Intelligent Machines 811 transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau will be here. Also Anthony Aguirre. He is the co-founder and executive director of the Future of Life Institute. He is really worried about AI taking over. He'll explain why next on Intelligent Machines Podcasts you love.

0:00:23 - Speaker 2
From people you trust. This is TWIT podcasts you love from people you trust this is twit.

0:00:31 - Leo Laporte
This is intelligent machines with jeff jarvis and paris martineau, episode 811, recorded wednesday, march 19th 2025. Flipping the. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we cover the latest in intelligent machines and AI. Jeff is out for a bit He'll be back a little later on in the show but Paris Martineau is with us from theinformationcom. Hi, paris, hi, great to see you and our guest.

This is the new format of the show. We've renamed it. We really are focusing on AI and one of the things that we want to do because I don't know about you, but I feel like there's a lot going on in AI and there's a lot I don't understand and I'm really trying to learn more, and what we're trying to do is, at the beginning of each show, spend half an hour with somebody who's doing something significant, interesting, uh, or can explain more about what's going on, uh, and so that's what we're gonna do, and then we will get into the ai news, uh, in other news, which is a chance for paris, jeff and I to get silly and our picks of the week. But we're going to start off today with our guest, uh, anthony. I forgot to ask you is it a query? A query agiri.

Anthony agiri is co-founder and executive director of the future of life institute uh, and he has just published a, an essay, a paper uh, about, uh artificial super intelligence. That I thought was very interesting and I wanted to talk to you about. It's great to have you, anthony. Thank you you for joining us. Tell me, first of all, what the Future of Life Institute is all about.

0:02:08 - Anthony Aguirre
Future of Life Institute we created back in 2014 or so, when AI was just a long distant possibility. It was getting started then, but the sort of systems we have now were decades, if not centuries, away, people thought. But we wanted to get started early, thinking that AI, if and when it came, would be very transformative. So it would be a sort of new species of intelligence on Earth, an intelligent machine, if you will, that we hadn't had before and that that was going to have giant implications for the long-term future of humanity. Could go badly, could go well, and we wanted to see if there were things that we could do for AI and other technologies biotech, nuclear, also thinking about to push the need a little bit from the more risky to the more positive side. And so we created this institute.

Back then we gave some of the first AI technical safety grants, thinking about not just how do we make AI systems powerful, but how do we make them safe and sort of do the things that we want them to do. This is back in 2015 and 16. We ran several big convenings to get together the people who are building AI with the people who are, you know, academics and the people who are thinking about it, and NGOs. And since then we've sort of steadily grown and ramped up our activities as AI has just dramatically taken off and gotten more and more interesting and powerful. We've put sort of all of our effort into AI and I've steadily sort of migrated from my academic job as a theoretical physicist into being the director of Future of Life.

0:03:37 - Leo Laporte
So we became aware of Future of Life very famously when the letter came out, the pause letter, a couple of years ago uh, gary Marcus was just on the show a couple of weeks ago was one of the signatories Elon Musk, uh, jeffrey Hinton, some of the big names in AI and it suggested a six month. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my suggested, I believe, a six month pause in AI to kind of reassess where we were going with it. Is that accurate?

0:04:07 - Anthony Aguirre
Yeah, a six month or more pause in the next generation of sort of large, you know, general purpose AI models of this sort of GPT or clot or whatever variety, and the idea there was. Let's take a moment to take stock of what is happening here. We've suddenly realized that general purpose AI is something that is possible. It wasn't clear to what degree that was true, you know, coming up into GPT-4. Suddenly, we have something that is really competitive with humans across a lot of different tasks. We should be thinking very hard about.

What is the way in which we want to develop that? What are the, what are the governance mechanisms? What are the safety frameworks? How do we keep it from turning into a mad race to just race ahead to the most powerful possible systems? What sort of you know processes should we be thinking about before we develop a system, after we develop it and before, after, before we deploy it? After we deploy it, how do we monitor it? All of these things we were sort of completely unprepared to do as of early 2023. Unfortunately, we're still completely unprepared to do those things in a reasonable way. We did not take a pause and, in fact, the companies did sort of just very much race ahead and sort of literally in a race. But that was the idea to take them, take some time and put into place the kind of governance and safeguards and methods that we would need to do the next generation of general purpose Well, was the idea you in your ass?

0:05:48 - Leo Laporte
well, was the idea you in your s? So there's a essay which I encourage people to uh to take a look at because you get more information about that. It's called keep the future human. It's a k, what is ktfhai? If people want to read it, there's an executive summary, there's a video, but there's the actual essay and in the executive summary this is. This is the beginning point. We stand at a pivotal moment. Humanity is on the brink of developing artificial minds that could exceed our own. You call it in the paper, asi artificial super intelligence, and you distinguish it from the tool ais that we're using today. Right, right.

0:06:22 - Anthony Aguirre
So most of the ai systems we've had so far that people are familiar with are more like other technologies. They're very powerful, but they're tools in the sense that they more or less sit there until you ask them to do something and then they more or less do what you want, and sometimes exactly the way you want it and sometimes less so. So they're a little less precise than some tools, but they really feel like other technologies in that they extend our capabilities and sort of empower us to do new things, and this is what's great about tools. This is why humans have been building tools for half a million years or whatever, and the key thing I think that is changing now as we go toward the next year, two years, three years in AI is that what have been tools so far.

We are trying very hard and by we I mean all of the major AI companies and several of the largest companies on earth to build systems that are less like tools, that are more like a new species, in the sense that, in addition to the intelligence that AI systems have now, like AlphaFold can fold proteins better than any human can there's a weather forecasting thing that can forecast weather really, really well.

So not just competent and not just general the way that chat GPT is or Claude is, you know they can do many, many things but also autonomous, and this is a really crucial thing. The combination of intelligence, generality and autonomy is something that we haven't seen before. That is something currently that is uniquely human, that allows us to do all the various things that we do, to like accomplish things in the world, to have goals that we achieve through our actions. That is what the companies are now trying to build, and I think that is the way to think about the next step that we could take of artificial general intelligence. I think it's better called autonomous general intelligence, because it's really about the combination of those three properties, and that's what I talked about in the essay.

0:08:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. So that's where we might the autonomy is a scary thing. You can have a hammer, and as long as there's a human wielding the hammer, I mean it could be dangerous, but it's not as dangerous as if the hammer wielded itself. And that's kind of what you're worried about. Yes, what is the likelihood of that, though? I mean, uh, that seems like a great leap from these tool ais that we have to a self-wielding hammer.

0:08:52 - Anthony Aguirre
seems like a great leap well, the the likelihood along the path we're going now is nearly 100, in that the there's no mystery as to how to make ai systems much more autonomous. We've been doing it a lot.

0:09:05 - Leo Laporte
We're talking now about weapons systems, autonomous weapons systems that are driven by ai. That, to me, is terrifying, because they're making a kill decision without a human intervening so.

0:09:15 - Anthony Aguirre
So there are all kinds of autonomous systems. You know self-driving cars. You know they're not perfect, but they're. But they're autonomous. Um, but even in the pure software realm, some of the early AI systems that were quite powerful were game playing systems like AlphaGo or the StarCraft playing system. These were systems that had a goal, which was to win at StarCraft, and they would ruthlessly pursue that goal with all sorts of agency. They would deploy their I don't play StarCraft, so I don't know what Zergs or nerfs or whatever they move around, but they would build the cities and the weapons and so on. They would do all of that as an autonomous system.

That was as good as the best humans at doing those complicated planning and goal-oriented tasks. So we know how to do it. We haven't done it in combination with the generality and intelligence. Those were very narrow systems, just playing a game, but it's not something that I can't do like we. There are techniques. Reinforcement learning works very well at creating these agents that pursue general goals. Um, and so it's, I think, just a matter of time at some level, from the, the systems that we have now, to ones that are even more intelligent and general but also have much more effective autonomy than the ones we have now.

0:10:28 - Leo Laporte
So I mean, it's unknown whether this will happen or not, but I think you're right. If there's even a small chance of it, we should consider what the implications of an autonomous general intelligence would be and whether that would be threatening to us. Why do you think that would be threatening to us?

0:10:48 - Anthony Aguirre
Well, I think the crucial thing is that once you have something that is as intelligent as humans broadly, or really more as intelligent, you know already, ai systems do a lot of things that humans do as well as humans do them Right, if you?

0:11:03 - Leo Laporte
they play go better than we do they.

0:11:04 - Anthony Aguirre
They play Go, but even much more general things, like you know. Do most people write a better essay than GPT-4? They do not. I'll tell you that.

0:11:13 - Leo Laporte
Some do, obviously. Some do, some do, but many do not yeah, many do not.

0:11:17 - Anthony Aguirre
And so the question is You've graded many problem sets and GPT. These systems do physics problems now also at a quite high level. That has gotten, by the way, dramatically better in the last couple of years, as I've been watching them. So the question is, what happens when we have these things not just at sort of typical level of humans, but at an expert level and we're obviously pushing that way but also with the autonomy? So those systems?

You can just tell it, please go and invent a new way of turning this piston inside the engine and, like a human engineer, it will try to go do that and it may succeed or not, depending on how hard that task is, but it will, you know, be able to autonomously take all the steps to do that.

So we'll have a goal that you gave it and it will figure out what it has to do to achieve that goal. It'll make predictions, it'll try stuff out, it'll think of new ideas, it'll try them out and it'll either succeed or fail at that very complicated task. And if we've built, you know, the idea of AGI as it's generally conceived is, it will be better at doing just about all of those sorts of things than the best humans would be at doing them and we don't know if or when that is going to be here. But the predictions from people in the, you know you can get lots of different predictions. If you ask people that are building the machines, you know, ask get lots of different predictions. If you ask people that are building the machines, you know, ask open AI or anthropic.

0:12:49 - Leo Laporte
They're talking about a couple of years from now but now you have to take that also, some of the things they say, because some of that is marketing.

0:12:56 - Anthony Aguirre
They're raising money based, certainly marketing yeah um, so you have to take that with a big grain of salt.

On the other hand, um, while some tech products, there's a lot of promise and we'll have this technology in two years and it really takes five or 10 or something, that has not been the case so far with these general purpose AI systems.

If anything, most of them have arrived faster than people would have predicted, and I know this well because I also run and co-founded a technology prediction platform called Netaculous, and it predicts in very great detail sort of what technologies are going to come into being when and makes predictions about AI and so on. And, if anything, those predictions have tended to be too conservative. The technologies have come sooner than we thought that they would, and so it's possible that the current predictions by experts, which are putting AGI of this sort of type at like two to five years or so away it's possible that those will be wrong and it'll take longer than that, but it's also possible that they'll be wrong and it'll take shorter than that. Wrong and it'll take longer than that, but it's also possible that they'll be wrong. It'll take shorter than that. Right, um, and it's it's very possible that it will be in the sort of range that those experts and and platforms that have been right before are saying, and that's sort of two to five years from now.

0:14:15 - Leo Laporte
so this is huge right, and I wrote keep the future human, because it is so huge and it is essentially almost upon us if we, if we go down the current track, that we're going on it would be sensible to at least think about how we would respond to such a thing, although, you know, I remember when we were talking about nanotechnology there, there was the fear that the world would turn into gray goo. Uh, you know, nick bostrom's talked about paper clips, and uh and ai never ending paper clips. So, uh, we've always worried about these kinds of things. What makes you think, though, that we couldn't just turn them off or somehow disable them? Why would they be an existential threat?

0:14:56 - Anthony Aguirre
Yeah, I think this is. You know, they're important ways to think about what these will be like. So one, I think, was actually provided by Anthropic itself in the way it talked about the systems it envisions existing in a few years, which are systems that are very autonomous and very general purpose and smart. They were described as geniuses in a data center, and it called to mind a million geniuses in a data center Now, and it it called to mind a million geniuses in a data center Now these things would have all the capabilities that very high level human experts have, but much more capability in certain directions.

You know, ai systems can speak a hundred languages. They can have, if they've got a PhD in physics, they've also got a PhD in molecular biology and engineering and mathematics and lots of other things at once. No human has that. A human runs at one speed. I can try to go faster, but this is the speed I run at. An AI system, if you just add more computation, can run 10, 100, 1,000, whatever times faster than it did. And similarly, if you have an AI system that can do something that is really valuable like maybe it does really great physics research you just copy paste and now you have two AI systems that do that same thing. They don't have to spend 10 years learning to do it in undergrad and grad school and postdoc. So there are huge advantages that those sorts of machines would have over humans as soon as they reach the expert level that humans have.

And so if you imagine a million geniuses in a data center, each one of which is sort of Nobel Prize winning in its general capability, but running at 100 times human speed, which never gets tired, never sleeps, doesn't have to eat, doesn't have to go on vacation, you can just copy and paste them and have as many of them as you want. They can interact with each other. They can sort of build plans together. You know there's a million of them. It's more like a society or a nation or a civilization than an AI system. So if you imagine that that's something we could have in a few years. Now, if you ask yourself, like how do I control that thing, or how do I just turn it off, you start to think, well, that's more like turning off a country than a machine. Right, that thing, if it knows that you might want to turn it off, is going to take measures. It's, remember, nobel Prize winning level of intelligence, and there's a million of them operating at 100 times human speed.

0:17:33 - Leo Laporte
They're way ahead of us.

0:17:34 - Anthony Aguirre
in other words, they're way ahead of you. So if you're thinking that you might turn it off, they have already figured out that you might turn it off and they have already taken measures to exfiltrate themselves and be somewhere else or whatever. So it's not that it's impossible to contain a system like this, but it's not going to happen by itself. You have to be extraordinarily careful in setting something like that up so that there is an off switch that you can actually turn, and I'm a strong advocate of doing that. So I think one thing we should do as we build these advanced systems is very, very carefully build in at the deep hardware level and off switch so that we can turn things off if we need to. But that is not going to happen by default. It's not going to be as simple as just like hitting control C and hoping for the best.

0:18:15 - Leo Laporte
So the first thing you wanted to do was pause. We didn't. I think it's probably reasonable to assume that there is so much money to be made in this that companies are not going to back off.

0:18:28 - Anthony Aguirre
Not voluntarily. No.

0:18:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so what do we do?

0:18:33 - Anthony Aguirre
Well, I think there's two things. I think one is to realize that we have a choice here. So there's this idea-. It's not too late. Yeah, first of all, it's not too late. Second, it's not inevitable. These are incredibly difficult things to do. They cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to build the hardware.

Sam Altman said a trillion capital and human intellectual capital into this than you know, the Apollo project or the moon or the Manhattan project by far. This is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. We don't have to do it Like it's not inevitable. We can just stop. Now the question is what can we just? Can we really just stop Because there's a lot of money in it, there's a lot of like pressure and there's a lot of desire to have the kind of fruits that ai promises to deliver well, and it's not just up to the united states, china is going to do this, uh, and we don't control them.

0:19:34 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I would imagine nation states which have those kinds of resources are pursuing it as avidly as as we are in the us.

0:19:42 - Anthony Aguirre
So let's come back to that in a second.

I think the one thing to realize is that there isn't just a go or not go option here. There are different paths that we can take, and, just like you don't you know. If a ship is heading for an iceberg, you might not be able to pull the brakes and just stop, and you might not want to stop because you want the ship to keep going. You want to get to your destination, but you can't steer away from the iceberg, and, as I see it, this road toward AGI like very autonomous human replacement, which then leads to superintelligence that's the iceberg. We don't have to go there, though. The sort of tools that we really want to build, like very powerful tools that let people do things that they couldn't do before. Let them do them faster, let them do them better, but let the people do the thing, rather than having the AI do the thing autonomously. We can still build those, and so I think we have a choice. Do we sort of stay on the path at some level people assume that we're on of building powerful AI tools that make us more productive and let us do faster research and things or do we build these artificial general intelligence and super intelligence systems that really are more like a replacement for humans rather than an empowerment or a tool for humans. So I think it's first recognizing that we have different roads ahead of us, that we can choose to take one rather than the other, not just go or stop. I think the second is once. I think the second is once, if the actual danger and actual nature of these systems becomes manifest, nobody actually should want to build them, and so it's not a question of like we don't to or lose control of and are acutely dangerous to everybody. It's in nobody's interest to build those things. I think the problem is that right now, there is simply an error in thinking that the tools that we're planning to build, like the road that we're on is going to lead to.

Sorry, I said tools and what I meant. You know, what we should be building are tools. The things that we are sort of heading toward building are more like a new species than a tool, and if we're going to build a new species, we should think about what that means. It's not like if this was just some like we're going to make super intelligent apes. You know, we know how that movie goes. It's like you would not just say we're going to make super intelligent apes because that'll give us some power over the other you know, the other country or it's going to boost our economy. You'd be like, wait a minute, why are we making super intelligent apes? Like, is this that seem? So you would pause and say, like, why are we doing this? And that's the thing that I would really like to see here.

Let's think about the thing that we're actually doing. Is that actually what we want? Is it going to be making us more powerful? Is it going to be making us more productive, or is it going to be something that is replacing us as individuals and, eventually, as a species? If that's the case, then nobody should want to be making that thing, and we should be talking about how do we help each other, not make it? How do we ensure that no one is going to get the wrong idea and make it anyway? How do we cooperate in managing the technology and making sure that the tools that we build instead are the right tools to build? And so I think it's really a question of clear understanding of what the actual issue is, rather than getting people to act against their own self-interest, which is very hard to do.

0:23:11 - Leo Laporte
I have talked, however, to AI accelerationists who are excited about creating an alien intelligence. They say it'll be like a new species, and some even say this is evolution. This is us replacing ourselves with the next thing.

0:23:28 - Paris Martineau
uh, so maybe not everybody agrees that uh humanity is is something we should worry about we had a guy on here last week that said we're gonna inject computonium into our brains and merge with ray kerswile.

0:23:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I actually asked ray some years ago literally 25 years ago uh, why we shouldn't worry about advanced super intelligence? And he said no, don't worry about them, they'll think of us as their parents, they'll honor and revere us well, that's one thing the kids do um with their parents, um but I think, why is it? Why is it an existential threat? Why wouldn't they want us around, aren't we just?

0:24:08 - Paris Martineau
I mean, Okay, Also we touched on this briefly before, but I want to come back to it what leads you to be so confident that tech companies have the capability to create super intelligent alien life?

0:24:24 - Anthony Aguirre
basically, Well, I think there are different steps. They've taken the first two steps, which are building intelligent systems and building generally intelligent systems. The question is can they build autonomously generally intelligent systems? And they're trying very hard and so far, everything you know, when you look at the trends from the last two years and even going back farther than that, everything is getting better. So whichever metric you use to measure about the capabilities of the systems, it's getting better. Some of them are getting better a little bit faster than others, but they're all going up and a lot of them are going up sort of in concert with each other. So if you dial up the amount of computation you use in training, almost everything goes up. If you dial up the amount of computation you use in inference and generating the results, not everything goes up quite as fast as everything else, but some things go dramatically up, some things go somewhat up, but all of these things seem to be getting better, somewhat up, but all of these things seem to be getting better. And so if all we do is more of the same, the systems are going to get a lot better than they are now.

And the question is is that going to be enough or do we have to use is something fundamentally different needed, and that's where I think a lot of the disagreement comes. Some people will say well, you know, just using these transformer models as they are is not going to get us to superintelligence, not going to get us to AGI, and that may or may not be true. But what I would say is, again, we are now putting more fiscal and intellectual capital into this quest to build AGI and superintelligence. Whether it's a wise quest or not, we are putting at the moment more effort into this than any other endeavor in human history, and when we have put our mind to it, as humans, to build a new technology with this level of investment and human effort, we have succeeded over and over again.

If we put this much effort into actually curing cancer, can you imagine if we spent a trillion dollars in the next few years on building the AI tools and the data sets and building up the medical knowledge and like doing the testing, all to cure cancer? I have a pretty good idea that we would be a lot like. Maybe we wouldn't totally cure cancer, but we'd be a lot closer. So we're putting more effort into this than anything else, and so I I think I would not bet on us or them failing um. And so there are lots of arguments I I could put forth as to like why, um, why I see the numbers going in that direction, but I think the biggest one is just that we're trying so hard and all of these efforts, you know, even if it's difficult, we're trying as hard as it takes to do something very difficult.

0:27:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, and even if we don't do it, it certainly seems prudent to consider that we might, and then what the consequences of that would be. So that gets to the second question, which is why do we assume that an autonomous, uh, super intelligence would destroy humanity?

0:27:32 - Anthony Aguirre
yeah, I don't. I don't think we want to assume that or anything else about what it's going to do.

Uh, because we don't know we don't know, part of part of the issue here is that ai systems aren't predictable. Um, we don't understand fundamentally how they're working and we certainly can't predict what they're going to do. And this is a very crucial point, because when people think about AI systems as computer programs, they think, well, there's a bunch of lines of code that are all instructions that tell the AI system what to do. And this is not how an AI system works. It's much more something that has grown under this training system than something that is programmed as step-by-step. And that's the whole point of AI.

It can do things that we don't know how to tell it to do it, and it can still succeed in doing it. And what this means is that you can get a system that is extraordinarily effective, that you don't know how it does what it's doing, and you certainly don't know what it's going to do in some new circumstance. And this is a crucial thing to keep in mind that normally with the technology, if we build something that is much more powerful, like a faster, better jet fighter, that's because we got better at making like we understood better the avionics and the electronics and the computers and all those things to make a better jet fighter, and so we're able to make one with these new ai systems. They're getting more powerful without us actually understanding any better how they're operating.

We're just using more computation and like hitting them with the stick and giving more carrots for, and they're getting better at what they do, and so we don't have the sort of science in understanding why they do a particular thing, what makes them safe or unsafe, what they're going to do in a particular new circumstance, and so we're very much in the regime of building something more like a biological being that we can build it, we can grow it, we can see it going out into the world, but we can't really predict what it's going to do, and so I think we should be humble about that. There are, on the other hand, reasons to think generally about what biological or other systems will do. We know that biological systems have to eat, so we know they're going to be hungry and they're going to seek food. We know that they want to survive because they want to reproduce, and so they're going to protect themselves. They're going to run away from things that are dangerous. They're going to lash out with claws if something is threatening them, and with AI systems, the considerations are a bit different, but you can think about general properties that they must have just because they are systems that pursue goals. So, for example, suppose you're an AI system and suppose you're a robot this is a famous example that Stuart Russell likes to give and your job is to fetch coffee. That's all you do. You're a coffee fetching robot. Now, if someone goes to turn you off when you're on your way back with the coffee, then you failed in your task. If they turn you off as a coffee-fetching robot, that means that you have to survive and you have to stay on to fetch the coffee, just in the same way that a bird has to survive in order to have children and have the next generation of birds, so they have a survival instinct.

A machine system will acquire goals like self-preservation, like accruing more power, like having secrecy if it needs secrecy so they're all kind of like developing new capabilities, like making itself more capable. It will acquire new goals just as sort of inevitable byproducts of whatever goal that it has, and this is something that people realized a long time ago. They're called instrumental objectives, and when you think about it, it sort of has to be true, like if you're just good at making money, you also have to be good at a bunch of other things in order to be good at making money, and we see this in companies that seek to make a lot of money have to do a lot of other stuff. They have to have a public relations department and they have to have a controller, and they have to lobby Congress sometimes, and they have to have really good organization and lots of employees that are happy. There are lots of things that they have to do. These are sub-goals of making lots of money.

In just the same way, any very capable system that is an AI or otherwise will have to have lots of other things that it does in order to achieve its goals, and so the real danger here is we don't know how they work. We can't predict what they do. We can't really understand in a mechanistic way so that we can strain them from doing some things and allow them to do others. And so if we give them some goal if you just have here's my super duper powered AI system awesome it can do like so many things really really well. I know what I want it to do. I want it to go make me some money. All right, so I'm going to send my AI system that's super powered out into the world to make me some money.

Obviously, people are going to do this, like as soon as they exist. People are going to send them out into the world to make them money, are going to do this as soon as they exist. People are going to send them out into the world to make them money. And so those systems, just like corporations and just like people, are going to do all sorts of things to make money, some of them legal, some of them not legal. If they can get away with it, they will do what it takes to make money if that is their goal. And so there are all kinds of things like acquiring power, acquiring influence, manipulating people, lying to people.

That are things that we don't like. We don't want AI systems or people or companies to do them, but they're incentivized by any goal that they have, and so this is a long story to say that, if we have something that is extraordinarily powerful, something that is extraordinarily powerful so imagine something that isn't as powerful as Google, but is, you know, and isn't as powerful as the United States government, but is more so at it whatever goals it has, they're going to have a bunch of side effects that are going to be negative for humanity, and the only way to avoid that is to, you know, not have that system. To have that system somehow very closely under control so that we can stop it when it's doing something we don't like. Or to have it very, very deeply aligned with humanity so that, although it can do all those negative things, it will choose not to do some because it really, really loves us.

And now the problem with it? So that's three options don't build it, or build it and, like, really control it, or build it and don't control it but have it be really closely aligned with us. The problem is only one of those things do we actually know how to do? We know how to not build them. We have no idea how to control them when they're this powerful, and we have no idea how to align them to our values if we don't control them and they're that powerful. So this is the fundamental conundrum. We've got sort of those three choices and only one of them is really open to us and the other two are very dangerous. And that's the road we're on.

0:34:35 - Leo Laporte
It sounds like your plan is to just scare the hell out of people so that they think a little bit more carefully about what they're developing. Because I don't think you can go to government and say, stop this. I don't think you certainly can't go to Sam Altman and say, stop this.

0:34:46 - Anthony Aguirre
You have to scare people. I think it's.

I think it's not necessarily about scaring so much as like, please understand what you're doing what we're doing here, and I think I mean ironically I think the companies that are building these actually do understand. A lot of them understand the stakes. They are people who worry deeply about AI safety in earlier times and are still worried about it at some level, but they are caught in a race. As they see it, somebody else is going to develop the AI system. If they don't, either it will be uncontrollable, and that's a danger to them, or it will be controllable, and that's a danger to them because it's competition. That's a danger to them, or it will be controllable, and that's a danger to them because it's competition. And so I better get there first, because at least there's a chance that I might control this thing and therefore, you know, be the one that gets to be in charge. Or maybe, if I develop it first, there's a better chance it'll be controllable, because I'm smarter and wiser and more careful than all of the other guys.

0:35:42 - Leo Laporte
So this is a direct analog to this in 1939 albert einstein and leo zillard wrote a letter to president roosevelt. Said the germans are going to have atomic weapons and we've got to make atomic weapons to save the western world. Uh, of course the manhattan project resulted and leo zillard really in his later years regretted that. He. He realized that he had, just as Oppenheimer did, that they had created a, a monster, and was very worried about nuclear proliferation and all of that. That it.

0:36:17 - Speaker 2
I know this is an even greater existential threat, but it seems analogous it's so many analog.

0:36:23 - Anthony Aguirre
I mean some things are different, but very interesting to see analogies and disanalogies. I mean one disanalogy is that we don't have Nazis who we think are building the AI systems first that are going to destroy the world. I mean, the stakes were incredibly high then in a way that they frankly just are not right now, like we could easily not build these things and it wouldn't be the end of the world.

0:36:50 - Leo Laporte
That's a very good point. Yeah, even though we have launched 10 Manhattan projects to do it, we don't have to.

0:36:57 - Anthony Aguirre
We certainly don't have to and we can get most, I think, of what people imagine that we're going to get from AGI and superintelligence with just awesome AI tools that people use. It might take a little bit longer. It might not take longer if we dump the same amount of money into it, but we certainly can get most of it. I think interesting analogies are the people who built the bomb imagined that they would have a bunch of control over how it was used, and we sort of saw how this played out the scientists built it and the government took it, and the scientists had nothing more to say of any influence over how it was used, and I think this is an important thing to keep in mind. You know, it was not out of human control, but it certainly was out of control of the people who invented it and built it, even though they imagined that inventing and building would give them some kind of leverage over how it was used in the future. There's something about the nuclear race that makes me very optimistic, actually, and this is something that I cling to when I feel like this road that we're on is so dangerous and we're sort of so committed to this path that I think is going to be quite disastrous, which is that, you know, at the end of World War II, the bomb was invented, it was set off twice. The Soviets got it surprisingly quickly and the people, the smartest people on earth at some level, then von Neumann and Einstein and Oppenheimer, and the whole crew of brilliant theoretical physicists they looked at this situation and they said we're done, for you know, the Soviets have it, we have it, everybody's going to get it. Soon there's going to be an arms race, which there was. Everybody's going to want these things. People that don't have it are going to need it for self-defense, so they're going to get it. Eventually, we're warlike creatures. A war is going to break out, the bombs are going to go off and it's going to be the end of the world. And that was absolutely good reasoning, right. That was a terrible situation that we were in, and yet somehow, here we are, 80 years later and we're still around. We somehow made it work, and so this is what this is, this.

I take a lot of solace in that, even though the sort of dynamics, the competitive dynamics, the geopolitical dynamics were pretty damning in that situation, we actually managed to muddle through by understanding what the dynamics were. By thinking through the game theory, we invented ways of thinking about deterrence and like ways of mutually you know, mutual understanding what the other person's other sides capability was and you know understanding what they think about, what we think about the, what they think about, what we think and all of this stuff Like it was very, very dangerous and we got very lucky. But we're still here in a situation that seemed pretty grim, and so I'm optimistic here too, that although it feels like all the incentives are driving toward building these AGI and superintelligence systems that are going to be out of control, that are going to be extraordinarily powerful, even if they were under control it would also be, I think, quite dangerous. So we're in this very, very bad spot. Nonetheless, we can, if we choose, take the reins on this and actually do some wise things, and I think the first thing to do so is to really understand the nature of the problem.

One of the things that was useful good about the atomic bomb was everybody understood exactly what it was. You know it was a giant explosion that blew up cities, so there's no doubt about what the consequences are. Here things are more confusing because AI is much more obviously double-edged With nuclear power. You did have the positive side of the nuclear energy, but it was much more separable from the bomb. Here the risks and the rewards are very much more tightly bound up and so it's much harder to see what to do.

But I think there are things, and one of the things that I try very hard to push in Keep the Future Human is how to think about that question Like how can we analyze the nature of the systems and this intelligence, autonomy, generality, sort of triple intersection that I spell out. There is one way to do that. How do we understand these systems well enough so that we can actually steer towards systems that we want and that are empowering people and are tools to make us do all the things that we want to do better, without going down this road that sort of leads to loss of control and leads to replacement of humans and humanity, and I think by understanding the problem well we can do that. And so I see my job and the Java Future Life Institute and why I wrote this to just try to bring a more clear level of understanding to the situation we're in, so that we can make some wiser choices.

0:41:56 - Leo Laporte
We didn't use the atomic bomb because we knew it would be the end of life if we were, and that realization saved us. I don't know. I think you're right. I don't know if we have that knowledge yet, but, to paraphrase Whopper, the only way to win is not to play the game at all. Anthony, I thank you so much. The paper is available to all if you want to read it. Ktfhai Well worth reading. Whether you are worried about superintelligence or not, it's certainly something we should consider and plan for. I wish you luck and I think really all we can do is all you can do is scare the hell out of people and let them know the risks that they're engaged in. And I think you're right. I think if people understand the risk, they might decide. Let's hope. If people understand the risk, uh, they might decide. Let's hope, uh, not to build those things that could be so dangerous to humankind. I really appreciate your time, anthony. Thank you for joining us.

0:42:51 - Anthony Aguirre
Thank you for having me on. It was great to be here yeah, take care, take care.

0:42:54 - Leo Laporte
Uh, the future of life institute. Uh, keep the future human ktfhai. Uh, we're gonna take a little break and when we come back, the other ai news, our show today, brought to you by us cloud, the number one microsoft unified support replacement now us cloud's an interesting name for a third party unified support for microsoft premier and microsoft unified support. But but actually they've got something that maybe justifies the name we've been talking for. Let me explain. We've been talking for a few months now about uh, us cloud. They are, in fact, the global leader in third-party microsoft support for enterprises. In fact, they now support the numbers going up 50 of the fortune 500. Uh, these big companies know that they can save by going to us cloud, big or small, your business can save 30 to 50 percent over microsoft unified and premiere support. But it'd be no good if it's just saved you money. It's better. Uh, us cloud is, on average, two times faster time to resolution versus microsoft. Twice as fast that's a big deal. When your hair's on fire, the network's down. And two times faster time to resolution versus Microsoft. Twice as fast, that's a big deal. When your hair's on fire, the network's down and you got to fix it Twice. The speed is a big deal. They'll also do things Microsoft will not do. For instance, they can help you save on your Azure bill. They've got a. This is really cool. Now you know Microsoft's not going to say hey, you're overspending on Azure, they love it. But US Cloud is here to help. They have a new Azure cost optimization service. I mean, really, when was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? It's pretty typical that you're going to have some sprawl, a little Azure spend creep going on, but it's easier than you think to save on Azure.

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Great to have you. Uh, paris is here uh and I hope we are all now suitably terrorized about, uh, artificial super intelligence. No, scared, nope, not scared. So you don't think it's possible? Is that it jeff?

0:47:00 - Jeff Jarvis
um, Jeff Booth, First we have to define the it, which is the real problem here. It's how they say it hammering jello to the wall in terms of the definition and no-.

0:47:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, what about autonomous general intelligence? That sounds pretty complete.

0:47:16 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I don't think so. Based on, based on, I mean, what he says is that there's this, um inevitable progression. You know one thing that, having written about gutenberg sorry, there you go, drink people um, there's a, there's a discussion ever since then of technological determinism, and that there's a set path and that, gee, if we're here now, we must be there then. Uh, I think that's a.

0:47:39 - Leo Laporte
Well, I understand that and you're probably right, but I wouldn't count on it. I mean, if such a thing is possible, do you not agree it would be a threat?

0:47:49 - Jeff Jarvis
No, because I do think that what this narrative robs us of is agency. We do have the agency. We're going to build these things, we're going to have plugs. Whatever the things are, they are in our control and, by the way, that if there are problems and there will be, those problems as with the internet, I believe will be human problems- Well, we know that.

0:48:11 - Paris Martineau
Do you believe that every single person that builds these technologies is going to act in the ethical manner? And make sure, no, they won't.

0:48:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Of course not. Of course not. Just the same way, a general machine is a general machine, right? The printing press led to the scientific revolution and also witch hunts.

0:48:30 - Leo Laporte
Should we not have developed the atomic bomb? Do you think there's a risk that at some point there could be a all out nuclear war that could destroy the earth?

0:48:42 - Paris Martineau
Yes.

0:48:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Sure, but there's been that since.

0:48:45 - Paris Martineau
So there's for sure a risk.

0:48:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, yeah, but that's OK.

0:48:49 - Leo Laporte
That's a bit different from the distance, I don't know if it is the point being you can build stuff that is an existential threat to humankind. We know it, we have. You can build stuff that is an existential threat to humankind we know it, we have. Uh, at that point maybe it'd be a and, and the assumption that scientists had that they could control it turned out to be false. Government said no, we got this now. See you later, abernheimer, uh, and the scientists were wrong and they, I think, deeply regretted in many respects. Now they did have a nazi threat. We don't have that.

0:49:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Um, maybe we shouldn't have done it.

0:49:22 - Leo Laporte
We are that, but no, no no, well, maybe we are, but that's a good point too. That doesn't make me feel any better, right? So, um, you know, I mean we're using AI now, uh, to decide which government departments should continue and what spending should continue. That seems like a very risky use of a tool.

0:49:43 - Jeff Jarvis
But that's definitely a human problem, not the AI.

0:49:45 - Leo Laporte
Well, I understand it's a human problem. I mean, this isn't going to happen without humans. They could do the same thing with-. So what he's saying is let's let humans, let's maybe pause and think about what we're doing here and not go after this. I mean, you don't disagree, do you disagree, that Sam Altman would love to gent to create such a thing as an AGI or a super intelligence?

0:50:08 - Jeff Jarvis
well he's. He's raising money on Justin. He wants to. I think it's. But I've said on the show you think he can, and again and again, but.

0:50:13 - Leo Laporte
I wouldn't bet on the fact that he can't. There are plenty of people who thought there'd be no way to make an atomic bomb in 1939?

0:50:20 - Jeff Jarvis
that metaphor, that analogy, is not going to take us very far, I don't think I.

0:50:26 - Paris Martineau
I don't think that it's necessarily bad to have a group that is arguing for people to slow down in a time of great acceleration. I think we can all agree and disagree on the ways that this particular group is accomplishing those goals and whether or not it's even feasible to try and roll back or slow down a technological advancement that is making a lot of companies, a lot of money and a lot of governments very excited about the prospects for advanced warfare. It seems difficult to put that cat back in the bag, but I mean, I don't think it's bad to try.

0:51:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't want to go into any great detail because part of the reason I wasn't there was that, and I don't want to go into detail about my views of this now because he can't answer. But I just want to at least raise the Stochastic Parents paper we bring up again and again and one of the issues with the Doomsdrew perspective is that it distracts from the very real present tense issues.

0:51:28 - Leo Laporte
And I agree. I think, there are.

You can do both. I don't. I think that you can consider the issues with AI tools, as Anthony calls them, uh and, at the same time, consider, uh or reconsider, what you're doing trying to generate, trying to create autonomous AI weapons and things like that. I think you can do both. I don't know why that's a mutually exclusive. It's not. We'll get, we'll get Timnit gabru. We're going to try really hard to get emil torres and timnit gebru on because, uh, they have a, a a. You know, a very real uh concern about ai tools and I agree with it well, they also.

0:52:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think that means, you shouldn't worry about what could also happen the other thing is and and um, jason and I have interviewed emil torres and, uh, they have a concern about the actual agenda involved in this discussion, and you've heard me talk about that many, many, many times. The.

0:52:24 - Leo Laporte
Tuscreal agenda.

0:52:25 - Paris Martineau
Tuscreal yep Drink.

0:52:28 - Leo Laporte
Gutenberg, tuscreal. All of that aside, it seems like a reasonable thing to say Maybe you should worry, or at least consider what you're creating here. That could potentially be a dangerous thing. Uh, and, and I don't the defense that, oh, you're never going to be able to make that let's not have a printing press because it couldn't be dangerous.

0:52:48 - Jeff Jarvis
In fact, it was dangerous. It led to. It led to the reformation, it led to the 30 years war should we have?

0:52:54 - Leo Laporte
we have not done the atomic bomb. You asked that already and you say we should have.

0:52:59 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that I think it's an inapt analogy. Okay, paris.

0:53:07 - Paris Martineau
My opinions on the atomic bomb. Is that what you're asking? Yeah, sure, I mean. Yeah, I guess.

0:53:15 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's a hard one to answer.

0:53:16 - Paris Martineau
If you're imagining a world where you could delete the atomic bomb from existence, the button, and no one could get it back, sure, I think that would be cool, you know, but that isn't feasible, nor is it the world we're living in, right?

0:53:27 - Leo Laporte
all right, let's move on. Uh, here's an exciting thing that's going to reassure everybody about the use of ai. Uh, the national institutes of standards and technology has eliminated any mention of ai safety and fairness, but instead says the thing we should be worried about is ideological bias I don't even know what to say about increasing competitiveness is the other part of that as well.

No, dei and ai. I think that we've. We agree that? No, dei, I don't know. The trump administration has removed safety, fairness, misinformation and responsibility as things it values for ai uh, instead, they're worried that conservatives are gonna get, uh, yeah, canceled this is.

0:54:15 - Jeff Jarvis
This is the problem with our dear language is that it gets used in various ways. I just was out walking in the neighborhood and ran into a cancer researcher who lives nearby. I was talking about trying to put in research proposals now, and all these words you have to avoid because they have been co-opted Right Safety has been co-opted, responsibility has been co-opted All of these words, and so we're not really having a discussion about the actual words. We're having a discussion about the shadow life that they hold now.

0:54:49 - Leo Laporte
And yet the AI safety, the words AI safety, have been removed from the guidance Right.

0:54:56 - Paris Martineau
Not great.

0:54:58 - Leo Laporte
I just I feel like this is a perfect example of what what we were talking about. But all right, a human problem again it's a human problem, I agree. And who's going to stop it?

0:55:08 - Jeff Jarvis
but humans um, I went to the. I I watched the entire uh jensen huang, jensen huang because it is it is my new favorite show.

0:55:18 - Paris Martineau
I was gonna say you always are you're always watching the entire Jensen Huang, jensen Huang, cause it is. It is my new favorite show. I was going to say you always are, you're always watching the entire.

0:55:22 - Leo Laporte
Now I only watched the 16 minute CNET super cut. Oh, you miss, you miss the.

0:55:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a two and a half hour speech. Yes, yes, and it's amazing. I mean, I'm amazed on it, at the level of, of showmanship he's, he's nuclear steve jobs, see I thought it was kind of awkward.

0:55:40 - Leo Laporte
To be honest with you, that's part of the charm, because he refuses to prepare. There is no script really it's. He says there's no script, but I think he's.

0:55:50 - Jeff Jarvis
There's no prompter uh, how do you know what slides you're gonna have?

0:55:54 - Leo Laporte
well, he just has to press the button and then he looks back and says, oh, now we're going to talk about. So I guess that's a script yeah, uh, but he is basically. He said I'm at the beginning, we're doing this without a net. I don't have, uh, we don't rehearse. It's the exact opposite, the antithesis.

0:56:10 - Paris Martineau
Now, speaking as somebody who doesn't rehearse, I think that's just laziness, yeah that's like I think he rehearses it's definitely laziness, because it takes a lot of pr people and a lot of meetings to get these sort of events together well, at the end, when something didn't work, he said I need a human, yeah, human, which was a good line so gtc, which is nvidia's uh, it used to be their GPU technology conference.

0:56:39 - Leo Laporte
Now it's just GTC, but it's where NVIDIA, who is, you know, without doubt, a leader in the hardware that's used to create AI these days and software to some degree. Yeah, absolutely so. His announcements here are very, very important. He showed, for instance, new chips, new ways. He showed, for instance, new chips, new ways. This is a motherboard that is this size of the Blackwell processor into a much smaller 1U rack mountable motherboard.

0:57:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Let me ask you, jason. I said this to Jason today. Even though I don't know what this does, I couldn't use it, it's too expensive for me. The geek in me says I think I want one of those.

0:57:18 - Leo Laporte
Use it, it's too expensive for me the geek in me says I think I want one of those. Well, in fact, he did kind of talk about the idea that we might be able to have home AI servers in the near future. They are selling a $3,000 home AI server right now or will be soon.

0:57:36 - Speaker 6
I don't know if you need a home AI server, but maybe you do, you destroy humanity, I guess well, no, that won't that.

0:57:43 - Leo Laporte
That'll never be a big enough. That's the kind of a that's an AI.

0:57:48 - Paris Martineau
Watch those together and Jeff's gonna have humanity destroyed in a weekend. That's an AI tool.

0:57:53 - Leo Laporte
But what? But?

0:57:53 - Jeff Jarvis
what they Wong is showing is the ability to uh cluster thousands or hundreds of what struck me so much about this um was that when I watched with um micah, what got me was the, the scale of it, and and he and I talked about that a lot, uh, uh, that at the time whoa, this goes on. Then the last one I watched was all about the digital twins and how there's systems to check out every possible alternative future. That's the matrix we're not in this time. It was all. If you go to the very beginning of the full presentation, it's tokens, tokens, tokens, tokens, tokens, and it's not about data, it's not about information. It's about factories to make tokens, which is really about making synthetic data to run these things.

0:58:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're acquiring a company that creates synthetic data. I think they're all tied together, though, jeff, oh yeah they absolutely are. The tokens are a creation of these machines.

It's the emphasis, but rather than say he said that a computer is no longer a retriever of files, it is a generator of tokens well, so, and so what he's talking about is that these things are transformers, and the larger the the size of uh data that you can handle, the more data you can handle at one time, the, but it's more than just the data you handle it's the, it's those relationships that you know of, that you use right?

0:59:21 - Jeff Jarvis
well, that's what the tokens are information are used to generate one token the new chip. He said we'll do 12 billion tokens per second well, that's right.

That's a lot smarter in a 100 megawatt, um, uh, factory, as you keep calling it a factory. And so it was just really interesting to me, and I don't know whether this is good in the sense that it seems to free from the bounds of the data we now have in training. On the other hand, where's the reality to it? If it's all synthetic, if it's all made up, how do you get to ground truth to know that it knows what real is? And he talked about that too. One of the interesting things was because he talked a lot about robotics and he called that embodied AI, and he said that you need verifiable rewards to train the robotics and that means that it's the laws of physics. And he said we need a physics engine. So he announced a partnership with Disney to work on a physics engine to help train it.

We've talked about this. The ball goes over the table. Yes, it still exists. The egg drops if you can afford to buy one, and it breaks right. What happens in real life and how to understand that. So I just find him fascinating and I find his show fascinating. I don't understand a lot of it. A lot of it is high math wait.

1:00:41 - Paris Martineau
What is disney gonna do to?

1:00:43 - Jeff Jarvis
to teach the ai about the egg I think kind of um how, yeah, it's pixar, yeah I think so what so?

1:00:52 - Leo Laporte
we've always had physics engines every video game has to have a physics engine so that, if you throw a ball, the ball has appropriate arc, parabola and ends up at the right place at the right speed, and uh, I presume that's what we're talking about we're talking about yeah it's just better physics engines.

So really, to me, what's gonna? What's going on here? I mean, obviously he's building bigger and bigger machines, oh yes, and a bit more and more information. We have seen a crisis of data. Once you eat the whole internet, what do you do? And then there's the issue of copyright and we have a number of stories. Hollywood musicians, all the creators are saying stop reading our stuff. I disagree with them, I think they're wrong, but that's become a problem. Is protecting copyright? So synthetic data is a way of getting more data, training, new models based on generated data, as opposed to, you know, taking data from other people. But what's interesting is it's, I believe, is just standing on the shoulders of the data you already stole. So you, it's, it's, it's. It's kind of a snake eating its own tail.

1:01:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Not with robotics, though.

1:02:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's okay, so that's to me the most interesting thing and he brought a little robot out and didn't say anything about the robot, but the interesting thing is this is going to be the year of robotics, because that's where you get the new data. What the machine in the box does is it's looking at language, it's looking at writing, but what it doesn't know?

very well is what happens when the egg the, but the machine in the box does the physics, looking at language, it's looking at writing, but what it doesn't know very well is what happens when the egg falls off the table. That's why you give me, you take these machines, you bring them out into the real world and you give them. And that's what gemini, what google is showing with this new gemini platform, this robotics platform. We talked about this last week. This is going to be the year you see a lot of robotics and and he agreed right, he talked a lot about about that oh, yeah, he did.

1:02:41 - Jeff Jarvis
He did absolutely, um, what he says it's gonna be the next trillion dollar business or 100 trillion dollar business, whatever it was. Yeah, um, just a little minor point. He named the earlier chip after grace hopper. Um, it's always women. Yeah, no, it's uh well, no, it's not going to be. David blackwell was the next one. Oh, okay, and he was an American statistician and mathematician. The next is Vera Rubin, who discovered dark matter and her grandchildren were in the audience, which is kind of cool. And then he dropped real quickly that the next generation is going to be named after Richard Feynman. Oh good, isn't that cool yeah.

He said there are 30 million software engineers globally. They're all going to have um coding aids from all this.

1:03:27 - Leo Laporte
I think that's probably true marcus, gary marcus, who was on our show a couple of weeks ago. Um said the synthetic data is fine when you're talking about physics and math coding because you can generate more data just using're talking about physics and math coding because you can generate more data just using the rules of physics and math and coding. It's a little bit more difficult on general purpose reasoning and open-ended domains. Yes, as one would imagine, um, you know, I think robots are a very promising area, although again, I think I don't think anthony's are a very promising area, although again, I don't think Anthony's wrong. A very scary area Because now they're out in the world and well, I'm not too worried about an LLM hurting me. Have you seen the new Boston Dynamics robots?

1:04:18 - Paris Martineau
You showed this last week.

1:04:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, you raised something last week paris, for that is that. Why are they humanoid? And why?

1:04:25 - Leo Laporte
well, because of the environments that they need to invite up depends what they're going to do, but if you are, for instance, a bomb uh diffusing robot, you might need to go upstairs.

1:04:35 - Paris Martineau
Open doors, move around spaces after the human body, in the vast majority of cases, is not the most efficient.

1:04:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's why there's dogs. That's why the robot that uh jensen wong brought out on stage was just a little thing on a box on wheels honestly, we should make more robots the robot you need to be, did I? Show. Did I actually show this, this video um?

1:04:58 - Jeff Jarvis
benito's trying to get in.

1:04:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I know Did.

1:05:00 - Paris Martineau
I actually show this video you did and we talked about it at length.

1:05:04 - Leo Laporte
Did I really Did I show him doing somersaults and running around he?

1:05:08 - Paris Martineau
was riding a bike. Maybe Is that this one, or no. Actually you didn't show the crawling. They don't look alike, that's kind of fun.

1:05:14 - Leo Laporte
They kind of do look alike. I don't think I showed this one, I think this is a newer one. Benito, what were you saying?

1:05:18 - Bentio Gonzalez
I was just saying. The robots you really need to be scared of are the drones, the flying ones. There's all kinds of robots you might want to be scared of.

1:05:26 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, I think that's the whole point of robots is they can have all sorts of form factors. A human form factor is useful for exploring spaces designed for humans, that's all.

1:05:35 - Paris Martineau
But drones are great, uh, so I will be scared of a robot when it can do a uh, really impressive lip sync like two drag queens how about that?

1:05:45 - Leo Laporte
how about that? That's better.

1:05:46 - Paris Martineau
Uh, that's better break dancing than a death drop, then a somersault over a competitor in an improvised move.

1:05:54 - Bentio Gonzalez
That will be, that'll be the moment I'm scared also, you know what of like individuality like, are they actually individuals or are they one thing?

1:06:03 - Jeff Jarvis
they're a network, aren't they?

1:06:04 - Bentio Gonzalez
yeah, so like individuals.

1:06:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't understand are the robots?

1:06:07 - Bentio Gonzalez
are they individual like for lack of a better word entities like people, or is that? Or do we count them as all one thing, like a hive?

1:06:16 - Paris Martineau
I think it depends how they're being controlled yeah, you control how they've been designed. I mean, if it's like a one-to-one sort of control thing, where a robot, a person, has to be like robots, going to take a step now and then do a somersault, then that's an individual robot. But if you have like 10 of them moving en masse, you'd probably refer to them as a you might ask the same question about an army brigade are they individuals or are they?

1:06:43 - Bentio Gonzalez
each of them individuals, don't we? We consider each of the people people, individual people. I think we train.

1:06:47 - Paris Martineau
Are you saying that you don't believe the military that are?

1:06:51 - Leo Laporte
there are armed forces made up of individuals I think we train them uh extensively so that they act as a unit, not as individuals.

1:06:58 - Bentio Gonzalez
Yeah, same as basketball teams and things like that. But you know you don't want soldiers to act as individuals. Because individuals protect their. They are individuals, though.

1:07:07 - Paris Martineau
They are. Yeah, Leo hates the troops. That's what we're learning here.

1:07:12 - Leo Laporte
No, I'm saying that, I'm joking.

1:07:15 - Jeff Jarvis
All right. Well, here's where it's coming closest to you. Here's where it's coming closest to you. Here's where it affects your life. Here's where AI is really going to matter, and NVIDIA is going to come into your life next time you go order a Taco Bell.

1:07:28 - Leo Laporte
Is this a story what lies? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. I have a feeling, I have experienced this already Yum Brands.

1:07:32 - Bentio Gonzalez
I've already experienced this Yum.

1:07:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Brands. There have, uh well, there have been various efforts that mcdonald's did it, wendy's did it, now yum brands is actually. Those were failures.

1:07:44 - Paris Martineau
Now they're partnering with nvidia to do um ai ordering to scale the fast food company's existing bite by yum platform. Great brand huh. Great spelled b-y-t of course, of course, by Yum. What are they actually doing, though, park? Said the company's planned to roll out AI solutions to about 500 restaurants across the four Yum brands, including Habit Burger and Grill, in addition to KFC and Taco Bell, which is very good, by the way, and Pizza Hut. Interesting, what are they? Going to do.

1:08:19 - Bentio Gonzalez
Last time I drove through burger king, I talked to an ai you did?

1:08:22 - Jeff Jarvis
yep, you did. Did you try to screw with its head?

1:08:25 - Bentio Gonzalez
no, I didn't.

1:08:26 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I wanted to see if you wanted your burger, I wanted to see if it actually worked properly, so I just did, okay, wait have you guys been to one of the new kfc drive-thru like locations where they have you pull up in like a pre-load area and well, when I was there, some teens with like computers on their chests took my order and then you got into a special lane and then you went through like a whole thing.

1:08:48 - Leo Laporte
It was a very streamlined experience they've been doing that in and out for 10 years really she doesn't have to go to the suburbs because there's lots of land with people, with people outside standing on the street 24 hours it gets real long

you go to the internet route is up by sfo and they're always, always jammed and they're always there yeah, they have to be, otherwise you'd be sitting in the line for half an hour without anybody to talk to and you, the neighbors, will be pissed off because the traffic goes up back way I don't think it's okay, I want to hear do you like it?

1:09:23 - Bentio Gonzalez
enough burgers, by the way, never heard ruling on that I've never had an out burger. Uh yeah, of course I love it in a burger.

1:09:30 - Leo Laporte
Who doesn't love in and out?

1:09:31 - Jeff Jarvis
burger they're okay. Oh, oh, leo, leo, I've got to tell you this. Oh, when you're in New York for Hank's opening, you need to Paris. I'm curious whether you've been here. You need to desert him for just one meal and go to American Burger.

1:09:50 - Leo Laporte
Is this the one where you go through the hotel lobby to get to the little kiosk in the back?

1:09:55 - Jeff Jarvis
No, that's all.

1:09:55 - Paris Martineau
No American Burger is I haven't had a burger from American Burger there.

1:10:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Or Hamburger America in the back, that's. That's, that's all. No american burgers. I haven't had a burger from american burger there speaking of stories we've done.

1:10:05 - Leo Laporte
We've definitely talked about american burger before. No hamburger america.

1:10:07 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I don't think hamburger america, okay, hamburger america. They, I'm telling you, they do the onion burger. Uh, it's a smash burger, right, you? You, I do like smash burgers because my art is with the onions are just in it like crazy. Is this the one? On the google street.

1:10:19 - Leo Laporte
Yes, okay, right near where hank's gonna be yeah uh, and it is unbelievable, you've been here it was.

1:10:27 - Paris Martineau
It was founded by a renowned burger scholar yes, yes, god, I wish, I wish I could be.

1:10:35 - Jeff Jarvis
It is so good, it is killer really oh really scroll down that site and look at the onion burgers there.

1:10:44 - Leo Laporte
This is uh, this is uh. There he is. There's the renowned burger scholar himself. He's got sideburns to write. Oh, look see, a smash burger starts as a ball, and then they squish it but, the onion does look like a burger scholar. Yeah, it does you start to render the fat, then you salt it and the salt salt mix in with the rendered beef fat.

1:11:03 - Paris Martineau
Then you add the that's a lot of onions. Oh, it is. That's the right amount of onions they really caramelize the heck out of it yeah, your onions are trapped in the beef steam.

1:11:13 - Leo Laporte
You put the cheese on the bun. Now you have the six sirens. Well, I should. I should let the guy speak for himself. Making me hungry?

1:11:18 - Paris Martineau
I'm making myself hungry, that's george recreating uh classic american burgers, and as authentically as possible huh, the best burger scholar, george mott's.

1:11:32 - Leo Laporte
He should have mozzarella, of course, but he doesn't I do think the smash burger is a uh as a significant improvement in oh, yeah, there's a place in new jersey called white manna.

1:11:42 - Jeff Jarvis
That goes way back to the um, to the like 30s and it's amazing, it's, it's. It's that old diner kind of. Yeah, it's white tiles and stuff.

1:11:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's killer, killer uh, google is officially replacing the Google uh voice assistant with Gemini. This is something Apple could not do.

1:12:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Apple tried uh, but seriously standards uh, maybe they have higher standards.

1:12:10 - Leo Laporte
I don't think that's the problem you know they hired John gen Andrea away from Google, who was a highly respected AI scientist, and they've been working on this. Apple just last week, or maybe two weeks ago, announced yeah, it's not going so well. Uh, we probably won't have a smart Siri for another year. Google says hold my beer.

1:12:33 - Anthony Aguirre
Um, here's a video, uh, of google replacing it says you read that title correctly the time has finally come the google assistant on your smartphone.

1:12:43 - Leo Laporte
Google is replacing me with gemini. Wow, wow. So I think I saw this. You could choose your. I think I should go get my. Uh, you use a pixel, right, jeff? Have you seen this? Hello, who am I? I know? Yes, you're mr google.

1:13:00 - Paris Martineau
You're, you're, you're all in on the dying empire of google.

1:13:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I live la vida. Google, yeah, uh. Where how do I, where do I go to find out?

1:13:08 - Leo Laporte
uh, uh yeah so the newest google phones, including including the Pixel, did this. I have sex. Google says millions of people have art, but you have an older Google phone. Yeah, so that may be not coming to you soon. I don't know. I don't know. So later this month they say we believe an assistant should be personal to you and aware of the world around you. See, I don't know why you think this is about to happen. It's happening all around us.

1:13:48 - Jeff Jarvis
And it can't end.

1:13:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is agentic. It should be able to interact with the apps and services you already use, and it should make you more productive, more creative and a bit more curious. It's about time something made you a bit more curious.

1:14:01 - Paris Martineau
What are you talking?

1:14:02 - Leo Laporte
about. I'm reading the press release.

1:14:04 - Paris Martineau
How will this make me more curious? How are we even remotely close to a future where AI is going to kill us all? Because it's so super powerful and autonomous Thank you yes, come on.

1:14:16 - Leo Laporte
You're going to be sorry sometime, jeff. I'm gonna be jeff and I are gonna be long gone, but you're gonna be sorry. You're the one who's gonna have to suffer with all was right yeah, you're gonna have to arbitrate this. Uh, an exec overseeing siri told staff the delays were ugly, made worse by apple publicly promoting the new features and it's unclear when they were shipped. This is mark german, the bloomberg rumor guru ugly and embarrassing jesus that's, that's bad, that's it's.

Uh. There's a history for that, though. Uh. Steve jobs famously pulled the mobile me team into the auditorium and screamed at them saying you're, you're hurting, your, the company, he said. He said to them what is mobile me supposed to do? And they said you know, it's the cloud. Well, why doesn't it do it? Why doesn't it do it during the all hands gathering? Robbie walker, who serves as a senior director at apple, during an all-hands gathering, suggested employees on his team may be feeling angry, disappointed, burned out and embarrassed after the features were postponed. They should feel embarrassed, he says. But he said you developed incredibly impressive features and someday we will deliver an industry leading virtual assistant one day one day soon.

1:15:39 - Jeff Jarvis
What I would love to know is the spec, which, of course, they never released. What was the spec? What was their expectation? What did they think it was going to do? Looking at all the competitors, what was going to stand out?

1:15:46 - Leo Laporte
Historically and this is, I think, the same problem Amazon's having. It's hard to take I think we talked about this a voice assistant that is really there to play music, buy stuff on amazon, tell you, set timers, and to turn it into a chat gbt style ai chatbot. They're very different tracks. You can't just you can't just flip a switch and make it do that, and I think that both amazon and apple are having that difficulty. So anyway, uh, here's a thing I don't know if, uh, people are happy about, but Google's a Gemini. A Gemini AI is really good at watermark removal. According to Umar Shakir, writing in the Verge, it can cleanly replace the Getty Images watermark with an edited with AI watermark if you should.

1:16:38 - Bentio Gonzalez
So I did this for the show every week. Because of the intelligent machines watermark in the top left, I get rid of that. Yep really why is?

1:16:45 - Leo Laporte
there a watermark on it, on our it's not a water, it's replacing.

1:16:49 - Paris Martineau
It's replacing the watermark with my books a little icon on the top left the intelligence icon.

1:16:54 - Leo Laporte
I remove this thing thumbnail. You have to replace that.

1:16:56 - Bentio Gonzalez
Yeah I have to just get rid of it for the thumbnail, and I do that every week with AI and what do you?

1:17:00 - Paris Martineau
use to do that? With what AI tool?

1:17:02 - Bentio Gonzalez
No, there's a thing in Photoshop. You just select it and say fill.

1:17:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, okay, now you've got to trick it. Paris, since it's always you, you've got to put up something that is not expected.

1:17:21 - Paris Martineau
The first four letters of a word and see what it makes up. Yeah, I do, I was imagining a large cowboy hat, but that could be that probably that's good and it really does an amazing job.

1:17:25 - Bentio Gonzalez
It like it really looks like it was part of the picture. It really that's one of those tools that that makes me a believer in that if you think about it that's exactly destroying mankind.

1:17:35 - Leo Laporte
But yes, it's impressive it's exactly what an llm does, which is it's looking. There's now an area and it has to predict what the next pixel would be exactly what it's good at, exactly what, yeah yeah, there is a long way from that to a world destroying robot, but but it's good, it's really good. Oh, it's just days away you're gonna be sorry when this show is replaced by a robot show where we just threaten me, you're gonna be so sorry you're gonna be sleeping with the hollywood.

Hollywood is very worried about the ai industry's push to change copyright law, and when I say hollywood, I mean chris rock, aubrey plaza, and paul Paul McCartney, among hundreds of others who signed an open letter to the government. Good luck with that, challenging OpenAI and Google. They sent it to the White House Office of Science and Technology. I don't know if there's anybody there to receive it. 400 members of the entertainment community expressed concerns about the wish lists of ai companies for the us ai action plan. Oh, we have an ai action plan arnold schwarzenegger an auction plan you need auction those recommendations.

The letter warned could severely damage the entertainment community I love queuing that part of leo.

It's just the greatest, which supports more than 2.3 million jobs, whose wages are currently 229 billion dollars a year. So there uh. The group urged the trump administration not to sacrifice america's leadership in the world of entertainment in the race to dominate. Ai, where do you stand on this? I mean, this is what kathy gellis calls the right to read. Um, these actors, directors and musicians don't mind it if I go to their movie, watch the movie and then tell a friend what it was about, or do they? Maybe they want to also legislate against spoilers? They probably would if they could it's not that simple.

1:19:38 - Paris Martineau
It is. I mean, we've had this discussion a million times in the show, but part of what the problem is here is should a uh for-profit entity be able to scoop up large amounts of content that typically require being like each one of the, each movie? If you wanted to purchase it, you'd actually have to spend money to buy a disc or spend money to go see it. Should you be able to scoop that up for free en masse and then use it to generate profit? I would argue no, and most of these companies and products have clauses in their terms of contract saying you, even if you buy a dvd of twin peaks, like I have many times, you can't, I can't, then that doesn't mean that I can then take all of twin peaks and sell it part of it and use part of it in my own things. But why is it when an ai does it?

1:20:35 - Leo Laporte
they're not selling twin peaks, they're just watching.

1:20:38 - Jeff Jarvis
They're learning how mountains look like? Yeah, they're learning. They're learning to speak. It's another matter. If they wrote a script and it was Twin Peaks, yes, it's another matter if they stole it, well, but then I would agree.

There's three cases here. One is training, and to me that is fair use and transformative if that's all it really does it's teaching you to speak or to draw. Two is acquisition If you steal it, then that's an issue, but that's an issue in all law and regulations before. And three is quoting. If you quote it at length without licensing, that's wrong. I think we have to separate those things.

1:21:16 - Paris Martineau
I think part of the issue, though, is these systems and tools are not learning, they're not reading, they're not watching a movie. They are their code bases. It is a data set that is being improved in some ways and then having prediction capabilities based on that content. And where is it getting the output that it is getting? It is getting it from the things that are put into it. It's not coming up with new words and new thoughts. It's ingesting material and then making predictions based off of that.

1:21:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Based on a trillion tokens, as my hero Jensen said. So it's the applicability of who got what. Let me ask a different question, Paris. So let's go with the presumption that we're going to all have AI everywhere. It's going to be in charge of the world. It's not necessarily bad, but we're going to have it.

1:22:15 - Paris Martineau
I would disagree with that presumption, but you know.

1:22:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I did earlier too. I'm just trying to, you know, go with the punchline, go with the joke. So if we presume that society is going to use AI like crazy, do we want smarter AIs or stupider AIs?

1:22:37 - Paris Martineau
Is there a question of enabling them to be better? I'll give you another question in response to your question. Oh, New Yorker, you are a New Yorker, you are.

We're back in the day of the horse and Bucky, this dear old guy, comes up and says I've got this newfangled invention called the car. Imagine that someday in the future soon, I can tell you with absolute certainty everybody's going to be wanting to drive one of these and using it to get everywhere. Do you want your car to be able to get you places quickly, much like the horse, but even faster?

Well then, we should never even think about these things like seatbelts or windshields that could just, you know, slow down the innovation that could just slow down the innovation of our here car uh product so we should really focus on the stuff that makes it better.

1:23:20 - Leo Laporte
If it didn't watch twin peaks, could I do this? Can you explain what the hell's going on in twin peaks?

1:23:27 - Paris Martineau
don't. I haven't seen the last season.

1:23:29 - Speaker 6
You can't do that, don't let it do yourself television series created by david lynch and mark frost, and it's known for its complex, surreal and often unsettling narrative. It's like your friend. There's a breakdown of what's going on, the basic premise the series begins with the murder of Laura Palmer Right, I'm not going to miss it A popular high school student in the seemingly idyllic town.

1:23:46 - Leo Laporte
Now, if it hadn't watched it, would it be able to give you this valuable information?

1:23:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Well that it got from lots and lots and lots of reviews.

1:23:59 - Paris Martineau
Hey, who killed Laura Palmer, do you know? Hey, if you haven't listened to Watch Twin Peaks, pause the podcast right now.

1:24:03 - Speaker 6
The answer to who killed Laura Palmer is complex, as it involves both a human perpetrator and a supernatural entity.

1:24:08 - Leo Laporte
What I didn't know, that yeah.

1:24:11 - Paris Martineau
That's a lot of stuff, I didn't know when I started Twin Peaks that I was really surprised by and it was delight if you somehow for the last 40 30 years I haven't watched Twin Peaks. Don't let Leo ruin it for you no, but.

1:24:24 - Leo Laporte
And I look at, I love Paul McCartney, cynthia Erivo, cate Blanchett. These are all signatories to this letter Phoebe Wallerbridge, bette Midler, cate Blanchett, paul Simon, ben Stiller, aubrey Plaza, ron Howard, taika Watiti, ayo Edebiri, jordan berry, jordan, joseph Gordon, levitt, janelle Monet all right. Rian Johnson, paul Giamatti, maggie Gyllenhaal, alfonso Cuaron. These are the, these are the cultural icons of our generation Olivia Wilde, judd Apatow, chris Rock, mark Ruffalo, all of them. But then if I said, but okay, but do you not want me to go see the movie either? They would say no, please go see our movie. Look, I understand this is an existential threat to them. I completely understand and I feel for them. But should we let the buggy whip makers prevent us from getting the Model T?

1:25:14 - Paris Martineau
I don't think that's what's happening. I think people are saying the Model T shouldn't you know, follow the rules. Think that's what's happening. I think people are saying the model t shouldn't you know um, follow the rules. The fall model t should follow the rules that everybody else has to follow, right? Well, okay, let's stay there journalists read each other.

1:25:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, and probably journalists don't have a.

1:25:34 - Paris Martineau
Journalists do not have a photographic memory of every single thing that they have read.

1:25:39 - Leo Laporte
That's true. The AI does a better job, and then they are not immediately.

1:25:43 - Paris Martineau
That photographic memory is not immediately searchable and interactable by any Joe Schmo in the world. For right now free, but soon to be. You know it's a paid product.

1:25:57 - Leo Laporte
I think, look, you both are right, but the good news is, when the super intelligence comes, we won't have to worry about any of this, because we'll be dead. We'll be. No, we might not be dead. We might just be batteries you know they're going to need somebody to feed the coal into the burners or something, whatever it is, the nuclear rods into the reactors all right, let's take a little break. Sorry, sorry yeah, go ahead, take your break.

1:26:23 - Bentio Gonzalez
No benito, please. I think what it really comes down to it's like not necessarily that the computer's reading is that they're charging us back the stuff that we put into it. That's what I disagree with, like why are you going to charge me for this? I, I put the data.

1:26:34 - Leo Laporte
How did you learn to talk? We all. We all put the data. How did you learn to talk, Benito?

1:26:36 - Bentio Gonzalez
We all put the data in how did you?

1:26:37 - Leo Laporte
learn to talk. Didn't you listen to a bunch of people? Yeah, I did. Did you pay them back, by the way, for all?

1:26:43 - Bentio Gonzalez
the tokens? None of the people. My school got paid very properly. Okay, that's good, you went to a better school.

1:26:51 - Leo Laporte
I mean people. This is how it happens. What they complain is not that it's happening to people. It what the complaint is not that it's happening to people, it's happening to machines is what people don't like. The machines are doing it. But believe me, when the machines take over, you're going to be sorry. You were so negative about the machines.

1:27:10 - Paris Martineau
It's not even that machines are doing it. It is that machines that are the product of incredibly large and well-funded corporations are doing it.

1:27:21 - Leo Laporte
I would do it but, I can't afford to.

1:27:23 - Paris Martineau
It's that all of our art and creative output and anything in humanity, even stuff that people are wanting to keep either private or at least behind a paywall, is being fed into someone else's product and they are making money off it, and we have all contributed to it.

1:27:42 - Bentio Gonzalez
We have all contributed to this thing. It's culture. It's our culture. So why are we getting charged for it then? That should come back right to us, right.

1:27:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, every novelist learns from earlier novelists, every filmmaker learns from other filmmakers. How many filmmakers owe Alfred Hitchcock money?

1:28:01 - Bentio Gonzalez
I think that's a false equivalence, because they learn from him.

1:28:05 - Jeff Jarvis
They use his same techniques.

1:28:07 - Bentio Gonzalez
It's a difference of scale and it's a difference of kind, like it's a difference of both things.

1:28:14 - Leo Laporte
Let's try.

1:28:15 - Paris Martineau
No, we can disagree I think there's is reasonable disagreement has a very valid point. Yeah, is that you know? A random filmmaker or a very important filmmaker, whatever the scale, is not the same as a company that is raising trillions of dollars on the promise of.

1:28:32 - Jeff Jarvis
We will steal everybody else's stuff. Let's say the filmmaker is disney. Oh no, it's a huge corporation.

1:28:39 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm really frustrated that disney stole all the grim brothers material and then copyrighted it yeah yeah, disney famously is people get mad at disney and sue disney when disney does this stuff.

1:28:55 - Paris Martineau
So I would agree disney's a great example of this.

1:28:57 - Jeff Jarvis
We should treat the ai companies like we've treated disney well, that's to say, pass laws that do just what they want to do is where that goes all right, let's, we do have to take a break.

1:29:07 - Leo Laporte
You're watching a very good argument and I, you know, I wish there were an answer to all of this and I don't think there is. That's the thing, and there's reasonable, people can disagree, and I don't know, I don't know that's what we're here to do every week. I don't know what the answer is. Every week Jeff Jarvis is here he is. I didn't get a chance to do this earlier, so I will do it now.

The emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Cree. This is the Reg Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is now at Montclair State University and SUNY Stony Brook. Great to have you, jeff, and of course, paris Martineau, who is filing a big story. You were working hard this week at the information.

1:29:51 - Paris Martineau
I was.

1:29:51 - Leo Laporte
Anything you could tell us?

1:29:55 - Paris Martineau
Story coming this weekend about section 230 keep oh oh good is I got one question for you.

1:30:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Is mike masnick going to be proud of you? Yeah you know about mike's famous page?

1:30:13 - Paris Martineau
yes, of course yes, I've listened to his podcast, which is recently.

1:30:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, I'm just making sure it's like so mike's mike is god.

1:30:21 - Leo Laporte
When it comes, he's the defender of the 23 words that he is king arthur 20, 230 26 yes all right, good. I think this is good. I'm glad. I can't wait to read it. That's exciting. That's really good. This is a lot of you know.

It's under assault right now, obviously yes, oh yes, it has been since, for the last decade, uh, this episode of intelligent machines brought to you by our friends at zscaler, the leader in cloud security. So the situation we're in right now not so hot. Enterprises have been spending billions of dollars on perimeter defenses firewalls, right, and then vpns, so that you can get into work through through the firewall. Has this fixed everything? No, breaches continue to rise. There was an 18 year over year increase last year in ransomware attacks. You think it's going to be less? No, it's going to be worse this year. Last year, a record payout, 75 million dollars in ransomware ransoms last year, and that is going to go up, of course, this year.

See, the problem is traditional security tools actually make you less secure. They expand your attack surface, giving you public-facing ip addresses that bad actors can go yeah, there they are and hang their hat on it. Now they're doing it more easily and faster than ever with ai tools. Plus, once the bad guys get in most security tools just assume well, they must be an employee, so they let them have at it. They can access all the software. They can access all the data. They can move laterally throughout your entire network, find the stuff you'd be most embarrassed about, exfiltrate encrypted packets through your firewall, which is struggling to inspect those encrypted packets, and you've got a problem. The fact is, hackers are exploiting our traditional security infrastructure and they're doing it faster than ever with AI. It's time to rethink security. You can't let these guys win well, that's why you want to check out.

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There was an interview. It's not just movie stars Video game voice actors are also losing their jobs, because, of course, in fact, it makes the games better. Let's face it. A video game actor might have to come in and record 50,000 lines. So there's a variety in your. In your, they talk, don't they? In your Baldur's Baldur's gate three, they talk.

1:34:10 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and the actors, the voice actors, were really integral part of character development. They did motion cap and I think it's one of the most captivating performances I've seen in a video game, at least in recent memory, because the voice actors were so integrally involved, all the different line reads and all the different changes, which wouldn't happen if you just used AI to crank out any new change.

1:34:40 - Leo Laporte
Well, sony thinks so.

1:34:41 - Paris Martineau
Ally Burke, ashley Birch is the award-winning voice and performance actor behind alloy in horizon zero dawn a video game, may I add, about AI, super intelligence, being essentially destroying the world because it is used for war machines.

1:34:58 - Leo Laporte
Then they become autonomous and uh take over the world and rated of human life meta on meta so there was a video it's now taken down of a sony experiment, a leaked video that shaw sawoy voiced and performed by AI technology. Ashley saw it and was not happy. She said well, I'll let her speak in her own words.

1:35:25 - Anthony Aguirre
I wanted to talk about AI Alloy.

1:35:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's Alloy, I mispronounced it. Oh, she got quiet.

1:35:34 - Paris Martineau
It's a long, a long video.

1:35:37 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so you get the idea she says, having seen the demo, she's worried, and not just about her own career, she's worried about the art form.

1:35:46 - Paris Martineau
Um, yeah, there's a whole transcript yeah, I mean, I think in this case they said um, it was just an internal test, they have no plans of replacing her, blah blah, but I think this is still a really important issue.

1:36:03 - Leo Laporte
I mean members of you know what, though, are currently on strike related to this if you're right, and balder's gate three isn't, or four is not as good because of AI voices, it will hurt them commercially, won't it?

1:36:17 - Paris Martineau
I mean, in the long run, a bunch of people are still going to buy Baldur's Gate 4, even though it's not going to be produced by Larian Studios, which made Baldur's Gate 3 and the other ones. So it's going to be bad already.

1:36:31 - Leo Laporte
Or I guess.

1:36:31 - Paris Martineau
Larian made the third, sorry Okay.

1:36:36 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's the thing if there, if the ai is not as good, it's not gonna work. If, on the other hand, an ai is is as good as a real actor well, this is you.

1:36:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Last week thought that open ai's story was good. We made fun of you.

1:36:51 - Leo Laporte
You laughed at me, but you know what? I'm not alone. No, you're not. There's a Guardian writer, a real-life actual writer. Guardian. For Christ's sakes, she's a novelist. Jeanette Winterston, writing a piece in the Guardian, said that metafictional short story that Sam Altman presented and I read a little bit of last week is beautiful and moving, so there guardian oh boy yeah, um.

She says, uh, she doesn't like ai. The alternative uh to it she prefers, uh is alternative intelligence, not artificial intelligence, because in all the fear and anger foaming around ai just now, its capacity to be other is what the human race needs. She says I should have mentioned this to anthony. Agree, our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction or planet by a planetary collapse or Global War. We need this alternative brain to help us get past she's. She's not wrong.

1:38:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Humans have not done a good job?

1:38:02 - Leo Laporte
yeah, that's interesting there's been a lot of fuss, she writes, and rightly so, about robbing creatives of their copyright to train AI. Tech Bros need to pay for what they want. They pay lawyers, and lobbyists pay artists. It really is that simple, okay, but what is not as simple is the future of human creativity as AI systems get better at being creative. She likes it. Ai reads us. Now it's time for us to read AI, she says. But, it means nothing.

Yeah, what and you made that point, benito that the short story, however well written, if it's not representing a human point of view, if there's no heart beating behind it, it's just not as good.

1:38:51 - Bentio Gonzalez
The point of art is for humans to imbue meaning into it. Right like then, if that, if that part doesn't happen, what's the point?

1:39:00 - Leo Laporte
no, I agree. Let humans make art. Let the ais make paper clips, fine. I don't think ai should be, I don't. You know the ai, image generation and all of that. The music generation, let's not. That makes it makes wallpaper, let's make. Let's. Humans should make the art, I agree. And and we should have more time to make art, because the ai is putting our babies to sleep so you agree that, uh, with their copyright concerns?

yeah, I mean, I understand their copyright concerns and you're right, I agree with you. If it's somebody, some big company making a lot of money off of it, it's the least they could do is at least pay for a ticket to the movie yeah, I think this is the fundamental like disagreement we're having is that we're not really talking about the technology.

1:39:47 - Bentio Gonzalez
We're complaining about the companies. Companies, yeah, the technology is the technology. It's neutral right.

1:39:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, largely, well, never fully.

1:40:01 - Leo Laporte
I have to say, one book that I am enjoying reading is this band Tome. How is it? Oh, yeah, so the minute I read that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg were trying to shut Sarah Wynns down for her memoir of her time at meta, I just had to buy it. It's called the stress and effect and it really works. I had read an excerpt already about her. You know the one where, uh, um, cheryl sandberg invites her to join her in their in their first class airplane bed boudoir. Um, and there's a lot of it's juicy as hell. Paul thorat's reading, he did the same thing. He said well, if they're gonna ban it, I better buy it now. So it's probably sold a lot more because of that oh yeah oh yeah, it's so dumb.

Um, it's juicy. He doesn't like it because there's no technology in it. Well, no, it's just a.

1:40:54 - Speaker 2
It's a it's a it's, you know it's sex robot throat.

1:40:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he's a robot. Um, I haven't. I have only read a little bit of it, but it's yeah, it's tea, spilling the tea, but it just shows you if you don't like something. The worst thing you could do is sue them so that you get a lot of headlines, do you? Know katie harbath I know that name, why do I?

1:41:18 - Jeff Jarvis
know she was. She was a policy person at uh, meta, uh, formerly known as as um facebook, facebook, and she's left. I think she's at the aspen institute, no, oh. So she wrote a piece and um, uh, she thinks that joel caplan was a wonderful boss. She's, she's. You know, she countered the narrative and she counted the narrative and she said there were some things that were true and some things that were sloppy and wrong. And you know you're gonna go back and forth we just don't know.

1:41:48 - Leo Laporte
I mean, honestly, I I don't know if it's true or not, but I can. All I do know is, when you try to suppress the work of uh yeah, non-fiction or fiction, you're just going to make people want to read you think that joel kaplan, who's in charge, who's now the new president of pr, basically there, would know better, would be more sophisticated about this? Yeah, it's not very sophisticated. They got an arbiter to say that the author cannot talk about it. Promote it. They couldn't really stop the publisher. They tried.

1:42:18 - Paris Martineau
No, yeah, well, I mean I know so many people who started reading it in the last week just because of this news cycle. Like, literally as we were getting on this podcast, the skee-ball group chat was popping off, people being like oh, I'm listening to the audiobook of careless people. Now I've heard about the suit. It's such a classic example of the streisand effect at work.

1:42:39 - Jeff Jarvis
So when I left time inc, when I walked out of entertainment weekly um, they were happy to see me go, they would have fired me. I quit. But I would not sign the managing editor's contract at time inc because it had an nda yeah, yeah and I said it's wrong for a journalist to do that.

1:42:54 - Leo Laporte
If I had signed it and if I had arranged for them to fire this little check, I bet three years salary, bonus and benefits you are a man of principle. I know the price of principle to the pity young and foolish as I was three years when, uh, we, of course, as any sensible company does, put a non-disparagement clause into our severance agreements, and usually it is tied to like you want your severance, but I think we've waived it, I think we don't in california that's also illegal.

1:43:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Now you can't do a non-disparagement I thought it was just a tied to severance.

1:43:30 - Leo Laporte
Ah, really oh well, this is what we were talking about, is probably what they were giving jeff, which is over and above the legal requirement well, this was many years ago, so yeah, they didn't have to give you three years or offer you three years, I'm sure three years is ridiculous that's a lot that's a lot golden parachute I would, and have you disparaged them? Have you, have you exercised?

1:43:51 - Paris Martineau
that's the thing. Well, he went into it in depth in his book magazine. I knew the story from magazine.

1:43:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, because I kept the documents and I wrote about it. Now, of course, the company is basically dead and gone. So nobody cares, so nobody would have cared. So when I was at Condé Nast at Advance, I said fire me, because they fire really well, oh, they fire so well, but they wouldn't fire me, damn it. I tried, god I tried.

1:44:19 - Leo Laporte
So, as you know, I like perplexity, but maybe now I should think again.

1:44:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, this was interesting, wasn't it?

1:44:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the Daily Wire has announced a new advertising partnership with Perplexity and my favorite guy, ben Shapiro. I don't understand. Is this an ad? What is he doing? How is this? How does it so?

1:44:44 - Paris Martineau
He's advertised. He's reading ads for perplexity.

1:44:47 - Leo Laporte
It won't utilize Shapiro's quintessential rapid fire reads. Shapiro will integrate the AI technology into his reg. How come I can't get some money into his regular reporting and utilize the tool to ask questions in real time, getting information straight from the internet to supplement his commentary? He's getting paid to do what I'm doing. I'm paying them. Oh well, he's, he's a big star, right. In certain circles, in certain circles, in certain certain circles, uh, apparent. Now, I don't know if this, this is uh true. You put this in here is is grok gonna merge with?

1:45:23 - Jeff Jarvis
I found that just hard to believe, but I put it in here because it's this is from a I who is?

1:45:28 - Leo Laporte
who is the american bizarre?

1:45:29 - Jeff Jarvis
no, I don't know, so I yeah this is perplexity.

1:45:33 - Leo Laporte
Might be looking to partner up with grok. Uh, apparently perplexity. Ceo aravin shrinovas hinted at a potential integration of the two aai models. This is his x post. Let me read it. It says hopefully soon we'll go up.

1:45:49 - Jeff Jarvis
No, or down, whatever you call that, since you're such a bad scroller the two best.

1:45:57 - Leo Laporte
So aravon is saying the two best. Ais now for real-time information. Uh, oh, you know. Okay, so this is a complete misunderstanding of how perplexity works. Perplexity has multiple models. That's what I was thinking you can choose from in perplexity works perplexity?

1:46:11 - Jeff Jarvis
has multiple models.

1:46:12 - Leo Laporte
That's what I was thinking you could choose from in perplexity, so it just adds another model you could choose. So I'm guessing that this is not a merger of perplexity and that's a misunderstanding it would just be that grok would be one of the engines I could choose that makes me feel better. I'm sure that's the case.

1:46:30 - Paris Martineau
Let me look at what the current uh uh engines are that I can choose you're telling me you could engage, uh, sexy mode on perplexity while you're doing your deep research good, I you know what all I care about is voices now.

1:46:44 - Leo Laporte
I just want better voices. That's all I really care about. Let me look and see what, because he's a radio guy.

1:46:51 - Jeff Jarvis
He likes voices, I care, so right now I'm using a sonnet clud, it's 3.7 sonnet.

1:46:58 - Leo Laporte
Uh, the default is their own kind of mishmash. It says optimized for fast search. There's sonar, which is an advanced model, trained by perplexity probably not trained by, but tuned by my guests, but anyway 404.5 sonnet. Gemini 2.0 flash. Yeah, grok 2, oh, you know what people have been saying. Where's grok 3? Where's grok 3? That's what it is, that's all. Where's grok 3? I?

1:47:26 - Jeff Jarvis
bet you that's back to liking perplexity. Did you see the ad they did dunking on google?

1:47:32 - Leo Laporte
I didn't can you play it? I don't know, um. I can't imagine why they wouldn't want us to you'd think yeah, I got it.

1:47:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Ads on this show. Oh, let's take five so it's.

1:47:48 - Leo Laporte
It's an ad with a korean uh star of squid game oh, he's the squid game guy. Oh, now he's in severance, or is it?

1:47:57 - Paris Martineau
squid game jay uh-oh yeah, it seems squid game-esque welcome to your challenge it is squid game.

1:48:06 - Leo Laporte
They probably spent a lot of money on answer three questions how do you remove coffee stains from a white shirt? It's getting very cold, yes, so they're gonna freeze him unless he can answer that. So he launches poogle and poogle says oh no there's a bunch of text you oh, he's got perplexity. Where knowledge this is.

1:48:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh saved. Correct.

1:48:50 - Leo Laporte
How do I make cheese stick to a pizza? Google, of course, said Elmer's glue, who was the first Korean actor to win an Emmy Award. He knows the answer to that. That's really good, isn't it? That's a great ad. I don't know when would they show that. Well, they just showed it on the. Intelligent.

1:49:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Machines show.

1:49:15 - Leo Laporte
That's true, yeah.

1:49:16 - Jeff Jarvis
More free things you do for people.

1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
This is going to kill me. I mean, I give them an ad all the time because I use it all the time. I just I don't know. The thing is, there's no stickiness to any of these, right, you just move to whatever works best for the moment, and that seems to be a moving target all the time. Google has announced, uh, a new healthcare ai updates for its search. Um, so it's, it's knowledge panels.

1:49:49 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, there's knowledge panels now cover thousands more health topics well, this is your scroll on down or up, whatever you call it um the page goes up, my finger goes down, so the company. Oh no, no, go back, go back and come back beginning the story. Oh jeez, you're so bad. Okay, stop, stop. Twitchy finger unveiled a new feature called what People Suggest, which uses AI to pull together. Oh no, that's bad, I know. Online commentary on patients with similar diagnoses. Oh no, Well, I rubbed grapefruit on my tumor and it went away.

1:50:23 - Leo Laporte
That's what we have Reddit for. We don't need Google to do that.

1:50:26 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what I was thinking. Yeah, but if AI is doing it, I don't know, I'm just nervous.

1:50:31 - Paris Martineau
But if AI is doing it. I don't know, I'm just nervous. Well, reddit now has a feature in the app where you can search all the Reddit comments. Like it's an AI engine, basically. Yeah, where you can type in any app.

And I assume it's also in the browser. I just don't know when you could message it being like I have a grapefruit-sized lump on my head. What do I message it being like uh, I have a grapefruit sized lump on my head. Uh, what do I? I guess I don't know what might come up with that uh, who powers?

1:51:01 - Jeff Jarvis
what should I do? Is it opening up reddit their deal? No, no, it's their own thing all the content from reddit.

1:51:06 - Paris Martineau
No but, what's the model? What model?

1:51:08 - Leo Laporte
I don't know I think it's theirs, but I don't know who. I think it's theirs, but I don't know. They made it Seek immediate medical attention. Here are some insights from Redditors on similar experiences and advice. This is exactly why Google's doing this, isn't it? Yeah, Contact your doctor emergency room. It could be a lipoma, it could be a cyst, it could be a tumor. How?

1:51:30 - Jeff Jarvis
they would diagnose it A tumor that is usually soft and movable.

1:51:36 - Leo Laporte
This is actually really good. I'm, I mean, they're not you heard it here first.

1:51:40 - Paris Martineau
Leo says go to reddit for all your medical advice yeah yeah, this is great.

1:51:45 - Jeff Jarvis
That's how the machine's going to kill us all how is baby made? Baby made. Oh my god, they're telling me how kids hide your eyes a fascinating and complex process.

1:52:06 - Leo Laporte
Here's a succinct guide to understanding how babies are made. Well, this is a lot better than the yahoo answer based on insights from reddit, that's where I always want my insights on the best spatula because that's really what I use reddit for is like recommendations fish spatula, silicone spatula, wooden spatula well, okay, look up a fish, but you know what they are giving. Look, the wusthof fish turner is is the best metal?

1:52:37 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't. I've never heard of one before. What's what makes it a special?

1:52:40 - Leo Laporte
a fish spatula yeah, you've never seen a fish spatula.

1:52:44 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I was watching my favorite um oh that's what you call that. Oh, okay, it's a it's funny shape.

1:52:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is. Oh, you got one yeah no, not according to google.

1:52:56 - Speaker 2
Hold on here right, it's a, it's a. Google it, you get a very different answer.

1:53:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Google fish spatula.

1:53:02 - Paris Martineau
Hard to say, by the way, this is the best fish you get the thing with the, with the horse has tines there's also one of those two, but I'm not gonna go get it okay, so you have a bunch of fish spatulas.

1:53:16 - Leo Laporte
This is great, this is, this is all redditors, and see, you know what's, oops, what, what I just typed? What? The best maple syrup that I that doesn't come from canada, because they can't get it from canada anymore well, you can yeah, for double the price. Uh oh, eskumi late harvest, escumaniac or kirkland not getting my maple syrup at costco? Hey, hey, costco's great chalk zero syrup at costco.

1:53:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Hey, hey, hey costco's great chalk, zero lecanto. No, I'm gonna go with this?

1:54:00 - Leo Laporte
what? Because it sounds weird, because it sounds like it's gonna be expensive. Yeah, yeah, that's what you do. Uh, oh, yes, it's only 27 dollars. For how big is that bottle? 500 milliliter bottle.

1:54:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Compare that to Costco. Go to the Costco. This is going to be so good. Well, it's $27 Canadian.

1:54:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, you're right Canadian, so I don't know what the.

1:54:21 - Bentio Gonzalez
Are there tariffs on?

1:54:22 - Leo Laporte
$500 then, right. Is there a maple syrup?

1:54:26 - Paris Martineau
There's a tariff on everything right.

1:54:29 - Leo Laporte
Let's see Costco.

1:54:31 - Bentio Gonzalez
Can you query just one specific subreddit?

1:54:33 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I'm sure you can there at. The funny thing is costco's is known for its good quality and value, available in large quantities. You need five gallons of syrup. Costco's got it here. It is 20 bucks actually. Look at this. This is the kirkland that comes in a whiskey bottle. Oh, that's neat Pure organic maple syrup. Now, that's 740 milliliters for 23 bucks. It's Canada grade A Syrup de la balle.

1:55:04 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, ask it.

1:55:05 - Paris Martineau
I wonder if the Canet Kirkland guys have done a thing on maple syrup. Do you guys know of these people?

1:55:10 - Leo Laporte
No, canet Kirkland, it's a TikTok group.

1:55:11 - Paris Martineau
It's a TikTok group. It's a TikTok group that I think is a band, maybe even named Morning Trips, I can't recall. But they've become popular on TikTok for this series they do called Can it Kirkland, where they try to compare brand name liquors at first against Kirkland brand liquors, in kind of a blind taste test.

1:55:32 - Leo Laporte
But they've since branched out to other things and I assume they'd have thoughts on maple syrup I did ask who the best skeeball player is in the world, and while it can't help me with that, it did say there are skeeball leagues, there's a oh, there you go, league in san francisco. There's high scores. It's just Skee-Ball Strategy. You might want to visit r slash Skee-Ball for all your Skee-Ball needs.

1:56:01 - Paris Martineau
A lot of it is photos of Skee-Ball.

1:56:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you already know about this.

1:56:06 - Paris Martineau
I mean, maybe I should get on there.

1:56:08 - Leo Laporte
Just got a Skee-Ball machine. Paint damage, designed and printed a skee-ball game. That's hysterical. Is this the kind of skee-ball here that you play?

1:56:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's the kind of skee-ball that's the classic one Sometimes there's a little thing in front of the holes, but that's all right.

1:56:28 - Jeff Jarvis
When you get your stock at the information and you're very rich from it and you buy your mansion. Well, let's imagine you buy your mansion on the hamptons and in the basement are you going to buy a skee-ball machine of your very own oh, absolutely yeah, in my uh fantasy mansion that I get from the acts of journalism who was it?

1:56:47 - Leo Laporte
was it lbj that put a bowling alley in? Uh, that was the white house. It was nixon. That's what. That's what. That's what went over the pool I think, right.

1:56:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, he put it over in. Uh, that was the white house, it was nixon, that's what. That's what. That's what went over the pool.

1:56:54 - Leo Laporte
I think right yeah, he put it over there, that became, that became the press room.

1:56:57 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what the classroom is now.

1:56:58 - Leo Laporte
That's where the press room is. Yeah, whoa. What did they do before then? I don't know. They stand out in the rose garden, maybe well, ask reddit. I don't know google plans to release new open ai models for drug discovery this is good, I'm always looking for new drugs yep yeah, especially now during a health-focused event in new york on tuesday, google announced that it's developing a collection of open ai models.

1:57:27 - Jeff Jarvis
That's not capital o open, that's lowercase open in air quotes air quotes open as jason and I like to say it's open ish open ish, open wait.

1:57:37 - Leo Laporte
I've been using open wait lately. Okay for drug discovery called tx gemma. Uh, it will be released through its ai developer foundation, pro health ai developer foundations program later this month can understand regular text the structures of different therapeutic entities, chemicals, molecules and proteins. I mean, I think this is a very promising area, right? We? We know that it can come up with new proteins and protein folding oh, it's very promising, yeah yeah and you know that there's going to be a huge process.

1:58:11 - Jeff Jarvis
If you discover a molecule that looks promising and you get as far as you can with it, then there's a process. Well, I don't know, there was a process that we went through to approve drugs, god knows.

1:58:21 - Leo Laporte
Now, hey, rfk Jr, you like this one, is this one's okay?

1:58:26 - Bentio Gonzalez
This is the stuff. This is really the stuff. That's the stuff, right, that AI should be doing.

1:58:30 - Leo Laporte
Yes, stuff, right that ai should be doing. Yes, yeah, everybody agrees. Yeah, uh, although I did see that they are. Uh, they've removed mentions of mrna vaccines from the nih, which is a little which is also very important for cancer research cherry. They now have designer. They have designer cancer drugs. They they do a genetic sample of your cancer and then design a drug that's aimed specifically at it as a two-time loser, um winner, I should say you are a winner.

1:59:01 - Jeff Jarvis
You're still here you're with us still here.

1:59:03 - Paris Martineau
But yeah, you really really want advances in these areas absolutely yeah, um I'm sorry guys, you said skeeball and the best, best ski ball player in the world. I went down a whole rabbit hole is there one. I mean there's contention between joey the cat, who's apparently I've been a very good ski ball player, and uh, another person who, uh, rafi footerman perhaps? Um, who is upset? From queens, one from brooklyn san francisco, new york city or new jersey.

1:59:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I want video.

1:59:42 - Paris Martineau
I'm trying to find it, I've realized that that there's been a recent upset happened at a local ski ball bar here in uh brooklyn which I didn't realize they were hosting national championships oh, you gotta be there I do. I do have to be there one in four league.

I mean, I wouldn't there's. I think it's a co-ed typically but, the skee-ball. The skee-ball bar that this took place at is full circle bar, which makes sense because every time I go there they have their own skee-ball league that we don't participate in because it is insanely good and it makes sense that this is where the world champions play, because I am always like what, how are you that good? But that's how.

2:00:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Video. Is there a video of this guy? I want to see a video.

2:00:31 - Paris Martineau
Joey the Cat yeah, joey the Cat Search the skee town video. Is there a video of this guy? I want to see video. Joey the cat, uh, search the ski ball. Kid versus joey the cat because those are.

2:00:38 - Bentio Gonzalez
Did they bring their own balls or something like? What do they have like their own tools and stuff.

2:00:42 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's funny, that's actually no, maybe it's it's gotta be, it's gotta be standardized. Right here I'll put this wait a minute.

2:00:48 - Leo Laporte
This is who will win the national ski ball championship on me and the crowd's cheering. That's, that's. Is that Joey the Cat? I don't know the big mustache. There's the kid that's got to be Joey.

2:01:01 - Speaker 6
First time I ever played ski, ball was Full circle ball.

2:01:04 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a full circle. Okay, I want to see the full.

2:01:08 - Leo Laporte
This is frustrating. I mean, look, if you could televise bowling, you could televise this.

2:01:14 - Jeff Jarvis
So did I tell you about the Swifts in typesetting.

No what's that? Typesetting one letter at a time became a spectator sport. It was the honest to God, it was the bowling or golf of the day People. They would have week-long tournaments and people would watch. Type centers set type uh and win money. Yeah, they had, they toured uh. It stopped because the international typographical union forced them to stop because the typesetting machine the latter type that I'm worried about came along. They didn't want. Want a John Henry man v machine. Defeat whoa. Isn't that great that's.

2:01:59 - Leo Laporte
EFF is concerned about California AB 412. They say a bill that could crush startups and cement a big tech AI Monopoly is going to bring us back to the prior conversation uh, the bill demands that creators of any ai model, even a two-person company or a hobbyist tinkering with a small software bill build, identify copyright materials used in training.

2:02:25 - Jeff Jarvis
You'd have to have a list so efs says this is going to kill the little guys and stop competition with the big guys. Timnit gebru on linkedin um said that's all bogus. Uh, if you um take ingredients for your stew, then don't you pay for them, which is going to paris's argument here.

2:02:45 - Leo Laporte
Um yeah, eff, which I, you know I generally trust on these kinds of things. This is Joe Mullen writing says even for major tech companies, meeting these obligations would be a daunting task. For a small startup, throwing on such an impossible requirement could be a death sentence. They'll be forced to devote scarce resources to an unworkable compliance regime instead of focusing on development and innovation. Innovation and ai's I mean. The efs position is that ai training is like reading and it's very likely fair use. So they agree with kathy gellis and jeff jarvis, and I guess I include myself, although I'm on the fence.

2:03:27 - Paris Martineau
I I am sympathetic with creator's point of view, so I'm not sure that it's an impossible standard to have ai developers track and disclose when they use a copyrighted work in their training yeah I think that that's a fairly reasonable thing the problem.

2:03:44 - Leo Laporte
They say is part of the problem is that the searching for a copyright at the copyright office is a very manual thing. It's there's, it's not machine readable, it's not accessible. It's more like a card catalog than a database. Uh, so it's very difficult to identify the providence of the data that you're reading in.

2:04:07 - Paris Martineau
And it's I mean, then why have copyright at all?

2:04:11 - Jeff Jarvis
well, that's a legitimate question in this day and age, which I've written about. That's why I suggest something new called credit rate.

2:04:21 - Leo Laporte
Tell us about it, Mr Jeff Jarvis. Haven't I told you about that?

2:04:24 - Jeff Jarvis
No, my argument is that in a string of creativity, there are many players who should be noted and potentially rewarded and whose good behaviors toward creativity should be uh, recognized. So if I? Um tell you a story, it inspires paris to write a poem about it, and then benito makes a song for that. Then leo puts it in his um award-winning film. Shouldn't each in that sequence get at least credit? Now, whether they get compensation is a different question, but then you now have the system to enable you to recognize who gave you what in that sequence. It recognizes that creativity is in fact a collaborative effort.

Corey Dr O's complaint is that copyright these days really benefits the publishers, the companies, not the individuals that created the content booksellers of England to protect licensing lapsed because there was too much publishing in their view and they wanted to control it and they wanted to um, and so what's interesting to me is that um, so, so, so. Then the publisher said, well, uh, this is a, this is a like a god-given right, that the author has permanent rights to their stuff. So when we buy it, we get permanent rights. And it went to the lower house of lords where that was turned down. And so what you really, then copyright is is not a granting of rights, it's a limitation of rights, because the the doctrine was that there's a natural right to your creation in public that could last forever, but when you sell it, uh, when you set up those circumstances, you're limited at the time to 14 years.

2:06:17 - Leo Laporte
So just interesting little copyright stuff scooter x is pointing out that, uh, for the first time since this launch, uh, the gemini app no longer requires you to sign in with your google account to use it. If you go to geminigooglecom and incognito mode or without being logged into google you, you will be able to actually go to the chat interface and query it. So it's free, free, free, um you, you don't have to have a google account to do it. I think that's a big move from google. Good for them. They're you know what. I think they're worried they're falling behind. I don't think they're technically falling behind, but I think in the perception of people, anthropic and open, ai seem to be completely dominant. Uh, and google is not often considered yes or no? Is that just me?

2:07:10 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think it's not as universally known chat gpt is obviously more of a shorthand than gemini, but I think that's also because google changes the name of its products, like every other week.

2:07:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's part of it too. By the way, if you wanted a sponsor for your ski ball league, I would be glad to kick in, as long as we get a a logo on your sleeve we need to.

2:07:34 - Paris Martineau
We need to actually make the um jerseys happen this year yeah, we'll sponsor you how many teams are there in the league?

it depends. Every year at volo sport it kind of changes, um, and it depends which league. Like last this year, last winter, we weren't able to play because we, I think, as I mentioned, normally there was like a whole scheduling snafu and we ended up getting booted out of our normal day in a no, I know, and we almost were like don't you know who we are? We've been doing this for like we didn't, but like the boulevard ski has been doing this. If you were mad, you'd do that.

2:08:14 - Leo Laporte
Do you know who we are? We are the bourgeois ski, it's true. Well, if there's anything I can do as a corporate sponsor to support you, I'll let the team know. Uniformio, an italian newspaper says, has published the world's first all AI edition. Ai used for everything the writing, the headlines, the quotes, even the irony.

2:08:41 - Speaker 2
They say yeah, I can't tell it's a conservative, liberal daily.

2:08:48 - Leo Laporte
I don't even know what that means?

2:08:49 - Jeff Jarvis
what's that mean?

2:08:50 - Leo Laporte
Italy is so interesting. It's part of a month-long journalistic experiment. This is a story from the Guardian To show the impact of AI technology on quote our way of working and our days. It's only four pages. It was wrapped into the newspaper's own regular edition. I don't read Italian so I can't tell you how well written it is.

2:09:18 - Jeff Jarvis
However, you do read English.

2:09:21 - Leo Laporte
Oh, is there a translation?

2:09:22 - Jeff Jarvis
No, the Independent is launching an AI-supported news service.

2:09:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting.

2:09:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not exactly. I can't figure it out exactly what it is.

2:09:31 - Paris Martineau
I'll be honest AI-supported how.

2:09:33 - Leo Laporte
I'm not sure I often and you see this, I've mentioned it before might see the link in some of our news stories through perplexity, because perplexity has a news page which I find quite excellent and I haven't found any errors in it. Um, so I don't know. Interesting stuff. Oh, google did announce the 9a. We thought they might do that today. See there, you go right there, look at that now.

2:10:06 - Jeff Jarvis
But also look, and they do link to the stories, but the stories are all basically the same yeah, isn't that the funny thing?

2:10:14 - Leo Laporte
isn't that the funny thing? Yeah, because everybody's copying everybody else. We've always liked these uh a versions of the pixel phones, so, uh, this looks like a pretty nice one. Um, according to ai, this is the most robust a series phone to date. Oh, no, google said that. Uh, ip68 water and dust resistance. Yeah, fine, uh, it's a sleeker design that eschews the iconic camera bar that you find on, uh, on a lot of the pixel phones a big old bar there. I think that's cool. I think there are people who don't want that bar and so might not worry so much about the camera if they don't have to worry about the bar.

2:10:53 - Bentio Gonzalez
It's a phone that can lie flat it can lie flat it's like there's no phones. Phones can't do that anymore who'd have thunk it?

2:11:00 - Leo Laporte
499 for the 128 gigabyte model. I guess I could just go to the google store and get some pictures of it for you. Um, yeah, I'm, you know, I. I like these google phones. They call this tagline is magic done? Bright, because it comes in colors. Kids, purple, pink. We've decided, lisa and I decided, to do everything in hot pink from now on.

2:11:24 - Bentio Gonzalez
By the way, just uh that's great, yeah, it's the new color still a small bump, still a small camera bump there's a little bit of a wee thing a little bit 30 plus hour battery life.

2:11:36 - Leo Laporte
They claim up to 256 gigs of storage. So that there's not is there a price?

2:11:41 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, 499 for 128 that's pretty good.

2:11:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, these are good phones. We've always thought that the a-series phones. So google releases uh phones in the just around the same time, apple releases its iPhones, sometimes October, sometimes August, and then, around springtime, releases the A version, the less expensive version of it, gemini, built in AI creative canvas. Look at that tiny chihuahua enjoying a bully stick at home. Oh hey, I think I might be wrong, but I think that sloth is enjoying some cacio e pepe. Oh yum yum yum.

2:12:20 - Paris Martineau
It looks like ramen.

2:12:22 - Leo Laporte
Actually it does.

2:12:22 - Jeff Jarvis
It does yeah.

2:12:23 - Leo Laporte
They're right.

2:12:26 - Jeff Jarvis
So, when I had my colonoscopy last week I know you're not going to want to know any more about that my wife tried to be good for me and went and bought things I could have on that day where you're supposed to have nothing but clear things, and she got pho broth, yeah. Oh, I love pho. I think it's, isn't it pronounced pho?

2:12:45 - Leo Laporte
It's pronounced pho, yeah, pho, but it's spelled pho, so I'm no pho fan either.

2:12:50 - Jeff Jarvis
You're not a fan. I'm not a fan I like pho you don't like.

2:12:53 - Bentio Gonzalez
I see why one might know how to eat it, though there's, there's a technique. Well, there's no noodles in his foot yeah but I'll pause.

2:13:02 - Paris Martineau
It's not for you, thank you, thank you, thank you how about this?

2:13:09 - Leo Laporte
from uh cornell university, an ai ring that tracks spelled words. Not it's the spelling, not the asl, but it does do the spelling. Uh, well, spelling is asl right well, there's finger spelling and then asl. Is that part of asl? Yeah, okay, how does?

2:13:25 - Paris Martineau
it figure out what the other fingers are doing and also isn't face, because it's smart enough to take over mankind isn't face like isn't your uh facial expressions a big part of it's just the spelling letters, just the letters.

2:13:38 - Leo Laporte
That's why probably asl is much more gesture much richer yeah, uh, but it does recognize continuous finger spelling in american sign language just by wearing a ring. A ring with a rather large circuit board attached. But okay, I think that's cool.

2:13:54 - Paris Martineau
I mean, there's some really cool stuff I do think that you should do is you should get all of these AI products, wear them and then take a photo like that with the ring, the B, the glasses, the pin, everything.

2:14:08 - Leo Laporte
Here's the question, though these days everything's a little like this is the aura ring is probably using some ai, as is the apple watch, to understand the movements and stuff like the watch knows if I start rowing, it says it looks like you're rowing. Um, so you know. I mean there's ai and all of this stuff.

2:14:24 - Bentio Gonzalez
Now, that's the point you wouldn't have called that ai before transformer technology, no, yeah, so why are you calling it ai now?

2:14:31 - Leo Laporte
well, the way they did it is they brought in a lot of athletes doing a lot of different movements and they tracked those movements and then created a model based on those you know aggregate move movements that you know they. They don't know what's going on, but they notice that my hand's going like this and they say, oh, that usually that's correlates I think it's probably much like an llm it correlates to a certain kind of exercise, I guess kevin roos marketing that's marketing.

That's the difference marketing. Kevin roos, uh, agrees with our guest earlier today, powerful ai is coming. We're not ready. We know that he is an accelerationist.

2:15:14 - Jeff Jarvis
He loves his ai and you know what he's a. He's a. I loves him, that's. That's the other thing.

2:15:19 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah, he says. I believe that when agi is announced, there will be debates over definitions and arguments about whether or not it counts as real agi, but these won't matter, because the broader point that we are losing our monopoly on human level intelligence and transitioning to a world with very powerful ai systems in it will be true. You don't you really believe that that will never happen, jeff?

2:15:47 - Jeff Jarvis
no, it won't I'll say okay, long think, but again it's the wrong question because it can already do a huge list of things way better than we can ever do it.

2:16:00 - Leo Laporte
Absolutely.

2:16:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, that's what we pay attention to and this idea, it's the hubris of our species.

2:16:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's why I did like Anthony's definition, because the A for him in AGI is autonomous. Anthony's definition because he the a for him in a GIS is autonomous, and I think that is a very important.

2:16:18 - Jeff Jarvis
That's something you can measure like an autonomous, what's also necessary for his nightmare it is necessary for his nightmare, because it's controllable, because it's uncontrollable that's right.

2:16:27 - Leo Laporte
Um, so I think that that is something maybe to to add to the definition, I don't know.

2:16:33 - Bentio Gonzalez
Um I think there's even a bigger question there of like is general intelligence even a real thing?

2:16:41 - Leo Laporte
well, it is a meaningless thing because, as we've like artificial, as jeff just pointed out. Some people know more than other people. There is no right. So and by the way, bruce quotes Dario Amode, who is the chief executive Anthropic, as he doesn't like the term AGI but agrees with the general principle, he says last month we're a year or two away from having a very this is more something to his liking a very large number of AR systems that are much smarter than humans at almost everything well, it's smarter, right?

2:17:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, it's.

2:17:18 - Paris Martineau
What humans are you measuring, I guess? Well, we can't.

2:17:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's there's still a debate over iq tests. I mean, are those meaningful? Do they measure anything?

2:17:26 - Paris Martineau
no, I mean, they're probably not.

2:17:28 - Leo Laporte
I feel like very debunked right, yeah, so if you can't measure human intelligence, how are you going to measure machine intelligence? Right, I think we'll know when we see it. That's why, even though the Turing test is somewhat debunked, there is some value in it. The point of the original Turing test is proposed by computer scientist Alan Turing was many years ago. Well, turing test, proposed by computer scientist Alan Turing was many years ago, well before AI was if a human can't distinguish in a conversation, a blind conversation between a human and a machine, which is the human and which is the machine, that's the Turing test. Last week we talked with Ray Kurzweil who had a kind of a more advanced Turing test that he felt would be more reflective. But he's always, always said and I think it's true if you can't tell the difference, what does it matter? What's going on internally, if, if?

2:18:19 - Paris Martineau
because then who do you blame when someone goes wrong?

2:18:22 - Leo Laporte
well, who do you blame if you have an accident?

2:18:26 - Paris Martineau
I'm saying if someone, uh, if the person I am talking to. I call a doctor and they give me bad medical advice. That harms me. If I'm looking for the person who has done me wrong, the answer is that doctor. If the doctor was a large language model pretending to be a doctor, then who do I blame for my grapefruit sized tumor. It's the liability question.

2:18:54 - Bentio Gonzalez
Who's liable?

2:18:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, doctors make mistakes, ais make mistakes.

2:19:00 - Bentio Gonzalez
Yeah, but then the doctor's liable, do you think?

2:19:02 - Leo Laporte
that makes it better that you can sue the doctor but you can't sue the AI.

2:19:05 - Bentio Gonzalez
There's recourse is the thing. There's recourse, there's no recourse with an AI. Oh, there's recourse.

2:19:13 - Leo Laporte
Where did you use this? Did you use it at your doctor's office? Did you use it? Uh, I mean there's record, there's somebody who was running the machine that gave you the bad diagnosis. I just, I mean, I think it could do the same thing. A human will do the same thing. Does it make it better that you can sue them? I don't know.

2:19:30 - Paris Martineau
You still have a lump the size of a grapefruit I mean, I think that liability is a real and concrete way to think about this. It doesn't mean it's the best way to think about it, but it is one of the hurdles that we're going to have to come up against and we're going to have to come up against honestly right now, if not very soon. These tools are being used in medicine, in in health insurance. In the government, you know who is to blame when the AI cuts an entire department that was responsible for important national security issues.

2:20:08 - Leo Laporte
Are there countries where you can't?

2:20:08 - Jeff Jarvis
sue a doctor for malpractice.

2:20:09 - Paris Martineau
I bet there are.

2:20:09 - Leo Laporte
Are there countries where you can't sue a doctor for malpractice? I bet there are.

2:20:13 - Paris Martineau
I'm pretty sure that malpractice isn't as big of a thing outside of malpractice. Litigation isn't as big of a thing outside of the US. I think it's a US specific thing because we're a very legal liability.

2:20:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Like most of the answers to who is to blame in the US come back to lawsuits because of the way that this country well, when you have state run health care, when you have single payer, then you know in the uk it's the national health service and probably you can't sue it as easily as you could hear a company yeah, I mean in the united states you can't sue governments, right well, yeah, sure you can, you can country in general, governments are protected against lawsuits okay.

2:20:55 - Paris Martineau
Someone in the chat is saying how ridiculous is the statement that we shouldn't use a method of solving a problem if we can't attack them if it does wrong? That's insane. That's not entirely. What I'm saying is I'm saying, when we are handing over, uh, large segments of the decision-making process to autonomous machines, to intelligent machines, you might say we need to be thinking about the consequences of that and what we would then do if that machine produces outputs we don't like, because we can't just assume that everything is going to go super well. That's not, I think, a great idea when we're thinking about large scale, systematic changes in our society I couldn't agree more, and I think we start with so-called autonomous cars and tesla.

2:21:45 - Bentio Gonzalez
I cannot believe that they are allowed on the road with what they have yeah, wait, what happens now when, if a waymo crashes into somebody, who what happens?

2:21:54 - Jeff Jarvis
you sue google, you sue google, okay, uh, speaking of which, there's a new waymo in san francisco where they're testing it right now yeah, I hitched a ride in line 123 yeah this is the one without any steering wheel. This looks like the zoox.

2:22:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it is zooks. This is Amazon's. Oh, Amazon, sorry. Yeah, yeah, this is the Zoox. This has been around for a while, but I'm yeah. Why put in a steering, why have a front seat if you don't have a driver? So Zoox is from Amazon and it is now testing in San Francisco. Waymo's been around San Francisco for some time. I think the Zoox's are kind of cute.

2:22:36 - Jeff Jarvis
This looks exactly like the taxis in uh west world, of course so so the three of us get in one for our 24-hour festival that we want to do okay uh, do you? Uh, who who tries? Who's willing to sit facing backwards?

2:22:52 - Leo Laporte
I don't care, I'll sit back facing backwards. Who's willing to go over a bridge in that you don't like sitting backwards?

2:23:01 - Paris Martineau
not, not, yeah, not in a moving vehicle yeah, really doesn't bother me at all.

2:23:08 - Leo Laporte
Really, I often take the train.

2:23:10 - Paris Martineau
I was just, if you're getting on a train you're like oh yeah, the backward seat. You're not a little bit like I'd prefer the front, the forward facing seat? I do too, yeah, well, there's other saying I won't sit in the backward facing. See, I'm just saying, if I have a choice, I'm choosing the forward seat.

2:23:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah well, especially in this case, because you kind of want to know where it's going, so you can at least scream when you know you're going to hit something don't you want to know where you've been?

2:23:33 - Paris Martineau
what about? What about respecting the past? What about respecting from where we've come?

2:23:39 - Leo Laporte
By the way, good news, for Elon X is now worth $44 billion, exactly what he paid for it. It was $10 billion in September. You know it really helps when you own a government.

2:23:54 - Jeff Jarvis
You can really Not so much Tesla.

2:23:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, tesla's not doing. Well, he's not doing, he's lost.

2:23:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's see lost 250 billion.

2:24:00 - Leo Laporte
I think it is something like that, you know and that's a hard one to stop, because it's not just the us that that's happening, it's. It cracks me up, though, that conservatives, who have been anti new green deal and anti-ev for so long are now buying teslas, trump's hawking them on the front lawn of the white house. It's the. We live in a very strange world. Let's just say that ever right um, you can buy the 560 pound twitter logo right now.

2:24:26 - Paris Martineau
It's up for sale for auction guys, we should go in, we should go all in on it. We could each take apart where do we put it? It's 12 feet tall.

2:24:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's yeah, it would fit on the wall behind me. Current bid is $27,500. So you'd have to bid $30,250 to beat the current bid. But it's going to go on for a while. Another 24 hours, another day. Remember when? Like Dow's were buying stuff like that and it would give one piece to everybody yeah, maybe there is a dow gonna buy it, the the blue bird logo that was on the front of the uh market square headquarters market street yeah, I don't know why it says market square.

The auctioneer has got it wrong yeah the headquarters were square, though maybe that's what he means. Perhaps, square headquarters, it's a they. Oh, you know what. Somebody bought this in september or of 2023. Elon had an auction the rebranding auction. Somebody bought it. Now they're selling it off. Oh, it's an investment oh, they're flipping it, they're flipping the bird okay, we have a show title thank you for your submissions mark andreessen wants to shut down all higher education yeah, this was freaky what the hell's wrong with this guy, this guy? Is really over the edge.

2:26:00 - Jeff Jarvis
This guy has just gone off the deep end and in exchange with lex fridman, who just drives me bananas does he have kids?

2:26:08 - Paris Martineau
see college age kids andreessen, I don't know.

2:26:13 - Leo Laporte
Andreessen said there's no way to fix higher education in america without replacement, and there's no way to replace them without letting them fail. This is the most obvious conclusion of all time. How come you don't understand this? What happens in the business world? When the company does a bad job, it fails. Another company takes its place. That's how you get progress. So can we explain?

2:26:33 - Paris Martineau
to mark that a university is not a business what about all of your, the companies you've invested in mark that that haven't made money for years? Part of the deal.

2:26:41 - Leo Laporte
But you continue to give them money just because. He is a notorious nitwit, I'm sorry, yeah, he is.

2:26:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Eight-year-old son, now 10. That was two years ago, so 10. Well, I wonder if he'll go to uh.

2:26:56 - Paris Martineau
I often find whenever people are making the argument that colleges need to be shut down, they're brainwashing the kids. You look at their kids and see if they've recently gone to college and whether or not they speak to them.

2:27:07 - Leo Laporte
Um yeah, uh well, let's not forget that Mark Andreessen has money because he went to the university of Chicago.

2:27:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Illinois.

2:27:16 - Leo Laporte
Illinois, Urbana. Uh, he went to the University of Chicago, Illinois, Urbana, the University of Illinois in Urbana, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where he wrote the first browser. What was it? Was it Mozilla? Was it Netscape? It was prior to Netscape Mosaic.

Mosaic, that's what it was. You're right. And thanks to all the money that was provided that national center for super computing applications by the federal government um again, notorious nitwit. This is unfortunately a problem with people who fall into a lot of money and then think they're somehow geniuses. I do not have that problem. I am proud to say I have no money and I'm an idiot not a nitwit, but a twit there is yes, exactly right, there is an auction that I'm intrigued by.

The free software foundation is having a silent memorabilia auction, which I mean. I don't know what they're auctioning off, but I feel like it could be like hairs from the beard. I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is. This is uh. It'll be interesting to see what the first 10 items are up a variety of plush animals that greeted visitors in its former boston dynamic duo, the uh new and the penguin oh, the canoe, the original canoe head it's autographed oh rms rms, I don't see if I don't get a little piece of richard stallman.

I don't know if there's a norbert wiener award they're auctioning off their norbert wiener award. They're auctioning off their norbert wiener award, a pair of gcc gnu letter drawings by gary torresi studio. That's the cover the, the cover of the book using gcc, the gnu compiler reference manual. The internet hall of fame medal awarded to richard stallman. You shouldn't be able. Oh, a legendary katana sword given to stallman by friends of the fsf. Oh, the sword resembles the one drawn in the xkcd comic and will and will can be used as a weapon in the fight for computer freedom that's really good.

It's good they specify that and there he is, richard stallman with his katana ninjas that are attacking him. A night of blood I've long awaited. Free software will carry on for a gnu dawn lena's torvalds.

2:29:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I hear he sleeps with nunchucks that's hysterical.

2:30:04 - Leo Laporte
All right, all right. All right, all right, let's see we need to take a break. You're watching intelligent machines brand new, episode 811 uh with uh, our, our guest, anthony aguirre, from the uh pro-human sector. I don't know what was it called?

the institute for the future of life institute future of life institute right, something like that probably and paris martineau of the information, and jeff jarvis, who does not believe in the future of life. So that's his problem. That's all I can say. If you're not yet a member of the club, I would like to invite you to join club twit. Without the club, there would be no scintillating conversations like this. Uh, the club also hosts a bunch of stuff inside the discord that are. You know, tonight at 6 pm, just a couple hours from now, less 6 pm Pacific, it's Micah's Crafting Corner. We've got a Chris Marquardt photo segment coming up, stacy's Book Club. We're going to do another coffee segment with the Coffee Geek, mark Prince, all of those in the Clubhouse, which is our wonderful Discord Plus, you get ad-free versions of all the shows.

I think if you, if you hear all of that, you might say, well, that must cost 30, 50, 100 a month. But no, it's only seven dollars a month and it helps us put on all the programming we do. It makes a big difference to our bottom line. It covers all of the expenses that advertising does not and that is a significant portion. Sad to say, if you're not yet a member, we would love to have you in the club. Twittv slash, club twit. Um, what else do we? I think we talked enough about gdc. Did you see anything else you wanted to?

no no, uh, any other stories. Blue sky made more money selling those those t-shirts jay graber's t-shirts, mocking mark zuckerberg than it has selling custom domains they're a t-shirt company now pivot, pivot, it's like every band is actually a t-shirt company yeah

2:32:12 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, yeah, uh, isn't the google story this week a big deal.

2:32:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, we should talk about that. The federal government is, of course, still going after Google. They didn't drop that. That's what you want to talk about.

2:32:29 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I'm talking. They're buying cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion.

2:32:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, if this were this week in Google, I might do it.

2:32:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, what's?

2:32:38 - Leo Laporte
interesting. What would you like to say about it?

2:32:39 - Jeff Jarvis
it's a huge tried to buy it last year yeah for like 23 billion or something. I can't scroll this right now, so I don't know how much it was. Um and uh, they didn't because they feared antitrust ah, but now they're not worried about now they're not worried about antitrust, or or should they be? Because? Because supposedly the Justice Department is still going after it, or the FTC, or whoever it is. Well, that's because the trial is over.

2:33:04 - Leo Laporte
They lost, so the judge gets to decide what to do. And the FTC? I guess the lawyers there are still suggesting remedies.

2:33:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, they just fired the two Democratic FTC commissioners.

2:33:19 - Leo Laporte
But I think once you've lost a trial, I mean, I guess the ftc could say well, we don't want any remedy, thank you, but the judge is going to get to this side.

2:33:24 - Jeff Jarvis
But so now they're trying. Now the price went up, but they're trying to buy it because they've got tons of cash and so they're buying this for their um, so that's a big deal and then also Last year's purchase fell through according to Financial.

2:33:35 - Leo Laporte
Times.

2:33:36 - Paris Martineau
The fee if they back out on the deal now is astronomical, like the walk-away fee is crazy big, if I recall correctly.

2:33:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, all of this is expensive. They're spending a billion dollars to keep the employees. It's an Israeli cyber intelligence company, I guess Security, cyber security, I mean it's. These are. This is the largest acquisition in google history yeah, that's a big deal uh when I bought motorola, motorola, it was only 12 and a half billion right, how'd that go? Mandiant was five billion.

2:34:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, really so alphabet meanwhile spins off the starlink competitor, tara, did you know about that?

2:34:21 - Leo Laporte
I didn't even know that existed no, and I would love to use a starlink competitor. We use starlink as our backup internet access should comcast go down, because it does, or it had for a while when we first started streaming from here. It's actually been pretty solid knock wood, knock wood right now well, but I got this I got the satellite dish on the roof, um, but I would love to look at an alternative absolutely this is.

This is a terrestrial uh, that's the difference uh, that's the difference internet from terrestrial lasers. And this was uh. This was an alphabet. Uh x, right, uh x, yep. Incubator moonshot. Um, the company currently has two dozen employees, so it's not huge. It operates in 12 countries, connecting the capital of the democratic republic of congo to the coachella festival. Oh no, wait a minute, that was. It was two separate installations. Although I think that would be a good, useful, we've realized over time that for a number of things we create, there's a lot of benefit to landing just outside of the alphabet membrane. This from astro teller x is captain ofhots. Is that what it says on his card? Hi, I'm Astro Teller, captain of moonshots. They're going to be able to get connected quickly to market capital. Oh, that's it. That'll raise money and scale faster. The current tech involves firing a narrow beam of light from one traffic light-sized terminal to another, transmission of up to 20 gigabits a second over 20 kilometers. So it isn't. It's nothing like satellite, it's uh, it's. But there are other satellite competitors, by the way.

2:36:06 - Bentio Gonzalez
Does this thing need a line of sight or something like yeah, it's line of sight does but it's what it's meant for.

2:36:12 - Jeff Jarvis
So you put it on a tower.

2:36:13 - Bentio Gonzalez
Yeah, that's the thing so like microwave, like a bird sitting on, it is gonna mess things don't no birds allowed.

2:36:20 - Jeff Jarvis
It'll fry the bird? I don't know. So my eighth grade honors you've heard already about my my sixth grade science project uh, electronic bongos yes in my eighth grade honors science class, we all had a project and I was trying to work on transmitting information with light. Oh, that's great. Did you succeed? No, I failed.

2:36:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh were you blinking the light? What were you doing?

2:36:47 - Jeff Jarvis
well, I had a, I had a cell and I had a light bulb, but I couldn't figure out what to do about the ambient light, and so you needed lasers.

2:36:53 - Paris Martineau
That's why well yeah, I didn't have could have gone to a very dark room, you know.

2:36:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.

2:37:00 - Leo Laporte
Uh, Amazon is killing off Boy I was a geek early on.

2:37:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I know I'm impressed. I had no idea.

2:37:06 - Leo Laporte
You were much geekier than I was.

2:37:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, what happens? I even was. I was an AV guy too. I mean, paris would have made fun. Paris, being the cool kid, would have made fun of me.

2:37:16 - Paris Martineau
No, I was a nerd and a geek.

2:37:19 - Leo Laporte
I was a theater kid.

2:37:21 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say I was a theater kid, I liked anime, I wrote fan fiction. I was not cool.

2:37:30 - Leo Laporte
We didn't have anime when I was in high school. That had not yet been invented.

2:37:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Wait a second, Leo, we got over this. A few roles, what a few roles, please.

2:37:39 - Leo Laporte
I was Sheridan Whiteside in the man who Came to Dinner. Oh, so that was a great role.

2:37:45 - Paris Martineau
Did you come to?

2:37:45 - Leo Laporte
dinner. Yes, the whole idea was he was a famous New York critic, famously cantankerous, who came to dinner at a house, slipped on the stairs, broke his leg and was forced to recuperate at the house where he became a very annoying guest over a period of many weeks. My first line was offstage. In fact it's the beginning of the play. It's a very famous funny play. My first line was, as I remember, you driveling cow. You have the touch of a sex-toff cobra and then they wheel me in the whole play. I was in a wheelchair. I also played, as I remember. I played the hero in, as you Like it, dubois, I think, was his name, what else? Yeah, no, no, I did a few, oh, oh, and I was also richard burton in the in the night of the iguana whoa, which required a considerable amount of drinking, which is a big deal for a 14 year old I was walter hollander, the jewish caterer from newark, new Jersey, in Woody Allen's Don't Drink the Water.

Oh, that's great. How fun Did you play it for comedy?

2:39:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, but as it turned out, it was the lead. I'd never been in anything, I got it accidentally.

2:39:14 - Paris Martineau
How does one accidentally get a lead role.

2:39:16 - Jeff Jarvis
So I filled out the form. I had moved from New Jersey to New role. So I filled out the form. I had moved from New Jersey to New York and I filled out the form. Were you done before? And so I mentioned the productions and I made very clear to say I was in lighting, I was the geek, I was the boring kid and the drama coach thought that I was like a star in those productions and so I did a good audition and I got the lead.

2:39:37 - Paris Martineau
I was really crappy well, do you think it's just that there weren't any men that wanted to be in the production, because that's a problem some schools have?

2:39:49 - Jeff Jarvis
so there was a guy who was in it who became a movie star, namir el-kadi, whoa was in my class. He was a maybe he's a movie star.

2:39:57 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's pretty so you could have been a laser inventor. You could have been a movie star.

2:40:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Instead you chose to be here on this electronic percussionist. I'm actually.

2:40:06 - Leo Laporte
I'm looking at the plot of the man who came to dinner. I had forgotten this. He was a radio personality.

2:40:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, an acerbic new york personnel so this may be where it all began. We have found your Rosebud, Leo.

2:40:20 - Leo Laporte
Wow, I forgot that. I thought he was a theater critic. No, he was an acerbic New York radio personnel. All that and the voice, yeah, great dribbling cow, you have the touch of a sexton cobra.

2:40:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo's Rosebud Yep we're there.

2:40:44 - Leo Laporte
You just, we just found my rose. You found, we found the uh unified theory of leo. You're watching uh this week in uh, intelligent machines. Whoops, almost said google, almost said it. I almost said it, I knew I would at some point. Uh, we're gonna take a little break. When we come back, it's pick of the week time paris and jeffrey. All right, paris martineau, kick us off with your pick of the week from the new york post nope, I said the wrong.

2:41:09 - Paris Martineau
I put the wrong link there.

2:41:10 - Speaker 2
That's something for work um hold on oh I'm not gonna look at it, then is it a secret she put in a work link listen.

2:41:22 - Paris Martineau
Sometimes you got a lot of links in the clipboard, are you?

2:41:25 - Leo Laporte
talking about the broadway show. Oh, mary, when you say I am, yes, I.

2:41:29 - Paris Martineau
So last night I went to go see the broadway show oh mary, which just opened, with a new person playing oh, it's Titus.

2:41:36 - Leo Laporte
Burgess in it. Oh my God, I love him.

2:41:39 - Paris Martineau
He was fantastic in it and I just wonder if anybody's coming through New York and wants to see the show. O'mary was really good. Titus is the lead for, I think, the next couple of weeks, the very least, and then it's going to be back to Cole Escola.

2:41:54 - Leo Laporte
Who wrote it and created the part originally?

2:41:58 - Paris Martineau
cole escola um, who wrote it and created the part originally?

2:42:00 - Leo Laporte
yeah, and I'm gonna go back and I've seen him like on, uh, the talk shows in his mary lincoln garb and it's hysterical, but so it's a.

2:42:07 - Paris Martineau
It's a one person show about mary lincoln ish, it's technically they have a cast of five but, um cole, there's a couple of other supporting characters, but they don't really play a big of a role because it's all about mary todd lincoln and it, um is, I would say, very loosely related to history or mary todd lincoln at all. It is basically using by romp.

That is a manic depressive alcoholic who can't stop lying about everything, kind of what if mary todd lincoln was a real housewife is kind of a good way to think of the show.

2:43:08 - Jeff Jarvis
That's hilarious, what a premise my mother insisted that she was mary todd lincoln. Uh, reincarnated, oh.

2:43:16 - Leo Laporte
Not somebody to emulate.

2:43:17 - Jeff Jarvis
She was kind of a notoriously horrible person.

2:43:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I wanted to see this so badly and I love Titus Burgess. He was in the unsinkable, unbreakable.

2:43:30 - Paris Martineau
Kimmy Schmidt.

2:43:31 - Leo Laporte
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, it's really quite.

2:43:33 - Paris Martineau
I mean you get to see all of his skills really come into play here.

He was one of the funniest I've followed him on tiktok for ages more in, uh, you know, supporting or cast like roles, and so it's really great, was great to see him in his first like leading broadway role. He killed it. It is a incredibly like for him physical role. It's very funny. It obviously requires a lot of acting but it also requires some singing and cabaret. It's not a musical, but that comes into play in some parts of it kind of unexpectedly and he really shown uh.

2:44:09 - Leo Laporte
So would recommend, and it would drive the administration crazy because it's a drag show that's true and I think I heard that.

2:44:19 - Paris Martineau
I don't know what. This could be fake news, but I think I heard that part of the reason why cole, the uh, original author and person who played um mary, why he, why they and the whole broadway cast are all coming back um in april is because I think they're going to be filming it for streaming. So you might be able to see it from the comfort of your home.

2:44:42 - Leo Laporte
I would love to. I would love to. How funny is that? I'm so jealous. See, this is why I wished I lived in New York City, because I would go to the theater all the time.

2:44:54 - Paris Martineau
It's fantastic the theater kid.

2:45:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, theater all the time. It's fantastic. It's really theater, kid, yeah, I, there's something about a live performance. That is just there's nothing like it.

2:45:04 - Paris Martineau
It's just I mean. It really is fantastic. It was also just I mean. This is the first time I think I've seen someone on broadway. It was literally the opening night um for titus on tuesday. I don know, I mean, I think I had just.

I had just seen it come across my Twitter feed that Titus was going to be playing this, so I opened it up and was like, oh, tickets are kind of cheap. So I nabbed them. But then they spiked. So I got lucky, yeah, yeah the tickets are really expensive now, but it was incredibly. I felt like moving just to see at the end the curtain call of like someone experiencing a like five minute standing ovation on their first night in broadway really brought tears to my eyes yeah, I don't know.

2:45:46 - Leo Laporte
Go visit your local theaters, guys. It's a great institution. Theater is incredible. It's amazing, it's amazing.

2:45:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Um, I guess that means it's your turn, jeff jarvis so you know, the other day I was wondering whatever happened to mike errington oh my god, whatever happened to my crunch I'm not exactly sure he's doing all right. Yep, he bought a house in miami beach for 60 million dollars what oh crypto baby? Oh, oh, and founder turned crypto investor boy.

2:46:26 - Leo Laporte
The house was uh built by a real estate mogul for seven and a half million dollars in 2020. He spent four years building it. They moved into the home last fall and sold it uh without a realtor, to mike errington for 60.

Well, they saved on the commission yeah, yeah, the property was not on the market at the time of sale. Oh, this is so, mike errington. So mike, uh, mike just said I'm buying your house. Um, he got a call from a real estate agent with another overture. Apparently he was getting one every week. Um, he's about to turn him away. When carp suggested he throw out a number 65 million dollars, said the realtor, which would net him a significant profit, according to the Wall Street Journal and Mike said 60.

2:47:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, but they just moved in Five bedrooms, two staff bedrooms.

2:47:26 - Leo Laporte
You got to have staff bedrooms. You have to.

2:47:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Fourth of an acre pool, elevator gym with sauna and steam room. Picture Mike in the sauna.

2:47:36 - Leo Laporte
I made a big mistake, throwing him off of, uh, our shows. Yeah, what? What did he do? Um, he accused me of a favoritism because I got a review phone of the uh uh, it was the palm pre and I really liked it. And he said did they, did they give that to you? And I said, yeah, for review. I'm returning in two weeks. He said uh-huh. So finally I just swore at him and threw him off.

That's a mistake I could have a nice place to stay in miami if I had just stayed, friends. I saw him a couple of years later at le web in in Paris and I said let me shake your hand. He was holding court. He was sitting high atop a pile of cushions, so he was about eight feet in the air. I know it's really weird. It was eight feet in the air and I reached up and he said no, no, I'm not shaking hands these days and that was that last time I saw him.

2:48:38 - Paris Martineau
Not shaking hands these days.

2:48:39 - Leo Laporte
I bet he has a pillow thrown in his new home, however.

2:48:43 - Paris Martineau
Kind of a whole pillow room.

2:48:45 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a wonderful accident story Because I talked to him early on. I haven't talked to him in years. I talked to him early on in his business in TechCrunch, and TechCrunch was like Craigslist, but rich In that he was just making lists for the sake of his own work, and tech crunch became a thing that he didn't anticipate huh, interesting he did a good job I mean tech, I mean, I don't think he sold it for that much so and he became an investor.

2:49:13 - Leo Laporte
I think this is really.

2:49:14 - Paris Martineau
He fortuitously invested in bitcoin I was going to say a lot of.

2:49:18 - Leo Laporte
I mean he, I assume, probably started off this trend of a lot of tech crunch people going into venture capital or right, yeah, I mean like tech journalists have been doing that forever, you know if you bought a thousand bitcoin for a hundred dollars in you know 20, not even 20 years ago, 10 years ago uh, you'd be doing, you'd be sitting pretty right now you could afford a 60 million dollar house in miami. Well, it's kind of amazing, wow. Thank you for sharing that with me yeah, I feel terrible, you now yeah uh, yeah, right. Well, that's it for this edition of intelligent machines, jeff jarvis. Uh, paris martineau, wonderful to have you. Who are we talking to next week, benito?

2:50:05 - Bentio Gonzalez
do we have a? Let me look, yes, we have. We have somebody next week. It is gary rivlin who wrote the ai valley this is.

2:50:13 - Leo Laporte
He's got a new book, uh, about ai, the ai valley. Awesome, you know, gary, right? Uh, um, jeff, no, I don't, no, you don't I thought you I thought you must. I don't think so. He, um, he is, uh, he's an investigative reporter. He's worked for the times mother jones wired. He's a pulitzer prize winner, so that'll be, uh, that'll be fun.

He's been writing about silicon valley for some time new book, a lot of good books, ai valley, microsoft, google and the trillion dollar race to cash in on artificial intelligence so it's focused on google and ai and microsoft yeah okay, that'll be interesting so it will be fun. That's next week. Uh, we are trying to shed light on ai, what it means, how you can use it, uh, what it's going to be like in an ai driven future, and that's uh. That's all we do the week after that.

2:51:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Can we talk? Can we mention that one too? Yeah, who's after that?

2:51:18 - Leo Laporte
you want to say it pineal oh yeah, they've been doing a good job booking mike, mckee, mike mckee oh great. So surf, we can hear about surf. Yes, he's got a new uh venture. Mike is, of course, the founder of flipboard and, uh, I've been using surf. The idea is it's kind of an aggregator, I guess you have been using it. Oh good, oh yeah I have the uh, the test version of surf, on my on my phone in paris.

2:51:45 - Paris Martineau
We're gonna miss you for the next two weeks I am, paris will be in paris next week.

2:51:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, when I, when I went to europe in the old days, I went ahead and did the show from Europe.

2:51:55 - Leo Laporte
He did sometimes from a basement, sometimes a cafeteria.

2:51:59 - Jeff Jarvis
You never knew where Jeff was going to show up Cause I I Paris was dedicated to the show and the culture that's true, you know I'm not dedicated.

2:52:08 - Paris Martineau
I'm dedicated to eating a lot of cheese and drinking a lot of wine and not thinking about tech news for two weeks. So I'm going to try and force myself to.

2:52:16 - Leo Laporte
When do you leave?

2:52:19 - Paris Martineau
Uh, I'm going to try and force myself to. When do you leave?

2:52:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Tuesday at midnight. So earlier on the Discord I recommended a book. I'm a huge fan of Russell Shorto Ooh, and he wrote a book called Amsterdam the History of the World's Most Liberal City. I think it is. It's a really good perspective on amsterdam.

2:52:39 - Leo Laporte
shorto also wrote I read his book on manhattan, which I loved well so he's got two.

2:52:44 - Jeff Jarvis
He just has a new one. I just finished.

2:52:46 - Leo Laporte
You'll love it I read the island at the center of the world which is great, which is about, uh, the dutch new york the early days of new york.

2:52:53 - Jeff Jarvis
It's fascinating I want, I want to, I a, a a fund to build a statue to Adrian Vander Dunk, who kind of brought uh, the ideas of freedom of expression to our shores. He just has a new book out, which I just finished, called taking Manhattan.

2:53:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I'll have to get it.

2:53:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Which is about how the English took over uh, what was new Amsterdam? And made it in New York and didn't fire a shot and made it into kind of an experiment in a new economics and a new diversity and pluralism. That becomes the essence of New York to this day.

2:53:29 - Leo Laporte
And then along came Alexander Hamilton and the whole.

2:53:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Thing was shot. We'll never know where it goes. Shorter was just great. He's just wonderful.

2:53:36 - Leo Laporte
And why are we mentioning him? You're gonna, we're gonna, she's going to amsterdam oh, I'm going to paris and amsterdam. Yeah, so I will so he's going to talk about amsterdam and new amsterdam. Yeah, he lives. He lived for some time, and so amsterdam.

2:53:48 - Jeff Jarvis
A history of the world's most liberal city is really quite wonderful now I've got to read the entire russell shorto library.

2:53:57 - Leo Laporte
The oeuvre that's a french word that means eggs over easy, you know.

2:54:03 - Paris Martineau
Uh, omelette fromage right how is your french paris oh, it's a bit rusty is what I was going to say in french, but are you gonna?

2:54:16 - Jeff Jarvis
are you gonna impress? Going to impress the teammates.

2:54:19 - Paris Martineau
I will definitely impress my skee-ball teammates with my French. I will never impress a French person. I did not do that even when I spoke fluent French in France.

2:54:28 - Leo Laporte
The French people, though it's interesting, like the American accent, because I always try to, you know, do all the R stuff. And somebody told me no, no, don't do that, just do r, because they love. They think the english american accent is so cute.

2:54:43 - Paris Martineau
So if you say they go, isn't she cute instead of they'll just love it oh, I'll take that into consideration whenever I speak with or at least back in the day, whenever I was speaking what I thought it was a french accent. One french shopkeep was like oh, I thought you were in French. They're like oh, I thought you were Belgian you speak with a Belgian accent. That's such an insult. It's because I I know it's because my first French teacher was Belgian.

2:55:08 - Jeff Jarvis
At least your word, quebecois. That would be an insult.

2:55:22 - Paris Martineau
I mean, yeah, it's an insult, but it's not the worst. Well, your french must be very good, if you haven't, if they thought you were belgian, that's very it was. It's it's gotten worse. It'll come. You exchange students? I think it will. Yeah, I studied abroad there for a year.

2:55:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh my god, oh wow, in belgium, in france, in paris. Oh, you studied in paris for a year, mm-hmm, it was fun in high school or college In college.

2:55:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, all for a say.

2:55:39 - Paris Martineau
Partially. Yeah, my daughter did that in her junior year in high school she announced I'm going to be gone for a year.

2:55:47 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to. France, and it was what? It was very disruptive, it was very disorienting. It was a sad day. She studied in Rren for a year. She loved it and we went and visited her. Of course, it's beautiful. Well, have a wonderful trip, it's two weeks off.

2:56:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm going to miss you.

2:56:07 - Leo Laporte
We're replacing you with people who will be of a tenth. Your caliber yes.

2:56:14 - Paris Martineau
I hope you tell them.

2:56:16 - Leo Laporte
Have a great trip. We'll see you in a couple of weeks and thank you all of you for joining us. We do Intelligent Machines every Wednesday, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live on eight different streams If you're in the club Club. Twitter Discord is one of them.

Youtube is probably the preferred way. Most people like to watch it on youtube, but there's also twitch, tick, tock, xcom, facebook linkedin and kick. So choose your favorite platform, but you don't have to watch live. Uh, we, you know. We make it a podcast. You can download a copy of the show from our website, twittv I am. There's a youtube channel dedicated to intelligent machines. You can watch the video there. Great way to share clips or subscribe that's the best way, I think in your favorite podcast client and you'll get the show automatically the minute it's done. You have a choice of audio or video. I think most people now do video and then just listen to it if they're in the car, but if they want to see it, they can do video. But it's it's up to you. However you want to do it, we just you, you want to see leo's shirts.

You, you do the shirts are a part of the attraction the shirts are a big deal.

2:57:24 - Paris Martineau
He's got a whole. How how many shirts do you have?

2:57:28 - Leo Laporte
uh, it's. I think it's approaching 50 now well I think. I look, I figured out that I could go, uh, three months without repeating. I think something like that.

2:57:37 - Paris Martineau
That's the goal which one do you get the most compliments on when you wear it out? Is it still the avocado shirt?

2:57:42 - Leo Laporte
they. Yeah, that's the one I wore in New York City.

2:57:44 - Jeff Jarvis
They love the avocado people on the street in New York who never talked to anybody, said hey, avocado guy, hey I can't afford those anymore.

2:57:54 - Leo Laporte
Avocados uh, this is a nobody's hey sugar skull guy. That's not going to happen, but this is a fun shirt. I agree. I get these from a little shop in San Miguel de Allende, mexico, called Abrazos Design. You can get them online. They're wonderful, made by local artisans, local prints. Yeah, I'm really happy with them. They're very comfy. Thanks everybody, we'll see you next time on intelligent machines bon voyage.

2:58:29 - Paris Martineau
I'm not a human being, not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent machine.