0:00

It's time for Twig this week in Google.

0:02

Paris Martineau's here. Yay! She's back. Jeff Jarvis

0:04

is here also. We'll talk about two

0:06

big court decisions going against Google, one for

0:09

the App Store, and well, one

0:11

it's the DOJ saying, I

0:13

think we're gonna break Google up. We'll

0:15

see what happens with that. We'll also

0:17

talk about the states, more

0:19

than a dozen of them, suing TikTok.

0:22

And is Peter

0:25

Todd really Satoshi Nakamoto? I

0:28

have some thoughts, all

0:30

that coming up next

0:32

on Twig. Podcasts you love

0:35

from people you trust. This

0:38

is Twig. This

0:44

is Twig this week in Google episode 789

0:46

recorded Wednesday, October 9th, 2024.

0:52

Mauritius compliance. It's

0:55

time for Twig this week in Google, a show

0:57

we talk about the latest news from

1:00

the Google verse, which covers pretty much everything

1:03

out there in the

1:05

internet cloud. Paris Martineau's

1:07

back, hallelujah. Yay! From

1:09

theinformation.com. She writes for

1:11

the weekend section talking

1:13

about apparently children's

1:16

flag football. So that's good. That'll be

1:18

exciting. You know,

1:20

only the important topics. She's

1:22

covering issues. Online child safety.

1:24

Yeah, issues with the youths and

1:26

online and all that. That's a good subject,

1:29

isn't it? Boy, these days. That it is.

1:32

Great. We missed you. Your friend Ed is

1:34

a character and a half. I

1:36

love that I've introduced Ed into the

1:38

twit universe. Oh my God. He

1:40

just can come on through

1:42

Twitter. I feel like, yeah,

1:45

he tweeted his way into my heart and

1:47

yours. Yeah. Your

1:49

nihilistic heart. That's Jeff

1:51

Jarvis, professor emeritus of journalism

1:54

at the City University of New York.

1:56

Well, we should say at the Craig

1:58

Newmark Graduate School. Have a

2:00

fantastic New York. Have a

2:03

fantastic New York. At the City University of New

2:05

York, emeritus. And Jeff has now created a kiosk

2:07

in his office. Well, the

2:10

web we weave is officially out. Get

2:13

your copy now. By the whole set.

2:16

He did a TikTok where he opened

2:18

the boxes. It's hysterical. Is that your

2:20

first TikTok or is that... No, I

2:22

did it before. It was

2:24

cute. It was really cute. Do a lot of dances on there.

2:27

So I have all the books. I do.

2:30

But the latest is this, the web we weave. Soon

2:33

to be a New York Times bestseller. Why

2:35

we must reclaim the internet from moguls and

2:37

misanthropes and moral panic. I got

2:39

my first review and it's a pan. Moral panic you say? Who

2:42

panned you? Oh, some old

2:45

bitty. Some old

2:47

bitty. Bad feeling about this. Hey,

2:50

I didn't realize we still had that. I thought we

2:52

left it at the studio. We apparently have 20 of them. I

2:55

think we realized. Oh yeah, you didn't know that. We

2:57

have versions. We have a bunch of

2:59

versions of that. It's just, I don't have a hot

3:01

key for it. So it's hard to hit on

3:03

time. You got to bring it up. Yeah.

3:07

All I have is John, John, Selena

3:09

going, Hey, hey, that's

3:11

the only thing I brought. Anyway,

3:14

well, you don't deserve bad reviews. Although

3:17

I would imagine the people who don't like it are

3:19

the people who are lobbying

3:21

for the shutdown of social

3:23

media. That's what it is. Yes.

3:25

Yes. Yes. This week, the what is it? 13

3:29

states attorney general decided that they're

3:32

going to go after social media and shut

3:34

her down. Well, tick tock before

3:36

and tick tocks on the way out anyway. So

3:38

you're wasting your breath. They said

3:40

it's like it's like cigarettes. It's like

3:43

nicotine and cigarettes. This social media. It's

3:46

not causing cancer. You nit wits. No,

3:49

you're nit wits. Moral

3:53

entrepreneurs. Yeah, it was 13 states

3:56

and the District of Columbia sued

3:58

tick tock on Tuesday. arguing

4:00

that the company deliberately designed

4:02

the app to be addictive to children

4:05

and that it has misrepresented

4:08

the effectiveness of its content moderation

4:10

efforts to consumers. And cases do

4:12

this. And this is kind

4:14

of advancing a novel legal

4:16

strategy. It's been finding purchase

4:18

in courts around the U.S.

4:21

lately, which is they're trying

4:23

to basically sidestep section

4:25

230 protections by using

4:27

the principles of product liability

4:29

to get these companies on

4:32

negligent design or essentially

4:35

just knowing that

4:37

something in their product could harm

4:40

consumers in some way and

4:42

continue to do it anyway. Section 230

4:44

protects them against being

4:46

sued for either moderating or not moderating

4:49

the content. They can't be held liable

4:51

for something other people post or

4:53

that they take down because it's bad. But so they

4:55

can't go through that. So

4:57

specifically what these suits are doing is

5:00

they're targeting the TikTok algorithm in different

5:02

parts of the TikTok platform, saying that,

5:04

you know, the way that age gating

5:07

was implemented, the process by which they

5:09

determined like, are you under 13 or

5:11

not, that it was designed

5:14

in a defective way that

5:17

could have harmful impacts or that, you

5:19

know, the algorithm could have harmful

5:21

impacts on mental health of young users. And

5:23

they knew that and continued to make those

5:26

choices anyway. Let me channel Ed

5:29

Zittrain from last week's show. Social

5:32

media is killing children.

5:34

The algorithm is like

5:36

nicotine. That's

5:38

not a very good Ed Zittrain, but you get

5:41

the idea that people very, very much feel that.

5:43

And it feels, and by the

5:45

way, that's what you're arguing against very much in

5:47

the web we weave, Jeff. Yeah, but trying to

5:49

actually find the Supreme Court up

5:51

until now has again and again thrown down

5:53

this argument. I can't find it in my

5:56

own book. It should have an index.

6:00

thrown down the idea that it does have an index.

6:02

I know it does, but I can't. Uh,

6:06

it's thrown on the idea that, um, censoring

6:12

for children is okay. Cause it's for

6:14

children. Right. It's always fundamentally insulting

6:16

for children. Interestingly this week, it just,

6:19

if I may do it, just a

6:21

little tiny detour, we'll come back

6:23

to it. No, no. Detour array, because we're,

6:25

this is going to be a fast moving

6:27

fast paced episode with many, many stories. Oh,

6:29

okay. Unlike last week when we did two.

6:32

Yes. Um, so, sorry, I'll get

6:34

rid of this. I got to laugh at your

6:36

kiosk. That is the funniest thing ever. By the

6:38

way, I hope that

6:40

a Glenn Fleischman never sees that you're

6:43

using his books

6:45

to prop up the web. We, we, that's

6:49

how you keep it. That's how you keep it

6:51

stable is that's the, uh, that

6:53

the type shift happens book that Glenn did. Notice

6:55

that it's right here because I'm using it for

6:57

research for the day. Okay. So

6:59

that's not really a, uh, a

7:01

show kiosk. That's my desk. I

7:04

love stacks. Book

7:07

cart that we have more books over

7:09

here. I am working. That's

7:12

a proper desk. It is. That

7:14

is, that is really impressive. Camera

7:17

is never going to be back in the right spot.

7:20

Fine. It's not. Wait

7:26

a minute. Just in sympathy. I'm

7:28

just going to lower my, uh, my shot.

7:31

Let's all sit a little lower. Now

7:35

he's high. Make up your mind. Mr. Jarvis. So,

7:44

uh, last week, I think

7:46

we, I've fallen and I can't

7:49

get up. It's really

7:51

hard to adjust from here. Oh

7:53

God. How do I do it? Okay.

7:59

The show's fallen apart already in the

8:01

first seven minutes. That's impressive. Where

8:04

was that when I was so rudely digressive?

8:06

We were talking about the fact that there

8:08

are bad people out there who think that

8:10

social media is addictive. And you talk about

8:12

that in the web we weave. And there

8:14

are constitutional issues. So, uh, one of the,

8:17

one of the AI bills that Gavin Newsom,

8:19

the governor of California signed in the

8:21

last month or so was a last

8:23

week enjoined, uh, because,

8:25

um, it was

8:27

against deep fakes being promoted in social

8:30

media. And a guy did a

8:32

deep fake of Kamala Harris doing something. And he

8:34

sued because he said it was a violation of

8:36

his first amendment rights to take it down. And

8:38

the court agreed with him so far. So

8:40

the first amendment comes, it's more than section two

8:43

30. The first amendment comes into play again and

8:45

again and again. Well,

8:47

I'll play devil's advocate here for

8:49

a minute. Please talk to a

8:51

lot. I know I can't do a word

8:53

of sex and otherwise I would, but for

8:56

instance, let's take the safe for kids act

8:58

safe stands for something. I'm not remembering, which

9:00

is something that passed in New York recently.

9:02

One of the provisions in that is that

9:04

accounts for children should by default

9:08

have, uh, an

9:10

algorithmic recommendation engine turned off

9:12

and should instead display content

9:14

from people like on Instagram,

9:17

the kid follows chronologically. That's

9:19

ostensibly because they think, Oh, a

9:22

problem a lot of kids have is,

9:24

you know, regulating their time. One of

9:26

the things that makes it worse is

9:29

if you have a recommendation algorithm that

9:31

keeps serving them really interesting content, I

9:33

don't think that that's that bad. That's

9:36

just saying social media

9:38

is too much fun. It's too

9:40

interesting. So please make it boring.

9:43

And then we don't have to worry about it being addictive. The

9:46

algorithm often, I mean, we set up with

9:48

like alcohol and cigarette. I set up my

9:51

Facebook because somebody told me, Oh, you know,

9:53

you can't, cause I kept saying, Oh, I

9:55

want the, I want just the friend feed,

9:58

the chronological feed. I said. up. It was

10:00

the most horribly boring

10:04

list of stuff. One guy posted half of

10:06

it. It's not good. So what's

10:09

wrong with a company saying, look, we're going to, we

10:11

want to give people what they want to see. It's

10:14

not for everybody. It's just for, I'm

10:16

forgetting the exact age range, but let's

10:18

say like under 16 year

10:20

olds or under 13 year olds, if they're

10:22

using a product, I don't think

10:25

that that's that bad of a policy

10:27

to say by default, you have one

10:29

feed. If you have parental permission, you

10:31

can change to the normal one. That's

10:33

fine. But on very specific kid accounts

10:35

to have by default kind of increased

10:37

operation standards, I don't think there's

10:40

nothing real. Children's television, Teletubbies is

10:42

far too entertaining. We need to

10:44

have it be droning

10:46

teachers telling them about

10:48

stuff they need to

10:50

know. I mean,

10:52

I don't mind them banning sugar

10:55

cereal ads in children's TV programming and it

10:57

would be okay to say no advertising. The

10:59

algorithm is not bad. It is a choice

11:01

of ranking and ranking is made for many

11:04

reasons. And I quote from a book just

11:06

out, um, the governor of

11:08

New York, Kathy Hochul, uh, who

11:10

not only killed former congestion, former governor, she's

11:12

still the governor. Oh, I was, I was

11:14

wishful thinking. Oh yeah. I'm thinking of Eric

11:16

Adams. Oh no, he's still maybe, he's still

11:18

here. He's former soon though. Come

11:20

on. I guess who may become

11:22

our next mayor, but anyway, she

11:25

said, do you understand how an algorithm

11:27

works? It follows you. It

11:29

preys on you. No, it says classic.

11:31

It doesn't have a crap. Yeah. No.

11:35

And I know you're doing a little bit

11:37

of devil's advocate, but that's my job. That's

11:39

Leo's job. But, uh, no, but, uh, and

11:41

I, and I have said that myself that

11:43

the algorithm is the problem you've, you've been

11:45

blasted at the past, but you're coming to

11:47

learn. Well, I just realized that

11:49

with that, all an algorithm is, is trying

11:51

to make the content more interesting. Well, that's

11:54

a bit of an extrapolation. Really what it's

11:56

doing is optimizing for the maximized

11:58

engagement. It's optimizing for how long will

12:01

it keep this user on this website.

12:03

And I do think that there's some

12:05

way of an argument is a proxy

12:07

for satisfaction. Isn't that's yeah. But

12:10

when you're talking about like a,

12:13

you know, minor child, I think that

12:15

there could be something to maybe having

12:17

a different type of account for

12:19

someone like under 16 or under 13

12:22

years old that perhaps doesn't

12:24

optimize for that. Okay. I won't disagree

12:26

with having a different account for a

12:28

young person, but, but the algorithm is

12:31

irrelevant to that. I

12:33

think you got taken in by a cupcake, Ms.

12:35

Martin. No. What?

12:38

Right. I must have missed that discussion before the show.

12:41

Um, and,

12:43

uh, uh, so, so then, then what are the

12:45

criteria? What is it that you want to do

12:47

with the account? Okay. But the algorithm

12:50

is just ranking, making ranking decisions. That's all

12:52

it's doing is say, and, and, and as

12:54

Leo said, it's often getting rid of the

12:57

bad stuff, the boring stuff, the

12:59

competitive stuff. It depends on

13:01

how it's written. Algorithms like saying, we

13:03

should make candy taste bad if children

13:05

are going to eat it. Well, you

13:07

were just talking about how you'd be

13:09

in support of no like high sugar

13:11

ads being shown to kids. I feel

13:13

like it's kind of a similar vein

13:15

of regulation. I mean, let's take, for

13:17

example, this New York law I just

13:19

mentioned, I believe the provisions

13:21

in it are, you know, some

13:23

level of like minor kid accounts should

13:26

by default have chronological feeds instead of

13:28

having Algorithmic as the default. You can

13:30

switch it if you want. And then

13:32

the other one is, uh, notifications

13:35

for, I believe like under 13

13:37

year olds should be by default

13:39

muted from 10 PM to

13:41

six. Yeah. I don't have a problem

13:43

with that. Those are those, I don't

13:45

think that's that big of a deal.

13:47

Shouldn't that be the parent's job? Why

13:49

does the government have to decide when

13:51

your kids are getting notifications? I mean,

13:53

why does the government decide anything? Why

13:56

does the government regulate the airline industry?

13:58

Why does the government decide whether we

14:00

can add? advertise stuff to kids like,

14:02

I don't know, the government

14:04

does a lot of stuff. I don't know if, yeah, I'm gonna,

14:06

I don't know if I can codify it, but

14:08

there is definitely stuff that it's an appropriate

14:11

thing for the government to do and stuff that's appropriate thing

14:13

for the parent to do. I guess, Something

14:16

that I recently heard. What the government could tell companies is

14:18

you have to give better parental

14:20

controls to the parents. Like, there

14:22

should be a switch that says no notifications

14:24

at night and the parents should be made

14:26

aware of that. But the presumption

14:28

really is, oh, parents aren't gonna care. They're

14:31

not gonna do anything. So we have to,

14:33

and it bothers me a little bit. And

14:35

it's a red herring. Show me the research

14:37

that says that the algorithm does

14:40

this to children. That's what I couldn't

14:42

find. And the, you know,

14:44

it's, it's the algorithm has now been demonized,

14:47

which is like demonizing math. I

14:50

mean, I agree. I think like even that hope

14:52

chill quote you just did, it's ridiculous the way

14:55

that something as simple as an algorithm has been

14:57

demonized. But I do think that there is something

14:59

like to your question of like, oh, it should

15:01

be the parents responsibility. I agree. I was talking

15:04

to kind of a big

15:06

supporter of this recently, of these

15:08

sort of regulations recently. And

15:10

I posed that question to her asking like, well,

15:12

shouldn't all of this be parental responsibility? And

15:14

she did bring up an interesting point I hadn't

15:16

thought about, which is like, she

15:19

will one, she gave an example of,

15:21

she had three, has three kids. At

15:23

one point she downloaded

15:26

one of those, software services. I think bark is

15:28

the name of one of them, where essentially it's

15:30

like spyware for your phone, where it sits in

15:32

the back and monitors every social media every texting

15:34

thing, anything you have on there, and you can

15:36

set certain triggers and it'll alert you for all

15:38

of it. And she did like whatever the basic

15:40

bare minimum was. And she was like, I was

15:42

receiving 500 to a thousand alerts

15:47

a day. She was like, it

15:49

was incredible. She's like, I'm really privileged. Why

15:51

was able to deal with that? But most

15:53

people who do not, who, you know, maybe

15:55

work two jobs probably can't. And right now

15:57

these social media companies don't seem to have

15:59

parental settings. in place to make

16:01

it easy for parents. Facebook only recently, or

16:03

Meta only recently came out, this was Instagram.

16:07

The other thing I think is, I

16:10

agree, the other thing I think is notable that

16:13

she brought up that I hadn't thought about is

16:15

she's like, for a lot of parents she knows,

16:17

they don't allow their kids to have any access

16:19

to personal devices like phones or computers, but that

16:22

doesn't work because nowadays if you have a kid

16:25

in elementary school, they're gonna be sent home

16:27

with an iPad, school issued, or a computer

16:29

starting a middle school. A Chromebook, a Chromebook.

16:31

I mean, and you might say, and I

16:33

mean, I think the

16:36

gasp is somewhat warranted, but also it's

16:38

incredibly difficult to then police your child's

16:40

social media use if they have a

16:42

computer 24 seven. If

16:45

the kids are being given computers

16:47

from the schools, it's incumbent on the

16:49

schools to do the right thing and

16:51

make sure those are not introducing stuff

16:53

into the house. I

16:55

think whoever provides the object should be responsible

16:57

for making sure the object does no harm.

17:00

What about this example? Just

17:03

explain to me how this is different

17:05

from, let's take the sugar out of

17:07

candy if it's sold to people under 13, because

17:10

it was clearly bad for them. It causes tooth

17:12

decay. We're learning

17:15

more and more, the sugar is actually a poison.

17:18

We should take sugar out of candy,

17:21

but only for people who are underage.

17:24

I don't disagree that that could be an

17:26

argument. I don't think

17:28

we should for any, I don't have any strong

17:30

personal beliefs on either of these subjects. I think

17:33

the difference is that it has

17:35

become, the social media issue has become

17:37

such a big issue for parents in

17:39

recent years that they're mobilizing on it.

17:41

Meanwhile, sugar isn't something that's incited

17:43

like mobilization. And more and more

17:45

viewers are exploiting this and making

17:47

more fear and not using research.

17:50

The problem, and so much of this, for a lot

17:53

of kids who feel

17:55

very lonely and very depressed, there's a lot

17:57

of research that's actually I write about in

17:59

the book, which. says that it

18:01

makes them feel better. They know

18:03

that they're not alone in the world. It's a

18:05

way that they have friends. Ed last week was

18:07

talking about how he, it was very sad really,

18:09

about how he had no friends, none at all.

18:13

And the internet, time and time again, is a

18:15

place where kids can see that they're not alone,

18:18

that they find other people who sympathize with

18:20

them. That is an important human

18:22

connection that's being cut off because

18:24

of a fear of a screen or an algorithm.

18:28

It's pure moral panic. There's

18:30

also the argument that. Is

18:33

this gonna be a different one? Houston, we have a problem.

18:36

What are we doing? It's

18:39

also the case that focusing on

18:41

this distracts from real

18:44

solutions like make

18:46

sure you fund mental

18:48

health experts in every school, that you

18:51

fund mental health centers, that you

18:53

pay attention to what's going on for kids. There's

18:55

a lot of things we could do that

18:58

we don't do. It's very easy to blame. Just say,

19:00

well, it's big tech, we can fix it. Let's

19:02

just ban them and then we'll be

19:04

all fine. And I think that that's

19:07

really a shortcut that unfortunately leaves behind

19:09

real solutions. So there's also that.

19:13

Anyway, it's a good conversation. Yes.

19:17

I guess we'll let the courts decide

19:19

because the courts are so smart that

19:22

they should be able to figure this out. Obviously they're so

19:24

smart. And I think it's a

19:26

good conversation to have because I

19:29

fall on both sides of the spectrum depending on what

19:32

the day is. I think I can see

19:34

benefits in both sides. And I think it's gonna be kind

19:36

of interesting to see how this shakes out. I

19:38

was a laissez-faire parent. Even

19:41

when my kids were, I mean now they're 30 and 32. So

19:44

they're older than you, Paris. So they obviously

19:46

didn't have access to the same social media

19:49

you do or kids today have. But there

19:52

was even an end. Should they

19:54

play video games? Should you limit that to too much?

19:56

Should you limit screen time? Et

19:59

cetera, et cetera. laissez-faire, I figured, well,

20:02

we'll let them figure it out. And I, we

20:04

would have discussions like if you see something online

20:07

that upsets you, please

20:09

come to us and talk about it. We're never going to yell

20:11

at you for seeing it. We want to talk

20:14

about it and that kind of thing. They

20:16

survived. Um, so

20:19

my, my inclination is laissez-faire, but I'll

20:21

tell you the other thing is I

20:23

think parents should have whatever tools they

20:25

need to keep their kids safe. It's

20:27

up to the parent. And that's why

20:29

I'm not crazy about government getting involved.

20:31

I think government could mandate the tools.

20:33

That's fine. Yeah. I mean, I

20:35

do think that there is something to the argument though, that,

20:37

I mean,

20:40

let's, for, let's take, for example, these new

20:42

teen accounts that, uh, metagist rolled out for

20:45

Instagram that happened a week or two ago,

20:47

but they, I don't know whether that's a

20:49

good solution, but they had features in there

20:51

that I, when I saw it was like,

20:54

what, you didn't have

20:56

this beforehand to where, you know,

20:58

if you're a child who's told

21:00

meta, I'm 13. Now

21:03

your account by default doesn't let any

21:06

stranger that wants to talk, like connect with

21:08

you and message you, you know, I

21:11

think, and now there are stronger supports

21:13

for a parent wants to have parental

21:15

controls on that kid's account. They can't.

21:18

And I think those are both

21:20

good things and they only have

21:22

come because meta has been bullied

21:24

for years, like months and months

21:26

and years by angry

21:28

parents and threatened with serious

21:31

legislation and regulation by state

21:33

and federal lawmakers. Yeah. Remember

21:36

when the Senate committee made

21:38

Mark Zuckerberg stand up and

21:40

apologize to the parents in

21:42

the, in the gallery? And

21:44

now he says he's done apologizing. That

21:47

was, that also probably backfires because rather

21:49

than, than, than having a cooperative discussion

21:51

about this, it became so combative. He

21:54

just says Oscar. Yeah.

21:56

Maybe that's really what we need is this sense that

21:58

we are all coming from a point goodwill

22:01

and that we're trying to find a solution that's best

22:03

for our kids. I

22:06

agree, but I would also say, I mean, something,

22:10

something that struck me out when I was reading the,

22:12

it was a couple weeks ago,

22:14

the Department of Justice sued TikTok

22:16

for various violations of

22:19

COPPA, the Children Online Privacy and

22:21

Protection Act, and a different agreement.

22:24

And it detailed in, it went

22:26

into great detail in the complaint

22:28

of the lawsuit, all the various

22:31

ways in which TikTok had been

22:33

deficient in stopping children

22:35

under the age of 13 from making

22:38

accounts as adults. And

22:40

one of the things that they mentioned was

22:42

that TikTok has, I guess, some

22:44

form on their website where if you're a

22:46

parent and you're like, my eight-year-old

22:49

has a TikTok account and I want

22:51

it to be deleted. TikTok's

22:54

system for responding to those requests

22:56

was so deficient that the vast, vast,

22:58

vast majority of requests from parents went

23:01

nowhere. Even if parents did everything correctly,

23:03

filled out all the forms, TikTok would

23:05

ignore it and in some ways built

23:08

a system specifically to keep those accounts

23:10

around and active for the kids when

23:12

parents wanted to get them taken down. That should

23:15

definitely be fixed. Although all that's

23:17

doing means is that TikTok is operating at

23:19

the same level as our government does. I

23:21

mean, yeah. So I think that that's probably

23:23

why things have gotten deleted. I have to

23:25

say, it

23:27

hurts me a little bit to think of

23:29

banning TikTok because of my son who,

23:32

so one

23:35

of the things we've been talking about, Benino said

23:37

this a couple of weeks ago and it really

23:39

sunk in with me. If you're going to start

23:41

a new project, a podcast or YouTube video or

23:43

whatever, you need to put it somewhere where there's

23:45

an algorithm, where there's a discovery engine because

23:49

discovery is impossible in a world

23:51

where there are millions of creators.

23:54

You need to put it somewhere where an algorithm can

23:56

promote you. My son started

23:58

making sandwiches. on TikTok and

24:01

paid attention to what the algorithm promoted

24:03

and what it didn't promote and

24:06

worked hard to make sure that his videos

24:08

appealed to the algorithm, presuming

24:10

that the algorithm was doing what

24:12

it does because it appealed and

24:14

turned to people, right? It's

24:17

watching likes and so forth. And

24:19

he's been able to build a pretty darn

24:22

good career out of it. I'm holding up

24:24

his cookbook as I'm talking about that, which

24:26

is available in bookstores everywhere. I

24:28

saw that kind of salt napkin,

24:31

salt, Hank, a five napkin situation

24:33

by Henry Laporte, buy

24:36

it at bookstores everywhere. But

24:39

that is, I think, and

24:41

a hundred percent owed to

24:43

the marriage of TikTok's algorithm

24:45

and his ability to create

24:48

stuff that fit the algorithm.

24:51

Not that he's just one of a thousand

24:53

or a hundred thousand TikTok

24:55

chefs or YouTube chefs. That's

25:00

why I'm kind of, I feel a

25:03

certain loyalty to TikTok. And if they're doing

25:05

stuff wrong, they need to work on it.

25:08

Obviously if they, you know, parents should be able to

25:10

say to TikTok, Hey, this is a kid, you

25:12

know, block his account, whatever that, that needs to

25:14

be fixed. Obviously I'm not against that. Let's

25:16

take a little break there. There's lots

25:18

of news. Let's take a little break. Because

25:21

we now know who Satoshi Nakamoto is

25:24

and they amaze you.

25:29

I'm going to argue for this one, but

25:31

I'll tell you, we'll talk about it in

25:33

just a second. Also, if you've got a.

25:35

One of the arguments for being Satoshi is

25:37

that they share the same pizza, favorite pizza

25:39

topping. I'll just put that

25:42

out there. Be patient. We'll get to that.

25:44

Also, the .io domain is going to disappear

25:46

in all likelihood. What are you going to

25:48

do? Then

25:50

google.io all

25:52

of that and more coming up in just a little

25:54

bit on this week in Google Paris, Martino's back. We're

25:57

so glad to see her. And

25:59

by the way. coordinating the

26:02

Monstera sweater and glasses

26:08

and the green, the green lighting behind you. Very nicely

26:10

done. Very nicely done. Are

26:13

your parents in the, in the, uh, wake

26:17

of the, they are thankfully not in

26:19

the part of Florida. It's going

26:21

to be hit by the hurricane. Yeah. Our

26:23

deepest thoughts and,

26:25

uh, and, uh, good

26:28

wishes to the people in North Carolina and

26:30

Florida and the areas affected by

26:32

first Helene and now what's

26:34

his name? Milton. Milton. It

26:37

truly looks like it's going to be devastating. I mean,

26:39

the Tampa Bay area hasn't been directly

26:42

hit by a hurricane in a hundred

26:44

years. Yeah. It's been rough,

26:46

spared time and time and time again. And

26:48

it's time. It looks like

26:50

it's gone. Did you see the amazing animation

26:52

the weather channel did, uh, about

26:55

storm surges? Yeah, that was really good.

26:57

That was, that was a really good

26:59

example of, you know, normally I don't

27:02

like this kind of, um,

27:05

uh, show off show off the effects,

27:08

but let me just, I, I probably get taken down

27:10

for this. I don't care. It's so good. Uh, just

27:12

show a little bit of it. The,

27:14

uh, anchor, uh, is, I'm not, I'm

27:17

not playing the audio. Maybe that'll help is, is,

27:19

you know, standing in a street with a car

27:22

and the storm is coming and he's describing what a

27:24

storm surge would look like. And he says, well, here's

27:28

a three foot storm

27:31

surge. This is

27:33

very at six feet. This

27:35

is very effective in, in

27:37

really showing what

27:39

people who are deciding to so-called

27:41

ride it out are going

27:43

to face with a nine. That's

27:46

nine feet. Uh,

27:48

you have very little chance of survival and,

27:50

and we're talking some areas. Not just that

27:52

you're on the second floor, the house goes

27:54

down. Yeah. The whole thing's gone. And

27:56

they're even showing all the stuff that's floating in

27:58

that water. Oh, that's the other

28:01

problem, of course. So I really,

28:03

uh, I thought that was a really

28:05

good example of using CGI, uh, very

28:08

effectively for information. Good job,

28:10

Weather Channel. Please don't take us down. Uh,

28:13

all right, we'll come back with more in just a

28:15

bit. You're watching this week in Google brought to you

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32:31

back we come to Twig. And this was,

32:33

I forced myself to stay up

32:36

late last night watching

32:38

Electric Money, which is

32:40

a new HBO documentary from the same

32:42

guy who did the QAnon documentary. And

32:45

I think quite credibly unmasked Q. Did

32:48

you watch the? Yeah. Yeah.

32:52

I mean, I think he quite credibly

32:54

unmasked Q because the Q, the. The

32:57

Q kid. The important

33:00

part of unmasking Q was

33:03

going back through old 4chan

33:05

forum posts and 8chan forum posts. And

33:07

I think that he and his team

33:09

are an expert at that kind of

33:11

digital research. I'm not sure if the

33:13

same is true with Satoshi Nakamoto. So

33:16

that's the Electric Money is about, or

33:18

Money Electric, I guess is the name,

33:20

is about Bitcoin. It's,

33:24

you know, I'm watching it. Before

33:26

they even start going into, well, who

33:28

is Satoshi Nakamoto? And thinking this is

33:31

very, very positive about Bitcoin.

33:33

Doesn't really mention a lot

33:36

of the consequences of Bitcoin

33:39

instead kind of sells Bitcoin. Colin Hoback,

33:42

the filmmaker though, I think

33:44

really intended it all along to be unmasked

33:47

the creator of Bitcoin who

33:49

has been mysterious since

33:51

2012. He's dropped off

33:53

the internet, disappeared. He

33:58

wrote the paper that was. the

34:01

Bitcoin is based on. He created

34:04

what they call the Genesis block, the first block

34:06

in the blockchain, and is thought to

34:08

have a million, one

34:10

million, Bitcoins in his

34:13

wallet. Hang

34:15

on right there for a

34:17

second. Yeah. Like

34:22

Alexander Hamilton creates a US

34:24

Treasury and doesn't keep a

34:26

million dollars for himself for

34:29

doing so. There seems to

34:31

be, granted, whoever

34:33

this is hasn't cashed

34:35

any of it in, but

34:38

it really gives

34:41

me a bad taste to

34:43

think that someone creates a currency, but

34:46

does so to that tremendous personal

34:48

advantage. Well, yeah. Good

34:51

point. Like it would might be a

34:53

pyramid scheme. Like maybe, yeah,

34:55

I mean, they don't debate that. I

34:58

mean, they don't go into it either,

35:00

but I agree with you. I mean,

35:02

there are definitely things about Bitcoin that

35:04

are kind of... I

35:06

thought when it started, I thought, oh, this is cool.

35:08

And blockchain is really cool technology. And I kind of

35:11

went along with it. And of course, the culture

35:15

of the crypto bros is enough to

35:17

turn you off on anything. But

35:19

it really is an interference with

35:23

economic systems in a way that

35:25

isn't regulated, really. And

35:27

it's disturbing. So the one hand, why do I

35:29

care who Satoshi is? But the other hand, I

35:31

guess maybe we should. Well,

35:34

if he has what would make him a

35:36

60 billionaire

35:38

now and potentially a trillionaire

35:40

down the road worth

35:42

of Bitcoin. Now, of course, if he were

35:44

to cash even a significant, any

35:47

significant part of that in, it would

35:49

probably undermine Bitcoin entirely. Right.

35:51

And the confidence in it, which might explain

35:53

why he hasn't. There's some people who've also

35:55

thought that he might be dead. Right.

35:58

Or maybe it's not one. person maybe it's

36:00

a couple of people. Leo I've got it.

36:02

I've got it. You've talked about your drive

36:04

with your Bitcoin on it. Yeah. And how

36:06

you can't open it up. Yeah. I think

36:08

that's just been a confession that you. There's

36:11

a million Bitcoin on

36:13

my drive. You keep doing this podcast

36:15

thing and you complain about the business

36:17

beat down as a cover. It

36:20

is interesting they point out in the documentary

36:22

there is a way to burn Bitcoin publicly

36:24

in such a way that everybody would know

36:26

you no longer have access to it. And

36:29

that has not happened. The

36:32

person he actually I think and

36:34

this is maybe just me

36:36

I think he in effect said two

36:38

people are Satoshi Nakamoto

36:41

the two people that but the person that

36:43

he by the way both of them

36:45

deny it as by

36:47

the way as one would if one

36:50

were Satoshi Nakamoto who knows what

36:52

the United States government or any other government

36:55

might do to you and kidnapping you. Yeah.

36:57

Or not to mention terrorists who would want

36:59

your Bitcoin and on and on

37:01

and on. So I don't

37:03

blame whoever it is for being

37:05

anonymous and for denying it. He

37:08

I think now you see you watched all the way to the

37:11

end because at the end of the

37:13

documentary there is this I think has become

37:15

the Colin Hoback

37:19

trademark. He gets the

37:21

two guys together in like

37:23

a deserted factoring in Slovenia.

37:30

Because Peter Todd who he thinks

37:32

is Satoshi Nakamoto is a caver.

37:34

He likes to a Torontonian. He

37:37

was very if he is Satoshi Nakamoto

37:39

he would have written Bitcoin's seminal

37:41

paper at the age of

37:43

22. The biggest piece

37:47

of evidence is very flimsy which

37:50

is that Satoshi on the on the

37:52

forums before Nakamoto disappeared Satoshi

37:55

posted on the Bitcoin forum before

37:59

it was even before Bitcoin was even the

38:01

paper came out kind of some who's thinking

38:03

out loud. And all

38:06

of a sudden this guy, Peter Todd, who's

38:08

never been around, he's only made one other

38:10

post basically finishes

38:12

the sentence in a way that shows

38:14

a deep technical understanding of what the

38:17

issues are and

38:19

then both Satoshi

38:21

Nakamoto and Peter Todd disappear.

38:24

Colin Hoback's theory is this

38:27

that Peter Todd is Satoshi was

38:29

posting a Satoshi accidentally logged back

38:31

in using another account,

38:34

posted and then went, oh shoot,

38:36

both disappeared. And then never

38:39

deleted it? Well, never

38:41

deleted it. And Todd says, well, why didn't I

38:43

delete it? And I

38:45

think you could make a credible case that deleting

38:47

it would just, nothing ever is

38:50

deleted from the internet, right? So

38:52

that deleting it would just call attention to it. I

38:54

don't know that the forum posts are that

38:59

indicative of it being

39:01

the same person, the

39:03

message, I'll read the Satoshi message here

39:05

and then I'll read the Peter Todd

39:07

reply. There would need to

39:10

be some changes in the Bitcoin coin

39:12

miner side also to make the possibility

39:14

to accept a double spend into the

39:16

transaction pool. But only strictly if the

39:18

inputs and outputs match and the transaction

39:20

fee is higher. And then he, you

39:22

know, as one other sentence about the

39:24

transaction fee and then Peter Todd responds,

39:26

of course, to be specific, the inputs

39:28

and outputs can't match exactly if the

39:30

second transaction has a transaction fee. I

39:33

don't think that that is some secret forbidden

39:35

knowledge. No, it's not. But a transaction fee

39:37

would make something not match. I will add

39:40

one more piece to this. What

39:42

they're talking about is

39:44

a pay for fee piece

39:47

that was not included in the original paper,

39:50

but Peter Todd later wrote and added

39:52

to the Bitcoin, the ability to pay

39:55

extra to get a faster transaction. So

39:59

Peter Todd did it. in fact implement that

40:01

piece of Bitcoin later.

40:06

To me, the thing you're right, it's

40:09

flimsy, to say the least.

40:12

I'm watching it, though, and he's getting

40:14

real squirrely. And

40:16

I'm kind of thinking he

40:19

looks damn guilty. I

40:21

mean, he reacted exactly as you

40:23

would expect somebody who was

40:25

pretending not to be Satoshi

40:27

Nakamoto would act. Now, the other person

40:29

standing next to him was Adam Back, who

40:32

is the chief executive of a Bitcoin

40:34

development company called Blockstream. The

40:37

only other person mentioned by name in

40:39

the Bitcoin paper, the

40:41

only person who is thought to know who

40:43

Nakamoto is, in fact, he's been holding on

40:46

to email and email exchange between

40:48

him and Satoshi Nakamoto for years, saying, well,

40:50

it's not my mind

40:52

to reveal. I

40:55

think personally, it's

40:57

not just Peter Todd. I think it's Peter

41:00

Todd plus Adam Back, who had written something

41:02

called Hashcoin a few years earlier, which was

41:04

kind of an early Bitcoin, an early cryptocurrency.

41:07

I honestly think that

41:09

the most credible answer is that this kid, Peter

41:11

Todd, who was a genius, who

41:14

is also, by the way, nobody in

41:16

the Bitcoin community wants him to be

41:18

Satoshi Nakamoto. He's pretty widely disliked. I

41:22

think it's him and Adam Back. How crypto boyish is

41:24

he? Yeah. Well, but he's not, though,

41:26

is a Bitcoin bro, which is interesting. He's

41:29

not the, you know, and he doesn't. I don't

41:31

think he ever cashed in a lot of Bitcoin

41:33

or anything. I think

41:35

he and Adam Back did it

41:37

together. They had the they

41:40

certainly had the means, the

41:42

technical ability to do it. Todd

41:45

Hoback did catch Todd lying about

41:47

his skills in C++. Todd

41:50

says on camera, I don't know C++,

41:52

but in fact, wrote an entire system

41:54

in C++ some years earlier.

41:58

I think they got him. Now, what is it? it

42:00

matter? Probably not at all. But

42:03

it's fascinating. And it's exactly the kind

42:05

of person the Bitcoin community

42:07

wouldn't, would not lie. It's

42:09

not his no magical, brilliant,

42:12

dark night created

42:15

a world changing cryptocurrency. He

42:17

was just some annoying kid who

42:20

was really skilled. I

42:22

don't know. I like it. I I'm going

42:24

with it. Peter Todd and I'm going with

42:26

Adam Beck was right there and did

42:28

part of it. And Paris, you're your best argument against

42:31

his pizza. Well,

42:33

I think that one of their one

42:37

of the arguments in the documentary

42:39

was based on the account,

42:42

the Satoshi account saying that its

42:44

favorite pizza topping is pineapple and

42:47

jalapeno and that that also being

42:49

Peter Todd's favorite pizza topping. That's

42:51

not a work like pineapple and

42:54

his pizza. As the other stuff

42:56

said, pineapple jalapeno is not completely

42:59

normal. That's not a very common.

43:02

I mean, I I don't think that I think

43:04

that it's probably pretty likely that someone

43:07

who is maybe involved in the early

43:09

days of Bitcoin, then when confronted in

43:11

a warehouse with an entire camera crew

43:13

and a director accusing you in hours

43:15

long interviews of being Satoshi Nakamoto, that

43:17

you're going to get defensive and act

43:19

weird. I also think I mean, I

43:21

don't know any of the stuff about

43:23

the C plus plus, but I could

43:25

think of conceivable explanations to why someone

43:28

would say they don't know a programming

43:31

language. Perhaps they were referring to, you know, not

43:33

knowing it that well or they don't really think

43:35

he did it as part of a denial saying

43:37

I couldn't have written. I don't know anything about

43:39

C plus plus. I

43:41

mean, honestly, this is exactly what you

43:44

would say if you were Satoshi Nakamoto.

43:47

He started contributing to C Well,

43:58

look, we've seen a lot of specious announcements,

44:01

including Newsweek's appalling

44:03

announcement that they discovered Satoshi Nakamoto as

44:05

a cover story, which to my knowledge

44:07

they never retracted. Did they ever? It

44:11

was completely wrong. So

44:13

it could be just another one of these. Who

44:16

is Cullen Hoback? I mean is it enough to say

44:18

well I found out who Q was? I don't know

44:20

if that's enough. I,

44:24

it just rang quite true to

44:26

me. I mean I think you just

44:29

need more for it to be like a smoking

44:31

gun. Right. I

44:35

don't much care. And does

44:37

it matter is the bottom line? I mean

44:40

honestly he has Peter Todd, for

44:42

whatever you think of him, has perfectly

44:45

good reasons not to be outed.

44:48

And I respect that because. What does he do for a

44:50

living? He

44:53

is on X, he says he

44:55

is a crypto-chrome answer

44:57

and web-py developer. Hey

44:59

this is Benito. So

45:01

like why this does

45:03

matter is because that

45:06

if this person is Satoshi Nakamoto then they

45:08

essentially have control of the Bitcoin market. They

45:10

more than that they have control of a

45:12

world economy. Exactly. So like that's what makes

45:14

it important. He

45:17

says, Peter Todd said in a

45:19

post, and they talk about this

45:21

in the documentary, that he did a very hard

45:23

thing. He burned a bunch of Bitcoin. But

45:27

there's no way to prove that because he didn't do it

45:29

in a way that was provable. And so I

45:32

mean I've burned my Bitcoin by forgetting

45:34

my password. You can lose

45:36

your Bitcoin very easily. Steve Gibson did it

45:38

by throwing his heart, raising his hard drive.

45:40

I mean that's easy to do. But

45:42

there's no provable, that's not provable. There is a

45:44

provable way to do it and he did not

45:47

choose to do that. That raises

45:49

some big issues. If he controls

45:51

a million Bitcoin, he

45:53

could collapse Bitcoin. And

45:56

there are a number of nations, there's very active... not

46:00

just El Salvador, but a number of other nations that

46:02

want to use Bitcoin as their currency. Uh,

46:05

yeah, I think you're right, Benito. There is, there is

46:07

some, but what are you going to do?

46:09

You can't, if you can't prove it and if you could, let's

46:11

say you could prove it and it really is him. Then

46:15

what? Then what? I

46:18

mean, I think also the question is like, if

46:22

he or someone else is Satoshi,

46:25

what are they going to do with that? Like

46:27

you can't start moving

46:30

Bitcoin out of your account. Otherwise the

46:32

whole market's going to catch on fire

46:34

and people are going to freak out

46:36

because Satoshi has been active in years.

46:38

Right. Um, I don't

46:40

know. I guess

46:42

maybe it was a national security asset.

46:46

Okay. Now that you say that actually, I will bring

46:48

up, there was a time about

46:50

a year ago where for

46:52

weeks, every, every

46:54

reporter at the information was

46:56

getting these emails,

46:59

signal messages, calls to our personal phone,

47:01

LinkedIn DMS, Twitter DMS from some guy

47:03

being like, I figured out who sought

47:05

Toshi Nakamoto is. You've got to listen

47:08

to us. And none of us really

47:10

replied. And then afterwards he would call

47:12

and email again and be like, I

47:15

figured it out. It's Elon Musk

47:17

and his first was very similar to

47:19

yours in the sense of like both

47:22

Elon and Satoshi used two

47:24

spaces after a period Satoshi

47:27

posted in a time zone that

47:29

was similar to where Elon was

47:31

during some of those months. Uh,

47:34

both Satoshi and Elon have used

47:36

the words bloody in messages

47:38

and things like that. And that's, that's what

47:40

this documentary sounds like to me is it

47:42

is more wishful thinking of a loon. Yeah.

47:47

I'm going with it's Peter Todd and Adam

47:50

back. But again, I don't

47:52

know what you do with it. You can't prove it. So

47:54

I don't know what you do with it. It's a very

47:56

interesting topic. Peter, if

47:58

you're listening, come on. the show and

48:00

and tell us why it's

48:03

complete nonsense. His

48:05

denial was not that credible. Alright

48:09

let's see, yeah let's take another break

48:11

and then I do want to talk

48:13

about .io. This

48:15

is a little

48:18

bit of an issue and it

48:20

kind of it shows a little bit of a weakness

48:22

in the whole domain name system

48:25

thing. Every system has

48:27

weaknesses. Okay thank you. You're all

48:29

human. Professor Jeff Jarvis ladies and

48:32

gentlemen, we need him. He's

48:34

the resident intellectual here. Of

48:37

course Paris Martineau is the resident

48:39

young person genius here.

48:41

And nihilist. And nihilist. Self-described

48:45

nihilist. I never

48:47

knew that till Jeff told me you were a

48:49

nihilist. We've talked about that on this

48:52

show. Perhaps like three or four

48:54

different episodes. Maybe I didn't believe it. I

48:56

knew you liked Nietzsche. I didn't know that you

48:58

were a nihilist. I mean I

49:00

would say I'm a soft nihilist in the sense

49:02

that like everything is meaningless but that means we

49:04

have to derive our own meaning from it. And

49:07

optimistic nihilism is an actual philosophy. Yeah.

49:09

Okay good. I would say optimistic nihilist.

49:12

Yeah you kind of actually that's kind of my

49:14

philosophy which is everything is meaningless and

49:16

everything means something. So

49:20

a person yeah if you want it to mean

49:23

something. Yeah it's up

49:25

to you. Yeah. And

49:27

I'm just the dunderhead in the middle. I'm

49:29

the I'm the baloney in the genius

49:32

sandwich. Our show

49:34

today. Praty-Fi. And

49:37

Benito's the mayonnaise. Benito's the mustard. I

49:39

was gonna say mustard. Yeah the show

49:41

today. Well mustard on one side, bananas

49:43

on the other side. The oh I

49:46

just invented a new topping. Bananas. I

49:49

might have to make that. Our

49:52

show today brought to you by One Password. I'm gonna make

49:54

that tonight and I'll let you know how it comes out.

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We thank them so much for their support of

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this week in Google. I

52:42

have to go because I've just

52:44

invented bananas

52:47

and I have to go make some bananas right now.

52:49

I don't think Hank is going to approve. I don't

52:51

think he's going to allow you. I think Hank would.

52:53

It'll be bad for his reputation now. If

52:56

his father... It could be

52:58

a vegan mayonnaise alternative. Well,

53:00

I guess you could. So

53:03

I don't ever buy mayonnaise anymore. I

53:05

make it. It's easy. With an immersion

53:07

blender, all you have to do is

53:10

you put two... I use the Serious Eats recipe. Two

53:12

eggs. You put the whole egg in. You don't need

53:14

water, just the egg. Two eggs. You

53:17

put a tablespoon of Dijon mustard in

53:20

there, some salt, some lemon, and then

53:22

oil. I use avocado oil. You want to use an oil that

53:25

doesn't have a lot of flavor. Now you whip

53:27

it together and you got mayonnaise. That's mayonnaise. That's basically

53:29

mayonnaise. Does it keep in the refrigerator? Yeah. And

53:32

it's fresh and delicious. Don't

53:34

make more than you're going to need in a week

53:36

or two. It's

53:39

not a giant jar of Hellmann's. It doesn't have

53:41

anything else in it. It could stay for years.

53:43

Yeah. Yeah, because there's other stuff in it. But

53:48

this is really good. It's delicious. And you can

53:50

put garlic in it. But you could also put

53:52

a mushed up banana in there and

53:55

you'd have bananas. That's

53:57

true. Not a lot of people are going

53:59

to do that. But a

54:01

peanut butter and bananas sandwich

54:05

I will say sometimes people substitute

54:07

bananas for eggs in recipes So

54:09

you could leave the egg stuff

54:12

so you could replace the egg with

54:14

a banana and that could be bananas

54:16

and somehow Inspire

54:19

those banana. What he says. Have

54:21

you had banana ketchup? No,

54:24

no, never heard of that. A Filipino thing.

54:26

Yeah, but I know it's delicious See?

54:29

Mmm. And I'm thinking

54:31

for the holidays you could put a little pumpkin

54:34

spice in and then you have pumpkin spice bananas

54:37

Wow Now,

54:41

you know where salt Hank

54:43

gets his genius No,

54:46

he would never ever make anything like

54:49

that. I don't think You

54:52

should just text him bananas question

54:54

mark? One word. Right

54:57

now I would actually love his opinion on

54:59

banana ketchup Okay,

55:03

I like just suggesting you strange things

55:05

to text Philip

55:07

Manila banana ketchup. He says

55:11

Wednesday I get weird texts from you

55:19

Then like a weird thing in the Philippines, it's

55:21

like normal banana ketchup is on the table and

55:23

rest. It makes perfect sense It's a tropical ketchup

55:27

So I just texted him one word bananas. We'll

55:29

see what I should mark. Do you put a

55:31

question mark? No. Oh Exhalation

55:34

point. Yes There's

55:38

no question my friend, how do

55:40

you spell bananas I guessed

55:45

B-A-N-A-N-A-I-S-E All

55:48

right, right sure

55:52

so What's the dot

55:54

IO stand for? Do you know? trivia

55:57

question Indian Ocean Ocean very good

56:00

I know it's been in the news recently. Oh,

56:02

yeah. It's the

56:04

country code domain. Except for the show.

56:08

Yeah. I knew once, but I

56:10

didn't remember. So it's the country

56:13

code domain for the Chagos Islands, which

56:15

is the British Indian Ocean territory,

56:18

disputed territory for a long

56:20

time. Mauritius said,

56:22

that's ours. The British government said,

56:24

it's ours. And took it. In

56:28

1814, the French ceded control of the Chagos

56:30

Islands and the island country of Mauritius to

56:32

the British. When the

56:34

British took over, the islands remained a

56:36

dependency of Mauritius. In

56:39

1965, the UK gave sovereignty

56:41

to Mauritius, but said,

56:44

we're going to keep the Chagos Islands and make

56:46

it the British Indian Ocean territory. That's in 1965.

56:50

In fact, and this is horrible,

56:54

the UK forcibly removed the

56:56

indigenous people, the Chagosian people,

56:59

so the US could build a military,

57:01

the US, us, could build

57:03

a military base on the island. They displaced 1,500

57:05

people. That

57:08

might sound a little familiar to you, Benito. Colonialism.

57:12

Colonialism. Eventually,

57:14

the Chagos Islands were given the .io

57:17

country code. That

57:19

was in 1997 by who else? The,

57:22

you know, IANA. Even though they

57:24

were still, they were a British protectorate, but

57:26

they were independent enough to have their own

57:28

country code. Right. Well, that's

57:30

not unusual, right? Canada is

57:32

part of the Commonwealth, but it has its

57:35

own. Anyway, the British government granted rights to

57:37

sell .io domains to the

57:39

Internet Computer Bureau, the ICB.

57:43

The country's government receives revenue

57:45

for any sites that register with their country

57:47

code domain. For instance, Anguilla,

57:50

which has the country code AI. Nice one, right?

57:55

Expect to make 25 to 30 million

57:57

dollars from websites registered with the .io

57:59

domain. Yeah Tuvalu is

58:01

.tv. I have a .tv domain.

58:03

Twit.tv is our domain, right? Unfortunately

58:11

The British government collected some of

58:13

the revenue and didn't give it

58:15

to the Chagosian people. In

58:17

2020 they submitted a claim to gain ownership, which they

58:20

said of what they said was a 50 million dollar

58:22

property. This is from the Verge. But

58:26

the UK has now finalized an agreement giving

58:28

the Chagos Islands back

58:31

to the Mauritians, to Mauritius,

58:34

a move by the way that Chagosian said the

58:36

government didn't even consult them on, ending

58:39

the British Indian Ocean territory. It's all

58:41

Mauritius now and here's

58:44

the problem. It

58:46

also potentially ends the IIO domain,

58:49

the .io domain. What

58:51

does it end it? Why can't they just

58:53

agree to keep going? The Internet

58:55

Assigned Numbers Authority, the

58:57

successor to ICANN, IANA,

59:00

has a process for retiring old

59:03

country code domains within five years. This

59:06

was after .su, which was

59:08

the Soviet Union's domain, kind

59:11

of lingered even though the Soviet Union had

59:13

gone on. In

59:15

fact, it was used apparently according to the Verge

59:17

by cyber criminals. So... No,

59:20

I'm shocked. No, every domain

59:22

is used by cyber criminals. Especially what

59:24

associated with Soviet Union. Soviet Union goods!

59:27

Since then IANA has also had to

59:30

recover the Yugoslavian domain .yu, although

59:33

it went on for a few years after

59:35

the country was broken up. But

59:39

if Chagos was part of the British Empire,

59:42

couldn't it just as easily be part of

59:44

Mauritius but independent enough to have a .io?

59:47

Yeah. Human

59:49

beings could decide these things. Yeah, can't we

59:51

just decide to make it not a country

59:53

thing and just make it a regular domain?

59:55

The fact that Google uses it for google.io.

59:57

Anyway, Emma Roth who did a very, very

59:59

good. piece on this explaining it all

1:00:01

and the Verge writes, for now it's still

1:00:04

too early to tell what would become of

1:00:06

the .io domain, whether it will

1:00:08

go through a similar transitional period like

1:00:10

.yu or if IANA will let

1:00:12

the Chagossians keep it because they

1:00:14

say we want it, we

1:00:17

don't want the Brits to have it, we want the money.

1:00:19

The Verge reached out to Identity

1:00:21

Digital, the domain registrar that previously

1:00:23

obtained rights to sell IO domains

1:00:26

and IANA for information about

1:00:28

IO's future but we haven't heard back. Okay,

1:00:30

so there it is, it's the money. It's

1:00:33

the money because the Chagossians say wait

1:00:36

a minute, we make just

1:00:38

like, by the way Tuvalu is sinking. Tuvalu

1:00:41

will in the next few decades disappear

1:00:43

under the ocean. There goes your domain

1:00:45

too. Well, but

1:00:48

the Tuvalans would very much like to move

1:00:50

to another island and keep .tv

1:00:52

because it's a lot

1:00:55

of money. Hmm, I

1:00:57

don't know. There

1:00:59

are a lot of .io

1:01:02

people who just .io out

1:01:04

there, including my bookmarking service,

1:01:06

raindrop.io. It's a big

1:01:08

deal to change your domain. Yeah, especially

1:01:11

a really popular one. Yeah. Okay,

1:01:15

well that's that story. What

1:01:17

are you guys going to do? Do you

1:01:19

have any .io domains, Leo? I do, yes.

1:01:22

I think I do. Which one? Yes, how

1:01:24

many domains do you have? I was about

1:01:26

to say, how much do you spend a

1:01:28

year on domains? Hundreds of dollars. Didn't you

1:01:30

clean them out somewhat? No.

1:01:32

Why would I do that? None of them

1:01:34

are worth anything? None of them are worth

1:01:36

a thing. I

1:01:38

still have tunictime.com and fancypants.com. We've

1:01:40

talked about this before. Yes, yes,

1:01:43

yes. I had S

1:01:45

widget spelled out. Swidget?

1:01:48

No. No, you don't have fancypants.com. We've talked

1:01:50

about this. Oh, that's right. I gave you.

1:01:52

So it's true. Some of them have lapsed.

1:01:56

Normally I have auto. No, that went to your wife, your

1:01:58

ex-wife. She got it

1:02:00

in the divorce settlement. That would be funny.

1:02:03

Fancy pants? I should

1:02:05

write to her, hey hun, do you

1:02:07

think you still want fancy pants and

1:02:09

tunic time? Let

1:02:15

me see, I'm just going to log in to

1:02:17

Hover here and see what's happening. I

1:02:20

feel like I have a .io. I

1:02:22

simply wish I could own hair.is. V-A-R.is.

1:02:28

It's never going to happen. Why not? .is

1:02:30

is Iceland. You should be able to get that.

1:02:32

I know. It

1:02:35

was registered by someone else in 2007. Some dope.

1:02:37

I can't find a way to purchase it and I'm

1:02:39

sure if I did it would be like a million

1:02:41

dollars. Hey, if you're out

1:02:44

there owner of par.is, please give it

1:02:46

to me for a reasonable price. I

1:02:48

was miffed because I

1:02:51

wanted leo.com, which would be

1:02:53

a fantastic domain, right? Or

1:02:56

a leo.anything. The Royal Bank of

1:02:58

Canada's mascot is a lion named

1:03:00

Leo, so they owned leo.com for

1:03:02

the longest darn time and

1:03:04

then they let it lapse and I didn't notice

1:03:06

in some domain squatter. Yes, I

1:03:09

have leport.io. Oh. Yeah.

1:03:12

leport.io. My son got

1:03:14

jarv.is. It's

1:03:17

registered to. That's really good.

1:03:19

Jarv.is. I got to

1:03:21

update the address. It's registered to the Twitch cottage.

1:03:27

I've had this since 2016 and it will

1:03:29

not expire till 2025. So

1:03:33

I should really think about it now. Should I keep

1:03:36

it? Do the Bagosians need

1:03:38

it? What was their names for the

1:03:40

Chagosians? Do they need it?

1:03:42

Do they need the money? The Brits got your money instead

1:03:45

of them. Yeah.

1:03:47

I have so many silly domain names. I probably should

1:03:49

get rid of some of these. You could get leo.lol

1:03:51

for $3,000. Yeah, no. See,

1:03:54

not worth it. I do have, I think

1:03:57

I have an lol domain. a

1:04:00

dot fund domain. So I don't

1:04:03

know if I have a dot, no, no, no

1:04:05

L O Ls. How

1:04:08

many domains do you have Paris? You have a lot

1:04:10

probably. Yeah. Not really. I just have

1:04:13

Paris, smart, no.com and Paris dot NYC. Oh,

1:04:16

I like Paris. That's

1:04:18

kind of an interesting juxtaposition of

1:04:21

two big cities, one after the

1:04:23

other. I love Paris.

1:04:25

Absolutely. And your spirit. Yes. What

1:04:27

do you use it for anything? Um,

1:04:30

I just use it for my blue sky

1:04:32

handle and it also redirects my website. Oh,

1:04:35

so you do have a website. Yeah. Paris

1:04:38

dot NYC, man. Right. Pretty good.

1:04:40

Oh, that's the best. I finally

1:04:42

just this week started using Jeff

1:04:44

jarvis.com. What were

1:04:47

you using before? Well, the

1:04:50

goods machine dot com, good breath. This

1:04:52

is dot com. I forgot that I

1:04:54

owned it. My old employers advance. Somebody,

1:04:56

somebody sat on it and tried to

1:04:58

screw me in. So the lawyers for

1:05:00

advance went and got it and

1:05:02

I forgot it. They paid for it for years.

1:05:04

They finally said, uh, Jeff, can you take this

1:05:06

off our hands? We got it. We don't want,

1:05:09

you know, what you were sitting on things. I

1:05:11

know we, last week we talked about our Oala

1:05:13

bottles, Paris. Just a little tip.

1:05:15

I sat on the lid. Oh,

1:05:19

the springs went. And,

1:05:22

but it turns out Amazon sells a

1:05:25

fake third party. Yeah,

1:05:28

that does look fake. Look at the colors

1:05:30

for only $8. Well,

1:05:33

I was going to buy a whole new one, but you

1:05:35

know, the can still good. So I

1:05:37

just bought the new lid anyway, just a little

1:05:39

tip. It's not, it's not a, who says this

1:05:41

show, is it useful? Prime

1:05:45

deal or anything? Wire cutter. You can

1:05:47

do so. I feel so bad for people who

1:05:50

work at sites like the wire cutter, uh, the

1:05:53

verge cause they're going crazy right now

1:05:55

cause prime days, right? The

1:05:58

second one of the year. Yeah,

1:06:00

I never find anything I want in prime days.

1:06:02

Never, never, never, never. Do

1:06:04

you Paris? Are you a prime shopper? No, I'm not.

1:06:07

It's barely a Holland. I had to

1:06:10

do the prime day gift

1:06:13

guides for New York magazine

1:06:15

one year. And it was a nightmare.

1:06:17

Right now what all those writers are

1:06:19

doing is combing through an endlessly long

1:06:22

Excel spreadsheet and

1:06:25

looking at meager deals and trying to find a

1:06:27

way to get readers excited about it because it

1:06:29

pays for their salary. Exactly. Yep.

1:06:32

I remember one day we thought we weren't

1:06:34

going to make our prime day targets and

1:06:36

then four people bought like a five grand

1:06:38

TV using our affiliate link and there

1:06:40

we were. Yep. Yes,

1:06:44

you got to keep doing it. Who

1:06:46

said I was trying to remember some site said it

1:06:49

might have maybe was maybe it was wire cutter.

1:06:51

Here are the 4,393 good deals in the 28,972 Amazon

1:06:57

prime deals. It

1:06:59

made me go, Oh my

1:07:01

God, that hurts. That hurts. Whoever

1:07:03

had to do that. I was just searching for

1:07:06

that story and I don't see it here anywhere.

1:07:09

Anyway. So I just put

1:07:11

up a little news about open AI from the

1:07:13

FT. Well, there's a

1:07:15

big story about open AI actually. From the

1:07:18

information from a few minutes ago.

1:07:21

Oh, okay. Let's

1:07:23

do that. Then I'll do mine. What's so what's the

1:07:25

story? Opening

1:07:27

I burned 340 million in the first half of 2024. They

1:07:33

got 167 billion. Their

1:07:37

total losses between 2023 and 2028 are going to be

1:07:39

$44 billion. So

1:07:44

that means they have a four year runway. Yeah.

1:07:48

They don't know. I think how,

1:07:50

uh, like when they're going to be

1:07:52

profitable or they're not going to be profitable for a very

1:07:54

long time, I believe. Um, but

1:07:58

according to my story, it was. won't matter.

1:08:01

Why not? Because now the latest

1:08:03

gambit from Altman is

1:08:06

that he wants to structure OpenAI as we know

1:08:08

he wants to structure as a for-profit company and

1:08:10

end it not for profit, but he

1:08:12

wants to structure it as a public benefit company.

1:08:15

Oh boy. Well that's better than a...

1:08:18

It's just a trick to fend off. Yeah,

1:08:20

it's not really real. I

1:08:23

know a lot of public, but I thought that you

1:08:25

had to, I don't know,

1:08:27

be a public benefit or something. But yeah,

1:08:30

what does that mean? Yeah, you make some

1:08:32

fakie. We're really good. It's not quite non-profit,

1:08:35

but you're not allowed to get rich, right? No, you can

1:08:37

get as rich as you want, but the thing is

1:08:40

that what it does is it protects you from

1:08:43

raiders coming and saying

1:08:45

you're not making enough profit. Oh.

1:08:49

So what he's protecting here is his lack

1:08:52

of profitability going forward by doing this

1:08:54

to hide behind a public

1:08:56

benefit because Sam is... I wouldn't

1:09:02

trust him. So

1:09:04

my stories were actually about

1:09:06

AI also. Jeffrey

1:09:09

Hinton wins a Nobel Prize

1:09:11

in physics. Hinton

1:09:14

of course is the

1:09:16

godfather of AI. One

1:09:19

of many. But he was the guy who

1:09:21

came up with neural networks many, many years

1:09:23

ago. He's also one of the signatories

1:09:26

of the letter.

1:09:29

Which I think is why they gave it to

1:09:31

him. I think that the bells have become more

1:09:33

and more political and

1:09:35

I think it's an opportunity for them to give

1:09:40

him attention. Interesting. The

1:09:42

Wall Street Journal did immediately. The Wall Street Journal

1:09:44

said, and he's screaming about danger. The Wall

1:09:47

Street Journal loves to do that. Well,

1:09:49

you know who else won a Nobel Prize? D'Amisisibis.

1:09:54

Which really says that Google

1:09:56

has really become, or at least

1:09:58

was, a a

1:10:00

key basic research, the

1:10:03

Nobel labs. He of

1:10:05

course was the founder of, of

1:10:07

deep mind. I

1:10:10

wasn't, you lost your mind. I

1:10:14

knew that deep throat was wrong. It

1:10:17

was the founder, very long. Yeah. Very

1:10:19

long founder of deep mind,

1:10:21

his Nobel prize is in chemistry. So hitting

1:10:23

one in for physics, cause there isn't a

1:10:26

Nobel prize for AI. Not

1:10:28

yet. Uh, but his

1:10:30

CBS one, because they came up with

1:10:32

a pro deep mind, came up with

1:10:34

a protein folding that has

1:10:36

been used to ice. I

1:10:39

thought, I don't know, no effect,

1:10:41

but apparently some effect in

1:10:43

medicine. So,

1:10:46

uh, David Baker university, Washington,

1:10:48

John jumper, Google deep mind and Damaese,

1:10:50

I'm a CBS of deep mind. Uh,

1:10:54

uh, has CBS and jumper developed a

1:10:56

powerful computational tool. This is from the

1:10:58

Washington post that gave researchers the long

1:11:00

sought ability to predict how proteins twist

1:11:02

and fold to create complex

1:11:05

3d structures that can block viruses,

1:11:07

build muscle or degrade

1:11:09

plastic. Um,

1:11:11

and protein folding is, you know,

1:11:13

this remember the, the,

1:11:15

uh, the whole thing

1:11:17

where you were, uh, getting your computers

1:11:20

idle time and you were donating it

1:11:22

to a project and one of them was folding

1:11:25

it home. Remember that where you

1:11:27

would get all the computers in the

1:11:30

world with their idle cycles, trying to

1:11:32

fold proteins. Well, that's gone away because

1:11:34

AI does it easily

1:11:36

and quickly. You don't

1:11:38

need all those computers. Um,

1:11:43

so I'm curious,

1:11:46

they got the Nobel prize, but have,

1:11:48

has alpha fold. Generated.

1:11:51

I mean, is there a medicine or something I

1:11:53

could point to that says it's,

1:11:56

it's working. I mean, I

1:11:58

know it's making these defined working. It

1:12:00

was a product that people undertook this project for

1:12:02

a reason so that they

1:12:04

could. And, and, and we got there thanks

1:12:06

to this. Okay. So

1:12:09

see, it's no, it's a good

1:12:11

thing. Yeah. It's

1:12:15

not all generative AI. That's

1:12:17

a good, okay. There you go. That's a good point.

1:12:20

It isn't, this stuff is not generative AI.

1:12:22

I mean, I don't

1:12:24

know what to me it is. It's

1:12:26

all anything that generates something with AI.

1:12:28

It's generative AI, but. Well, so,

1:12:31

so I'm, I, I, I had a call for

1:12:33

him with the World Economic Forum at Davos. Oh.

1:12:35

And they, uh, cause I'm a member of

1:12:38

the, of some kind of AI thing, the

1:12:40

AI governance thing. So anyway,

1:12:42

they said that it's also diagnostic,

1:12:44

predictive, prescriptive, and adaptive AI. Oh,

1:12:47

those are the categories. Okay. But.

1:12:50

I think a lot of times we think

1:12:53

of a generative AI as chat bots basically.

1:12:55

Yeah. Right. Chat GPT. Making, um, swimming hippos.

1:12:58

When the Nobel committee called Jeffrey Hinton,

1:13:00

he said he is quote. Worried.

1:13:04

Oh Jesus. That the overall consequence

1:13:06

of this might be systems more

1:13:08

intelligent than us that might eventually

1:13:11

take control. But then they

1:13:13

said, but, but knowing that would you, would you do

1:13:15

it all over again? He said, Oh yeah. It's

1:13:21

a whiny Oppenheimer. Yeah.

1:13:24

I'd do it again. I

1:13:26

am, I am created chat

1:13:28

bot. Uh, uh,

1:13:31

Annoyer of worlds. Exactly.

1:13:35

Good. Very good. Hopfield

1:13:40

echoed his co-laurates concerns in a

1:13:42

video call yesterday afternoon at Princeton

1:13:44

university. The worry I

1:13:46

have is not quite, not AI

1:13:48

quite directly, but AI

1:13:50

combined with information flow around

1:13:53

the globe. Oh,

1:13:56

no one's worried about like bad people with

1:13:58

AI. Like that's

1:14:00

more worried about is like that, that,

1:14:03

that maybe deep fakes. I don't know.

1:14:07

Uh, Hopfield is 91 hitting is 76. Uh,

1:14:12

that's usually the case. You don't win a Nobel

1:14:14

prize to your, Dennis is very young, isn't he?

1:14:16

He's pretty young. Yeah. Yeah.

1:14:20

Well, I'm just saying, is there still hope,

1:14:22

Jeff? That's all. I'm just trying to get

1:14:24

your 4am phone call. I

1:14:27

just want to MacArthur by the way, that's

1:14:30

what that play that I really liked that the

1:14:32

Washington post hated. I saw that. I saw you

1:14:34

sneaking in at a interview last week. So

1:14:39

we were talking about McLean, which I thought

1:14:41

was a great movie. It's, uh, it's the

1:14:43

Robert Downey Broadway debut play nut movie play

1:14:46

that I saw. I mean, it's a movie in some

1:14:48

ways he's moving. He's moving. And

1:14:50

there's a lot of special effects on the stage.

1:14:53

It's actually the staging and the post did like

1:14:55

the staging, but they hated the,

1:14:57

the, the, the play itself. I

1:14:59

don't know. I haven't did the times hate it. Did the New

1:15:01

York City? I haven't seen a review yet.

1:15:04

We should talk about megalopolis, which I saw, and I

1:15:06

don't know if I hate it or not. It

1:15:09

was a movie,

1:15:11

an experience of

1:15:13

what a ride of a lifetime. I spent

1:15:15

the whole time thinking of it. Adam Driver

1:15:17

as Leo, because he famously voiced

1:15:20

an early version of either driver's character

1:15:22

or you said maybe

1:15:24

the narrator I thought might be the narrator. It was

1:15:26

one of those, I walked

1:15:28

down the rainy streets and

1:15:30

you know, it was, I thought he was a detective,

1:15:32

but maybe it was Adam. Maybe he was an architect.

1:15:34

I mean, that does seem like something that Adam drivers

1:15:37

would say in this, it was

1:15:39

a bizarre film. I

1:15:42

really enjoyed it. There were parts of it that

1:15:44

I was like, I

1:15:46

love the weird movie. This is fun. And

1:15:48

there are parts that I was like, this

1:15:51

is terrible. Like one of the first things

1:15:53

that Adam driver's character, the plot of this

1:15:55

is it's set in new Rome, which is

1:15:57

like New York city, but it's Rome.

1:16:00

in the future, but it's

1:16:02

not very confusing. And Adam

1:16:04

Driver plays a mad architect

1:16:06

named Caesar, who's got this

1:16:09

vision for a future city that kind

1:16:11

of looks like Hudson Yards mixed with

1:16:14

that meme of the utopia

1:16:16

city that you see, which is an insult. Is

1:16:18

it like, like, yeah, it was shrugged a little

1:16:20

bit? I mean, when I say it was an

1:16:22

architect. It's like,

1:16:25

and Rand mixed with Hudson

1:16:28

Yards mixed with Caesar.

1:16:31

I don't know. It's not

1:16:33

great. I want to

1:16:35

see it just because of the spectacle. By

1:16:37

the way, you're lucky you saw it because

1:16:39

there's some, some thought that they will not

1:16:41

be sent to streaming, that this is it.

1:16:43

You see it in the theater. You don't

1:16:45

see it at all. I also saw an

1:16:48

immersive screening where midway through, oh yeah, you

1:16:50

don't consider an a spoiler because this is

1:16:52

30 seconds of

1:16:54

the movie and it does not have

1:16:56

a console. A satellite

1:16:59

crashes into New York city. Then

1:17:01

archival footage of 9 11 is

1:17:03

played, which I've since

1:17:05

learned was shot when they were filming

1:17:07

because they've been filming this movie for

1:17:09

so goddamn long that they have never

1:17:11

before seen footage of 9 11 in

1:17:14

this. Then there is a scene

1:17:18

of Adam driver as the architect in

1:17:20

a very tiny box on screen at

1:17:22

a press conference. Then the house lights

1:17:25

go up in the theater and a

1:17:27

man walks out in front of the

1:17:29

movie theater with a mic, takes notes

1:17:32

and then asks Adam driver on screen

1:17:34

a question. Adam driver responds and then

1:17:36

he goes away and the lights. Oh,

1:17:39

that's so it was, oh my God.

1:17:41

What reality is bending. I know. I

1:17:44

thought it was kind of like going to the

1:17:46

Rocky Horror Picture Show and seeing some guy dressed

1:17:49

as Frankenfurter, but that, that, that person is now

1:17:51

going to say that he was in a couple

1:17:53

of production. Right. Well, like me, I was in

1:17:55

a car like you. So

1:17:57

you, this is good. Did you, we did this.

1:18:00

before the show. So

1:18:02

Megalopolis, Coppola has been

1:18:04

working on this for 40 years. Yes.

1:18:07

And I mentioned that 30 years ago,

1:18:10

I was called into Zoetrope.

1:18:13

I auditioned for a role in some

1:18:16

unknown radio thing that Coppola

1:18:18

was doing at Zoetrope and read a part

1:18:20

for a couple of nights with

1:18:22

other actors in Zoetrope.

1:18:26

I later figured out that we were recording

1:18:28

some sort of pre-visualization for a movie that

1:18:30

Francis was working on, but the movie never

1:18:32

came out. And the other

1:18:34

hit that says you're Adam Driver is

1:18:37

that you were supposed to sound like Bob Woodward. I

1:18:40

got fired. I'm not knowing how he

1:18:42

sounds, and Bob Woodward sounds like Adam

1:18:44

Driver. Francis grew increasingly agitated. He kept

1:18:46

saying, do it more like Bob Woodward.

1:18:48

And I had no idea

1:18:50

what Bob Woodward sounded like, so

1:18:52

I didn't know what this direction meant. So

1:18:55

I just tried different accents. Some of the

1:18:57

strangest voice acting

1:18:59

and just general acting choices I've

1:19:01

ever seen in a movie in this film. That's what

1:19:04

he was trying to get me to do. There is

1:19:06

one where it's a normal scene between Adam Driver and

1:19:08

what will become his love interest. And he's talking in

1:19:10

a normal way. And then he goes, so

1:19:13

go back to the club. That

1:19:15

is fully how he delivers

1:19:17

the love. I can totally

1:19:20

see Adam Driver doing that. He does that little

1:19:22

vocal tick. Yeah. I have to

1:19:24

see it because you have to

1:19:26

see it. And I also heard from Coppola

1:19:29

when he was talking when someone was asking

1:19:31

him in an interview recently, what led you

1:19:33

to come back to megalopolis all these years

1:19:35

later? He said some years ago he had

1:19:38

filmed a food

1:19:40

tour TV show episode with Anthony Bourdain. I

1:19:42

assumed it. Where else would he go? But

1:19:44

he was watching himself on it and he

1:19:46

was like, oh, I look so fat. I

1:19:48

hate the way I look. So he signed

1:19:50

up for like an exercise camp. And during

1:19:52

the whole exercise thing, he was like, what

1:19:54

should I listen to? Might as well listen

1:19:56

to the old audio recordings I made for

1:19:58

the visualizations of Megalov. So I was

1:20:01

thinking, I was like, he's listening to Leo.

1:20:03

I wonder if he left my part in

1:20:05

and then had father Guido Sarducci do the

1:20:08

rest. Frankly, given the way that

1:20:10

this movie turned out, that would

1:20:12

make sense. It is the

1:20:15

most disjointed, confusing experience. There

1:20:17

was a whole subplot where Aubrey

1:20:19

Plaza is a character named Wow

1:20:21

Platinum that is kind of like

1:20:24

sexy Jim Cramer. She hosts a

1:20:26

financial morning talk news

1:20:29

show called The Money Bunny. Oh,

1:20:33

God. Which is the money honey reference

1:20:35

to that. Oh, I get it. So

1:20:37

he borrowed or raised

1:20:39

money like a hundred, what, 120 million to make this? He

1:20:41

sold one of his vineyards for it. He sold a vineyard

1:20:43

for 120 million dollars. Or

1:20:46

he leveraged, I think, his vineyard as collateral.

1:20:48

Right. This vineyard, by the way, is just north of

1:20:51

me. The couple of vineyards. It's going to

1:20:53

be sold by somebody else pretty soon. This

1:20:55

is a triggering question for me. So it

1:20:57

is opening weekend. It earned

1:20:59

four million dollars. Yeah,

1:21:02

no, it's not going to make money. It was not

1:21:04

a I will probably see it again, but I'm

1:21:07

also crazy. I wouldn't say I found

1:21:09

that a decent movie watching

1:21:11

experience, but it wasn't pleasurable. I was listening

1:21:13

to pop culture, happy hour talk about this,

1:21:16

and they were trying to decide whether it

1:21:18

was a failure or a fiasco because a

1:21:20

failure is just a failure that is like

1:21:22

not fun at all. But a fiasco has

1:21:25

got some pizzazz. Like there's something about it

1:21:27

fails. And this is definitely a fiasco and

1:21:29

kind of a fun way. One of

1:21:31

the funniest this American life episodes ever is

1:21:33

called fiasco. And if you haven't listened to

1:21:36

it, it is a series of

1:21:38

fiasco and it's a one. It's

1:21:40

it's it's what made this American life. It's how long

1:21:42

is it Paris? Two hours

1:21:44

and 18 minutes. Oh, I thought it might have been a

1:21:46

four hour. So I'm maybe four hours.

1:21:48

It might have made more sense. I

1:21:51

see that it is now up for

1:21:53

presale on Amazon and iTunes and the

1:21:55

various streaming sites. So I would

1:21:57

say it's definitely a movie I'd recommend. in

1:22:00

theaters, if you could, I guess I don't

1:22:02

know whether the theaters would be packed. I

1:22:04

saw it in a packed giant IMAX theaters

1:22:06

and people were just uproary. It was sold

1:22:08

out. It was opening again. It would be fun to

1:22:10

see that with a lot of other people. It was the immersive one

1:22:12

with the guy, so everybody was there to see the

1:22:15

guy. But people were laughing their

1:22:17

butts off during it because there are

1:22:19

some really strange choices in there. At

1:22:22

one point, a character is talking about a

1:22:24

baby she's about to have to someone and

1:22:26

she's like, if it's

1:22:28

a girl, we'll name her Sunny Hope.

1:22:31

If it's a boy, Francis. It's

1:22:36

like stuff like that one after another. Jeff,

1:22:39

you were asking a question before? It's

1:22:41

triggering for me to ask this, but now

1:22:44

I'm curious. What

1:22:47

was the 9-11 footage like? I

1:22:50

feel like it was just kind of a

1:22:52

short, like they had like three panel

1:22:54

shots that were kind of interspersed throughout the

1:22:56

film, one of which I believe was

1:22:58

like perhaps like the aftermath of 9-11.

1:23:00

Like it wasn't, you know, planes crashing into

1:23:03

the towers or anything like that. But

1:23:05

it was footage that I recognized as, huh,

1:23:07

that's a 9-11. And then afterwards, I

1:23:09

heard that it was never before seen

1:23:11

footage from the day because they were

1:23:14

filming in downtown Manhattan when that happened.

1:23:18

I am I am looking at the

1:23:20

six thirty show tonight at our local theater

1:23:22

and looks like I can have the theater

1:23:25

all to myself. Leo's

1:23:30

going to be rushing off to make sure he gets in. Yeah,

1:23:35

I think I'll go. Should I get tickets? I

1:23:38

see sad to see it. Like I'm the

1:23:40

only person in the freaking theater. I

1:23:43

would go if you could go. I mean, honestly,

1:23:45

if you're there by yourself, then just like

1:23:48

know that it's good to laugh. I think that it's

1:23:50

kind of a very funny movie to me. But

1:23:55

God, it's weird. It's such a weird

1:23:57

movie. There's a whole deep fake subplot.

1:24:02

I feel like I would like this movie to be honest

1:24:04

with you. That's what's just. Yeah, no, it's like a

1:24:06

mix between like, there are parts of the movie that I'm

1:24:08

like, oh, this could have been good, but it doesn't make

1:24:11

sense. There's it switches between at

1:24:13

one point, Adam Driver does the full

1:24:15

Shakespeare to be and not to be

1:24:17

monologue at another point. A guy does

1:24:19

a phone or joke. It's, it's bizarre.

1:24:22

It's bizarre. Doctor trying to

1:24:24

get out of writing a few pages of script.

1:24:26

I think I have this old Shakespeare stuff I

1:24:28

could use. Because

1:24:30

like it's kind of said in modern times.

1:24:32

So then all the people watching were like,

1:24:34

what's this guy doing in like normal English?

1:24:37

And they're like, ah, just let him come.

1:24:39

Not to be that's the question. Basically.

1:24:43

It just sounds like he was working on it for too

1:24:45

long. That like he left too much and he did not.

1:24:47

That's what he does. Yeah. You

1:24:50

know, I sat next to him once in San Francisco

1:24:52

and it was when apocalypse now

1:24:54

was coming out. I was one of the few

1:24:56

people who liked it. I loved it. It's the

1:24:58

greatest apocalypse. You know, in hindsight, you're right at

1:25:00

the time it was panned in hindsight.

1:25:03

Well, it's gotta be the greatest war movie. It's not

1:25:05

as good as apocalypse now, but it is

1:25:07

interesting. I think it's the most interesting movie

1:25:09

I've seen. He's made some

1:25:12

terrible movies. There's no doubt about that.

1:25:15

But I have huge respect for Francis. The

1:25:17

opening of it is a direct nod to Hudsucker

1:25:19

proxy, which is one of my favorite movies. So

1:25:22

I liked that. So you're a movie fan,

1:25:24

a nihilist. I am. An optimistic

1:25:26

nihilist and a movie fan. It's

1:25:28

true. An optimistic nihilist and a movie fan walking

1:25:30

to a bar. So the truth is

1:25:32

I really liked going to the movies for the

1:25:34

popcorn. True. And when the pandemic

1:25:38

seems to die down, it's not died down. It's still

1:25:40

there folks. I know that, but I

1:25:42

thought, you know, I haven't had that popcorn in

1:25:45

four years. And I went to

1:25:47

the local theater where they have the probably here's

1:25:49

a popcorn. It's terrible. A, B, a little tiny

1:25:51

one, $8. Well,

1:25:53

that's their profit. I know,

1:25:55

but geez. I'll make

1:25:57

you, when next time you're out here, I'll make you some

1:25:59

good. I make good popcorn.

1:26:02

Nice. I do. I have a whole, I

1:26:05

have actually official popcorn equipment.

1:26:07

Of course you do.

1:26:09

I have a pot that's exclusively for making

1:26:11

popcorn. Do you make it in your

1:26:13

pizza oven? You don't have a pizza oven anymore. No,

1:26:15

I don't. I don't make it in the pizza oven.

1:26:17

I make it on the stovetop, but it's a, it's

1:26:20

a whirly pop. Now I use the, uh, the official

1:26:22

whirly pops for a while, but they fall apart. I

1:26:24

got myself a really nice stainless

1:26:26

steel glass metal

1:26:29

gear whirly pop that does muah. And

1:26:32

then I use a Amish country popcorn.

1:26:34

It's very, very good. And

1:26:36

then I put the salt in the whirly pop

1:26:39

so that, and I use ghee, not

1:26:41

butter, not oil, but ghee to

1:26:43

pop the popcorn. And then of course melted butter on top.

1:26:45

If you really want to go crazy, but another thing you

1:26:48

could do is put the salt in with some sugar and

1:26:50

do the whirly pop. And then you got your cell.

1:26:53

Or put bananas. Bananas

1:26:56

top with the mayonnaise. You've got

1:26:58

your cell. Bananas. I think it's

1:27:00

a, it's a thing. You

1:27:04

know, there was a lot of Google news this week.

1:27:06

Yeah. Let's take a break and then come back and

1:27:08

actually do some stuff. I just want to, I just

1:27:10

want to say for the records, we did no news

1:27:12

last week. We're doing no, you know, we've done a

1:27:14

lot of news. It

1:27:17

was an oops all arguments. Oh yeah. So

1:27:19

it was, there was no news. We

1:27:21

hit like two headlines. We started

1:27:23

to play scooter X's notebook,

1:27:26

LM change log and it was so

1:27:28

awful. We had to stop. We

1:27:30

got into a fight about Taylor, the Renz. By

1:27:34

the way, I still can't go to our

1:27:36

site. It says it's malware. I don't know

1:27:38

why, but I have my, my, my, you

1:27:41

know, our, our security software is blocking

1:27:43

it weird. Yeah. That's

1:27:46

kind of all we did. Anyway,

1:27:48

let's not think about the past.

1:27:51

Let's be optimistic. Shall we

1:27:53

more to come with this week in Google Jeff

1:27:55

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veeam.com. Thank

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you, Veeam. I

1:30:04

do have some other stories, but they're not yet Google

1:30:06

stories, but I'll get to them. One

1:30:08

day. One

1:30:12

of the things we talked about last week, Ed Zittrain would

1:30:14

not talk about it, is the

1:30:16

kerfuffle between automatic

1:30:19

and WordPress and

1:30:21

WordPress engine. And

1:30:23

of course, that was last week was

1:30:26

the day. And the reason he couldn't talk about

1:30:28

it is he represents automatic. Oh,

1:30:30

I thought he was just like too boring. I don't

1:30:32

want to talk about that. No, maybe he also was

1:30:34

crazy glued like, same word. We

1:30:41

had somebody on the

1:30:43

show Sunday

1:30:47

who used

1:30:49

to work for automatic has a lot of respect,

1:30:51

I think, for Matt Mullenwegan as

1:30:53

I do. But it's a

1:30:55

complicated story. Great piece from Jeffrey

1:30:57

Zeldman. I have a lot, I'll tell you what, I have

1:31:00

a lot of respect for Zeldman. He is one

1:31:02

of the guys behind so

1:31:05

many web standards that we use. He's one of the old

1:31:07

school guys. He works at

1:31:09

automatic. He decided

1:31:11

to stay there or

1:31:13

decided to take a job there after. Should

1:31:15

you give, if I may, the background here of

1:31:17

what he was, what everybody was offered? It

1:31:21

was like six months. Or

1:31:24

30,000, whichever is larger. To

1:31:26

do what? To leave? To leave because

1:31:28

people were disagreeing with what Matt had, this is

1:31:30

background, I think it

1:31:32

matters. Matt had come out with his jihad

1:31:34

against the other company. And

1:31:37

some disagreed with him and his tone and

1:31:39

Matt said, okay. And

1:31:42

it wasn't, it was, I think, I think it was a

1:31:44

uniquely Matt thing to do to say, I don't

1:31:47

want to have you feel like you're working in a

1:31:49

company where you're going to disagree. So I'm going to

1:31:51

make a very generous offer. Anybody who wants to leave

1:31:53

can leave and get six months salary. And

1:31:56

that six months health insurance. Yes.

1:31:59

In fact, that's. That's why Zelman said,

1:32:01

I really thought about this because he

1:32:03

has creditors. He's already hired somewhere else.

1:32:06

Yeah. He said six months

1:32:08

salary in advance would have wiped the slate

1:32:10

clean on medical debts and financial obligations incurred

1:32:13

by the closing of my publishing businesses

1:32:16

and my conference. So 159 people took

1:32:18

the offer. A lot of

1:32:20

people. 8.4% of the company. The

1:32:24

other 91.6% gave up 126 million in the potential severance to stay. 63.5%

1:32:29

were male. 53%

1:32:31

were in the US. By

1:32:34

division, it affected our ecosystem WordPress

1:32:36

areas the most. 79.2%

1:32:40

of those who took it were in our ecosystem business

1:32:42

compared with 18.2% from Cosmos, our

1:32:45

apps like PocketCasts. Yeah. 18

1:32:47

people made over 200,000 K a year. One

1:32:51

person started two days before the deadline.

1:32:53

Wow. Four people then took

1:32:55

it and changed their minds. Okay. So

1:32:58

that's the background

1:33:01

here of what Zelman faces. And I get it again.

1:33:03

And I say, I really respect Zelman. He is a

1:33:05

legend and had been around forever.

1:33:07

He says, uh, even as I made myself think

1:33:09

about what six months salary and a lump son

1:33:12

could do to help my family and call my

1:33:14

creditors, I knew in my soul, there was no

1:33:16

way I'd leave this company. I

1:33:18

respect the courage and conviction of my departed colleagues.

1:33:20

I already missed them. I feel that departure is

1:33:23

a personal loss. My grief is real.

1:33:26

The sadness is like a cold fog and

1:33:28

a dark wet night, but

1:33:32

I stayed because I believe in the

1:33:34

work automatic is doing. I believe in

1:33:36

the open web and owning your content.

1:33:39

I've devoted nearly three decades of work to this

1:33:41

cause. And when I choose to move in house

1:33:43

or when I chose to move in house, I

1:33:45

knew there was only one house that would suit

1:33:47

me automatic. Now he refers

1:33:50

to a post by the

1:33:52

guy who created Drupal Dries Boudart

1:33:55

called solving the maker taker problem

1:33:57

entries, you know, do

1:33:59

pro, which is what we use as our content management

1:34:01

system is definitely a competitor with

1:34:03

WordPress. But Dries says, I'm not going to

1:34:05

take a position on the WordPress thing, but

1:34:12

it's important to understand that every open

1:34:15

source project has people who contribute to

1:34:17

it and people who take

1:34:19

from it. And

1:34:22

it's as if, and

1:34:24

Zelman says it this way, he says, it's

1:34:27

as if you would, you'd

1:34:29

go to dinner with Paris and Jeff and I

1:34:31

go to dinner every week for

1:34:33

years and I always pay

1:34:35

and nobody else offers to pay. At some point

1:34:38

you got to say something about it. So

1:34:42

he can you summarize the core of the debate again

1:34:44

for me? What is, what

1:34:46

are people upset about? I

1:34:50

actually, I don't

1:34:52

know. I mean, I do kind of know.

1:34:55

So remember that Matt Mullenweg wrote

1:34:57

WordPress in the beginning

1:35:00

and it became very, very

1:35:03

widely used. He

1:35:05

gives it away at wordpress.org. You can download it,

1:35:07

you can install it yourself. He

1:35:09

also started a company, wordpress.com, it's

1:35:11

called automatic. And

1:35:15

that is a managed version of WordPress. So

1:35:17

you pay somebody to run your website and keep

1:35:19

it up to date and all that stuff. 43%

1:35:24

of the web now uses WordPress. It's

1:35:29

a huge enterprise. And it

1:35:31

defeated moveable type. That's

1:35:36

right. Cause it was open and

1:35:38

cause it's free as an open source project.

1:35:40

But there's something interesting there is that, oh,

1:35:42

hello, gizmo. Are you interested in this open

1:35:44

source maker? Take your problem. Do you ever

1:35:46

pay for dinner? Gizmo, do you? Gizmo

1:35:49

never pays for dinner. She believes in

1:35:51

saving her capital. Yeah,

1:35:53

exactly. So

1:35:59

moveable type. this is relevant I think to where

1:36:01

you're going, movable type, uh,

1:36:03

tried to disadvantage license

1:36:05

source of its software,

1:36:08

which meant that it was put itself in

1:36:10

a conflict of interest. But WordPress didn't do

1:36:12

that and said, anybody can compete.

1:36:14

Anybody can, it's open source. We meet it. It's open

1:36:16

source. And thus it won. However,

1:36:20

WP engine was not acting

1:36:22

appropriately according to that, right?

1:36:24

Yeah. I mean, they, um,

1:36:27

they competed directly with

1:36:30

wordpress.com by offering a

1:36:32

simple managed WordPress installation,

1:36:35

but, uh, and I'm

1:36:37

not, I don't, they didn't want to contribute to

1:36:39

the open source was. Yeah. I don't want to

1:36:41

misstate Matt's objections or

1:36:44

even take a side in this. But

1:36:46

what Droy says, and I think is right,

1:36:48

is that the problem with open source software

1:36:50

is you have this, he calls it the

1:36:53

maker taker challenge, which you have people who

1:36:55

are very generously giving their

1:36:57

software away with

1:37:00

a kind of unwritten expectation that

1:37:02

people who use it, especially companies,

1:37:05

and this is a big problem who

1:37:07

use this software will contribute back, not

1:37:09

necessarily financially, could be financially, but also

1:37:11

maybe in kind with contributions

1:37:14

to the software, that kind of thing. And

1:37:16

there is this imbalance and we know

1:37:18

that there's an imbalance between people who

1:37:21

make and give away their software. People

1:37:23

like Linus Torvalds and then big

1:37:25

companies that really

1:37:28

just use it, uh, because they don't have

1:37:30

to pay for it and don't

1:37:32

contribute back. Uh, Dries

1:37:34

says addressing the maker taker challenge

1:37:37

is essential for the longterm sustainability

1:37:39

of open source projects. And I

1:37:42

agree. I think Matt maybe

1:37:45

lost his head a little bit on

1:37:47

this. You know, it really became personal for him. Um,

1:37:50

and so maybe what caused

1:37:53

the, like what flipped the switch

1:37:55

for him? Because this seems like a very

1:37:57

dramatic stance to be taking. I know. And I feel

1:37:59

like I don't. Oh, I owe you. I probably

1:38:01

shouldn't have brought this up without being more willing

1:38:03

to have an

1:38:07

opinion on it. I

1:38:10

feel a little bit like Ed. I feel

1:38:12

like a little like Ed because I really

1:38:14

know, I know and love Matt and

1:38:17

I've known him since the beginning and we've had him on the

1:38:19

show and he really is a

1:38:21

very strong advocate. Matt defends open source. He's

1:38:23

an advocate. That's why I tend to trust

1:38:25

him. Yeah. It's all

1:38:27

right to be biased on something and make

1:38:30

your bias. Yeah. This is

1:38:32

now, I decree. Perfectly neutral on everything. To

1:38:35

be known as a challenge in

1:38:37

the, in the discord. Have

1:38:39

you ever seen this? What challenge? The

1:38:41

Trenton challenge, the Trenton is bridge. The

1:38:44

stupidest slogan for a

1:38:47

town anywhere. Do

1:38:50

you see it on the bridge going to

1:38:52

the trend? World takes just,

1:38:54

just so bitter, isn't it? Just like, okay,

1:38:56

be that way world. So

1:39:00

in mid-September, this is from tech

1:39:03

crunch. Mullenweg wrote a blog post

1:39:05

calling WP engine quote, a cancer

1:39:07

to WordPress. It's a little strong.

1:39:10

Yeah. He criticized WP engine

1:39:12

for disabling the ability for

1:39:14

users to see and track

1:39:17

the revision history for every post. This

1:39:19

is a feature of WordPress. They disabled

1:39:21

it. Mullenweg says that's the

1:39:23

core of the user promise of protecting

1:39:25

your data. WP engine turns

1:39:27

it off. He says to save money. He

1:39:31

also called out WP engines,

1:39:33

investors, Silver Lake, a

1:39:35

private equity company. And

1:39:37

said they don't contribute sufficiently

1:39:39

to the open source project

1:39:42

and that WP engines use of the

1:39:45

WP brand has confused customers into thinking

1:39:47

it's part of WordPress, which I think

1:39:49

probably some people do. It's not, I

1:39:52

think to somebody who's not paying attention,

1:39:54

it's really not clear what wordpress.org, wordpress.com,

1:39:57

WP engine, automatic, what are

1:40:00

that where are they something like if

1:40:02

you gave ten dollars to WordPress you'd

1:40:04

be doing a hundred times more than

1:40:06

WP Engine is given to the open

1:40:08

source project yeah that's pretty

1:40:11

strong WP

1:40:14

Engine of course sent a cease

1:40:16

and desist letter and automatic

1:40:18

sent a cease and desist to

1:40:20

them and you know then the

1:40:22

battle goes on again

1:40:27

I my sympathies are with the Matt I

1:40:29

think he's maybe this

1:40:32

is a hot button for him and he's

1:40:34

maybe overreacting a little bit but I also

1:40:36

don't blame him because it is a problem

1:40:38

and there you have it okay

1:40:42

because we wanted to kind of cover it on last week

1:40:45

but Ed's recusal made it difficult

1:40:47

to talk too much I bet he

1:40:49

left a big his him being

1:40:51

silent leaves a big void in the room yeah boy

1:40:53

when you got him throughout the show and then suddenly

1:40:58

it really you hear

1:41:01

it all

1:41:03

right you said there's a lot of

1:41:06

Google news of Google news

1:41:09

oh my god I missed all of this I've

1:41:11

just rolled down just to give it a quick

1:41:13

digest here a judge well wait a minute the

1:41:15

most important one is we're gonna break up Google

1:41:17

says the Department of Justice right

1:41:20

that's what the DOJ says well

1:41:22

they had no the DOJ says

1:41:24

we have a menu of punishments

1:41:26

for Google you're on

1:41:28

our take your pick and

1:41:31

so it goes up to breaking up

1:41:33

but that's not the only remedy there's

1:41:35

other remedies one is they can't anybody

1:41:37

for search which means that Mozilla

1:41:40

and Apple are badly hurt

1:41:43

another is that they

1:41:45

that saves Google forty

1:41:48

billion dollars fortune

1:41:51

it doesn't hurt Google no sense another

1:41:54

is that they have to advertise that you

1:41:57

have choices in search That's

1:42:01

dumb. That's dumb. Another

1:42:03

is to break up, though it doesn't say exactly how. And

1:42:07

so I have Google's response here at mine.

1:42:10

DOJ's radical and sweeping

1:42:12

proposals risk hurting consumers,

1:42:15

businesses and developers. Of

1:42:17

course Google's going to say that. Of course they

1:42:19

will, yes. But not Robert. And you know what,

1:42:21

with some merit, I mean, it's not like, it

1:42:23

isn't, you start knocking

1:42:25

at the supports

1:42:27

of this house of cards and who knows what's

1:42:29

going to happen. And do you end up with

1:42:32

five more valuable companies that, you know, because the

1:42:34

thing is consumers will probably still pick Google

1:42:36

search. Right. Remember the

1:42:38

DOJ was going to break up Microsoft and

1:42:41

we talked about this earlier on Windows Weekly

1:42:43

and really the upshot of that would have

1:42:45

been having breaking up Microsoft into two companies,

1:42:47

operating systems and soft and work

1:42:50

office would have been two

1:42:52

more valuable companies. Consumers would have gotten

1:42:54

shares in both. Everybody wins. So

1:42:58

yeah, it's, I would love to see

1:43:00

Google be forced to give up YouTube. I think

1:43:02

that's a little much. I think

1:43:04

Google, the fact that Google controls

1:43:06

all ends of the advertising transaction

1:43:08

is clearly problematic. It

1:43:10

has hurt us with an Elon

1:43:12

Musk. What

1:43:15

if it ends up with Satoshi saying, I know what I

1:43:17