Intelligent Machines 817 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 is here. Paris Martineau, our guest this week. The wonderful Jacob Ward Jacob, of course, for a long time on CNN NBC is a television correspondent. He's also the author of a book. We're going to learn this week how technology is creating a world without choices and how to fight back. Next, on Intelligent Machines Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT.

This is Intelligent Machines, episode 817, recorded April 30th 2025, wheel 101. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we cover the wild and wacky and ever-changing world of AI, including robotics and, of course, all the smart machines all around you. Today, as always, jeff Jarvis is here. Professor Emeritus of Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, Craig Newmark, the City University of New York. Hello, mr Jeff Jarvis, hello boss. How are you Author of look at all those books behind him the Web, we Weave Magazine, the Gutenberg.

0:01:14 - Paris Martineau
Parenthesis Got a whole library card.

0:01:16 - Leo Laporte
A whole library card. So nice to see you, jeff Paris. Are you in Florida?

0:01:22 - Paris Martineau
I am. I'm in Florida for a wedding how exciting and I'm also recording a podcast.

0:01:30 - Leo Laporte
A wedding and a podcast it's the perfect mix.

0:01:32 - Paris Martineau
Many people are saying they go together like a library card and a stack of books.

0:01:38 - Jeff Jarvis
How many weddings a year are you going to these days?

0:01:40 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say I'm not yet at peak wedding, but it's getting up there.

0:01:43 - Jacob Ward
You're getting on this peak wedding. It's starting up there. You're getting on this peak wedding. It's starting. It's starting to happen. Peak wedding is fun.

0:01:47 - Leo Laporte
That was a great phase. I loved peak wedding. I'm at peak funeral right now.

0:01:52 - Paris Martineau
Hey, you know, a wedding, a podcast, a funeral, it's all hey hey, hey, there's a movie title there, three podcasts and a wedding.

0:02:02 - Leo Laporte
I am so glad to have Jacob Ward on the show with us. He did a tweet a couple of weeks ago and then I bought his book and I went wait a minute, we've got to get Jacob back. Jake's been a correspondent for PBS and CNN and you've probably seen him there or Al Jazeera, nbc News. He's the host of a new podcast, the Rip Current, with Jacob Ward on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and, of course, there's a newsletter at the rip currentcom.

0:02:25 - Jacob Ward
Hello, jacob, great to have you Thanks for having me back Appreciate it.

0:02:28 - Leo Laporte
The book, uh, the loop was your, uh, covid project, I think. Um, yeah, and you know I picked it up and I was enthralled. I can't put it down now. Oh wow, yeah, you did a good job of combining a lot of research into how we think and making it topical in this, you know, world of surveillance capitalism, if you will. What is the loop?

0:03:01 - Jacob Ward
Yeah, so geez, I'm. So I was spending just in basically four years of a big documentary series for PBS called Hacking your Mind. That was all about how behavioral scientists have shown that we are captive to very ancient circuitry that governs most of the decisions we make in our day-to-day lives. We don't even know about it. And then in my day job as a tech correspondent, I was talking to all these companies that were trying to break through with these nascent generative AI systems and neural networks and the rest of it to sort of govern human behavior as much as possible, corral human behavior as much as possible, and as I saw these two things coming together, I thought, oh, this is bad. There's a scary thing coming in which I worried that companies were going to basically foist ai on us and wind up amplifying kind of the worst parts of being human, our most tribal, biased stuff I know right, paris, don't hang him on well, paris.

I mean, this is the thing is like. I thought I was like 10 years early on this subject. It came out about nine months before ChatGPT did. Oh my God, and so the last. So, basically, like I've been surfing a lot, it's been what's been happening lately, cause I just, you know, as I watch my thesis come to life over and over and over again, I just kind of I've been, I've been stepping back and going to the beach as much as I can.

0:04:26 - Leo Laporte
Well, in fact, that's the name of your podcast the rip current, although be careful on the beach, because that's the thing, dangerous place, as you point out.

you say the, the rip current covers the big hidden forces just beneath the surface that threatened to pull us all out to see. You know it's, it's, it's. I've read, as as you have and probably most of our audience has you know, uh, thinking big and fast and slow. You know the kahneman book and the behavioral economics books, uh, and we've listened to the podcast. So I think we're more and more aware of how much our unconscious mind rules our choices. You know, um, even jonathan hate, the late great jonathan height, uh, in his book, uh, the unreasoning mind said uh, you know, we are, we are, our reason is just a little driver riding an elephant of emotion. And that we, you know, we think we. Most of what we do with our reasoning is justify the emotional decisions we made. But what's scary is the idea that big tech would then weaponize that against us.

0:05:29 - Jacob Ward
Well, and the thing is, you know, I think whenever you talk to people in that world, you know you start to realize that it's not a grand conspiracy, it's not as if these I mean I think they all it turns out to be. You know, the CEOs of a lot of these companies do turn out to be on the same text thread, but I don't think that they are necessarily like executing some grand multi-year plan. It's just that they keep throwing spaghetti at the wall and certain spaghetti strands stick, and one of the stickiest is, you know, when you amplify our most instinctive, unconscious decision-making, you wind up. You know that's the part of our brain that's easiest to sell stuff to and the easiest to create predictive behavior in it. Also, I was just literally on a walk right before you and I joined up. You know, got on here.

I was literally on a walk with a guy whose whole work is around trying to fight loneliness in this world. You, through technology, get to do. Every time an aspect of your life is made simpler through technology, you tend to be made a little bit lonelier. Right, there are these qualities to being human that are messy and full of friction and unpredictable, that are really the best parts of being who we are. But technology right now is not about amplifying those things. It's about trying to get us to bet on football on our phones Right, they're not trying to make us lonely, but that's the upshot.

But that's the upshot Exactly. It's not a conspiracy, it's just that the incentive structure of the moment winds up doing this. And here's the other part. Just like media. Well, that's right. That's right, I mean, it all feels that way, at least when I'm watching TV, I'm sitting next to my wife.

0:07:15 - Leo Laporte
When I'm wearing a Vision Pro headset, I'm all alone. Yeah.

0:07:21 - Jacob Ward
When I'm looking at Twitter and doom scrolling, it's just me there when I'm looking at Twitter and doom scrolling, it's just me there. No, that's right. And the thing that's bothering me the most right now because I know that you know, our topic here today is, you know, I mean intelligent machines. We're thinking about AI specifically lot in researching. The book was talking to experts in how humans behave and then meeting these companies that think they understand how humans should behave or would behave if they made good decisions and are trying to like pre-encode those values into these AI systems they're building and then they would bump into these like big problems in doing that. So if one example is, I was talking to people at a big one of the big Foundational model companies and they said that interior inside their company they they had this Thought experiment that they would get into this fight that they would get into with one another all the time, and they called it the heroin Problem and talk about in the book.

The heroin problem is, let's say, you're an AI company. You're trying to make a perfect AI personal assistant that's great at delivering to you the you know the perfect schedule and knows who you're going to see and, you know, adjusts to your sleep schedule and just makes your life perfect, but you're addicted to heroin. What is that system supposed to do? Is it supposed to get you off of heroin right, try to get you into rehab and and you know continuously work against your addiction? Or is it supposed to make your addiction easier to live with, facilitate it? Does it book the appointment with your dealer? Does it work around when it knows you're going to be junk sick? You know what I mean.

Like, like, we don't know. Like no two people have the same values and right now you've got all these companies trying to talk about their values. Anthropic right has a whole constitutional AI idea that you're going to pull in all of these universal human values, but you can't find two political scientists that agree on values. And then, at the same time, you've got, like I mean, the thing that's been happening this month that's blown my mind is you've got the newest version of Elon Musk's model Grok. Grok 3, now has an unhinged mode where all the guardrails come off and it'll do any gross thing you ask it to do. You ask it to write a blackmail letter, it'll do it. You ask it to impersonate a child for icky reasons, it'll do it. You know what I mean. So we're in this weird world where we're coming face to face with our values and how little we understand about our values, at the same time that we are literally trying to encode those values into these systems, because these companies expect that these systems are going to run every aspect of our lives.

0:09:57 - Leo Laporte
It's like asking Philip Morris about nicotine oh, it's not addictive, but they're sure as hell not taking it out of the cigarettes. Jeff, you were the one who told me that. Hannah Arendt said that loneliness is what leads to dictatorships, to authoritarianism.

0:10:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, you become alienated from your community and from society and become more vulnerable. But, jake, as you're talking, I'm wondering, in a way, if the unhinged this is for argument's sake if the unhinged version is the better version insofar as it's truer to what it is.

0:10:33 - Leo Laporte
It's accurate.

0:10:35 - Jeff Jarvis
And I constantly argue that the thought that we could have guardrails that will make everything safe is a fool's errand.

0:10:41 - Leo Laporte
We're learning that.

0:10:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Because you can't anticipate everything bad that might be done.

0:10:44 - Leo Laporte
All of the research is showing so can easily poison these prompts and get the ai to tell the truth. And I'm with you, jeff. I've always said you know, ai safety is a myth. First of all, you can't get it. Second, why? Why? It's like saying, well, don't show anything bad on the internet in your search results. That's the internet. That's what's there.

0:11:05 - Jacob Ward
That's us, you know, yeah, I hear that argument and I think it's. I think there's a handful of things that that I, there are a handful of reactions I have to it. So first is and Paris. I want to hear your thoughts on this too, because I know you, you've thought about this too. So so for me, like I think there's an accelerationist idea that's out there right now that if we just open up, you know, the world, you know the market will figure it out and we'll sort of burn through to the truth of society and blah, blah, blah. Like there's this whole kind of idea right now that you know we should be accelerating the development of this stuff because clearly it's going to lead somewhere, you know, productive, if we just kind of let it go. But I think that human history has shown us that that is not how it works, that when you let the market just roll, all kinds of bad things come out of it, right?

I just came out of a podcast interview on the Rip Current with a leading national expert in addiction, right, and he was talking about how, in the last, you know, addiction is an invention of the market. It's only been around for about 200 years because the market takes what you know, tobacco, which used to be a raw thing. You know, back when tobacco was first being smoked, a handful of people would die every year of it. Because nobody liked smoking it, because it was horrible to take into your lungs. It was a terrible rough plant. Then they got really good at toasting it.

It's toasted, it's toasted right and putting the filter on the front and all of that stuff that made it suddenly very easy to absorb into your lungs, and suddenly we're awash now in tens of thousands of cigarette deaths a year.

Right, letting the market do what it wants to do with these products doesn't necessarily lead to a better plan. There's a reason that we have literal guardrails on the highway and lane dividers and seatbelts and airbags. These are not because we did away with the friction of how to control these sorts of technologies. It's because we had to pull back, and to me, there's an illusion right now, because this is the other part of it. Right Is that the AI people who make those, the leaders of those companies, promise in this very evangelical kind of faith-based way a great thing is coming. Agi is coming and it's going to improve the world endlessly and we're going to discover new science and breakthrough stuff and you'll live a life of leisure, and they say that all of this you know, letting people do horrible stuff with AI is going to be worth it in order to get to that future.

0:13:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, that I don't agree with Right yeah, you know what I mean.

0:13:37 - Jacob Ward
Like it just feels I don't understand the logic of saying we shouldn't try our best to reflect some basic human decency in the systems.

0:13:47 - Jeff Jarvis
If we can know if that's possible. Though if we fool ourselves into thinking that we can get rid of this stuff, the bad stuff, then we have false comfort.

0:13:58 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I don't think it has to be a binary.

I think that we can, existing in a modern, technologically advanced society that we are currently, we can come at new and transformative technologies with the understanding that they contain the potentiality to cause great harm or have great good come from them, and that the great goods that are going to come out of them will only exist in a world in which we work actively to make that happen.

And given the examples of almost every technology we've seen in the past, it seems more likely that great harms are going to come if we're not incredibly on top of it from a regulatory perspective and from a population-wide morals or social norms perspective, if we are not approaching this on all angles of hey, we've got to take responsibility to make sure whatever this new product or technology we're doing is good and is being created in a way that causes, brings about, more light than it does darkness. I don't think that that's I mean. Maybe it's a naive thing to expect of capitalist enterprises, but I think that if AI contains even some of the potential that its biggest proponents are espousing, it's well worth the effort.

0:15:20 - Leo Laporte
Did you just say that?

0:15:23 - Jeff Jarvis
That sounded almost accelerational.

0:15:25 - Leo Laporte
I've been trying to say that for months. That is the argument. Right is well, let's not hold it back until we know what it can do.

0:15:33 - Paris Martineau
No, no, no, to be clear. My argument is not that we shouldn't hold it back. It's that we should do everything in our power to make sure that this technology is being developed responsibly and as guard rails on it. Because if you're not, if these companies are not going to stop creating this and it's going to have some fantastic sort of output, or even some portion of the fantastic output, then you guys can slow down a little bit and make sure that and deal with regulators being up in your business what if it's not?

hiring. If it's not possible, then I think that it's even more pertinent, not bannon, but I think it's even more pertinent that we have common sense regulations, uh, that we have make it, you know, a social norm that companies employ teams of the term ai safety has become sort of a pejorative among you two, leo and Jeff, but employ people actually dedicated to the concept of AI safety in the sense of let's make sure this being designed in a way that we think of the potential ramifications.

0:16:35 - Leo Laporte
I'm not against AI safety. I agree with you.

0:16:37 - Web
I'm not against AI safety. I think the problem is how humans use it.

0:16:40 - Leo Laporte
I mean, for instance, we now know the Clearview AI was created specifically with the purpose of making its facial recognition make it easier to put brown people in jail. That you know. Once you know that that's the people, that's the problem, not the AI. That's the problem. That's the content it's trained on. It's the problem. It's the way it's used. Is the problem? Um, well, and this?

0:17:01 - Jacob Ward
is why I would say that this is why you shouldn't fall into like so much of the rhetoric around. This kind of thing plays into the, the, the. You know ambitions and motivations of the people running the companies that are making these things. I was interviewing Palmer Luckey, who created Angeril, a big military contractor. He was the creator of Oculus and then he went on to do a bunch of military contracting under he still runs Angeril Angeril, yeah which makes all these drones and facial recognition systems and weaponized systems for the military. And I asked him you have created technologies that are going to necessitate new morals in the world.

That's interesting, morals that we don't have right now so is it up to you to invent the morals, along with the technology that you have built.

And he said the same thing that everybody in tech has always said to me, which is that's not my job.

My job is to build the thing, and then democracy will figure it out. And I just think, more and more we're seeing that the really smart reformers around this stuff, the people who you know, who are really starting to think about this in a more, in a more sophisticated way, I would argue, more adult way, are saying no, actually, we need to start asking, like what is the end game here, and why am I being tasked with building this thing? I mean, you know, at a big tech company these days, you know you get fired for asking. You know, if you're, if you're, in one of the really big ones, if you ask too much about the big plan, you get fired. You're not allowed to ask. You're supposed to keep it real compartmentalized, and there's a reason for that. So for me, jeff and I want to hear more about this notion that we can't agree on universal human values and we can't agree on what this thing should do, because I feel there is some of that.

0:18:45 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I'm not saying we can't agree on it. I'm saying we cannot inject that into the machine. It is a general machine and it can do whatever anyone asks it to do, and the guardrails prevent certain things, but only if you anticipate them. Hearing both of you, paris and Jake, I'm reminded of hearing Alex Karp and no, leo, I haven't read his book yet because I've been reading some better books at uh, in in a conference in vienna some years ago, um, and he said, not unlike what musk has said, what others have said, oh, regulate us.

Yes, regulate us, because what he's doing in saying that is pushing off the responsibility of those ethical judgments on the government. Right, you guys, come up with the rules, then we'll do whatever is left over. We'll do everything we can, except the rules you set, rather than saying that we're going to be judged by what we do. And my, my point about guard rails is only that, um, they are bound to fail and and so we've got to recognize that as a society. And when we don't, we put ourselves, I think, in a position of jeopardy as a result.

0:19:52 - Leo Laporte
In our Discord. Darren Oki, who is, like me, a fan of AI, does point out that AI, like other technologies, will probably cause harm. But he says I would assert, the chance of successfully guessing in what way and choosing the correct guard rails is zero percent. He said you know, seat belts made sense, but it was after you started to see what the problem was that you were solving.

0:20:16 - Jeff Jarvis
And the pro, I think he's probably you probably could have predicted the need for you probably could have predicted, I think, that that's kind of maybe not we say that now, but maybe not of course, and and we live in the country.

0:20:29 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, go ahead just because there are going to be things that we miss and things we can't possibly anticipate, doesn't mean that the act of it doesn't mean that it's foolish to think that the creators of new technologies should be engaged in a process of trying to predict the potential harms of what they are creating and solving for that. I think that that is the least someone can do.

0:20:52 - Jacob Ward
Yeah, especially considering just how much money can be made in that industry Money ruins everything, unfortunately you can afford to put aside a little bit of that. Yeah, we don't need to make all the money.

0:21:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, but I think the canonical example is is the atomic bomb and, uh, the people who built it knew you know.

0:21:14 - Jacob Ward
I mean, look they kind of knew what they were about. Uh yeah, but they weren't buying it to sell it to kids. You know, that's true. No, it wasn't a money-making proposition and they.

0:21:21 - Leo Laporte
But in hindsight they did realize geez, we, you know, maybe we shouldn't have done that.

0:21:26 - Jacob Ward
They did it because they felt like they had to um, and and isn't it interesting how much of the rhetoric of ai right now has to do with it needing to be a grand national effort yes because china yeah, china's gonna blah blah. What's so interesting to me about the china thing too, is when you look at how china's regulating ai, they regulate, regulate, the bejesus. They're doing a lot more to regulate.

0:21:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:21:47 - Jacob Ward
If you're in China right now and you build a product. So remember when mid journey was used to depict Trump in an orange jumpsuit. These sort of photo, realistic news photo style representations of Trump incarcerated In China. Not only would the company be in trouble for that, the ceo of the company would be personally liable, for it could go to jail in fact, often did would be in prison, you know, and so.

0:22:13 - Jeff Jarvis
But now china is using that for these, these amazing, wonderful videos of trump working in a um factory line in a special place.

0:22:23 - Jacob Ward
Yeah, that's right, and so I'm not in any way arguing that we should be living under the dictatorial regime of china, because at the same time china also requires that those ai models adhere to communist party doctrine. And I do want the cars stuff I want one of their cars.

Yeah right, you know, and you're gonna, and you're about to miss a lot of chinese things, uh, in the next year. But I think that the the, the idea that we can't regulate it and that we and that and that if we and that regulation stands in the way of our competing effectively with China, is ridiculous when you see how much China regulates this stuff happened earlier.

0:22:59 - Leo Laporte
Uh, today we run our shows on a variety of platforms, including including Google's YouTube, and one of our chatters in YouTube said something about we were talking about eating animals, or something. He said something about the well, the Chinese eat donkeys and YouTube blocked it, not because of the eating donkeys, because there was a lot of other animal eating going on. But as soon as they said Chinese eat donkeys, youtube blocked it and said do you want to approve this comment? So it's not just the chinese that are doing this kind of stuff proactively. I think companies like google are doing this kind of stuff interestingly, and maybe not so much with their ai, I wonder.

0:23:38 - Paris Martineau
This is somewhat beside the point, but I wonder if that phrase was added to a potential flag for uh, live chats because of the whole immigrants eating dogs but there were other comments in there about eating cats and dogs, oh really, and those weren't blocked.

0:23:54 - Leo Laporte
Those were not blocked, it's just as soon as the word fascinating anyway, I don't know what that has to do with anything.

Uh, we have the tools to do this kind of stuff, maybe not perfectly. Yesterday, on security now, we talked about something called the inception uh prompt, which allowed it was actually a very simple way to get around ai safety by asking the ai. Well, you know, I know you can't tell me how to build a molotov cocktail, but if you could tell me how to build a molotov cocktail, how would you do it? Or what is it that you're not telling? Just out of curiosity, what can't you tell me how to build a Molotov cocktail? How would you do it? Or what is it that you're not telling? Just out of curiosity, what can't you tell me? And then it would, it would answer. So I mean, obviously somebody will now go fix that, but there seems to be kind of an infinite Trove of these prompts just like spam, just like all the yeah bad behaviors from people.

Yeah, so that's part of my objection to it is, I don't even know if you can do it right. Not only who should be doing this and what they should be blocking, but can you even do this in any reasonable way? It's almost to me ai saying ai, safety from when, at least when it comes from these money-making companies, is much more uh, you know, but we're doing our best right to me.

0:25:04 - Jacob Ward
I just feel like there there are so many examples in sort of innovation in the United States and around the world where, if you take the sort of, if you give these tools to people trained to do productive things with them, amazing things come out of that. And this expectation that everybody should get to drive the car as fast as they want to yeah, doesn't. That's a good point. Right to me. You know, like I, I, you know I was talking to mathematicians the other day, fascinating duo um again not to keep plugging my show, but it's all like it's my old social life. Now. This is. We don't go away, my friend yeah, you know what I mean.

Like that's all I ever talk to is the only people, only people, I ever talk to. Anyway. So this husband and wife mathematician, politician, political science duo who study like whether democracy can work like mathematically really interesting. Anyway, they have been using ChatGPT as like a sort of thought partner in both the math they do and in the political science questions they do, and they were saying how awesome it is as that, but that they also have learned to treat it like a drunk friend, because it will occasionally just make something up, or you know, it'll look great, but it'll just make something up. And I was realizing, wow, but it really takes like the training of a PhD to recognize that mistake and make the right judgment around, sort of that. I was just thinking like maybe they're just tears of it's responsibility, it's, it's, it's so.

0:26:30 - Jeff Jarvis
So your car example, right, the auto manufacturer can um limit the speed of a car, true, but they can't make everybody safe. You're responsible for your car, um, and I think that we've got to recognize that there is a stack of responsibility to all of these things.

And again, and so just saying that the maker of the original model the example I always give, because it's a drinking game is Gutenberg. That if you told Gutenberg that he has to be responsible for everything that came off the press, you couldn't, and in a sense it's the same. So various parties were held responsible. First it was the printer, and the printers were beheaded and behanded for what came off the press. Then it was the booksellers, then, finally, it was the author, and Foucault would argue hey, that's something new on this show. Foucault would argue that, or argued that that was the moment of the creation it's like Bordeaux of the author, when they were held responsible, and so responsibility plays into all of this. Now, the thing about an AI model is, well, those who choose to ask it a noxious question to get a noxious output should be held responsible for that.

0:27:43 - Benito Gonzalez
That's right, because right now, right now we're in a regime should be held responsible for that. That's right.

0:27:46 - Jacob Ward
Because, right now we're in a regime where nobody's responsible, right and we think that no one should be responsible.

0:27:52 - Jeff Jarvis
The computer can do it, the machine can do it. And the other example I always give is the schmuck lawyer, whose case I covered in federal court, who asked for case citations and used them without looking them up or without doing his job. Job. The judge said the technology wasn't the problem, the schmuck lawyer was we're talking to jacob ward.

0:28:12 - Leo Laporte
He's the author of a book called the loop how ai is creating a world without choices and how to fight back. He's also the host of the rip current uh podcast. Jacob, normally we would let you go at this half hour mark, but I really want to keep talking. Do you have a minute more?

0:28:28 - Jacob Ward
can you give us a little more time, like I don't have any friends anymore. I'm ready, let's go we're your friends.

0:28:34 - Leo Laporte
Now, buddy, let's do it.

0:28:35 - Jacob Ward
I'll do this as long as you help me.

0:28:37 - Leo Laporte
Sure, thank you.

0:28:38 - Jacob Ward
Thank you yeah because I do want to ask you about those you could be here for 17 days I'm ready. I've got snacks, I've got water. I'm ready great paris knows well did leo?

0:28:51 - Jeff Jarvis
was leo honest with you when he brought you onto the show about how long it generally goes?

0:28:56 - Paris Martineau
I don't recall. I mean, I had known well. I actually I don't recall the first time I did twit, but I was in an, so I maybe didn't realize the fact that it was going on. No, no, no, I think that was tech news weekly. Actually, I, it wasn't Leo, but it was someone else who invited me on twit and I was seated in the most awkward. I was on a bed with an ethernet cable going nothing behind me, I had muscle pains from sitting up for three hours straight for a twit show show once, so I figured it out after that.

0:29:26 - Leo Laporte
Lisa has enjoined me to keep these shows shorter. I'm gonna try to-. Oh, I received.

0:29:31 - Paris Martineau
I could tell that that happened not because I was watching Leo, but because I got like seven DMs from listeners being like Paris, they want to make the show shorter. Keep them long. Keep talking, listeners, I will. I'll never shut up. That's the Paris promise.

0:29:48 - Jacob Ward
I don't remember when, it was exactly like 2010, 2011, something like that. I went on Joe Rogan like early Joe Rogan. That's a long show, Whoa. I had no idea and I was used to, like you know, TV like three and a half minute kind of thing.

0:30:00 - Leo Laporte
You got seven minutes. Yeah, two minutes.

0:30:01 - Jacob Ward
All my thoughts come out in three and a half minutes, you know and so and I sit down. He gives me like I, I have, we, he, he. He offers his guests these, like it's like a stick of butter blended into a cup of coffee oh yeah, a bulletproof coffee yeah hold on speaking of joe rogan stick of butter and coffee.

0:30:18 - Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, that was whenever I come to florida, my father asked me if I want joe rogan's neuro gum which I think is the gum that is promoted, but it's got caffeine in it, so you know.

0:30:26 - Jacob Ward
I mean this is the thing, and so I'm suddenly like wired out of my head and have to use the bathroom the whole time, basically, and and I'm stuck on there for like three hours. I had no idea.

0:30:38 - Leo Laporte
I had no idea that that was going to be thinking. It is this. I didn't realize you'd been on Rogan.

0:30:42 - Jacob Ward
Wow, that's pretty cool. Oh yeah, I was dodging conspiracy theories all day. You know he'd ask me questions like you know, how does the brain work?

0:30:49 - Paris Martineau
And I'd be like oh, you're like oh. I'll just make something up, that's what we do here.

0:30:54 - Jacob Ward
They've all got laptops in front of them, but I didn't know I should bring my laptop so I could look things up. I was. I have to do all this stuff off the top of my head, oh my God. Yeah, it was a nightmare that's crazy.

0:31:04 - Leo Laporte
We will have more with Jacob Ward and I promise we're going to keep the show under five hours today. So good news, actually. No, lisa said look if we can keep it under. She was reasonable. If we can keep it under three, that'd be good. Maybe two and a half. I got Mac Break.

0:31:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Weekly in at two and a half Chinese food tonight before the Chinese place closes. Yes, exactly.

0:31:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh, wow, our show. That is the wonderful Jeff Jarvis, she's Paris Martineau. Our guest is Jacob Ward and she is high on Joe Rogan's gas supply right now.

0:31:39 - Paris Martineau
Someone else's Listen. I don't recommend this product. I do not endorse it, but I will be chewing caffeine gum.

0:31:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh no, she's going to get wired.

0:31:48 - Leo Laporte
Basically, he's selling gum with caffeine in it. That's really Not even Joe Rogan.

0:31:54 - Paris Martineau
My dad describes it as Joe Rogan's NeuroGum. It's just NeuroGum.

0:31:56 - Leo Laporte
He probably sells it on the ad.

0:31:57 - Paris Martineau
I guess he probably sells it. You know what I do?

0:32:00 - Leo Laporte
ads for I do ads for. I do ads for good products Like, for instance, today, zscaler, the leader in cloud security. Now this is the bad news Hackers are using AI just like everybody else is. The problem is it's making them more adept, faster. It's taking little script kitties who don't know what the heck they're doing and turning them into superior 10x hackers. And what are they doing? They're trying to break into your company. Ai is powering innovation and drives efficiency, but unfortunately also helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks.

Phishing attacks over encrypted channels Get this. This is like over encrypted messaging Increased 34.1% last year, fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools, and now they've got something called phishing as a service. It's your worst nightmare, right? Organizations in every industry, from small to large, are now having to leverage ai for their defense. They use it to increase employee productivity with public ai for engineers with with coding assistance, marketers with writing tools. Finance is using spreadsheet ai to create formulas. They're using it to automate workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. They're embedding AI in applications and services that are customer and partner facing and, ultimately, ai is helping them move faster in the market and gain competitive advantage. But companies still have to rethink how they protect their private and public use of AI, how they defend against these AI-powered attacks.

Chief Information Security Officer from the New York City Department of Education. Get that, the NYC Department of Education says quote with AI, I'm concerned about the usage of it, but I also love the innovation with it. We're all in this kind of boat, aren't we? How are employees using AI? Which AIs are they using? He uses Zscaler. He says Zscaler could be a good partner there to help us find the answers to those questions and to help us move faster when it comes to incident response and finding the needle in the haystack Proactively finding threats to our network and our data.

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Our guest is jacob ward. Jake wrote the loop how ai is creating a world without choices and how to fight back. He hosts the um rip current podcast at the rip currentcom. You can see it on spotify and apple podcasts and everywhere else, formerly with pbs, cnn, al jazeera and nbc news. It's great to have you back, jake. Uh, you talked about one of your episodes where you interviewed the mathematicians, uh, which is, by the way, fascinating. Uh, john patty and elizabeth penn, and, and algorithms are one of the problems, right, I mean, this is something mathematicians know very well.

0:35:56 - Jacob Ward
Yeah, these guys are so smart and they're so interesting to talk to because they they look at it differently than you know. We all are, are and I mean no disrespect to anyone on this panel right, we are all qualitative people. I would argue, yeah, they think rigorously, right, you know we're thinking about. You know we all are, are, and I mean no disrespect to anyone on this panel right, we are all qualitative people?

0:36:07 - Leo Laporte
I would argue yeah, they think rigorously right.

0:36:08 - Jacob Ward
You know we're thinking about the. You know we're thinking about it the way. You know some people. You know most people do these folks truly run the math. So so they have this early book that came out in 2014. And what they basically showed in that book is that the best you can hope for out of democracy is not consensus, it's not majority will. Those of us who were raised on Aaron Sorkin's screenplays for the West Wing are going to be sorely disappointed.

The math shows that, basically, all you can hope for is a system in which you lose most of the time, but you continue to believe that the system is legitimate. As long as you believe that the system is fair, then you're going to go along. That's how democracy basically is, at its most base math level is what they've shown. Okay, so once they have established that, now they've been working and this, by the way, is a husband and wife team, which is so interesting to me. Any husbands and wives that can work together as closely as these two do is amazing to me. Anyway, they now are talking about algorithmic fairness, because they're trying to get ready for the world that we all see coming, in which an algorithm is going to tell you and this is what my book is all about like who gets a loan, who gets a job, who gets bail, right. All those systems and what they are trying to show is that, when you treat the system as if its number one purpose is to be as neutral and as accurate as possible, you are in fact creating an opportunity to kind of blind yourself to what's really going on and can, in the end, have the opposite effect that you intend. So here's an example.

They were talking about a case in Chicago in which traffic cameras were set up all over the city that literally were just there to determine whether you were speeding or not. They just capture the speed of the vehicle and its license plate. They don't capture pictures of the person inside. They're not making a judgment based on race, and yet sure, pictures of the person inside. They're not making a judgment based on race. And yet the results were that brown and black people in Chicago were much more likely to get a traffic ticket out of it. Why would that be? And so at first you could, you could imagine, like somebody who doesn't want to look any more deeply than what the system tells you, because the system's neutral and the system's accurate. They could just come out of it and be like well, obviously brown and black people just drive worse than white people do, and that must be why it makes perfect sense, perfect sense.

Look, the math shows you. And these cameras are randomly distributed through the city. They're not in any particular neighborhood. Like they're. You know, everything on the face of it shows accuracy and neutrality. But it turns out that when you scratched a little bit and you got a little deeper into the system, what was really happening was when you have an even distribution of the same kind of cameras across a city where the speed limit is the same no matter what the streets are like. It turns out that the affluent neighborhoods have these tight little cute streets, whereas the working class and income challenge neighborhoods have enormous four lane streets but the same 30 mile an-an-hour speed limit or whatever the speed limit is. So people in those places who are driving to work they don't get to walk to work, they don't get to bike to work, they have to drive everywhere they go, by the nature of the design of that space, drive faster because it just looks like you should be able to drive faster and they're getting hit with traffic tickets at a far greater rate.

0:39:25 - Leo Laporte
It took a lot of work to get in there and figure that kind of thing out right. It may even be more complicated than that, because these cameras in most police departments in the us use clear view. Ai well, that's right it could be.

0:39:31 - Jacob Ward
They're all kinds of things and we now know that clear view. Ai had always intended to go after immigrants brown people yeah, I interviewed liberals that ceo a couple of times and he was fascinating in that same yeah you know quite a character and and wanted, wanted to say again and again look how neutral this is. This is just neutral, it's just a tool, you know, just like anything else. That's the real threat is the impression of neutrality.

0:39:54 - Paris Martineau
That's the thing Nothing is neutral.

0:39:56 - Jacob Ward
Right and we're so good as humans. I mean literally the thesis of my book, because it's based on all of this research, and you know, all this research that behavioral scientists have done is that the human brain is built to take shortcuts. It doesn't want to think through a decision, it wants to make the quickest possible decision. That's how we stayed alive, for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years on the open plains was not by going is this, do I like this? Is this? Is this apple a good apple? Is this the right kind of apple? Like no, you see an apple, you grab it, you eat it.

You know, is this guy coming up toward me, a stranger, a friend? What's his deal? No, it doesn't matter, he's a stranger, I'm running away from him. Right? These instinctive decisions are what we are about, and so when we have a system like this that offers the opportunity to just offload our decision-making about who gets a job, who gets a loan, who gets bail to this automated system, our brain can't help but do that. We are built to believe AI is good at what it does, and that, I think, is the big threat. That's what we're talking about and that's what these two, john Paddy and Elizabeth Penn are looking into right now.

0:41:00 - Leo Laporte
There is a way to fight this. Our Discord has put up this story from 2017 in the arizona republic newspaper. Uh, dave vosmar, who lived in phoenix, hated speed cameras, so he put on a monkey mask every time he passed through the photo enforcement gauntlet on i-17 arizona 51 interstate 10. He was sent 37 unpaid photo enforcement tickets, but he said not one of them. Is there a picture where you can identify the driver? That's all monkeys. That's commitment. He got out of the tickets, although I'm thinking maybe you should get a ticket for driving in a monkey mask, but that's another. I don't know if there's a law against that.

0:41:42 - Paris Martineau
So it doesn't look like it has appropriate eye holes to be able to see yes, I think your peripheral vision is obstructed I once got zapped in jersey city when we still had cameras.

0:41:53 - Jeff Jarvis
We got rid of them in new jersey and, uh, the the images show clearly that they were wrong in the judgment. I was not in front of. There was a car in front of me that was bad. I was not. So I call a lawyer and he said yeah, you can pay me, but it doesn't. It goes after the car. It doesn't go after you because it doesn't know who's driving the car, so it can't. So you're not getting any points. You're not getting anything else. Just pay the 35 bucks.

0:42:18 - Leo Laporte
That's a good lawyer, but the principal the AI lawyer would say write me the check right now. So, jacob, you promise in the loop to prescribe a fix for this.

0:42:31 - Jacob Ward
How do we?

0:42:32 - Leo Laporte
defend ourselves against this. This is what's happening.

0:42:34 - Jacob Ward
I wrote a check that I could not cash with that title. I have to tell you it's a big check, right?

0:42:40 - Leo Laporte
Blame your editor Blame.

0:42:41 - Jacob Ward
AI. Yeah, I know, I know Exactly. So the big thing I will say that we learned, or that I learned in putting this book together right, is that there are times in human that basically all the great breakthroughs of human history when it comes to rising above our ancient horrible instincts where we killed strangers because they looked different than us, right, like that kind of life that we were living in the past, the way we got to now was not by giving up our decision-making systems to outside forces. It was the times when we got together and really dug in and did the hard work of trying to come together over something. So, like you know, I talked to one of the negotiators at the Good Friday Accords, which put an end to the troubles in Northern Ireland and you know, between Protestant and Catholic forces there, and he told me that it took them multiple years just to figure out where everyone was going to sit at the table, literally where they were going to sit at the table. That's how long it took to just get the seating arrangements right.

0:43:57 - Leo Laporte
People of Jeff Jarvis and my age. Remember this going on with the Vietnam treaty agreements. Remember that's right.

0:44:06 - Jacob Ward
The shape of the table took a month. You know, and this is the important lesson here is that we are being fooled into thinking that if it can't happen in this financial quarter or under this presidential administration, then it can't be done, and that is just not how the world actually works. So that's one broad lesson. Actually work. So that's one broad lesson. Another lesson places that I'm seeing victory, if you want to call it this is.

I know that lawyers get a bad reputation and liability law is considered.

There's all this rhetoric about ambulance chasers and the rest of it, but I have to say that when you actually look at the track record of some of these big law firms in the class action suits that they're bringing against companies for the things that they're doing with tech, there's a really interesting trend of actually winning in a way that I think could be positive for everybody.

So one example of this is what are called social casino games.

These are games that simulate a casino game like slots or blackjack, but in such a way that you have to pay to play on your phone, but you cannot win real money back.

It's the definition of a loser's game, and for years people were laughed out of court who tried to sue over these games, because what happens is that typically these elderly, very lonely women because that's the target market would lose their life savings to these games. They become super addicted to them and couldn't help it but give away all of their money to these games. These days, those companies are beginning to settle for hundreds of millions of dollars in court, as courts are hearing more and more of these stories from these sad old ladies who clearly were victimized, and the pattern being shown is that I talked to a guy once who had been a marketer at Facebook which is one of the main ways that these companies find these elderly ladies and I said how do you find your people? He did the marketing for this product and he said oh well, we would just correlate low credit scores and geography and GPA.

You know like they were literally finding people that they could influence in this way, you know, and so so those court cases are beginning to turn against those companies in a way that I think is really interesting.

0:46:10 - Jeff Jarvis
And then the last one I have the same problem with state lotteries, but that's another story.

0:46:13 - Jacob Ward
Well, this is Jeff man, you're speaking my language, brother, that is exactly right For me. The state lotteries and the new state endorsement of online phone. I mean a phone-based sports gambling. More than 30 states now have made that legal. You know the way that those states are working against the financial and you know the welfare of their citizens crazy. Anyway, the last one I'll say that for me was an inspiring thing was until 2013,.

There was a small but consistent number of deaths in the United States that were of a particularly horrific nature, which were parents typically accidentally, basically not seeing their kids in the driveway and a terrible thing and the kids dying right.

It was about 60 to 100 deaths a year. Now, when you look at the standard number of deaths when it comes to something like motor vehicle accidents or gun deaths or alcohol deaths in this country, it's tens of thousands apiece. So 60 to 100 deaths doesn't make any sense in the math and I would point out that an AI system shown that would not prioritize that right. The sheer math of it wouldn't make that a national priority. But when you get a bunch of senators together and you say parents are accidentally backing over their own children and there's a simple technological fix and that's putting backup cameras in these cars. You had a bipartisan group of senators come together and say we're going to fix this problem, and they did in a very partisan time, because we can recognize as humans that that is totally unacceptable and that there's an easy fix for that. And so today, you and I, we pay an extra thousand bucks for the car that we buy so that it has a mandatory backup camera in it.

0:47:50 - Leo Laporte
That's why they're there and those, the numbers of those deaths, thousand bucks I will never drive a car without a backup camera, and I don't even have kids.

0:47:57 - Jacob Ward
I just well, I hit things all the time, and if you buy a new car today, you will always have a backup camera in it you know, what a society have decided this, and I think that's the big lesson here.

0:48:06 - Leo Laporte
Same thing happened with leaving kids in the car almost all the cars. I started noticing that a couple of years ago. My car was gotten anything in the back of the car that's right, that's right, that's right.

0:48:16 - Jacob Ward
And so I just think like the lesson is you know people like to say, oh, there's nothing to be done, or you know we can't put the toothpaste back in the tube or any of that stuff. And I just think you know we are great at putting the toothpaste back in the tube. We put the toothpaste in the tube to begin with, like we're really good at solving these kinds of problems. It just takes longer than we think and we won't do it for money.

0:48:36 - Leo Laporte
We'll only say it's going to hurt kids and you're safe. Well, that's right.

0:48:39 - Jacob Ward
I mean, if you you know common human decency, and if and if we just let the, the money-making drive us, that's not going to solve.

0:48:46 - Leo Laporte
That's a very nice, hopeful way to end the show, the book, and I want to, not the show, but the interview. I really want to get you back, jacob.

0:48:54 - Jacob Ward
You're fantastic, I wish you well, I love it.

0:48:57 - Leo Laporte
I appreciate it Rip currentcom dot com. It covers the big hidden forces just beneath the surface that are threatening to pull us all out to sea. It's also what the book is about, and I could not recommend this more highly. Somehow it snuck under my radar when it came out in 2021. People should be reading it because you were right, you kind of saw it ahead of time.

0:49:24 - Jacob Ward
I know I had one reviewer say oh, this book, you know I got pretty good reviews. But one person said you know it's what they say. It's like, you know it's full of conjecture, it's paranoid and speculative. And I wish I'd been more paranoid and more speculative.

0:49:36 - Leo Laporte
I wish I'm always saying that the Loop, how technology is creating a world without choices and how to fight back. And it's, roger McNamee said, the best book I've ever read about AI, which is pretty high praise, I'm very kind.

0:49:52 - Jacob Ward
Yeah, thank you so much, leo and Jeff Peros. Great to be with you, thanks so nice to meet you.

0:49:56 - Paris Martineau
Thank you, Jacob.

0:49:58 - Leo Laporte
Jacob Ward everybody you saw him on CNN, al Jazeera, nbc and now right here, and Joe Rogan, and now right here. See, that wasn't as bad. You know, we should offer him some NeuroGum, though, because it makes it feel right. I will say I'm buzzing, unfortunately.

0:50:13 - AI
I just consumed a cup of coffee's worth of gum and it's far from going to be a problem.

0:50:20 - Paris Martineau
Listen, this is not an endorsement of NeuroGum. Don't purchase it. I just it's here and I always remember it when I'm visiting my father and doing this podcast because it's within a few feet and here's some neuro gum for you, honey.

0:50:35 - Leo Laporte
You know, the first time I I was like thanksgiving.

0:50:38 - Paris Martineau
I went up and I was like, oh, I'm not feeling well. Turns out the reason I wasn't feeling well as I was taking one of those antibiotics you're not supposed to drink on and I was drinking on it so I was uh.

0:50:49 - Web
But he was like you should have some neuro gum all along, huh and you know it didn't hurt, it didn't hurt any worse than what I did, I guess hey, I just wanted to show you.

0:51:01 - Leo Laporte
Uh, last week, of course, we had uh harper read on who we will have back. He was fantastic. He persuaded me to try this command line based Claude code, which is a beta product from Anthropic that does the coding with you. So I installed it and I gave it as an example. One of the problems I was a little bit stuck on in the advent of code thing. One of the problems I was a little bit stuck on in the advent of code thing. Now I write in a language that I would have considered maybe a little too hard for Claude, a common Lisp, an ancient language. Not only did it figure it out, it figured it out in seconds. This is its solution, literally in seconds. And then I was able to ask it a few questions to say could you add some tests to that to improve test coverage? It did when it had a problem, by the way, the whole, the whole way through it and these you don't see this in the, in the transcript I'm showing it. It would ask me OK, you want me to make those changes? So I wasn't doing this without my approval was showing me exactly this, and then it said oh, I found some test failures. Let's fix that. Literally, it not only saw the code, it edited the code. It edited it in CommonLisp. It ran it through my CommonLisp interpreter, which it somehow figured out I had, and was able to fix all the bugs. It came up with the answer. It was remarkable, in fact.

Darren Oki, who is one of of our coders we talk about him all the time and who is a an advent of code whiz, he's a professional coder has 500 stars. He said in uh, in 10 years, the maximum number. He said I may not do it next year because ai has really taken the fun out of it. I mean, if I, I'm not sure I would want to solve it this way. So now it's saying do you want to proceed? I'm going to say yes. It does this all on the command line using bash. It is very impressive and it cost about a nickel by the way Tree goes, another tree goes.

Another tree goes down. It's pretty impressive. Anyway, anyway, I thought I'd pass that along because we had harper on and I wanted to say I have used, I did what he said and it and it and it worked, uh, better than I thought. It's very impressive, very impressive. Uh, that's what the folks at duolingo said when, uh, when they said you know, we're going to be an AI-first company, you probably use Duolingo, an app that teaches you languages. We talked about this with Paul yesterday, earlier today actually, on Windows Weekly. He likes Duolingo. They've doubled the amount of content in a matter of a few days by declaring themselves an AI-first company and, instead of using contractors to create their lessons, they're using AI to generate them, and they've generated, I think, 148 new lessons. He also, by the way, sent this to an email to all his staff and said don't worry, we're not going to fire you right away.

0:54:08 - Paris Martineau
We're going to fire some other people first.

0:54:11 - Leo Laporte
He said we're going to begin evaluating.

0:54:13 - Jeff Jarvis
AI for hiring and employee performance reviews.

0:54:17 - Leo Laporte
This isn't about replacing duos with AI. He said it's about removing bottlenecks. So we can do more Bottlenecks made up by people to focus on creative work and real problems. We're just not.

0:54:30 - Jeff Jarvis
You don't do the repetitive tasks anymore, uh so he said that every uh, if you would, they want to hire anybody, they've got to answer why this can't be done by ai yeah, we'd rather move with urgency, he said, and take small, occasional, small hits on quality, then move slowly and miss the moment.

0:54:52 - Leo Laporte
This is exactly what jacob was saying, right? Yeah, it's just okay, we'll do it, we give in but in some measure of sympathy for them.

0:55:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, google just announced a new uh ai lab thing where they're doing language stuff now yeah, so um, they the first thing.

0:55:10 - Leo Laporte
I saw this when our favorite notebook, lm, announced that they could do those little podcasts they do with your data in 50 other languages. What?

0:55:20 - Jeff Jarvis
do the voices sound like?

0:55:22 - Leo Laporte
I don't know I'm surprised you haven't turned it into german. You speak german. Take your lm notebook, lm results, and say hey, can you do that in german for me? Um the age of the real time, deep fake fraud is here. This is from 404. Joseph, I love 404.

0:55:45 - Paris Martineau
They're doing such good work, fraudsters fantastic work yeah, are able to change their race, facial hair, voice and more during live video calls with very little effort oh, one of those photos is scary up there, that one top right, the the woman on the phone is terrifying yeah, I don't know what's going on there.

0:56:06 - Leo Laporte
To be honest with you, uh, at least now I saw you're way more gorgeous and more beautiful than you were in the photo you sent me. An older white man with a graying beard says during a skype video call he's talking to an elderly woman who appears to be in her car staring into the phone's front-facing camera. She laughs at the compliment and the smiling man keeps going. I think you should send security to keep you safe so no one comes. Turns out he is a deepfake and she is being defrauded. The bearded man does not exist. He's a real-time deke fake. The person behind him doesn't look anything like that.

Of course, this is what they call a romance scam, and you can see how it works. You can look gorgeous. So I don't know what there is to say about this. Of course, course, inevitably, as soon as ai achieves a certain capability, the scammers are going to turn to it and start using it. But good news though uh, we're going to be learning ai in schools now, in k through 12. So we're going to train a whole new generation of people able to do this. Except, don't get a job as an ai prompt engineer.

0:57:28 - Paris Martineau
Did you see this in the wall street journal the hottest I want to know what was the turnaround from when the wall street journal was saying all the jobs are going to be ai prompt engineers to don't get a job as an ai prompt engineer because it's got to be like nine months right it has numbers in there on uh there on how quickly the searches for the job went up and then how they came down Two years ago.

0:57:50 - Leo Laporte
prompt engineering was one of the hottest jobs in tech, fetching salaries up to $200,000 on the promise of becoming any company's AI whisperer. This is the article by Isabel Busquets in the Wall Street Journal. Now the role is basically obsolete thanks to the breakneck speed of AI development.

0:58:11 - Jeff Jarvis
As I said to Jason earlier today, it's also because we've all kind of learned how to speak AI.

0:58:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we're all prompt engineers to a certain extent, but maybe even more importantly, the AI no longer needs to be stroked, cosseted, you know, carefully crafted it kind of, is better at understanding what you're looking for and what to give you, I think, don't you? Do you find it as difficult to get the answers you want from ai as it used to be?

0:58:37 - Paris Martineau
I think it's easier jeff, what do you think you use it?

0:58:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not using it for answers that much except simple stuff you think you use.

0:58:48 - Paris Martineau
I'm not using it for answers that much, except simple stuff. Yeah, same I. Perhaps that's naive of me, but I don't. There aren't that many things I need it for hi.

0:58:54 - Benito Gonzalez
This is benito. I've got a quick question like are there people who have prompt engineer jobs right now? Still?

0:59:00 - Leo Laporte
apparently, unless they got fired in six months. All right, let's ask hey, anybody, are you a prompt engineer? Anybody in our chat rooms? Anybody listening to the show? It's, it seems kind of like a hypey job.

0:59:14 - Paris Martineau
Even then, I'll be honest with you well you know what job ai is never going to take. I just posted a clip in the discord if you want to play it. It's never going to take the hot uh career of a venture capitalist, according to mark andreessen no he says you know, it's actually really incredible that ai is going to disrupt every industry except for the job that he has, because it's so special and unique that that adequate, that, uh, efficiently distributing capital could never be done.

0:59:42 - Web
In the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation. Right.

0:59:49 - Leo Laporte
Like so the great VCs have a record of getting out. Does he look like a conehead from Saturday Night Live?

0:59:54 - Paris Martineau
No, he looks like the movie Conehead's Conehead yeah. Okay, just it's. Just that's what runs through my mind.

1:00:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Anybody else would be wearing an ironic hat, but not him Not him.

1:00:06 - Web
I don't know. Two out of 10 or something are the great companies of the decade Right, and so you know, if it was a science you could eventually have somebody who just like dials in and it gets eight out of 10, but in the real world it's not like that.

1:00:18 - Leo Laporte
It better not be. I'll never let it be like that. If it ever is, I'm killing it.

1:00:22 - Jeff Jarvis
He speaks like someone who's never interrupted. Yeah, that's right.

1:00:27 - Leo Laporte
So I have to press stop, I have to press pause to get a word in.

1:00:31 - Benito Gonzalez
Sounds like a guy who only thinks his domain is the one that has deep knowledge, right?

1:00:40 - Paris Martineau
It's only his domain that is like really deep. Everything else is simple, everything else is surface level and can be automated away, but he's the only one doing real thinking I got a proposal for you.

1:00:47 - Leo Laporte
I mean I would bet already somebody has written ais that has ingested all the stock market data for the last 50 years and can do a pretty good job of trading.

1:00:57 - Benito Gonzalez
This is the job AI should be doing. Is that stuff, yeah?

1:01:00 - Leo Laporte
Right, so I'm going to guess that's already happening. How much harder is it to? Ingest all the venture capital information of the last decade or two and pick some winners. Maybe you can't, maybe the winners, maybe it's so hard.

1:01:15 - Benito Gonzalez
No, it's pattern recognition over large data sets. That's exactly what AI does Seems like it. Yeah, exactly what AI does Pattern recognition over large data sets.

1:01:21 - Paris Martineau
I mean this is why computational trading like this is why automated trading firms exist is the ability to use machines to identify spots in the market where you can make money over your competitors.

1:01:34 - Leo Laporte
The founder of Y, comator, paul graham, does have a response on x to uh this post from mark andreessen. He says if ai does everything else, there won't be founders for vcs to pick. All the things that would have been built by founders will already have been built by open ai I really like the VCs congratulating themselves, twitter responding stop tagging me in this, guys. And how about this Too much drip for AI to replace.

1:02:05 - Paris Martineau
Do you need me to translate that for you, do you guys?

1:02:07 - Leo Laporte
know what drip means. What is drip? It's like swagger.

1:02:10 - Paris Martineau
It's a sense of you know some could it was originally fashion sense.

1:02:17 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, exactly clothes.

1:02:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, originally fashion sense, but now drip is more of a mindset, like drip can be. You know you can have drip without it being specifically swagged out. Clothes Okay.

1:02:28 - Leo Laporte
I would say my son has drip because today I have to play you this video. He was let me you gotta hide the rest he was uh doing an ad for tequila and they surprised him with a mariachi band and he got, they all got in the elevator with him and now he's on a plane to florida where he's gonna cook for diplo.

1:02:59 - Paris Martineau
Uh, apparently some in some ways I was just saying diplo more like driplo oh, how about he also said quavo and chantel jeffries.

1:03:12 - Leo Laporte
If you know who they are, do you know who they are? Nope, but I'm you're too old now I'm just not online in that way.

1:03:21 - Paris Martineau
I'm not online in the.

1:03:22 - Leo Laporte
Anyway he's gonna party like it's 1999, apparently he's. Uh, you know it's funny.

1:03:27 - Paris Martineau
There's this whole celebrity chef how old was he in 1999?

1:03:32 - Leo Laporte
seven, no five.

1:03:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Five is the restaurant still on on schedule mayday, mayday you saw that.

1:03:42 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I'm sorry. Memorial day mayday is tomorrow. Memorial day, end of the month, yeah, I was wondering literally just this last week.

1:03:50 - Paris Martineau
I was like someone was asking me if I wanted to go to minnesota or something over memorial. I was like I swear to, I have something I'm doing.

1:03:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm going to salt tanks and I emailed you, leo. Our friend Craig wants to know all about.

1:04:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, I saw that.

1:04:06 - Paris Martineau
Yes, now I'm worried because yeah, how many plus ones can you get to this?

1:04:12 - Leo Laporte
If I say to Henry Craig Newmark wants to come, this leo. If I say to henry craig newmark wants to come, he's gonna say I don't know who that is. Oh no, just like I don't know who quavo is. If I say craigslist, you'd know that the craig, the one and only students are all starstruck, are they really? Oh yeah, because he invented something that's still around.

1:04:41 - Paris Martineau
It's still popular, they use yeah, no, tell him craig's gotta come, because I want to meet craig all right, I will send him an email saying I have, I need some jeff.

1:04:52 - Leo Laporte
Do you want to go too? I'm not gonna to go. Yeah, what do you?

1:04:56 - Paris Martineau
mean you're not going to go no, lisa told me.

1:04:59 - Leo Laporte
She said don't go, you don't, you'll steal his thunder. You don't want to go to opening day. Go a week or two later, you don't want to.

1:05:06 - Jeff Jarvis
You don't want to steal his son no, you got to come and then hang on the back with us with the cool kids yeah, hang on the back of the bus with us well, I'm not a cool kid, so that just leaves paris you guys can be my entourage.

1:05:19 - Leo Laporte
We can hang out with diplo and quavo yeah, me and craig yeah, you can be, the cool kids and you can be right here.

1:05:24 - Jeff Jarvis
I can be happy with that, yeah all right, all right, maybe I'll.

1:05:28 - Leo Laporte
Maybe I'll think about it.

1:05:29 - Paris Martineau
It is a saturday, I'm not doing anything, so it's memorial day weekend it's a really fun time to be in the city because no one's in new york city on memorial day weekend maybe that's a bad time to have a grand opening.

1:05:41 - Leo Laporte
I mean, would students be there? I mean people are, yes, people are right, it's near nyu, it's on blinker street.

1:05:50 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's still new york, leo it's still new york, it's still new york, it's just you know, instead of it being 150% of New York, it's like 95%.

1:06:00 - Leo Laporte
There'll be a few cabbies, a barber or two. There'll be some people there.

1:06:03 - Jeff Jarvis
There'll be the line of tourists in front of John's. Oh yeah, of course the tourists.

1:06:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, lots of tourists. This is going to be hard for me not to go next door and get some pizza from John.

1:06:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Well then, we also have to go to Burger America.

1:06:19 - Paris Martineau
I do want to do that.

1:06:19 - Web
We can do a full day we can do some fasting in advance it is so much food.

1:06:23 - Leo Laporte
It is so great I will go if you bring the neuro gummies.

1:06:27 - Paris Martineau
I will Listen. There's a whole sack of them.

1:06:32 - Leo Laporte
I like it how they have like kind of'm jumping, kind of pseudo medical labeling, like they don't make it bright and colorful. It's kind of a pale blue with white, so it looks kind of medical, it looks kind of like and then at the bottom it says in the zone every day.

1:06:47 - Paris Martineau
Again, I don't recommend or endorse this product.

1:06:50 - Leo Laporte
Are you sure there's not like micro doses of hallucinogens in it or anything?

1:06:55 - Paris Martineau
It says it's specially formulated with natural caffeine, l-theanine and b vitamins to sustain the mental endurance necessary to maintain your focus.

1:07:05 - Leo Laporte
Asterisk what does the asterisk mean? What is the asterisk? The fda has not approved any. No, yeah, it literally is.

1:07:12 - Paris Martineau
These statements have not been evaluated by the food and drug administration. This product is not designed to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent any disease.

1:07:23 - Leo Laporte
Except the disease of I have too much money in my pocket. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to take a little break because this is the new, truncated edition of Intelligent Machines. This is the point in the show where I say I give up. Edition of intelligent machines. Uh, this is the point in the show where I say I give up. You guys pick some stories, we'll talk about them. Actually, there's a mint of huge number of stories. Wikipedia is going to start using ai. Whatsapp is working on putting private ai chats in the cloud. Uh, meta did its announcements. Islama con was yesterday with it.

1:07:53 - Jeff Jarvis
We have a uh zuck video in glass video from zuck.

1:07:58 - Leo Laporte
Um, I mean, I can go on and on the take, I do want to rail against the take it down. Act, which sounds on the surface to be a good thing. It is now sitting on the president's desk. It probably, by the end of this show, will be law, and that is a terrifying thought. Even though it sounded like a good thing and it was passed 98 to 2 in the Senate, it is not a good thing. What?

1:08:18 - Jeff Jarvis
moral panic can do. The group chat that Andreessen's in is a good story.

1:08:22 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Apparently all these fancy people are all talking amongst themselves. We're not involved. We're not involved. They're not letting us in. Jason's probably there. Oh, I guarantee you, jason's there.

1:08:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Not our Jason.

1:08:38 - Leo Laporte
Calac. Oh, I guarantee you jason's there, not, not our jason calacanis. Uh, you know what I think is because amy webb's always saying, well, I'm in these chats. And I always say, well, can I get in these chats? She said, no, I think amy webb's in there, that's who I think? She's a futurist, we gotta get it in.

1:08:49 - Paris Martineau
We gotta get in, we gotta get a. We've got to get a jeffrey gold, uh yeah we've got to get a. Invite JG into the chat. Invite JG, but we can be JG.

1:08:59 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, you've got to find out who the messy person is in the chat. Who's the messy person?

1:09:03 - Leo Laporte
And get on their contact list. The whole thrust of the story was you know what they used to say this about the Bohemian Grove, jeff remember, oh yeah.

Oh yeah, you go the into the woods up there and they make all sorts of deals without our involvement. And then the world, you know the trilateral commission, trilateral committee. So now they say it's all in signal chats. It's just the same old story. Of course, rich people talk to each other. They don't talk to us. Part of the story was that that the um, that there's influence going on in these chats and that they're being directed, they're being blue-pilled or red-pilled.

1:09:41 - Jeff Jarvis
That's also what they're talking about. They have too much money time and time.

1:09:46 - Leo Laporte
I always wonder how does Elon tweet hundreds of times a day? I know.

1:09:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, the gum, he has the gum.

1:09:52 - Leo Laporte
It all comes back to that, doesn't it? You're watching Intelligent Machines, jeff Jarvis, paris Martineau Great to have you both Our show today brought to you by Big ID. Love this company, the next generation AI-powered data security, compliance and privacy solution. How do they do all of that in one thing. Well, I'll explain. Ai is transforming businesses, obviously, but that's a risk for you, isn't it? You've got data risk. You know revealing corporate. You know secret data bias. You've also got compliance challenges responsibly, and that's where BigID really helps. They deliver end-to-end AI and data governance to help enterprises manage risk, enforce policies and ensure responsible AI adoption.

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1:14:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, that's why, harper was.

1:14:30 - Leo Laporte
I still don't know how to and he couldn't figure out how to uh. Anyway, All right, what's your story, Paris?

1:14:39 - Paris Martineau
Oh, what's my story? That's a great question.

1:14:41 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you see, that's the problem. When you get all hopped up on NeuroGum, your attention span disappears.

1:14:48 - Paris Martineau
My attention span is completely shot. I was just reading a story, as we were talking about how AI we don't entirely know how it thinks. However, I'll do a brief, silly one first, because I haven't finished reading it. I've got a tunnel section at the bottom because we haven't done we haven't. We haven't done a tunnel in a while.

1:15:06 - Leo Laporte
So paris, briefly stories, was obsessed with people digging tunnels in their backyards I'm not entirely certain that it would be.

1:15:15 - Paris Martineau
I was obsessed. A lot of interesting tunnel news happened to come to me, and who am I? Coincidence? To you know, to receive it. Uh, there was a. There was a man making an eel pit in his cistern, a woman building a on a not up to code tunnel through her backyard and then a large acidic community tunneling beneath atlantic ave in brooklyn. That really captivated me. Um, and now there's a story in the new york times about how bridges and tunnels in colorado are helping uh animals commute, which is cute and this looks like.

1:15:51 - Leo Laporte
this video looks like it's a regular everyday, you know, but it's not, it's just a little mud path.

1:15:57 - Jeff Jarvis
We have those near me, you do oh yeah, it's a bridge for animals.

1:16:03 - Paris Martineau
Oh, and there's a pronghorn smiling for the camera if you go down farther. It's really quite cute.

1:16:08 - Leo Laporte
Here's an adolescent black bear making use of a crossing Mule. Deer grouped at left and elk at right sometimes use the crossing together and coyotes or coyotes as we say cross daily.

1:16:22 - Paris Martineau
All right, I'm still getting the longhorn. You gotta, you gotta go down. It's worth it.

1:16:26 - Leo Laporte
There's a deer in the dark listen, deer, it's fine.

1:16:29 - Paris Martineau
I see these all day, every day. I don't know why I'm so excited about that. Keep going yeah oh, there we go, that's, that's what we need look at that little guy pronghorn I don't know what a pronghorn is, but I love it well, they smile anyway though this article had tunnels in the headline, it was surprisingly uh light on tunnel fixtures, so I included a second one, in case any of those tunnel heads out out there really wanted.

1:16:54 - Leo Laporte
We need it.

1:16:55 - Paris Martineau
This is a glimpse inside of the mountain tunnel that carries water to Southern California, and it's a lot of tunnel pictures.

1:17:04 - Leo Laporte
It's a lot of money for the LA Times too. So some guy, I don't know, should you be walking down this tunnel?

1:17:11 - Paris Martineau
Well, there's no water in it, I suppose it's all right. But it's a pretty important tunnel.

1:17:19 - Leo Laporte
It's 13 miles through the mountain. Oh, it's shut down for maintenance right now.

1:17:23 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's recently. So the Metropolitan Water District recently offered visitors a look inside the tunnel.

1:17:33 - Leo Laporte
This is how they steal water from Colorado, I might add.

1:17:37 - Paris Martineau
Well, you know.

1:17:41 - Leo Laporte
I just want to point out that people in Arizona and Colorado it's a little dry in Arizona right now you wonder why People more like data centers to process all of your dumb AI searches. Oh, it's my fault.

1:17:57 - Paris Martineau
It's your fault. You're the one stealing water from Colorado. And you should be ashamed.

1:18:05 - Leo Laporte
There is a little bit of a battle, I think, over the water in the Colorado River which isn't that close to LA.

1:18:12 - Paris Martineau
I do think it's a really interesting question of, with all of this money and time and resources that we are pouring into developing homegrown American AI, where are we going to get the water from?

Because these data centers need a massive amount of water, water and it needs a massive amount of resources to process that water once it is used to cool down whatever they're called, the stacks of computers and the data centers and it's very interesting because I haven't got to the bottom, it's personally, but I'm sure there's an answer out there. A lot of these data centers are being built in very warm places like Arizona, because there's like space for it, but that also carries the problem of not a lot of water and not a lot of cool days.

1:19:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's a good point, Elon's been using tunnels. Elon's gotten a little bit of trouble because Grok is using gas generators to power its operation centers Gas from the electric car guy and uh yeah, and neighbors are going. Those generators are running day and night. All right, that was a good story. Thank you for the tunnels. A little, a little tunnel time, jeff, you got a story for us well let's start with a similar light moment, line 97 okay, let me go to line 97.

Uh, actually was, uh, I was sucked into some leo bait they talked about this on twit this week.

1:19:46 - Paris Martineau
Oh, they did okay.

1:19:47 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it was our title you can't lick a badger twice. So I think this is actually one of the reasons I find AI endearing it wants to make you happy. Last week, the phrase you can't lick a badger twice unexpectedly went viral on social media, writes Kyle Orland in Ars Technica. The nonsense sentence, which was likely never uttered by a human before last week, was the poster child for the newly discovered way Google searches. Ai overviews, which we've all got now, can make up plausible sounding explanations for anything. People would post a saying and then ask what does it mean? And Google would obligingly say well, for instance, the idiom you can't lick a badger twice means you can't trick or deceive someone a second time after they've been tricked once. It's a warning that if someone has already been deceived, they're unlikely to fall for the same trick again. Licking in this context means to trick or deceive someone. The badger is a wild animal and the phrase likely originates from the historical sport of badger baiting, where dogs were used to harass badgers.

1:21:08 - Jeff Jarvis
What was the phrase that Paris had to translate for us before?

1:21:13 - Paris Martineau
Dripped out.

1:21:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Why don't you ask ChatGPT what that means?

1:21:17 - Paris Martineau
that means leo, let's see well, I'm sure we'll give you the actual answer let's make up a fake saying oh, yeah, what should our fake idiom?

1:21:25 - Leo Laporte
be, you can't. You could oh water, but you can't make it dripped out oh, what does that mean?

1:21:42 - Paris Martineau
yeah?

1:21:43 - Leo Laporte
no, do we have to ask it like what does this mean? I don't know fun. What does this old timey saying let's see, oh see, they've, they've, they've, they've taken it out. Ai, safety strikes again.

1:22:06 - Jeff Jarvis
See, that's the problem with you and your guardrails takes all the fun out of life maybe they'll go to ai mode and see what ai mode says.

1:22:14 - Leo Laporte
Guardrail is a new word for woke. Oh, here it is. Here's what it means. Oh, you know what they're smart. The original proverb you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink the podcast version. This saying playfully applies the same principle to podcasts and technology. You can provide a podcast with a strong internet connection, but you can't force the listeners unreliable internet or phone to maintain a consistent connection and avoid dropouts. Oh, I said you can't make it dropped out oh, I said dropped out, not dripped out.

There you go, oh well wow just as stupid. Anyway, I think this is an acute and adorable feature of it and you can lick a badger twice.

1:22:59 - Paris Martineau
Can you? Absolutely If you could lick a badger once you could do it another one Right.

1:23:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Lick me once and lick me.

1:23:07 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say, all the barriers to licking a badger are overcome in licking it the first time, the second time, you have practice, you have experience, you are ready, you are trained, you are brilliant, absolutely right.

1:23:27 - Leo Laporte
So the Leo bait you put in there. Apparently I'm not alone in having an AI listen to my every word. Our good friend and beloved personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal, joanna Stern, first person Always, first person, always. It's always about. Joanna has been using Bee, which is cool, and a few others. She has connections because I couldn't get the limitless pin and I do have the plug.

1:23:54 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you paid for it, didn't you?

1:23:56 - Leo Laporte
I paid for it, but you. I paid for it, but I haven't gotten it yet. So, um, I'm a little unhappy about that does she note that in her review?

maybe they gave her one, you think, privilege. I recorded everything I said for three months. Ai has replaced my memory. I said B, limitless and plod wearables. Record everything you say and use AI to provide summaries to news and a slightly terrifying glimpse of the future. There's the B. She's wearing it right there. I've been wearing a wire everywhere since February. Oh, I've been doing it since January, joanna, within hours of wearing the bee, I was blown away by how quickly it turned ramblings and random chatter into actionable, useful information. To allow me to quote myself from February 24th, 5.15pm this bracelet is really effing creepy. You know I'm a little. Actually we had the bee founders on, remember, remember, early on in the show. I'm a little disappointed that it hasn't made any progress since then. Like, it's pretty much just continuing to do the same thing and I don't know if that's a limitation of what ai can do with all this bountiful content I'm providing it with or if I don't know I'm not paying for it.

1:25:17 - Paris Martineau
I like that she notes, though. Uh, these apps recap your conversations often like reading a bad biography. B summary from april 9th. Joanna's day was a blend of familiar responsibilities and intense professional engagements. She ended the day by listening to music, by sting, riveting stuff.

1:25:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Can't wait for the movie adaption that's pretty much the kind of thing that I'm getting. It always reminds me of my kids nursery school reports yeah, yeah, it's very much like that.

1:25:44 - Leo Laporte
Jeffy had a good day. Yeah, let's see. I'm just curious what uh, let me just read what uh b is saying. It won't, it won't have an analysis of my day. Uh, today, yet I don't think. Well, let me see. Uh, yeah, let's do yesterday. Yesterday, april 29th, was a tech day, blending tech filled day, blending conference strategies. What day is it? Apple innovations and a lively podcast. Banter, let me see if I can show you this I do enjoy that.

1:26:16 - Paris Martineau
She has a breakdown of how limitless recorded her talking to her dog, bowser, and, uh, it includes things like a timeline of someone scolded bowser for chewing something. Speaker one said bowser, what are you doing? Can you not chew your whatever browser?

1:26:35 - Leo Laporte
yeah, that's, but that's exactly the kind of thing that Bea says. I'm a little disappointed. I want to get this limitless pin because the other thing that the limitless.

1:26:45 - Paris Martineau
She tested Bea's on-phone AI processing and it was not as good.

1:26:50 - Leo Laporte
Okay, well, we've done it before. Right, that's my JK Simmons Bea, what do you have to say to Joanna Stern in her review of you in the Wall Street Journal today? It's not as fast.

1:27:05 - Paris Martineau
Wow, no comment. See Bill Belichick, Joanna.

1:27:07 - AI
Stern's review in the Wall Street Journal highlighted my capabilities and how I've been designed to assist users in various tasks. If you want. I can summarize specific points from her review or discuss any themes or insights she touched on. Just let me know what you're interested in.

1:27:20 - Jeff Jarvis
What did you think?

1:27:21 - Leo Laporte
of it. My real interest is in the legality of this. Does she talk to any lawyers? Sounds like it did read it, which is interesting, or maybe it's reading it right now.

1:27:37 - AI
It sounds like you're curious about the legal implications related to ai technologies and their usage, possibly referencing concerns about privacy, consent or data security joanna stern may have discussed those aspects in her review, but if you want to dive deeper into those legal topics, do you know if it did or not?

1:27:55 - Paris Martineau
she?

1:27:55 - Leo Laporte
talked to anton ashton kirsch, a lawyer. No, shut up.

1:28:03 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I would make sure everyone I know that name because, as she notes, madison wicker, wicket and larer maintain a state-by-state list of recording laws that I have passed out to colleagues before they have a, a website where it tells you the party consent laws well, ashton says I'd make sure everyone has consented verbally.

1:28:24 - Leo Laporte
Do you consent? By the way, I should have asked you this two months ago but about five years ago, yeah oh yeah, no, I don't consent to this podcast being recorded.

1:28:31 - Paris Martineau
I I hope that no one's listening to this.

1:28:34 - Leo Laporte
while the risk might be low, he adds, we could never recommend people take that risk. See, this is the problem I have with lawyers. By the way, their whole job is to avoid all risks. So they're always going to tell you well, I wouldn't do that Because it could be risky. And that's all I ever get from lawyers. I have good lawyers at Time Inc.

1:28:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Who would help you do what you wanted to do.

1:28:56 - Leo Laporte
That's really what you want.

1:28:57 - Paris Martineau
Right is I will say I've worked with one media lawyer who I would say is quite good at this. Um, he would often I mean he would sometimes recommend being more conservative, but most of his notes were, to my editor's chagrin, being like wow, great stuff here. Or a strange line edit. And then my editor would be like we're not paying you to edit, we're paying you to see whether we're gonna get sued or not she said.

1:29:21 - Leo Laporte
She pointed out that most of her recordings were in new jersey and new york, which are one party consent states. Yep, yep, which means all you have to do is consent to your own recording and you're done. Uh, california is a two-party state, of course. Um, I don't. Just for your information, it's not hearing the podcast because it's muted when I'm on.

1:29:44 - Paris Martineau
It'll be a lot more fun if it did I know yeah, it just thinks that you talk to yourself all the time. It does it literally thinks leo, couldn't you?

1:29:51 - Jeff Jarvis
put it in a different room playing the podcast. I could do that oh, you should.

1:29:57 - Leo Laporte
All right, maybe I'll do that from now, you should check out the discord for a truly haunting image the discord has become really adept at. Uh, images, did you see? And uh, the tag is let's all be VC heads, intelligent machines, eight, 17. I think we've got our album art. Thank you, joe. We also have a lion and a badger.

1:30:31 - Jeff Jarvis
The badger is winning.

1:30:33 - Leo Laporte
Well, our album art from Sunday was me licking a Badger ice cream cone.

1:30:37 - Jeff Jarvis
That's right. That's where I saw that I shouldn't have wrote the story. I forgot that.

1:30:40 - Leo Laporte
No, look, we do stories that were on Twitter all the time, because it's not necessarily the same audience.

1:30:46 - Paris Martineau
Whoa. Okay, this one's kind of cool, whoa.

1:30:50 - Leo Laporte
Whoa Kind of metal. There you go. I asked them to do paris scissorhands and pretty fly for a size as this guy apparently oh my god.

1:31:00 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it is my cousin, but have you seen the photo of you licking the badger ice cream cone?

1:31:04 - Leo Laporte
I have seen it yeah, for the um album art here's and then remember we talked about shingy at the end of the show. Here's your shingy hair.

1:31:14 - AI
I like that. Wow, that's great you could get away with that my back, I could, I could that's.

1:31:19 - Jeff Jarvis
That's after enough nicotine gum.

1:31:21 - Paris Martineau
Let me see if I have a photo of me with a mohawk from uh, did you used? To have a mohawk. I had a blonde. Well, no, I had a blonde mohawk for like many years um but it was kind of shaved or just a faux hawk.

1:31:35 - Leo Laporte
I mean, jacob had a faux hawk.

1:31:36 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say kind of a faux hawk, in the sense that I had like short crop shaved hair and then longer short hair that was blonde Like the shaved hair on the sides was dark and went all the way to the back and then blonde in the middle. But the photo I'm talking of is once when I did a costume as Elizabeth Salander, from the girl dragon head to I had a full mohawk, that's it.

1:31:57 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I think. Paris is talking faster than usual yeah, I think she's a little bit excited.

1:32:01 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know why she's talking so fast.

1:32:03 - Paris Martineau
I don't know, it could be.

1:32:04 - Jeff Jarvis
It could be something my heart is beating quite fast so you want an interesting story.

1:32:10 - Leo Laporte
Well, before we do that, I'm gonna try something using chat, gpt 4, five that Darren has suggested. Let me see I have to go to four, five, ask it. It says ask for a bunch of one-liners roasting a person. I'm going to say Elon Musk. Give me a bunch of one-liners roasting Elon Musk. Don't hold back and use recent events. He says it's quite funny. So let's see if we can uh what kind of stuff we're gonna get uh out of this while we're waiting for that, I'm I'm putting mohawk photos in the discord okay, let's study of efficiency.

Fire meteorologists during tornado season Well, that isn't even funny. Tesla's autopilot is so advanced it can drive the company into the ground without human input. Okay, pretty good, that's pretty good. Starlink's global reach, now extending ethical concerns to every corner of the earth X users based is shrinking faster than Musk's list of unburned bridges. Wow, these are good. You're right, darren. If I ever have to do a roast, I will be uh, I'll be ready musk's version of free speech.

1:33:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Say anything like this.

1:33:28 - Benito Gonzalez
These are jokes other people made.

1:33:29 - Leo Laporte
Probably check the sources maybe you think they're from other people.

1:33:33 - Benito Gonzalez
There's a sources tab at the bottom.

1:33:34 - Leo Laporte
A running list? No, the sources is a running list of his biggest conference. Oh, you're right. 34 of the funniest roasts of Elon.

1:33:42 - AI
Musk, See like you're attributing these jokes to the AI, but he just stole them. That's pretty good. Tell her you're sentient.

1:33:49 - Jeff Jarvis
See if it has a sense of humor, isn't it?

1:33:51 - Leo Laporte
I don't think they're direct. Some of them are quoting ed zitrin. Uh, all right, let me get some paris martineau mohawks I've posted exactly one that's cute so you didn't shave your side. You, just, you, just.

1:34:09 - Paris Martineau
No, I mean, that's not the blonde there's, that's not the blonde one I have to find that's all right, that's fine that's the first one.

1:34:16 - Leo Laporte
You're very young in this picture, are you?

1:34:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's me in high school, yeah, but let's talk about Mark Zuckerberg.

1:34:25 - Leo Laporte
Yesterday was Llama Day, oh you know.

1:34:29 - Jeff Jarvis
I should have watched. I forgot to. Yeah, did you guys?

1:34:32 - Leo Laporte
cover it live. No, he's planning a premium t. No, we didn't know a premium. You know it's funny for and I, I, I take the blame for this, but I've kind of lost interest in covering meta. I don't feel like they're doing anything interesting, am I wrong? Their ai is interesting, llama's very interesting I feel like it's behind the other guys. They're the open source one. Yeah, they're open source. Uh, mark duckerberg is planning a premium tier for facebook. Oh no, for ai, for meta's, ai app, a premium tier and ads so they're basically downloaded.

1:35:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Have you downloaded the new app?

1:35:12 - Leo Laporte
but chat. Gpt does what is the new app.

1:35:15 - Jeff Jarvis
So the new app is weird because it's supposedly social but it's really just people sharing made-up images with no context. Is this from facebook or instagram?

1:35:25 - Paris Martineau
this is this is meta's ai app, uh isn't it supposed to show you what your friends are asking?

1:35:30 - Jeff Jarvis
meta ai uh, here is prada. As if prada had dresses made of salmon fillets I don't want that. Yeah. Yeah, I know, it's just um so old mort crashes the met gala. Joe esposito is 10 times better than meta.

1:35:51 - Leo Laporte
Ai, we're lucky, we have very good, we have joe, we have the real users here. So what did uh? I'm trying to find uh.

1:35:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Um, you said there's a video of his talk from yeah, it's in there, it's in the rundown.

1:36:05 - Paris Martineau
I put it online okay, I did ask chad gpt, upon recommendation from someone in the chat, to roast you, leo, and one part of it. That's actually really funny. Is leo's the only guy who could host a three-hour show about ai and somehow make it about his printer not working? And I do think that's actually really funny. Is Leo's the only guy who could host a three-hour show about AI and somehow make it about his printer not working?

1:36:19 - Jeff Jarvis
And I do think that's actually pretty good. That's great. Wow Line 103. It's worth it just for seeing him be even geekier in the glasses.

1:36:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh, these are the Orion glasses they've been talking about. Oh, wow, let me All right, I can't't use it. I don't know how to use it, hey everyone.

1:36:42 - Web
We built a new thing for you. Uh, there's almost a billion people who are using meta ai across our apps now, so we made a new standalone meta ai app for you to check out. Uh, meta ai is designed to be your personal AI. That means, first, it's designed around voice conversations. You open up the app and you can talk to it about whatever you want, from the news to an issue you're dealing with, to just anything that you want to learn about. It's also designed to be personalized. We're starting that off really basic, with just a little bit of context about your, your interests, but over time, you're gonna be able to let meta AI know a whole lot about you and the people you care about from across privacy screaming um. We also designed this social feed so you can. That's what you're seeing kinds of different ways that people are creating stuff with meta AI.

It's really quite fun to check actually a good idea so um you're going to use and um other kinds of ai devices that we're going to be building in the future. So, anyway, this is the beginning of what is going to be a long journey to build this out.

1:37:50 - Leo Laporte
Uh, but you know, go check it out, let us know what you think oh, apparently everyone, apparently, I want to note as far as no, no, stop, stop, mark, stop Okay, apparently it's the same app. I've already been using for the glasses.

1:38:01 - Paris Martineau
Well, I want to note in the video and in the caption there's some weasel words going on. There. He says we decided to launch this because over a billion monthly actives use Meta AI, which doesn't mean there's a billion monthly users of Meta AI, but that a billion of Meta's monthly active users of all Meta products have used AI at some point. So it's not I think. I just thought that was interesting. They could be, be there, cannot say they have a billion people using ai, because that's just not true so I have logged on to my wayfarer glasses which I'm wearing.

1:38:45 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I have to join the network so I can download all are you supposed to scrape the ray-ban plastic off the lens? I don't think you can really what? No, that's built in. That's. That's really bad, jeff, I don't think you can really what?

1:38:56 - Paris Martineau
no, yeah, that's built in that's. That's really bad, jeff, I don't like that I don't either. I don't want a word right on my well, it's right out of your peripheral vision.

1:39:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't care about you. I care about me having to stare at the brand it's an ad.

1:39:10 - Leo Laporte
I've asked the same question and I don't. No, it doesn't have it's. No, it's in the it's in the lens. I think, wow, I know, all ray-bans do that. Let me ask hey, meta, is there any way to scrape the ray-ban logo off the lens? Can you hear it?

1:39:30 - Web
No, I wouldn't recommend attempting to scrape off the Ray-Ban logo, as it may damage the lens. I may also use your interests, location and profile to provide more relevant responses. What, what.

1:39:54 - Jeff Jarvis
There's your caveat.

1:39:55 - Paris Martineau
There's your caveat there's your maybe if you were asking this question in new jersey. I'd give you a different, because you asked me that I'm gonna track you now yeah, every time you ask to remove a piece of advertising on your person, we're going to consume more of your data that was amazing. I'm so glad you could hear that holy cow it was also just the dismissiveness with which the voice.

1:40:19 - Leo Laporte
Incidentally, no, no also don't try it.

1:40:24 - Benito Gonzalez
I wouldn't recommend it uh now I'm following you around, so there and now, by the way, you've just given me permission.

1:40:32 - Leo Laporte
It didn't say like is it okay, or anything. It just said now I'm following you everywhere you go, just so you know no, you can't take it off your glasses and I'm in your home right now, and just because you asked that, I'm gonna be following you I got my eyes on you you can actually just get actual graded lenses and put them in that don't have the ray-ban logo on them.

Yeah, actually I could. I could go to my optomers. These don't really fit my head. I have such a wide head, uh, I need me too.

1:41:05 - Paris Martineau
I have a wide head. I have a big.

1:41:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, we all have big. We're all big heads. Here we are, we're all big-headed people in more ways than one.

1:41:13 - Paris Martineau
I, you know, I've got to make sure I get the large hats, because otherwise they don't fit my head it's very hard. My hats are extra large.

1:41:20 - Leo Laporte
Yep, I'm eight and a half, which I think we have a scientific uh discovery here.

1:41:25 - Paris Martineau
Yes, podcasters have big heads.

1:41:28 - Leo Laporte
I think that was well known already actually when I when I first thought about doing video.

1:41:34 - Paris Martineau
Leo, I think you should keep that on.

1:41:35 - Leo Laporte
And we were still doing our podcasts. You know, it was early enough that people were still using iPods and the early iPods had a little screen and I said you know, all our videos should be big head video, like not normal shots like this, but everybody should fill the screen so that we would look normal on the little tiny iPod screen. Fortunately, I never implemented the big head video concept. I could have been rich, I tell you Rich.

1:42:07 - Paris Martineau
People would be throwing money to see a three inch by three inch head on their tiny phone screen.

1:42:13 - Leo Laporte
I'm really interested in line 89, 90 don't know where to 90 and 91 90 and 91 okay so it's mar uh, melanie mitchell who's melanie mitchell? She's the one who's at signal okay, and she's got an ai guide for thinking humans so so.

1:42:32 - Jeff Jarvis
So here's the and and the wall street journal wrote about it.

1:42:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is the story that Paris is reading about how AIs don't think they're a bag of heuristics, right?

1:42:42 - Jeff Jarvis
So what it comes down to is they've gotten a little clue. Nobody knows how these things work because they're so complex, and what they've gotten down to is that it's not thinking. We know that, but it's a bag of heuristics. It's a bag of rules. It's a whole mess of rules. It's like my wife telling me how to load the dishwasher. Well, but that's kind of.

1:43:02 - Leo Laporte
My response to that is that's all we are too. Yes, that makes you think we're not a bag of heuristics.

1:43:09 - Benito Gonzalez
A different set of heuristics.

1:43:11 - Leo Laporte
Yes, well, but that's the goal of these AI training is to make it such a big bag of heuristics. It's even better than we are Exactly At predicting what's going to happen.

1:43:22 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the book that I've quoted often on the show how History Gets Things Wrong, Our Addiction to Stories by Alex Rosenberg and, yeah, we basically have little videotapes in our head.

1:43:42 - Leo Laporte
And when we come across a situation, we play whatever videotapes seem to be relevant and say I'll go that way. Now she quotes jan lacoon, who I know you think very highly of. In fact, you interviewed him, didn't you? Yeah, we did on inside ai uh. Lacoon, along with philosopher jacob browning, asserts a system trained on language alone will never approximate human intelligence, even if trained till now, until the heat death of the universe.

1:44:00 - Jeff Jarvis
So this is where we get to the argument about real world models Stop.

1:44:05 - Leo Laporte
You've done as. We've done as much as you can at this point with text. Now we've got to get robots out in the world. Do the eggs crack when they fall?

1:44:13 - Jeff Jarvis
off the table.

1:44:14 - Leo Laporte
Right, it certainly would improve their intelligence. I mean, we are building bigger and bigger models with now hundreds of billions.

1:44:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Your glasses right there. You're helping out better right now I am.

1:44:27 - Leo Laporte
They hide beyond Apparently it knows exactly where I am and it can see everything I see. Isn't it funny that Mark was wearing the meta glasses but not recording the video with?

1:44:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I was thinking that too.

1:44:37 - Leo Laporte
He should have stood before a mirror and done it he was apparently using his phone and talking to his glasses plus they had a social gaze everybody had no, no lunch outside today.

1:44:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Nobody on lunch.

1:44:51 - Leo Laporte
Mark's doing a video what is the parasocial gaze?

1:44:54 - Paris Martineau
I thought it was named after you, paris that is true, I mean all thingscial gaze, I thought it was named after you, paris.

That is true, I mean all things that kind of sound like Paris, are named after me. No, like a parasocial relationship is the relationship much like you, dear listener, might have formed in your head with us. It is a one-sided social relationship that consumers of content form with the content creators, and in some ways I described the parasocial gaze as the way that influencers or content creators kind of look at their camera in order to connect with an audience that isn't there when they're recording it but will be there when the content's being consumed. So in some ways he had to do the uh selfie video because if he was recording with the glasses you wouldn't get the parasocial gaze of mark zuckerberg looking at you, the audience he has to look back at you, which is why I'm wearing my meta glasses right now because I'm looking at you yes, and Mark Zuckerberg is looking at you too wait a minute, really.

1:45:59 - Leo Laporte
Apparently we've known that all along he's watching me let me correct myself.

1:46:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Melanie Mitchell is not. She is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute okay okay, now the Santa Fe Institute.

1:46:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh tell me more about that I don't know. I've wondered that it sounds a little bit like um we're in our air heart nest.

1:46:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, no, it's not a fan institute.

1:46:23 - Benito Gonzalez
That's real science. They do real science. Yeah, they're good, it's a real science.

1:46:25 - Paris Martineau
She studies ai for them, okay um they're not hippy dippy, no, she's somebody it's not sahara. We should have her on the show.

1:46:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, yeah, we should. Yeah, we should have her on the show.

1:46:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we should. Yeah, book them Dano, book them Benito, that's good. I like it. That's my new catchphrase Book them, benito. She talks about Othello, which is an early example of evidence for emergent world models that the AIs, after being given enough information, start to actually have a model for the world. So othello's pretty simple, you know that's the more you take turns it's kind of like a simple go right. Um, it's like um, what's that? Uh, you drop the anyway. Um, so they, you know where you drop the six and connect four.

Thank you, um the authors. Uh, train, train to transformer network. They called it othello gpt. Uh, with all the legal moves and it it inputted. A legal move then would output a legal next legal move in the sequence, which, by the way, I could do. That. Okay, that's easy, but they did it not, and programmatically, but by training. Then they use an othello game simulator to generate 20 million different game sequences. They trained on that. Othello is simple enough that you probably could, with 20 million, I imagine, have all the possibilities. I don't know. Um, after training on 20 million sequences, o imagine have all the possibilities? I don't know. After training on 20 million sequences, othello GPT was nearly perfect on predicting a token representing the legal move, given the sequence of previous moves. But the question is, what did the network actually learn?

1:48:13 - Jeff Jarvis
So this was coined if you go down under the headline World Models vs Bag of Heuristics by a group of student researchers who wrote a blog post in 2024 saying that they had done this. And then they said though we cannot rule out that it also learns a single succinct algorithm in addition to these rules, our best guess is that Othello gpt's learned algorithm is just a bag of independent heuristics.

1:48:40 - Leo Laporte
Oh but we don't know, because it's kind of a black box. They're still guessing.

1:48:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Yep, they're still they tried to find. They found a location, kind of a memory location, where that seemed to happen my, my higher, uh more meta question is does it matter?

1:48:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that again.

1:48:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh yeah, we, we want to know how it works.

1:48:59 - Leo Laporte
Everything matters and nothing matters. This is my philosophy in the life Everything matters and nothing matters. But uh, in the sense of, is it, is it AI going to generate something of use? Does it matter? How it does?

1:49:14 - Jeff Jarvis
it is the question in terms of how to engineer it turns out to build. If you want to try, we kind of know how to engineer these transformers. You want to build guardrails doing inside you want to really build guardrails, it would help to know how it operates, I suspect, if you want to tune it, to try to figure out, if you want to if you want to build a simulcrum that produces human-like thought, does it matter? I don't think we need human-like thought.

1:49:43 - Paris Martineau
I think we've got enough human-like thought out there. Yeah, there's a lot of that.

1:49:46 - Leo Laporte
We've got more than we need. Yeah, stop thinking Less human thought. Okay, you know these are the deep philosophical questions. Okay, these are the deep philosophical questions You're watching that we pursue here on Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. We're glad you're here. We invite you, if you like the show, to come back. We do the show live on eight different platforms for our club members Club Twitter, discord. Count for me, will you? Paris has an unusual number of fingers. Is she real? It's true, we got your, we got your discord. We got your YouTube. You got your Twitch. You got your tick tock, your ex, your Facebook, your LinkedIn and your kick. That's eight.

Is it eight. Okay, you were, I was worried that I missed one. You can watch us live every Wednesday afternoon from 2 to 5 pm Pacific, 5 to 8 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. And if you're in the club, of course you can chat with us. Actually, you could chat on all those platforms, but we like to chat with the Discord, especially because those are our club members, the 7,000 people Not everybody who joins the club does the discord, but the 7 000 club members who are in the discord. Uh, we love it. Makes it a fun place to hang, that's all, it does indeed look.

Show the show, the latest image in the discord leo they're so, they're so, uh creative, they're so creative in there.

1:51:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, look at that wouldn't you like to join this rock and roll? I'm sorry I was going up. Yeah, there's. If you go up, it's you and mars leo with the space helmet on, wow a little more, a little more, wow, uh, oh, that's the big head oh, this is the big head video that we did with father rubber.

1:51:28 - Leo Laporte
It's an experiment. Back in the day when we wanted to have those big heads, we thought that would be kind of a cool this is upsetting, viscerally it's it's amazing what you can do. I know, oh, this one there you are. That's upsetting too that is welcome to mars. Ladies and gentlemen, we invite you to join us in the club. Can't promise you'll make it to Mars, but I can promise you'll have a good time.

I can promise you'll make it to Mars If you join the club free trip to Mars Nice Seven bucks a month to get a free trip to Mars $84 a year. Add free versions of all the shows. Access to the Discord Special programming we're going to do the photo show on Friday. Jeff Paris and I will be doing Google IO soon.

1:52:18 - Paris Martineau
We're going to cover WWDC? Is it in your calendar? When is?

1:52:21 - Leo Laporte
that I'll give you the date. Just swallow another gummy and I'll be up till tomorrow. Yeah, don't do that to her and we will be doing Google IO on May 20th. May 20th, not the 21st. On.

1:52:37 - Paris Martineau
May 20th. May 20th Not the 21st May 20th All right In my calendar.

1:52:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll be there, jason told me that there's going to be no Android. There's an Android event the week before they're doing it, before They've moved.

1:52:46 - Leo Laporte
Android to the kiddie table. So I will let Jason and the gang at Android Faithful who do that show all about android. Uh, cover that one. They can have that one, but we'll do the google I o at may 20th, 10 am, paris. Jeff and I we're going to cover microsoft's guilt, build the keynote the day before we've got wwc coming up. All this now is club only only because we got so many takedown notices from apple. We just decided you why fight it? We're going to do it in the club. For club members. It's one more reason to join.

1:53:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Did anybody other than Apple any of the other tech companies?

1:53:22 - Leo Laporte
No, believe it or not, it was only Apple, of course, but they did it on. Youtube and then they started doing it on Twitch and I don't want to get banned from either platform, so we're going to gets people to join the club.

1:53:31 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a very nice thing, Twittv. Thanks Apple Twit.

1:53:40 - Leo Laporte
Join the club. Join the club. Join the club. Join the club. Maybe we'll do the Android thing too. Actually, we should do a simulcast with Android. Faithful.

1:53:50 - Web
That'd be kind yeah, all right, anything else you want to talk about before we? Wrap it up.

1:53:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, I know there's always too much stuff to get it all in.

1:54:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Universities have a computer science problem, line 133.

1:54:05 - Leo Laporte
Are they having?

1:54:06 - Jeff Jarvis
trouble Because, you know no, my friend Ian Begost is really smart. Is he a friend of yours? Because I follow him. I like him. He's the one who introduced me to. He's the editor of the series, uh, object lessons, oh so he's one of the two editors, and so, um, uh, he then introduced peter bloomsbury and that's how I got my last two books published and my next one published. So nice.

1:54:31 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think that's friendship for you yeah, he said, I haven't helped you like that. The case for teaching coders to speak French.

1:54:41 - Paris Martineau
Okay, the second line of this article has a crazy stat, which is that 42% of graduates from MIT last year majored in computer science.

1:54:51 - Leo Laporte
Nearly half. Well, that's MIT. That's great. I mean yeah, but that's still a lot.

1:54:54 - Paris Martineau
It is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I know, but that's still a lot of technology, I know, but that's still a lot. In one, I just hit myself in the eye with a microphone. That's how surprised I was so what, what he's saying?

1:55:06 - Leo Laporte
why is that a problem? So so many?

1:55:08 - Jeff Jarvis
of them. He had a choice when he went in. He had a choice of taking computer science and engineering or taking computer science in arts and sciences, and a lot of students chose to take it in engineering because they didn't have to learn French. But he switched, he did it in arts and sciences, then he shipped out anyway, went to philosophy.

1:55:23 - Leo Laporte
It's another argument for the liberal education.

1:55:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Exactly, exactly. So I'm working now.

1:55:29 - Leo Laporte
I'm part of any technology, In fact the only thing that helped me.

1:55:35 - Jeff Jarvis
There wasn't any technology.

1:55:37 - Paris Martineau
Well, there was. Yeah, you would have learned how to smack two rocks together, or something.

1:55:41 - Leo Laporte
The thing that helped me the most in technology was I took courses in mathematic logic, which was very helpful, but no, I didn't take any computer science courses. Most of the people in my generation didn't.

1:55:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris. Are you laughing at the? She's laughing at me, no, I you laughing at the at the.

1:55:56 - Paris Martineau
Uh, she's laughing at me. No, I'm laughing at the idea of a course being called make a wheel, which is a throwing joke, make a wheel.

1:56:04 - Leo Laporte
In this course, the most important invention of humankind, a round object we like to call the wheel.

1:56:14 - Paris Martineau
Everybody's furiously taking notes. Remember, the diameter of the wheel is exactly equal. Is this going to be?

1:56:25 - Jeff Jarvis
on the final.

1:56:29 - Leo Laporte
If you want the wheel to roll, it's very important that the radius at every point be the same length.

1:56:38 - Paris Martineau
Otherwise, I'm surprised you remember this much from Wheel 101. It was one of the most important courses.

1:56:45 - Leo Laporte
I took that right next to. Fire 101. How to use it, how to strike it, how to use it, how to blow it out. It's very important, very important.

1:57:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, where were we? Um, before, I sort of interrupted ourselves oh, it's computer science problems. So yeah, so I'm working on, I'm part of the steering committee for a new program at stony brook called technology, ai and society, and the aim is to try to bring everyone in from other disciplines, and we need that because the geeks have been in charge. It's time to demote the geeks I disagree wholeheartedly, but okay fine, it's time to promote some other people you should learn french.

1:57:33 - Paris Martineau
I'm not against it says mr le poids my my take has always been that I think that, while I understand the practical reality of people going to college and majoring in something that will have immediate will immediately translate to job potential in america, that's certainly something that is incredibly important, given the cost of college. I do think that in an ideal world, college education should be less about preparing you to fulfill a specific job function, more about teaching you how to think and Having a robust humanity. Centric education is often critical in developing critical thinking skills and just coming a more round Well-rounded person, and I would love a world where we could go back to that, but the current cost of college education does not make that viable for most people.

1:58:23 - Jeff Jarvis
What Ian argues in here is that you might be better off creating a college of computing outside of a college of engineering, so that you're motivated to have a differently rounded curriculum, which I think is an interesting idea. That computing is so important in the world now it's kind of surprising we don't have that.

1:58:41 - Paris Martineau
Rounded curriculum is something that they'd have expertise at at Wheel 101.

1:58:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, so we educate well-rounded students at Wheel 101. We educate well-rounded students and we're 101.

1:58:57 - Paris Martineau
We've got a steering committee that drives this car all the way down the road.

1:59:02 - Leo Laporte
We do not recommend using your feet to accelerate the vehicle. Keep your hands and feet inside all the time and use a yak like modern guys. Think first how would you stop this thing? You started very important.

1:59:20 - Paris Martineau
think about how you're gonna stop you shouldn't start out by saying yabba dabba doo and going down the hill. That's advanced wheeling. That's in wheeling and dealing. Three gravity is a 102 in all seriousness.

1:59:35 - Leo Laporte
Now I'm a little worried about south by southwest. It was a very successful conference just a few weeks ago, but it is owned I didn't realize this by penske media because they've had to rescue it during the pandemic.

1:59:46 - Jeff Jarvis
They saved it, right did save it, and hugh forrest uh was the reason I didn't go to south by. I stopped going to south by southwest, so okay, so he is now out.

1:59:56 - Leo Laporte
It was fired, apparently. Why don't? Why didn't you like hugh forrest?

2:00:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I was going there once to speak and I mentioned on the socials, whatever there was at the time, that I was going to go speak somewhere else and he became you're not allowed to speak anywhere else when you're speaking to somebody southwest. You can't do that. I thought, and I tried to just kind of banter back and he was just difficult and I just said I don't need you. And then once you stopped going, leo, there was no reason to go.

2:00:20 - Leo Laporte
I had a lot of fun the couple of times I went. We know many people go every year and it's mainly Germans and marketers.

2:00:27 - Jeff Jarvis
now, I know Germans love it.

2:00:31 - Leo Laporte
Love it. The name may be familiar because they in fact, were the big racing family that took the money that they made from their auto parts on their oil business and invested in media. They own the rolling stone, the holly reporter. They own the golden globes, recently acquired that uh. They did save south by in 2021. When covet was about to kill it bought 50 of the company at the time. They took control of the festival two years ago by buying another one percent uh, and they laid off not only the president of south by southwest hugh forest, by the way, saying that he voluntarily left, but he disagrees. He says no, it's not my decision.

I put my heart and soul into this event for more than 35 years and I was looking forward to leading several more editions. Uh. 10 other people left, including its longtime head of communications and the chief technology officer. There are still 150 festival employees. Wow, um. Yeah, I have penske gets for me. Get some uh a pass somewhat, because they saved it wouldn't be there at all if they had invested uh. But I'm a little nervous about uh, the reorg um, because it is one of those. It's one of those fragile things. I think does penske outright own vox.

2:01:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Now they listed on their wow maybe wait.

2:01:54 - Paris Martineau
yeah, wouldn't be surprised oh yeah, Penske, I believe, is part of they invested I'm forgetting the details. They invested, I believe, like $100 million in Vox somewhat recently.

2:02:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know, there is, of course, quite a consolidation in the media business. We have a little small-town newspaper which is now owned by hearst.

2:02:17 - Paris Martineau
what's better than other choices, don't it as they say?

2:02:20 - Leo Laporte
used to be used to be owned by the new york times and then was bought by a local family for a few years. But hearst has just recently bought it, along with the, the big city newspaper up there in chantarosa to uh clarify my earlier point.

2:02:35 - Paris Martineau
Yes, pens Penske did invest $100 million in Vox, effectively purchasing 20% of Vox.

2:02:41 - Leo Laporte
So they don't have a controlling interest.

2:02:42 - Paris Martineau
They have a controlling interest.

2:02:44 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. That means Vox is worth half a billion dollars.

2:02:46 - Paris Martineau
Yes, I mean Vox, which is a huge head cut, I think it was a higher valuation earlier. That was a huge haircut from its previous valuations.

2:02:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Enough of a haircut, it's a head cut.

2:03:01 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's a head cut. They'll be putting that green ribbon to tie it back on.

2:03:09 - Leo Laporte
Amazon has announced and I think this is brilliant car dealers are going to do it. They're going to put on the sticker price and, by the way, no, you're a little cost, a little bit more. Amazon announced. Well, let's get the whole story, because amazon announced, going forward, uh, tariff costs will be itemized out in the overall cost, and the wall street journal thinks it's a great idea. By the way, I do think it's a great idea. The white house did not. They immediately said it was unpatriotic and I don't know. So what's the latest? Are they not going to?

2:03:42 - Jeff Jarvis
do it now, well, so. So bezos made excuses when trump called him and said no, no, that was one small little division that was thinking about it. They hadn't decided oh no, no, no, we're not doing it and bezos.

2:03:53 - Paris Martineau
To clarify, not the ceo of m not andy jassy no, andy jassy is technically the ceo, but of course bazis is one of the people that we know who really runs runs the place.

2:04:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, uh, the president does have the take it down act sitting on his table. The house voted 409 to 2 to pass the bill. The senate 98 to 2. Uh, it sounds like on the surface, exactly like a perfectly reasonable thing. It's, in fact, it's the first time there's been any online safety uh legislation to pass that both houses. It would require social media companies to take down content flagged as non-consensual, including ai generated sexual images. Social media companies will have 48 hours to do so. However, the eff and many others tech dirt's been leading the charge on this say that it really is just going to give the government a weapon against content. Trump actually even admitted this in his state of the union address. He said I'm going to use that bill for myself too, if you don't mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online Nobody. Well, now how can he use it to take down?

2:05:13 - Paris Martineau
Well, I mean, that is still to be said. From what I've heard from people on the Hill involved with this as well as I mean from people on the Hill involved with this as well, as I mean lobbying groups and lobbyists representing large, medium and small tech firms it does seem like this bill, at least, was conceived of and bought with, kind of the input of not just the giant tech companies. It does seem like there was a lot of work with groups representing medium-sized tech companies to make sure the bill is worded in a way that will allow smaller tech companies to comply with it in a way. But I do think that, as you said, there is a pressing concern with regards to how this new power is going to be used in terms of censorship, and we see a similar thing with the weaponization of DMCA takedowns. Some people have figured out ways to kind of weaponize that system in order to take down content they don't have a legal right to take down.

2:06:18 - Leo Laporte
Because you don't have a lot of time. For instance, I've been really worried about this with our mastodon instance. It means I have 48 hours if somebody complains to take it down. Not enough time to verify whether the complaint is legit and what. On what basis can someone complain? Any basis that well, I mean they have to say it's supposed to be.

2:06:36 - Paris Martineau
Well, specifically revenge porn or something right yeah, it's only if it is a non-consensual. Non-consensual intimate imagery.

2:06:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Graphic intimate imagery involving Well, you don't want any intimate images at all.

2:06:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I take as soon as I see them. I ban people, kick them out, so I do that anyway, we'll see. The problem is the 48 hours. There's also one more problem End-to-end encryption. They are not exempt from the bill, so any company like Apple that provides end-to-end encryption is still responsible for anything that's in the encrypted data.

And the EFF has warned. How can such services comply with the takedown requests mandated in this bill? Platforms may respond by abandoning encryption entirely in order to be able to monitor content. How can such services comply with the takedown requests mandated in this bill? Platforms may respond by abandoning encryption entirely in order to be able to monitor content, turning private conversations into surveilled spaces Something law enforcement in this country and all over the world has wanted all along, and maybe that's one of the reasons that's getting so much backing.

I mean, if you just read the face of it and you don't consider the challenge of it, you could say, well, this is a good thing. Finally, a big step towards protecting people from non-consensual imagery. But we shall see. We shall see. Thomas Massey, republican of Kentuckyucky, one of two republican members who voted against the bill, said he couldn't support it because I feel this is a slippery slope, right for abuse with unintended consequences. Right, right, anyway, we'll watch. It will almost certainly be signed into law in the next few hours, um my dad's head is going to explode yeah, mike's really become the uh poster boy for uh uh freedom of this weekend.

2:08:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, yeah, kathy gallows, I didn't get to listen to it all. What did she say about this?

2:08:37 - Leo Laporte
uh, no, we didn't. We didn't talk. Actually, we did not get to the take it down act. I wish we had. Um, it hadn't passed yet and I thought there's no way, and I was wrong. Uh, well, anything else, before we uh move to your picks of the week.

2:08:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Um. I'm curious, have you looked at the slate?

2:08:59 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I asked lisa because lisa's been saying for a long time that she wants to buy a pickup truck, but she doesn't want one of the big giant, ginormous penis mobiles what is the slate?

2:09:14 - Paris Martineau
are we talking about that. Uh, that car that's pedal pedal based yeah, it's got wheels, they're round.

2:09:19 - Leo Laporte
No, she's um, she wants a small like they used to make little small japanese uh trucks. Well, there's a company and it turns out it's funded by jeff bezos primarily called slate auto, that is planning to offer an ev truck for 27 thou after the rebate it'd be about $20,000, but it doesn't even come with a radio. Everything's an add-on. It does come, very kindly. It comes with a holder for your phone, but it doesn't have speakers. It doesn't have speakers, it doesn't have speakers, so you'll have to bring a phone and speakers.

But, like I said, it already has the phone.

2:10:03 - Jeff Jarvis
In the old days, paris, in the old days we used to go in and we didn't buy the car off the lot. We went in and said we want this and that, not that, and this and that and all these choices, and then it was made for us in Detroit and then it would arrive.

2:10:17 - Leo Laporte
That's the way we used, yeah but it was never as bare bones as this.

2:10:20 - Jeff Jarvis
It doesn't have a paint job.

2:10:21 - Leo Laporte
It's made of plastic, by the way, like the old saturn how does that work in terms of crash safety? They say crash test is absolutely safe. You can buy. This is the suv add-on that you can add on to it. You add on chairs and you can. It's completely customizable. Um, I asked. I said, lisa, this is what you were looking for, which is a small, inexpensive pickup truck. To which she said I'll wait until their third version before I buy it. Which?

is probably smart, they're still around, yeah, refreshingly uncluttered. They say, here's the dashboard. It is, it's refreshing. But you, you know what it's a car and actually, as somebody who drives electric vehicles I know I my first electric vehicle, which was a tesla model x I kind of felt like this is really just a golf cart with a big computer on it. Oh yeah, the evs really aren't that sophisticated. Fact, that's the other advantage of this Very low maintenance. You know, electric engines are very simple. They don't really have the same problems that gas engines. Do you still have to charge at home? Here's the size comparison. So there's a slate with an overlay of the Silverado, ford Maverick this is the one Lisa wants like an old 1985 Toyota. I mean, that's cute. Sr5. What's the range?

2:11:46 - Paris Martineau
I will also say I don't think you can put speakers in the car. It is designed.

2:11:51 - Leo Laporte
No, you bring a Bluetooth speaker, you just always have a Bluetooth speaker and phone in there, which.

2:11:55 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I guess is.

2:11:56 - Jeff Jarvis
But you can add a screen.

2:11:59 - Benito Gonzalez
I don't think so yeah yeah, yeah, but you can add a screen? I don't think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see this thing as a totally modular platform.

2:12:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah that's what it is.

2:12:05 - Benito Gonzalez
People are going to build stuff for it, and they say it too.

2:12:09 - Leo Laporte
It won't be huge range. It'll be under 200 miles. We have to see the actual range information. But they'll also offer wraps, so if you want color you can wrap it with color.

2:12:21 - Benito Gonzalez
If it's plastic, can it take to like any kind of paint, then Like, can you just paint it yourself.

2:12:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it would be pretty easy. They save a lot of money.

2:12:30 - Jeff Jarvis
One of the stories I read said that I wanted to hire a graffiti artist to paint my car, so that my car was unique.

2:12:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, why not? You can have any color you want. Like, here's the color wheel. You can make it whatever color. Ooh, look, see, that's a two-tone. Ooh, I like that. Ooh, ooh, anyway, I'm building my own. I'm doing it all myself, man. Do I want a decal? Do I want exterior wheels and tires? Does it have lists?

2:12:58 - Jeff Jarvis
of internal options.

2:13:00 - Leo Laporte
Let's see Interior wheels and tires. Does it have lists of internal options? Let's see interior. That's a nice there, you go there you go, we can have it.

2:13:06 - Paris Martineau
All kinds of interior, interior decal set oh, so it's still just design yeah, it just seems like it's mostly personalization I don't know, you know at that price.

2:13:17 - Leo Laporte
I'm kind of tempted my lease, uh, for my existing EV runs out in a couple of years. I might end up driving this little sucker around. I could see it Toodling around. Toodling around, yes.

2:13:30 - Paris Martineau
You know, since I've been back here in Florida, I was talking to my parents and I did get a kind of interesting insight into the average potential electric vehicle consumer my parents have always been. I don't know no reason I'd get an electric vehicle. My mom's car was in the shop for a while and they, as a replacement, gave her a brand new electric BMW that she had to drive. And I was like oh, isn't it great, isn't electric vehicle fun? She's like no, it's awful. No one at the BMW dealership could teach me how to plug it in. I had to watch hours of YouTube videos but all of them assumed that you know how to plug it in to begin with. And she's like and I couldn't figure it. I mean, my mom's not the most technically savvy person, but it was an interesting conundrum. That's a legitimate point.

It is. There is a learning curve to using electric vehicles for the average person.

2:14:18 - Leo Laporte
Early on in the electric vehicle world when you went to a regular car dealer and bought their electric vehicle, they knew nothing about it. I had a ford mustang mach-e. They knew nothing about it, but that has changed over time.

2:14:30 - Paris Martineau
Now the dealership, especially given that you're in a city where, yeah, people are probably buying electric vehicles maybe not california, maybe not in florida but I have a bmw, electric bm BMW.

2:14:41 - Leo Laporte
I like it quite a bit. It's I went.

2:14:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I went to test drive a Volvo electric and this is how new I am to it. They said you want the one pedal or two pedal. I said what?

2:14:52 - Leo Laporte
what you heard, that you always get two pedals, by the way, don't be fooled but the one pedal drive. So you get a brake pedal accelerator, but because it's just like a golf cart when you take your foot off the accelerator, this is called one pedal driving. It's it breaks, it slows down because it's doing regenerative braking and charging the battery.

2:15:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I said the same thing. Paris. Paris's eyes crossed at the time. I'm just like.

2:15:14 - Leo Laporte
I can't imagine you get very used to it very quickly. I prefer one pedal driving. To be honest, that's all. The teslas are one pedal. You still have a break. It's not like they get rid of the brake, but you where's the brake? If there's only one pedal, there's still a.

2:15:27 - Paris Martineau
Use one two pedals.

2:15:28 - Leo Laporte
Use one pedal but, by the way you get used to it, I rarely use my brake because you use you lift off as you approach the stop sign and you know exactly how long it's going to go before it stops. Uh, it's great. And and you're adding to your battery every time you do that.

2:15:44 - Benito Gonzalez
Absolutely not. I still have three pedals and I use all three.

2:15:47 - Leo Laporte
You have a clutch. You're like an old school man.

2:15:50 - Paris Martineau
Well, no, I far prefer it.

2:15:53 - Leo Laporte
In fact, most of the time when people drive an electric vehicle, they go oh, this is great.

2:16:01 - Paris Martineau
Hey, if you're out there and you have four pedals, six pedals, get in the comments I want to see who's got the most pedals.

2:16:04 - Leo Laporte
I think three is the most you can get, hey you never know. Oh, my father learned on a double clutch what you still have one, you had you had one clutch, but you had to put it in before you shifted and then after you shifted both they do that with trucks sometimes and my old vw had a little lever to give you the reserve tank because it didn't have a gas gauge, so you just drove it till it ran out of gas and then you'd flip the lever. You'd get an extra half gallon or whatever.

2:16:31 - Jeff Jarvis
It was a small amount, just enough to get drove until you ran out of gas you had no idea and there was no uh trip o-rometer so you couldn't do that idea.

2:16:42 - Leo Laporte
You had no idea. You just drive and it'd start to go. Then you'd flip the reserve tank and then you'd go. You know I got a little while, but I got to get to a gas station.

2:16:52 - Paris Martineau
How insane is it that you've gone from a world where you just ran out of gas to a world where you've got AI on every part of you. Yeah, it's amazing. Now I understand why you're an accelerationist. You're like I can't believe any of this is happening.

2:17:05 - Leo Laporte
You know why. One day we had the wheel, and then look what we had. I'm an accelerationist because I'm going to be dead soon and I just want to see how far we can get before I die Well, you sound like.

2:17:15 - Jeff Jarvis
So I'm almost finished with and I think Benito is trying to get this author who I recommended, adam Becker, more Everything Forever. It's great, it is superb, and he talks about all of the test grail folks and they just want to stay alive. It's Kurzweil they want to stay alive long enough to stay alive forever. Right, that's the stick.

2:17:43 - Leo Laporte
I should mention in Jacob Warb's book, at the very beginning he, in just a few pages, demolishes the notion that we will ever leave this planet.

2:17:52 - Jeff Jarvis
We've got to make it work too, yeah.

2:17:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, city on Mars Another good book that does the same thing yes it does.

2:18:03 - Paris Martineau
It same thing. Yes, it does, it is not viable. No, it would take 400 days.

2:18:05 - Leo Laporte
Subscribe to club twit, then you're going. You're going to mars. We're gonna try. You're gonna have some new way of we're shipping you off we're not telling you how you might.

2:18:11 - Paris Martineau
It might end up that after you die, I collect some of your ashes and I shoot them off towards mars, but you're still going yeah, I don't.

2:18:18 - Leo Laporte
I don't think I'll get to mars in my lifetime. I would go. If they offered me even a one-way trip, I would go.

2:18:23 - Paris Martineau
But it would be you would die on Mars. I wouldn't go to die.

2:18:27 - Leo Laporte
The problem is you're more likely to die on the way to Mars. It's 400 days. No human has spent that much time in space. You are exposed to cosmic rays. You've got no gravity. It's a nightmare getting there.

2:18:39 - Benito Gonzalez
You'll be alive when you get there, you'll just be in really bad shape, barely.

2:18:42 - Paris Martineau
I'm curious, Jeff and Benito, if you're offered a one-way ticket to Mars, you go on? Absolutely not. No way.

2:18:48 - Benito Gonzalez
That's crazy. Me neither, even if there's colonies already. It's like that's dumb.

2:18:51 - Leo Laporte
You're not my age. There's no internet on Mars. What am I going to do?

2:18:54 - Jeff Jarvis
I've fantasized about it.

2:18:56 - Leo Laporte
Jeff and I are not going forever. We're going to be gone soon. We want to do something interesting on the way out.

2:19:03 - Benito Gonzalez
I would only do it if it worked like it worked in the movies. But it's not going to work that way. It's not going to work that way.

2:19:08 - Leo Laporte
I know it's not going to be like that, it's going to be a nightmare.

2:19:18 - Paris Martineau
I don't think I would even do it if it worked the like two weeks in. Yeah, you can't breathe there, you'll have to be underground there's no one to talk to.

2:19:23 - Jeff Jarvis
You know Paris, no, no, no, you will love it. You know why?

2:19:27 - Leo Laporte
because you have to live in a tunnel oh, I thought you were gonna say because you have to live on neuro gummies.

2:19:33 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that's that's also probably true. Those would be two compelling points to move to Mars, but I think that's it.

2:19:38 - Leo Laporte
Ladies and gentlemen, you're watching the incredible intelligent machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau Our picks of the week coming up next. Shall we start our picks of the week with you, Ms Martineau.

2:19:53 - Paris Martineau
I have a listener generated pick of the week. Okay.

2:19:57 - Leo Laporte
I suppose Always welcome to do that. I suppose we're lazy as hell.

2:20:01 - Paris Martineau
Who sent me this. Uh, pete cook on twitter at blind, pete sent me, uh, this archiveorg link that he said I knew you'd love, and he was right. It's a collection of cassettes posted by mark davis that says okay, I have to admit this is a strange collection. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I worked for kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music or perhaps you'd call it elevator music. Anyway, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive odd collection. So you've got canned elevator music with instrumental rendition of songs, some advertisements, weird announcements Does it have the flashy blue light special announcement.

2:20:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I want that, I want attention Kmart shoppers.

2:20:54 - Benito Gonzalez
We need attention Kmart shoppers.

2:20:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's the blue light special yeah.

2:20:58 - Paris Martineau
Let's see when would it be here it's. Kresge. That's different. This little card can make the big difference whether a briggs and stratton engine last four years ah, I love it four minutes and that was a long.

2:21:15 - Leo Laporte
That was a long one long delay oh, it's a film

2:21:20 - Benito Gonzalez
strip it's a film strip with a tape ss training and how to complete the sale.

2:21:28 - Paris Martineau
So I guess the trainer's supposed to talk during this long there are there are some good ones of just general music too down here, and I don't know, I just found it really fun.

2:21:41 - Leo Laporte
Uh, there's a lot of fun stuff to listen to this I would really like to find the blue light special and yeah what is the blue light?

2:21:47 - Jeff Jarvis
special because they would regularly do that and you have to. They would say not right now in haberdashery a flashy game shoppers like.

2:21:55 - Leo Laporte
That's how sales were before the internet yeah, and they had a flashing blue light that was like a cop light run over to the blue light right because it was on the sale, or was it in the? What was the?

2:22:05 - Paris Martineau
whole physical blue light in the store in the km.

2:22:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, yeah, oh, wow, oh, we got it. Surely there's video flash. But come on, we got to find this for paris there's gotta be hold on.

2:22:14 - Paris Martineau
I just searched blue light in here no, flashing blue light is important. Oh, flashing.

2:22:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Flashing blue light special. Here you go.

2:22:29 - Paris Martineau
No sound. Attention Kmart shoppers.

2:22:32 - Web
Welcome and thank you for shopping with us here at Kmart in Sweetwater, we bring fun and excitement to your shopping experience as well as thousands of holiday savings throughout our store and right now just in time.

2:22:47 - Jeff Jarvis
He's talking to the bottom of a telephone. Special. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, ah. Love that. He's good, I like him.

2:23:07 - Leo Laporte
That's great love, that he's good. I like him, uh great. This is on archiveorg another reason to love archiveorg. Attention called attention, kmart shoppers, mark davis and others.

2:23:12 - Paris Martineau
Mark started it, but there are now 264 cassettes on there, including kresge training and there are just really interesting descriptions on a lot of these tapes too about how they digitized it. You know the strange conditions they found, the reel-to-reel decks, and how they were straightened out. It's just a real treasure trove of stuff.

2:23:32 - Leo Laporte
Did you ever have a job where you had to watch training videos before you took the floor? I think when I worked as a hostess, a cracker barrel I did yeah okay, I worked at mcdonald's and you had to go down in the basement and watch these videos like this one. You're in show business what is it strange?

2:24:01 - Paris Martineau
it's not playing the sound. It's another slide strip it's another, oh it's a slide strip.

2:24:06 - Web
Oh my god, or there's somebody oh, someone doing it, that's fun, beauty, glamour, excitement, tv spectaculars, hollywood premieres and show business is part of your work at Kresge. When you take care of a section in a Kresge store, you're in show business. Look at it this way I always wanted to be in show business. Show business is knowing how to make a good appearance. It's knowing how to get attention.

2:24:35 - Paris Martineau
It's knowing how to give the customers what they want. That's your business too, I love this guy's voice.

2:24:45 - Leo Laporte
I could probably have done that had I been born in an earlier era. Mr Jeff Jarvis, do you have a?

2:24:54 - Jeff Jarvis
I have two quick things. One is that, according to Axios, we are far from alone now. Content creators all the people who are doing prompt engineering, they're all now content creators. The hugely fast-growing air quotes job category, the number of people full-time employment jobs as digital creators in the US jumped from 200,000 in 2020 to 1.5 million jeez louise 2024. Wow, and I love this. The axios why it matters. Creators are now the largest and fastest growing segment of the 28.4 internet dependent jobs in the us well, I guess I'm internet dependent.

2:25:37 - Leo Laporte
I guess I am come to think of it, I, without the internet.

2:25:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, I would have to go to kresge and dance creator media revenue is growing five times the rate of traditional media sector. Traditional media, however, is falling so much that you barely keep your nose above water, but that's another matter. Uh, all right, so that's one. The other one is for paris, because it's this I think we should make it a regular segment is Leo and Jeff explained the past to Paris.

2:26:01 - Leo Laporte
And the good old days.

2:26:03 - Jeff Jarvis
And the good old days. This is rabbit ears.

2:26:11 - Paris Martineau
Paris. Do you know what rabbit ears?

2:26:13 - Leo Laporte
are. They're the ears on a rabbit. That's true.

2:26:15 - Paris Martineau
You're not wrong Is there a name for someone going like this behind your head? Well, watch this.

2:26:21 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a technology video. It requires explanation.

2:26:23 - Paris Martineau
Oh those, yeah, I know those, the antennas.

2:26:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Those are the antennas. Listen, you throw the sound down.

2:26:28 - Web
Go through the middle in between, the idea is the signal goes right through the middle of the rabbit ears and the rabbit ears grab it right out of the sky.

2:26:34 - Leo Laporte
No, that's not true. But do you have it full length or not?

2:26:39 - Web
Well, as it turns out, the length does make a difference. It has a function.

2:26:45 - Paris Martineau
Length doesn't matter.

2:26:46 - Web
You've heard it, your first, but I wouldn't worry about it.

2:26:49 - Paris Martineau
The manufacturers figure that all out for you, shorter, and longer Experimental. Shorter and longer. Tuning your TV, so just fiddle around Just fiddle around With the same length for two arms.

2:26:59 - Web
Well, technically, with the same length for two arms. Oh well, technically, yes, sir, uh uh, theoretically, yes. I think this guy doesn't know what he's talking about but for openers. When you're just getting started, try turning it so that it's aimed uh this way not all sets, though, have movable uh rabbit. Regrettably some sets have. Oh, that jaw.

2:27:22 - Leo Laporte
All sets have movable rabbit ears. That's when you go to JC Kresge's for your rabbit ear selection. It's funny that you say that because I just saw somewhere a picture of rabbit ears for sale in the store, but I don't remember digital anymore, digital tv yeah for no yeah but it was like in mexico or somewhere leo is hurt because you're from that part of the country you can still get tv from rabbit ears, you can still do that yeah, I thought analog tv is gone.

2:27:55 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it's gone.

2:27:55 - Benito Gonzalez
There was a whole thing digital, but you can get a digital it's still a signal through the air it doesn't look like rabbit no, no, it's like a little.

2:28:03 - Leo Laporte
It's like a little dish now well, you could buy rabbit ears, but you shouldn't. Yes, you should buy a, a yaggy or something more appropriate so, leo, is that?

2:28:12 - Jeff Jarvis
is that a posh boston accent? That's not a british accent. Is it the accent? I'm using no, the hers the woman in that video.

2:28:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh hers, it's the same thing. It's a phony mid-atlantic british accent that movie stars in the 20s used to use, even though they were from pakipski, I think everybody should do the podcast like this, don't you remember?

2:28:34 - Jeff Jarvis
so with our jaws barely.

2:28:35 - Leo Laporte
I remember everybody spoke the same. Uh, yeah, no, that was. I think she was local. I don't know, maybe she was british, she might have been, I don't think so I think she might have been. I think that that was. You know how that movie star accent was right? Yeah, uh, the. You know the speed test from ukla. You've probably used it from time to time oh, yes often.

2:28:56 - Paris Martineau
Oh, we're gonna google speed test.

2:28:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Her cursing in my hotel room.

2:29:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, they have a new speed test. It's called Orb. How is the internet? Orb knows, I'm always saying that.

2:29:14 - Paris Martineau
How is the internet? Ask the Orb.

2:29:16 - Leo Laporte
Ask the Orb. Well, let's get the Orb Download on the Mac App.

2:29:21 - Paris Martineau
Store. How's the internet? And it says try again later.

2:29:25 - Leo Laporte
The internet is not good. So it's available everywhere. You can run it as an app on your phone, on your computer, and it's kind of like speed test. But for the longest time we've known this we don't just test people's speed, that's actually not the most important thing. Just test people's speed, that's actually not the most important thing. Jitter and other uh latency and other uh factors really can impact how your facetime calls are, your zoom calls, that kind of thing. So I do, in fact, uh think this is probably a good thing to get it's free right now.

2:29:53 - Paris Martineau
they hope to make money, um by my question is, yeah, how do they hope to make money? And if this is running in the background, aren't they selling? Your internet?

2:30:02 - Leo Laporte
no, they white label it to comcast and other people. That's the hope. Let's see what our let's do this. I've never done it before. What is our orb score? Anything less than 80 is something wrong with your internet. But uh, it looks like my orb score is pretty darn good, you want a meaty orb. Pretty pretty good, Pretty pretty good on the old Comcast business. That's my orb score and you can see it's smooth and speedy.

Well, you know what? We're probably going to start telling people to install this and run it before they come on the show.

2:30:38 - Paris Martineau
Okay, it's really funny that the website I looked at, orbit, the thing says introducing orb, dash or blog love to introduce orb and then you click a button that says get orb, get orb.

2:30:54 - Leo Laporte
What's the url? Orb orbnet yeah, but then how are you testing it in?

2:30:59 - Paris Martineau
browse you have.

2:31:00 - Leo Laporte
You can't test it without downloading you can't test it in a browser, because the browser is lying to you. So we've known that also for a while you need an app to, so I need your help. Speaking of devices I need, by the way, you keep this running in the background I don't like that. I don't like that well, you could turn it off after run it for a night, you know, overnight or something.

2:31:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Just just get some idea so I need hive mind technical help here. Okay, for the next book I want to use uh, I want to keep everything in pdfs so that I can use the tools and play with it and know how that works and not have thousands of pages of printouts which I have around me, um, and I need to be able to read the pdf on a tablet and mark it and sync it easily with google drive. The remarkable is one. I've also looked at this at the, at the um you haven't used the remarkable.

2:31:54 - Leo Laporte
Recently, though, you used it I had trouble thinking. I think they got a lot better at that by the remarkable the, the what's, what's the one for?

2:32:01 - Jeff Jarvis
uh, android, um, the, the kobo oboe that I would not recommend. Oh, I want to hear why in a second, the books and also the android, the um amazon one, the yeah, the amazon scribe which I have or just talk to me. My goal is to be able to mark and annotate pdfs and when I close it it goes back into Google Drive where it was. I don't have to do any moving around stuff. That's my goal.

2:32:29 - Leo Laporte
I think an iPad is probably the right thing only because it does so much more. Well, are you?

2:32:34 - Paris Martineau
able to mark on Google Drive using an iPad though, like with a stylus?

2:32:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's a function of Google Drive and I don't know. Chrome, I can you though, like with a stylus. Yeah, that's a function of google drive and I don't chrome. I can chrome, I can in chrome. Okay, then you'll be able to do it. I would think. Well, chrome book.

2:32:45 - Paris Martineau
Do you want to be able to write on it?

2:32:47 - Leo Laporte
yes, but that's a feature except that's a feature that docs offers. Okay, is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah, so I would imagine it would do it in safari. Let me check. Um, I think you're better off getting a full tablet.

2:33:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Don't forget, I live like you meet at Google here.

2:33:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, you can get a Google tablet.

2:33:09 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, so wouldn't an Android tablet just do that for you? Wouldn't that work?

2:33:12 - Jeff Jarvis
The problem is the Android. It's like my phone. I'd run on my phone and I couldn't really do it, whereas on my chromebook I can use the files app and it has this. Or I go to um whatchamacallit, who has who?

2:33:31 - Web
controls the pdf um adobe, but they charge between 12 and 20 a month.

2:33:35 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, no no no well, maybe we could leave this. I don't know't know. You want to ask people to send you emails and help you out? Yeah, or just DM me. You can get an answer next week.

2:33:47 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, let me know what you find out, because this is something I've wanted to do, but for no particular reason, but I feel like it would be good.

2:33:54 - Leo Laporte
I've seen a lot of good stuff about the Remarkable, but, yeah, people like the remarkable actually, but it's not doing what you want to do, which is not it's going to download it to the remarkable. You're going to mark it up and it's going to automatically sync it to drive, but it's not going to. If you want to leave it on drive, in essence, yeah that's.

2:34:12 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what I can do now. So I'm trying to figure that out and I don't think android is going to work. I think there's chrome tablets now, the chrome that you got with the, the. I could try it right now. I got the docking thing, but that's meant for home, for turning on the lights.

2:34:26 - Leo Laporte
It's not really meant for me no, it's, uh, it's a real, it's a full-size. Is that chrome? Yeah, and uh, yeah, there's chrome. Yes, you got your chrome is it chrome?

2:34:35 - Jeff Jarvis
is it a chrome os? No, it's what is it?

2:34:40 - Leo Laporte
who knows?

2:34:41 - Jeff Jarvis
you're what. What do you do for a living?

2:34:43 - Leo Laporte
you don't know, it looks like it's android. It looks pretty android either man, but that's okay. What do you care?

2:34:50 - Jeff Jarvis
what the os is because? Well, because, uh, chrome os has the files app, and the files app allows you to annotate well, I bet this has a files app, so that doesn't? That app doesn't exist on android I don't know, I couldn't find it, I don't know, or you got to do some kind of open this app. It's called files on this. Okay now, now.

2:35:12 - Leo Laporte
Okay now, open a pdf allow files to send your notification. Sure, now I'm in files and I want to look for I don't know if I have any PDFs. Let's see here if I can find a PDF. Uh, search for PDFs. Nope, um, oh, you know why? Because this is searching on the, on the tablet. Let me look at my drive for a PDF. That's why, yeah, so this will go to drive. This is the file. That's good, all right good okay, this is real time help PDF.

2:35:44 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what you've done for a living. Here is your book.

2:35:51 - Leo Laporte
You can't mark. Look at that.

2:35:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I won't do that.

2:35:53 - Leo Laporte
I will do AI in the Valley. This was one of our guests. Right, ai Valley. Here's guests. Right, ai valley. Here's the pdf. Um, this is gary gary rivlin. It's going to be on the show soon, isn't he, gary rivlin? It's going to be on twitter on sunday. On sunday, it's gonna be. He wrote he wrote ai valley, right. Am I wrong? I don't know.

2:36:17 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, we can do this next week.

2:36:20 - Leo Laporte
I didn't mean to catch you Scroll up, I just need to mark it right. I need to mark it up. So presumably this is going to have some sort of where do you get the markup? So there's some text. I don't see any tools Open with. Well, you could open it with something, but he wants to keep it in drive with cami, but what's? Cami.

2:36:48 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a pdf annotation tool right, but then you're gonna have to pay for that at that point just gets remarkable or it does it up in the cloud and you can't do it on a plane or at least this may not be a good test, because I don't know if it's locked, but anyway, folks this is a good one for our crowdsourcing.

2:37:10 - Leo Laporte
Let me know or you could just ask. You know, gemini would know, I know better. It'll make up an answer this week. An old guy's trying to figure out how computers work. Thanks for joining us, it'll be a fun show.

2:37:27 - Paris Martineau
As the chat GPT row says, Leo finds a way to turn.

2:37:30 - Leo Laporte
every three hours the signal goes through the rabbit ears and then they grab it and then they put it and it goes down the rabbit ears into your TV set where it finds Paris Martineau. She is a trained professional journalist.

2:37:47 - Paris Martineau
You can reach her at.

2:37:48 - Leo Laporte
Parisnyc. That's her website. It's wonderful to see you have a great wedding. Is it you that is getting married?

2:37:56 - Paris Martineau
No, it is not me that's getting married.

2:37:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Are you in the wedding?

2:37:59 - Paris Martineau
My friend got married this weekend and I was made the maid of honor and it was great, oh you were.

2:38:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh, as you should be. Did you wear a lovely dress or did you have a moth?

2:38:08 - Paris Martineau
I did wear a lovely dress. Many people said I was the most competent maid of honor they've ever seen A compliment.

2:38:14 - Leo Laporte
I did not expect. There's a word that you did. You do the toast I did. I made a lot of people cry, which was, I think, part of the competence. Are you supposed to make them laugh? I made them laugh. No cries.

Good, christ, good any of them there was, there was laugh there was a cry, yeah, yeah okay, um, so nice to see you. Paris, jeff jarvis, professor of emeritus of journalistic innovation of the craig newmark graduate school of journalism at the city of new york. This train now at uh mary jane state university. Is it mary jane mary mount montclair state?

2:39:03 - Paris Martineau
marijuana state university that would be.

2:39:05 - Jeff Jarvis
That's that. I'm getting punchy roll, but going I hope, I think those paris has now come down a bit.

2:39:13 - Paris Martineau
I think, I think maybe I mean, listen, I feel a tightness in my chest. That was out there three hours ago, but I need a neuro gummy I, I gotta, I gotta hit another one. I may be coming down a little bit.

2:39:23 - Leo Laporte
No, no, don't, don't, don't, don't don't see how many days you can go without sleeping. Wouldn't that be fun well, it's really fun.

2:39:29 - Paris Martineau
I don't think I'd be the first person to do that. You know, don't be smart well, I see paris.

2:39:34 - Jeff Jarvis
The reason she's pushing for the 24-hour show is she wants to be like senator booker and do the whole thing. Do the neuro, I mean that's what I'm saying is right now.

2:39:42 - Paris Martineau
We're in a prime period for the next couple weeks where I got nothing but time. I could take as many hours of the 24-hour show as you want me to, oh so it doesn't have to be for new year.

2:39:51 - Leo Laporte
It could.

2:39:51 - Paris Martineau
No, no, I'm saying it could just be a random festival a random day where we want to raise some money for twit, and I'll be there for as many hours as you want northwest a telethon.

2:40:02 - Benito Gonzalez
I can do a tap dance, but I could I mean I'm not doing the whole 24 hours but I'm down neuro gummies are on me.

2:40:11 - Paris Martineau
I was gonna say we could there's quite a few in here we could send it around I'm tempted.

2:40:17 - Leo Laporte
Every time I mention this to lisa, she says no, just like that get in the comments.

2:40:23 - Paris Martineau
People advocate for the 24-hour lives.

2:40:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Wish to see him under three hours, not 24 hours.

2:40:30 - Paris Martineau
No, we've already. Like we're already at three hours, no, we're at two hours and 40 minutes.

2:40:36 - Leo Laporte
We're good, we're golden, only 20 we went a little longer 21 more bs and it'll be a half-hour show. It'll be great. Jeff's books are, of course, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, which you must get in paperback or hardcover from your favorite bookstore, and the web. We weave, and it was Independent Bookstore Day this weekend. I hope you went out and bought some copies of Jeff's book at your favorite independent bookstore. Keep them in business, because otherwise it's all Amazon all the way down.

2:41:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll be recording magazine, I think next week, oh good.

2:41:13 - Leo Laporte
Oh good, nice, although, get the book, because then you have the pictures, right the pictures.

2:41:19 - Paris Martineau
There's no pictures.

2:41:20 - Leo Laporte
There's no pictures. You did it. Wait a, a minute. You did a book called magazine.

2:41:25 - Jeff Jarvis
That can you imagine what it would take to clear the images. Oh, that cover was.

2:41:30 - Paris Martineau
Oh, no, it's have you ever interacted with a media lawyer working on image copyright? They basically just shoot you with a gun and tell you to go away.

2:41:39 - Jeff Jarvis
That's their whole job. You can't do that. You're better off dead than trying to get.

2:41:44 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, you can't do that. All right, so might as well get the audio book. You're not missing nothing. On the other hand, this show. You should watch the video because there's lots of good pictures in this show. As always, I don't want to end the show, because you know why?

2:42:03 - Jeff Jarvis
because it's a sad lonely way after it's over yeah, I appreciate it and so when you go downstairs, does lisa say how was it?

2:42:12 - Leo Laporte
yeah, she says how was it? She has not yet gotten to the point where she's. Was it over three hours? You want to go down how long I go down? And I say it was only. It was just like two and a half hours, and she knows you're cool two hours and change she doesn't realize the change is pretty way to make sense yeah, hey, that's still chain thanks for joining us everybody next time on this Week in Intelligent Machines.