there's a phenomenal and amazing and wonderful, bright, generous family and it just cares my heart.
1:36:44 - Leo Laporte
She's survived by her sister, Ann Wojcicki, founder of 23andMe. Janet Wojcicki is a professor of pediatrics at UCSF and her mother is still alive. Esther Wojcicki she wrote a book in 2019 that I should have read, called how to Raise Successful People. She obviously was an expert at that. So a great loss to us all, and way too young. Oh, speaking of loss, I look like I've lost my head. Oh, there it's back. Oh, congratulations to our good friend. Did we talk about this? Mike Masnick has joined the board.
So we've been he's very busy now. We've been trying to get a hold of him, get him on the show. We will, but that is a huge get for Blue Sky and very encouraging for this Twitter alternative. I think it gives Blue Sky a lot of legitimacy in the eyes of those of us who follow Mike and Tech Dirt as fans. Oh, this was a story that you mentioned yesterday, jeff, and I said I promised I would bring it up today. A study from the Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management Brands should avoid AI, it turns out. So what they did is researchers sampled participants across various age groups, showing them the same products. What is going on with my picture Is that?
1:38:14 - Paris Martineau
Hey, everybody just wants to see me. I guess that's all we want. The only one that can be.
1:38:18 - Leo Laporte
Nobody wants to see us. They gave them the same exact product. The only difference is one was described as high tech, the other as using AI. Dogen Gersoy, one of the study's authors, said we looked at vacuum cleaners, tvs, consumer services and health services. In every single case, the intention to buy or use the product or service was significantly lower when we mentioned AI in the product description Isn't that hilarious? By the way, speaking of product descriptions, I should mention that Gersoi is the Taco Bell distinguished professor of hospitality business management at Washington.
1:39:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I not have that chair.
1:39:03 - Leo Laporte
You should be the Chipotle chair, yeah, or yeah, you could be the Taco Bell chair.
1:39:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm a Taco Bell chair. I'm a Taco Bell guy. What Taco Bell product would you want to be the Taco Bell chair? I'm the Taco Bell chair. I'm a Taco Bell guy.
1:39:11 - Paris Martineau
What Taco Bell product would you want to be the chair of? I would want to be the Taco Bell Fiesta Potato Fellow.
1:39:20 - Jeff Jarvis
I actually like the grilled chicken.
1:39:24 - Leo Laporte
Okay, we got to change your lower thirds. Paris Martineau Fiesta.
1:39:28 - Paris Martineau
Potato Fellow Taco.
1:39:29 - Leo Laporte
Bell University desserts paris martineau fiesta potato fellow taco bell university, I think. I think, jeff, you should be the chairman of cruncheritas I like that.
1:39:45 - Paris Martineau
You're completely. You're so excited about taco bell that you're breaking up completely we can't understand a word, it's just the universe doesn't want us to know uh, so you are.
1:39:58 - Leo Laporte
Now. You have a new job, paris. We should, we should mention this. Here's a picture of paris, that doesn't? That's true? A lot like you listen.
1:40:06 - Paris Martineau
You know, none of the photos look much like the people, and that's fine. Yeah, I recently switched beats. A little bit Previously I was kind of a roving features and investigations reporter and I've joined our weekend team, which is essentially like a little magazine.
1:40:27 - Leo Laporte
I read the weekend briefing avidly. It's my favorite email, my favorite newsletter from the information.
1:40:35 - Paris Martineau
I love it yeah, it's always really cute. We have a little recommendation, kind of like a pics of the week section, but we also do a like big read every week which is kind of like a big magazine article as well as like smaller things too, and so I've joined that team and my focus will be I'll be doing future investigations on kind of the intersection of children and technology, so I specifically will be covering all of these different bills like COSA the TikTok ban the DOJ actions on TikTok as well as just kind of the complicated ways in which like technology companies and their products affect like young people.
1:41:14 - Leo Laporte
We should get Jonathan Haidt on with you, and that would be a great interview with you and Jonathan Haidt. How about it?
1:41:24 - Paris Martineau
I mean I'll do it, but I think we have to have Jeff there and then have to have a finger on the sensor button. Jonathan's the author of the.
1:41:30 - Leo Laporte
Anxious Generation which we have been talking a lot about since it came out.
1:41:33 - Paris Martineau
That's the one that says have you read it?
1:41:36 - Leo Laporte
No, I know Well, I've interviewed Jonathan before on his book about was it the Righteous Mind about conservatives and liberals and why they differ, and I thought it was quite good and why they differ. And I thought it was quite good, but I did think at the time, you know, I think he's kind of a crypto conservative. I would recommend.
1:41:56 - Paris Martineau
Jeff and I were emailing about this this week is if books could kill. A really good podcast from Michael Hobbs and Peter Shamseri did a deep dive into the anxious generation this week. That I think is really interesting.
1:42:10 - Leo Laporte
I will have to listen to it. What a great title for a podcast. If books could kill.
1:42:15 - Paris Martineau
And so, specifically, what they do is they look at like airport books or like all these books that like are like the important ones, like like the anxious generation. I think some of the first ones they did was the Secret or Rich Dad. Poor Dad, and then Look Into it.
1:42:37 - Leo Laporte
They also talk about Hillbilly Elegy, the Origins of Woke. Oh man, this sounds like a great podcast. Forget this show. Start listening to this one. That's a better show.
1:42:49 - Jeff Jarvis
It's two hours. It's highly researched by Michael Hobbs.
1:42:52 - Leo Laporte
That's the big difference. We're also two hours.
1:42:59 - Leo Laporte
That's the only thing in common, very good, I will listen to that, yeah, and congratulations.
1:43:07 - Leo Laporte
So happy for you, Paris. Is this a promotion?
1:43:11 - Paris Martineau
I mean kind of I don't know, it's the same. I'm kind of doing the same job, but I have more of a focus right now, which is fun.
I think it's important to kind of change up. For at least me, I get bored if I'm kind of doing the same thing for too long, so I think it's fun to change up my focus. I mean, I'm still going to be covering like weird things going on at tech companies and looking for scoops and things like that, but this means on a month to month basis. If I have a question of what should I be looking into, I've got an answer.
1:43:41 - Leo Laporte
So and I think your, your new partner, josh, is it keen? Is that how he pronounces it?
1:43:48 - Paris Martineau
You know, I'm not sure I find out. On monday, when I talked to him on the phone for the first time, congratulate him.
1:43:53 - Leo Laporte
Uh, he, uh, he, uh was trying to become the miss gilroy garlic festival queen and uh, they, they, uh, she the the actual. No, no, he wasn't trying to do it, he wrote about.
I think he wrote about the miss gilroy garland I thought initially in the initial read of this sentence I thought he was running for it and got cheated out of it. But no, he wrote about the woman who became miss gilroy garlic festival queen and how she had cheated to become. Why anyone would cheat to become the queen of the garlic festival is a matter for Josh to explain, but anyway, that's how he started his career.
It's been all uphill ever since the information. Congratulations to our good friend Paris Martineau, who is now a big part of the information weekend. It's one of the reasons I subscribe is I just love the information. The information Oops, I just closed it. Sorry, the information dot com, and I just closed it, sorry, theinformationcom. And it's well worth it. Really a great read, great read. So you have in here, jeff, the story that Eric Schmidt blames remote work for the company's struggles in AI. But maybe you didn't know. I mean, the Wall Street Journal just published a letter from Schmidt, an email to the journal, saying I misspoke about Google and their work hours. I regret my error. He took it back. He took it back. Eric Schmidt said that Google was losing the artificial intelligence race because of its remote work policies. Oh boy.
We kind of get Jeff a better filter. This one is just not working. Google decided he said at Stanford that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. The reason startups work is because the people worked like hell. That is a commonly held belief among a lot of CEOs and startups that what family life? You're crazy. That's not what we're doing here.
1:46:03 - Paris Martineau
I feel like it's also a commonly held belief. I mean, forgive me for saying, but among your guys' generation, I feel like oftentimes I hear this even in our own newsroom from some of our older editors. We're like, oh, back in my day we would stay in the newsroom for 12 to 16 hours and work nights and weekends.
1:46:23 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to give you a little insight into that. No, that was not part of our youth. We were the laziest generation. No, that was not part of our youth. We were the laziest generation, but that's the best way to get young people to do. Your work for you is to insist that they stay late while you go out and have a martini.
1:46:40 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that's what I really think whenever people say that I'm like it's ridiculous.
1:46:44 - Leo Laporte
No, Jeff, am I wrong? I don't Well there's macho.
1:46:49 - Jeff Jarvis
in certain places there is newsroom macho. Paris is right.
1:46:52 - Leo Laporte
Maybe in the newsroom.
1:46:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, At the launch of People magazine. Famous story was Dick Stolle. The founding editor turned to Jim Gaines, who was a later editor, at the urinal. So why don't you go home early tonight, jim? It was 3 am.
1:47:07 - Paris Martineau
Oh Christ.
1:47:11 - Leo Laporte
Macho, I can only speak for myself, but I'm the laziest son of a bitch. You know I do not work long hours. If, when it comes to work-life balance, life you're on this, you're making shows constantly yeah, you know it's funny because uh, lisa said, oh, now that because I we stopped doing. Ask the Tech Guys. She said now you really have a good life, you say. I said yeah.
I'm only doing five shows a week, which is what I've been doing for the whole my whole life, and radio is five shows a week. I you know I was torn between Hellman's mayonnaise in aid of nuclear fusion or this story about zuckerberg's seven foot statue of his wife oh my god he commissioned a giant sculpture of his wife, priscilla chan he. In a photo of the statue posted to instagram, he said he's bringing back the roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.
1:48:07 - Paris Martineau
Don't get any ideas, lisa okay, I do respect that as a comment, a way to post about a photo, uh sculpture, you got of your wife. That's very funny, but it doesn't look good. I don't think. I think it looks kind of scary. Um, I wouldn't want to have to see that in my backyard what is she?
1:48:29 - Leo Laporte
is that? Yeah, you're right, she doesn't look great, yeah, there she is by the way next to it, so it's about twice as tall as she is it's very tall, it's got some weird shiny cloak on it yeah
1:48:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, I don't know why is it the color of that, that movie, of the james cameron movie?
1:48:51 - Leo Laporte
oh, it does look like the abyss. She's wrapped in the guy from the abyss. Benita, what you're saying. Why is she green? Why is she teal? Yeah, teal, even better, a great, uh, because she belongs on the planet.
1:49:06 - Paris Martineau
Avatar, I don't know pandora pandora right maybe it was like supposed to be bad with the color of the oxidized statue of liberty?
1:49:17 - Leo Laporte
I don't know oh, it does kind of look like the statue of liberty or maybe it was bronze and now it's oxidized.
1:49:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, well, it's kind of disembodied too, it's too.
1:49:37 - Leo Laporte
It's, it's very um, have we? Uh, we gotta go at this point. We've been going on for a long time. Is there any other urgent news that you would like to make sure that we talk about?
1:49:46 - Jeff Jarvis
well, I think one thing that maybe just since I'd like to always do this is let's blame Spotify for something how they killed Latin America's podcast.
1:49:56 - Leo Laporte
What that's kind of annoying. This is from rest of the world, which I love giving a plug to. It's such a great journalism effort to cover global news in a world in a country where we only care about what happens right here. Cover global news in a world in a country where we only care about what happens right here. How spotify started and killed latin america's podcast boom. In latin america, podcasts and spotify became synonymous. Now the audio industry is reckoning reckoning with the company's retreat. They they commissioned hundreds of shows a couple of years ago which helped build an industry and won them 90 of the market, according to the rest of the world. But they've frozen funding now for new shows and podcast producers are left holding the bag Lots of bitches.
Yeah, I mean, it's easy to blame Spotify for our own woes. I don't think it's all Spotify A lot, a lot Podcasts are going well I guess, all right, so there's that. The other one is I've lost my uh, my opportunity, I think in retirement.
1:51:01 - Paris Martineau
I was hoping to make cameo videos well, the time has, the ship has sailed.
1:51:08 - Leo Laporte
Maybe I shouldn't. What is Rudy Giuliani going to do now? So what? Are they out of business or are they just nobody's using them? Nobody's using them? Yeah, it was a cool thing.
1:51:24 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, you get a celebrity for $150. It was going to be a fad for a while.
1:51:27 - Paris Martineau
I mean, yeah, the thing is just they're never going to be processing enough cameos that they're going to make money, because they're only taking a small percentage of that. They've got all the pay payment processors. There's never going to be a high enough volume, for cameo is a perfect example of an idea that could have worked if it didn't raise a bunch of venture capital and thus was required to grow exponentially to survive. Like it potentially could have worked if it was a very small team and started just with, you know, a small amount of money and grew slowly. But the fact that it was saddled with tens of millions of dollars and then suddenly had to answer to venture capitalists that wanted it to grow at such a high rate.
1:52:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.
1:52:14 - Paris Martineau
It's never going to achieve that.
1:52:16 - Leo Laporte
You mean like I don't know, waymo, this is from Channel 4, nbc Bay Area. Actually it's not Channel 4 anymore, it's Channel 11. Sorry, neighbors annoyed by late night waymo honking. Apparently the waymos gather at night. I can't play it for you because I'll get in trouble. But uh, and they honk at each other. Uh, I've seen other videos of the waymo parking lot as they're trying to leave in for the morning and they just, they just they're not good at they're not good at that. They're not good at that they're getting each other's way.
1:52:56 - Jeff Jarvis
The other business shot in Florida is the humane pig.
1:53:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh no.
1:53:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Returns are now outpacing sales.
1:53:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, of course.
1:53:05 - Jeff Jarvis
There are only 8,000 left in the wild.
1:53:09 - Paris Martineau
I kind of want one now as a you know, I'm not yeah I don't will wish them ill. I'm not sure why you wish them ill speaking of uh promised tech, what's your glasses update? Never, never happened, I don't know how much should you pay for those?
1:53:29 - Leo Laporte
well, I have to check my credit card to see if I actually. You know, you're not supposed to charge people for a product until you're ready to ship it, so I have to check and see if I paid it. This is from brilliant labs. These are these frame ai glasses that, um, are kind of like the metas, but they have a heads-up OLED display which I thought really sounded cool. My mistake was ordering them with my prescription, my glasses prescription, well, I mean you'd need to have your prescription in it to use them.
I don't have to wear contacts to wear these. But I think that they discontinued that ability to do that. It apparently caused them issues. So I have the emails saying oh, thanks for your order. So I don't. You know. I have the emails saying, oh, thanks for your order, but I have don't have the uh the glasses. Is anybody who ordered these? Has anybody received them?
1:54:18 - Paris Martineau
I saw a little chatter on reddit that some people got like it or at least got a shipping notification or things like that.
1:54:27 - Leo Laporte
But it was very sparse and I don't know if any of those people ordered the prescription ones I have to see if I got billed, because if I did, then I I guess I should do a charge back because I don't think I'm ever going to get these, which is too bad. I was supposed to get them in july, I think, or no, early, no it was like april or something it was definitely months ago okay.
It's kind of fun, though, when you order something and you get it three years later and you a gift to yourself. It's like what the hell is this? I did that, uh. I did that every time I ordered a kickstarter.
Uh, I ordered, uh and they're actually now going concerned a way they make luggage with batteries in it to charge your phone yeah, the ones you have to take the batteries out of right the rules changed and you can't you're not allowed to check bags with batteries anymore, so but I ordered this, and I ordered it years ago and it arrived like two years after I ordered it and I opened it up I said what the hell? Why would somebody send me luggage? And you're like I sent me luggage I sent me luggage from me from the past.
Thank you me from the past. I did not order a humane pin, but I did. Oh, I know it was supposed to come in July, my limitless pin that has not come.
1:55:43 - Paris Martineau
I was wondering if it was going to be the rewind pin or something.
1:55:45 - Leo Laporte
Yes, rewind, they renamed themselves limitless. Oh, I am such a sucker. I thought something else yes, rewind, they renamed themselves Limitless. Oh, I am such a sucker. I thought well if I never order anything from Kickstarter. I'll be okay.
1:56:00 - Paris Martineau
But no, you're like, you're finding the Kickstarter. Plus which is it's a Kickstarter, basically in name only.
1:56:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Let us pause, capital Monte.
1:56:10 - Leo Laporte
Capital Monte Remind us. Ubc name only let us pause. Capodamonte remind us qbc.
1:56:18 - Jeff Jarvis
It was a, a gem.
1:56:19 - Leo Laporte
No, it was a really really ugly porcelain statuettes uh, here you go from qbccom your choice of capo de monte porcelain seasoned plates. We're sorry this item is not available at this time?
1:56:35 - Paris Martineau
are the flowers sticking out of the plates or is it just like printed it's?
1:56:38 - Leo Laporte
just cunning 3d painting. It's trompe. L'oeil oh okay, I was gonna say how are you?
1:56:44 - Paris Martineau
using that, but I guess yeah pretty.
1:56:47 - Leo Laporte
Now how much would you pay On?
1:56:48 - Jeff Jarvis
eBay, you're going to find a lot of Capitamonte. Is the joke that they made up this name Capitamonte. The joke is that Schmucks bought it.
1:57:02 - Leo Laporte
My father-in-law owns it. Do you have your dad's Capitamonte plates? It's a morning greeting.
1:57:06 - Paris Martineau
Like hey, capitamonte.
1:57:09 - Jeff Jarvis
It was like flower baskets and other things, all kinds of stuff I think it's a lovely.
1:57:15 - Leo Laporte
Uh, here's their website capo de monte in italy. Free shipping the lower 48, no, you can get more. Look at this beautiful stuff. Oh, wait a minute, I'm really that's nice, we found your birthday present. Yeah, many of our customers are not sure what Capodimonte means. It's a style created in the very finest Italian porcelain. It means the head of the mountain. For some reason, on this website for Capodimonte, they have a picture of the Colosseum, the leaning tower of pisa and the basano del grapa.
1:57:53 - Paris Martineau
just to make sure you know it's a from italy, from staten island, it probably is no, it literally says up top shipping from staten island oh my god or like uh, that's the where forest lamps and gifts are from. You know, that's forest lamps and gifts.
1:58:08 - Leo Laporte
so from that's, forest lamps and gifts.
1:58:11 - Jeff Jarvis
So people would watch QVC and it'd be described for half an hour of this beautiful, wonderful thing. And then people picked up the phone and old grandma's and ordered it.
1:58:21 - Paris Martineau
You know, actually I have my own personal version of QVC that me and my friends discovered one night, when we do these like annual trips, that we call cabin, which is just we drive a couple of hours north of New York City and rent an Airbnb that has a hot tub.
And the first time we did this we planned kind of poorly. A bunch of people didn't get off work until like I don't know six on a Friday, so we had somebody you know trying to drive a weird giant van through Manhattan at rush hour. It was a nightmare. It turns out the van settings were somehow in Spanish and voice only, so for like two hours we were shouting in Spanish to try and get it to connect to our phones Capo de. Monte.
1:59:09 - Leo Laporte
Basically.
1:59:11 - Paris Martineau
By the time we get there we're all exhausted. We're angry because the spanish thing we turn on the tv and what comes up but something called cutlery corner, which is just qvc for knives like oh yeah, that's a great place. It is awesome, and since then we found that there's like a twitch stream of it 24 7, so sometimes I'll just pull up cutlery corner and see like a knife with donald trump's face carved into it or something.
1:59:34 - Leo Laporte
Check it out, it's a lovely experience oh yeah, cutlery corner is well known in my, in my uh circles and there is a live stream going on right now on youtube, in case you listen, that's exactly what I was picturing.
1:59:46 - Paris Martineau
I was like it's definitely something like that would you?
1:59:50 - Leo Laporte
I don't know why chad is disabled for this live stream.
It's tough enough to use, nice enough to collect tough enough to use such a funny description for a knife so you know, it's a great thing to watch with your friends while you are completely sober uh, and if you really want to have fun, the discord is, say, telling me, search for cutlery corner fails I've never considered cutlery corner compilations it's live and uh, the cutlery corner blooper reel is uh, it's pretty, pretty darn great somebody hurt themselves I don't know, it's a little scary oh, there are so many big knives. It's a giant machete inching its way into the screen.
2:00:43 - Paris Martineau
It's got 13 pieces it's the big kahuna. Get them all, oh my god, do not give this to anybody on a knife okay, I want that one. Actually, though, the big kahuna oh, something bad's gonna happen.
2:00:58 - Leo Laporte
I just know it. I just know it. Well, we'll leave this, uh, as an exercise to the viewer, because we don't want to get taken down by cutlery corner that would be. That would be the ultimate third strike from cutlery corner.
2:01:12 - Paris Martineau
Oh god, oh you're watching this week at google that's paris martineau.
2:01:17 - Leo Laporte
She's in charge of kid coverage at the informationcom youth, youth, youth. She's got the youth beat kitty technology. Kitty technology no. The impact of technology on kitties yes.
2:01:32 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, online child safety and all its ilk Sounds much better.
2:01:37 - Leo Laporte
And, of course, Jeff Jarvis, who is the Leonard Tow Professor of some.
2:01:45 - Paris Martineau
Journalistic Excellence at Craig.
2:01:48 - Leo Laporte
The Craig Craig Newmark excellence at craig, the craig, graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york emeritus you know, jeff, he's only said it a thousand times I can't remember and you got it wrong and 81 times it's journalistic innovation. I'll have you know, young lady hey, I at least got journalistic I don't memorize this stuff.
2:02:14 - Jeff Jarvis
That's why I've got a teleprompter now I am the professor of pissing off journalists uh-huh, you are, you are, and I think that's a good thing.
2:02:23 - Leo Laporte
Piss them off. The hell with them. They want her to work too hard, though yeah, are you. You're a journalist.
2:02:29 - Paris Martineau
Though let's uh kick off the back of the book with paris's thing of the week, paris so, uh, you guys might recall mischief, the art collective I feel like best known for recently they did those big red weird boots. They have just released a new thing, which is they bought a cow, a baby, baby cow named Angus, and they pre-sold it. It's already sold out. People could buy tokens that would grant them burgers. They pre-sold Angus as 1,200 burgers and four handbags, which he will become in 576 days, unless all those people. Whenever you buy these, you get like a gold or silver token sent to your house and if you want you can pull off. I believe is the sticker of regret.
You have to. If you pull off the seal of regret, then you get a cow code that you can enter in the remorse portal which says do you regret your purchase? Do you want angus to live? Time to cancel your pre-order.
2:03:35 - Leo Laporte
And if 50 of all people cancel their pre-orders, angus will live but right beneath the seal of regret is the seal of sending, which you can use to say no, I want my hamburgers and handbags.
2:03:49 - Jeff Jarvis
What do you think? You remember Larry, the Lobster Leo.
2:03:52 - Leo Laporte
No, there's the same thing. Saturday Night Live.
2:03:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Saturday Night Live they did a whole thing where the audience had to vote whether or not to boil Larry the Lobster.
2:04:02 - Leo Laporte
And what was the outcome?
2:04:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I believe it was the same.
2:04:05 - Leo Laporte
See, I think Angus is going down.
2:04:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I dare not search on Google right now because it will kill my bandwidth and my voice.
2:04:11 - Paris Martineau
Well, I think it's kind of interesting, because so there are 400 like people who bought three burgers each, and then there were four people. I think the three burgers people like, paid like 35 bucks or something. Then there are four people who paid $1, dollars each for a handbag made of flesh. And those people get higher voting rights. So if all four handbag owners choose to not cancel their purchase, then Angus dies because they've basically got 50 percent.
2:04:48 - Jeff Jarvis
So we require college.
2:04:50 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's an electoral college system for this cow. So I mean right now no orders have been canceled because this just happened yesterday. So no one has gotten their cow cancellation codes. But so long as I don't know at least one or two of those handbag people cancel and a sizable smattering of the burger people cancel, the cow will live and go to a farm upstate in a non-euphemistic way you don't get your money though. No, you don't get your money back. You just get photos of a cow hanging out.
2:05:19 - Leo Laporte
And, by the way, the fine print under the seal of regret says this is a moral decision. You will not be refunded. This decision is final and can only be made once. You can't change your mind if you pull off the seal of regret. By the way, the seal of regret has a little French on it. Oui, je regrette tout. Yes, I regret everything. This is an art collective, but I believe them. I think there is an actual cow.
2:05:48 - Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, there's definitely an actual cow. They've got a bunch of little photos sold out within a day it sold out within like 20 minutes. I saw the post of this like 20 minutes after it went and I went to go look at it and I was like, oh I kind of.
2:05:59 - Leo Laporte
Did you want to buy um?
2:06:01 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I don't know if I would have bought it. I maybe I would have and I would have definitely returned it. Uh yeah, I don't I don't really eat burgers either way, but also I think it's a cool art project, um, and would want to support the life of the cow, but I don't know. I've just been thinking about like I'm not normally a person who is, uh, captivated by any of mischief's like art stuff. I couldn't name the last thing.
2:06:26 - Leo Laporte
They did other than aren't they the ones that put fake action figures in toy stores and things like that they do?
2:06:31 - Paris Martineau
I mean stuff yeah, that sounds like them yeah but I feel like this has really captivated me. I've been thinking about it for the last day. I'm like man, what's gonna go?
2:06:39 - Leo Laporte
on. That's the point to get you thinking yeah, uh, and how are any angus's chances? Looking at the moment, it looks like angus will die because no one has canceled their orders.
2:06:51 - Paris Martineau
I mean no one has gotten their tokens yet. This just people just ordered yesterday, so it hasn't. They haven't shipped out.
2:06:57 - Leo Laporte
You haven't had a chance to cancel. I don't know.
2:07:00 - Paris Martineau
I like the like motto for the website is the cow is of the bovine ilk. One end is moo, the other milk Food. One end is moo, the other milk Food or thoughts.
2:07:12 - Leo Laporte
Lavash Kimo. Wow, that's a great pick. That is right up there with the top 10. Wonderful pick.
2:07:21 - Paris Martineau
Right up there with cow magnets. Another top pick of mine, another good one.
2:07:25 - Leo Laporte
I'm sad because we have a stainless steel refrigerator and we can't have refrigerator magnets. What, yeah, they fall right off. You put them on and they go right to the ground. It is, it's terrible.
2:07:37 - Paris Martineau
That's a huge design failure. You've lost something essential to the human experience.
2:07:42 - Leo Laporte
I think that rich people make their refrigerators out of stainless steel just to defeat the fridge magnet crowd.
2:07:52 - Paris Martineau
And it's like. It's not as if, like, you're still going to be getting fingerprints and stuff on it too.
2:07:57 - Leo Laporte
And you still get fridge magnets, but you just can't stick them anywhere. That sucks. If somebody would invent fridge magnets that stick to stainless steel.
2:08:08 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think those are just called stickers.
2:08:17 - Leo Laporte
But I don't want to put stickers on my fridge. That's no good. I want to spell things. You know, they get those magnet sets where you have different words and you can write poems and stuff.
2:08:21 - Paris Martineau
None of that works when I moved into my apartment, there were only just a small handful of those words left on it, and it spelled out help here, hell here, and that's that's what it says they had a lot of h's.
2:08:38 - Leo Laporte
They don't know what to do with jeff. You have some good shows, uh good stories, for your picks. I do want to uh mention you don't have to do this one, but I? I the fact that the radio station that I listened to in my entire youth, growing up, is gone is devastating to me. I listen to WCBS radio. My clock radio when I was a kid is set to that. That was my alarm clock. I remember waking up in 1968 to hear that Martin Luther King had been killed, that Robert Kennedy had been killed. Every major news event launching to the moon, I heard on WCBS. And now it's gone.
2:09:22 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the end of mass media. It's just another chapter in that WINS continues. I think it was WINS 10-10 wins. It was 22 minutes we're giving the world. But yeah, who listens to radio anymore? Who listens to news on radio anymore? We have news everywhere.
2:09:41 - Leo Laporte
People, my age.
2:09:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I know, but it's gone, I get called. I get called. Yeah, KCBS is still on in. San Francisco.
2:09:51 - Leo Laporte
But, but kgo, which was the number one news talk station in san francisco is long gone. I worked there. It's long gone yeah, yeah.
2:10:00 - Jeff Jarvis
So on top of that, let's finish it off here with the death of this week's in the death of best media. Paramount global took a six billion dollar rate down on its cable TV business, and Warner Brothers Discovery did the same for $9 billion, oh so mass media is dying.
2:10:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the future is somebody on his cell phone in his garden, I think.
2:10:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, getting bitten by mosquitoes.
2:10:27 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say it's dark outside now. Oh yikes.
2:10:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Now that we're near the end, I can try that again.
2:10:35 - Leo Laporte
And oh, okay, you also had the Taco Bell story. Yeah, all right, I think that wraps it up for the afternoon. We appreciate you joining us on this not dead media, the, the new media called podcasting. And we're even, I think, even more modern now that I can do it from my attic and we can use technologies like restream, and this show is done via zoom, iso and e-cam on a Mac in the cloud and we can use Restream to do stuff Restream's really cool.
I love it, I am thrilled and we're going to do something on Friday. We're going to do our first. I'm calling him Ad Hoc from the Attic. It's just kind of me and whatever I want to talk about In this case it's going to be me and the coffee excuse me, the coffee geek, mark Prince, or is it Price? Mark Price, who is my coffee guru. For more than a decade, I've been following his website, coffeegeekcom, and I've been using his reviews and his information about coffee to help me make better coffee. He's a really fun guy.
He's going to join me 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2100 utc, to talk coffee, and we will be doing it on a restream, which means we'll stream it on all seven platforms. Let me see if I can do this discord for our club members YouTubecom, slash twit, slash live, twitchtv, slash twit, kik, facebook, linkedin and Xcom. There you go, that's all seven, so you can watch it live. We will record it and people who can't be there live will be able to watch it in the club after the fact, but you do have to be a club member to watch it, so we're trying to give you reasons to join Club Twit. So we're looking forward to this. It's going to be a lot of fun.
It's the world's most read coffee and espresso resource and he's already sent me an email saying there's two things I will not talk about. I said what he said I'm not going to talk about pod coffee, don't ask me about any of the pod crap. I said okay, and he said and don't ask me about uh, civet coffee, cat butt coffee, I will not talk about it.
So that's all right I know all about it. I've I've had it, so we will don't don't tune in looking for the latest courig tips. We're going to talk about real coffee made by real machines.
2:13:11 - Paris Martineau
I just love the idea that it's like an email like you get before you interview a major political figure where they're trying to negotiate the terms of the interview. They're like I will under no circ*mstances discuss this circ*mstance.
2:13:22 - Leo Laporte
Don't ask me about those prior convictions. I will not talk about them. Yeah, you know what? I would completely agree. I'm not talking about pods and I'm not talking about cat butt coffee. So there you go. If that's what you want for coffee, that's not the show for you, but we're going to do that. Uh, two o'clock it'll be the first, I hope, of many, including paris and I are planning it. Uh, we are going to do. Uh, paris is going to walk me through one of the most popular games of the year bald Baldur's Gate 3. She loves it. I started playing it, but I don't get it. And it turns out I didn't know this but Benito Gonzalez, our producer, and Anthony Nielsen, our creative director, both play.
2:14:02 - Paris Martineau
So we're going to we're going to squad up. We're going to squad up.
2:14:06 - Leo Laporte
And we're going to stream it live and take your comments or snark. You can mock me, that's coming soon, as soon as we figure out how to do it. We'll be doing that in the next few weeks and I hope we can do more of that Paris, cause I really think that'll be a lot of fun.
2:14:19 - Paris Martineau
I think it'll be a lot of fun yeah.
2:14:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, thank you Paris. Martino, the informationcom. And now you've got to subscribe to the Weekend Newsletter, which you should have all along, because it's really great. I'm so thrilled that you're writing for that. You can give her tips on SignalMartino.01. Thank you, paris. Thank you Jeff.
2:14:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Jarvis.
2:14:40 - Leo Laporte
I hope you make it out of the garden intact.
2:14:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Sorry, media torture day.
2:14:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know, I'm so glad we could get you on anyway, and I hope Verizon comes back for you.
2:14:52 - Paris Martineau
I've really spent a lot of time admiring this photo and, uh, I thank you for that at least he's a good looking guy.
2:14:57 - Leo Laporte
He's a good looking guy looks like I love doing this show.
I look forward to it and I hope you do too. We do it every wednesday, 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern 21,. 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC and, as I mentioned, streaming live on seven different platforms. There's no reason not to watch live. You can also join us in the Discord. We love our chatters and the club Club.
Twitter is $7 a month for ad-free versions of all of our shows, plus extra stuff like this coffee conversation. You're actually what's keeping Twitter live? We love our advertisers, but advertising is not enough to keep us doing what we're doing, to pay for Paris and Jeff and all our great members team members. I haven't taken a salary in months. It's not for me, it's for them, it's for keeping this show on the road and we love doing it, so I hope you will help us. Twittv slash club twit. You could pay seven bucks a month, but you could pay more if you want. But please join the club. We'd like to have you.
After the fact, on-demand versions of the show are available in a lot of places. Of course, from the website twittv slash tw, you can also. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Yeah, we do audio and video of all of our shows. There's also, of course, the best way to subscribe your favorite podcast player Subscribe to Twig. You can get the audio or the video or both, and listen and watch at your leisure. I hope you will do that and I thank you for being here. Thank you, paris. Thank you, jeff. We'll see you back here in the attic again in a week, on this Week in Google. Bye-bye.
