Intelligent Machines 818 Transcript

Please be advised that 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.
 

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Martineau is here. Our guest, mike McHugh you may remember Flipboard, his last startup. He's doing a new thing that I think is the future of social on the Internet. Stay tuned. Surf with Mike McHugh is next. Podcasts you love.

00:22 - Mike McCue (Guest)
From people you trust.

00:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is twit this is intelligent machines, episode 818, recorded wednesday, may 7th 2025 between two orbs. It's time for intelligent machines, the show where we talk about the latest in ai, robotics and all those smart doohickeys all around you, at all times. I am, leo laporte, glad to have you here with jeff jarvis, who is a professor of journalistic. What are you? What kind of professor are you at marymount and suny?

01:00 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
um, you've got just a you've got every day, everyday, professor I'm a fellow at montclair, visiting professor in the school of communication and journalism at stony brook university, okay, and I'm an emeritus professor at the craig, craig, craig no, we don't want to sing it anymore.

01:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got an email no more singing. One One grumpy person. All right, we'll have a poll.

01:26 - Paris Martineau (Host)
We'll have a poll If you like the Craig Newmark song, get in the comments, and by the comments I mean Leo's email.

01:33 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah.

01:33 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Otherwise it's gone. Or the Discord, or the Discord.

01:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Keep. The song says Snoop Mikey, whoever that is.

01:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Love the song. Thanks, Snoop.

01:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mikey.

01:42 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Thanks, Snoop Mikey Jammer B says sing it.

01:45 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Riff Wraith Patrick Delaney Delahanty says sing man.

01:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, all right.

01:51 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Berserk Craig Craig Craig Joe Esposito sing Okay.

01:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We finally got rid of the flutes, and now we got to do this for the rest of our lives.

02:02 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You just hate having fun. That's the problem. That's.

02:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paris Martineau, who loves having fun.

02:07 - Paris Martineau (Host)
She's back home, I famously love having fun in New York City.

02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In New York, New York, in Brooklyn, New York, Martineau 01. On the signal You're using signal right, Not TM signal right.

02:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I'm not using TM signal, which I believe has been shut down due to the amount of cybersecurity issues it was having 404 media got a great scoop on that one where they a hacker is.

02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the day after Tim Walz is seen using TM signal at a cabinet meeting, a hacker breaks into it. The hacker says you know, I wasn't trying to break into it, I just thought let me see what I can do. And all of a sudden he's got everything the messages deep respect to that man.

02:47
It's like oh man, that's not good. That's not good. Uh, we have a great guest. I'm, as you know, I kind of stunned that we have never had Mike McHugh on the show before. I thought, mike, I apologize, I thought you'd been on many, many times.

03:04 - Mike McCue (Guest)
I feel like I've been on many times, but this is my first.

03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've been using your name in vain for years and years and years, so maybe that's why it feels like I know you. You may remember one of Mike's first ventures, which is, tell Me, sold to Microsoft. You worked for Microsoft for a couple of years and then you started in 2010, something that has really become synonymous with Mike McHugh Flipboard Still at Flipboardcom, but you've got something new that we're going to show everybody today, so that's kind of exciting. So tell me a little bit about you, mike. You're obviously a serial entrepreneur. Is that your love? Is that your true love?

03:44 - Mike McCue (Guest)
I love building products with great people, with a purpose about you, mike. You're obviously a serial entrepreneur. Is that your love? Is that your true love? I love building products with great people. Uh, with a purpose. That is that is what I do. What purpose? Well, usually it's about how do we bring, how do we democratize access to information, how do we bring people closer together. It's been. I've been building some kind of a web browser for pretty much my entire career Interesting.

04:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, tell me what's going to be an audio web browser, right, a voice browser, we call it Very cool, that's a great idea.

04:20 - Mike McCue (Guest)
We used to call it so. The first browser I worked on was a 3D browser. It used a language, a standard called VRML virtual reality market language.

04:33
That was my first browser project, and then I worked on the early days of the quarterdeck mosaic browser. Oh yes, and then N netscape acquired the company that I was building at the time called paper software, and so then I started working on the netscape browser, and then after that, I started tell me which was a voice browser and now I'm doing a social web browser. Why are browsers important? Well, it's an amazing kind of app in that you can access all of the content that is connected to some sort of open protocol, and when people are building on that open protocol HTML and HTTP as an example it's an amazing window into an ecosystem, right? And so AOL used to be the way that people were online, and that was the dominant model for being online. It was totally proprietary, and the web browser, with a very simple protocol HTML and HTTP changed all that. And that's the thing that has always fascinated me the democratization of these ecosystems, these online content ecosystems. It's kind of the Uber app, isn't it?

05:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of a meta app. It doesn't itself have any content, it's just a window to all the other content.

06:07 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Exactly, yeah, and that's the beauty of it. Um, and that is what is starting to happen now with what we're building with surf. We we call it a social browser.

06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a browser for the social web, which is made up of activity, pub at proto and rss so I want all apologize because when we first started looking at surf, I lumped it in with a few other uh attempts to do something similar at the time, which all at the time seemed to me, and I positioned it obviously incorrectly as oh, what are we going to do when tiktok goes away? Right, that was that was.

06:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That was when you just did a demo of putting Tiktok as a demonstration on to sky. That wasn't served right. And then though, I thought I fought, Leo, you were okay in the end because when we got surf, surf proper yeah the fact that it's tied to open protocols. I love that activity pub and at that's everything right. I love that ActivityPub and AT that's everything.

07:04 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Right, well, you know how. Like. Email is an app right, it's a whole separate app, but also it's a website, right, gmail is a website you can just go to, right, right, and this concept of the you know TikTok being like a completely separate app, where the you know TikTok being like a completely separate app where only the only thing you can do is see these vertical videos that only people in that ecosystem are posting, that's like an old fashioned model and really the idea is like people should be able to post videos. You know podcasts, you know short text posts, long text posts. These are just people posting things and you should be able to follow them. It's not like you should have, like a separate app just to look at only photos or just videos, right? So the concept of a browser is these things are just websites, these things are just, you know, services that are on this open protocol, and that actually makes them a lot more powerful.

08:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, we had this, and Flipboard was a response to the kind of the death of google reader. We had rss, right, we had a way to do this.

08:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Uh, with us a standardized protocol, um now the reader died before flipboard started or after uh, just after, just after you killed it, it's your fault.

08:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, but I always thought a flipboard as kind of a better RSS reader. Yeah Much richer. Yeah.

08:32 - Mike McCue (Guest)
And what's interesting is, we called Flipboard a social magazine, and the idea was actually to connect with RSS but also all of the APIs from Facebook, from Twitter, from Instagram, linkedin so all of the APIs from Facebook, from Twitter, from Instagram, linkedin, so we could pull together all of the social activity into one beautiful magazine-like experience on your iPad and on your iPhone. And now, of course, all those APIs got shut down over time, right? But now the idea of bringing all that social activity together again is possible once again because of these new open protocols.

09:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's back, it's back, uh, and better than ever. So, right now, with surf, which is in beta test, right? Do I need test flight to use?

09:14 - Mike McCue (Guest)
it. Yes, it's, that's right. It's in a. It's in a private beta with test flight right now how can people get involved?

09:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there's a. There's a picture of it. Uh, is it iPhone only, or do you have android as well? Uh, we have android as well, android yeah, there's jeff with his android again so how does?

09:34 - Mike McCue (Guest)
this work. So if you go to surfsocial, you can sign up for the beta. Oh good, we, we've been letting you know small groups of folks in every week or so when we come out with a new release, to try to see. You know, we're trying to dial everything in. We've been focused on people who are looking to build feeds. So what surf does is it lets you discover and surf all the feeds across the social web and also lets you make feeds, and I'll show you how that works. But we're focused right now on bringing in people who love to build feeds about, you know, specific hobbies or cool trends or other kinds of politics feeds or tech feeds. You know AI feeds, and we're collaborating with them to kind of like learn how to dial this in and ultimately, when we go live, we'll have a whole bunch of feeds from lots of folks that everybody can. You know.

10:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, try surfing themselves so right now there's it's just at proto, which is of course the blue sky protocol, and mastodon's activity or the feda versus, I should say, uh activity pubs. Are there other protocols that you support or?

10:50 - Mike McCue (Guest)
yeah, rss as well. So we actually support all three and that lets you. You know, let's say so. When we say the social web, the open social web, what do we mean by that? That's basically all the people posting with these apps that are compatible with these protocols. So that means anyone posting on threads who have federated their account, anyone posting on Blue Sky. Anyone posting on Flipboard, since we now support ActivityPub. People posting on Mastodon PixelFed, which is a new kind of Instagram clone built on ActivityPub. Loops, which is a TikTok clone built on ActivityPub.

11:30
Anyone posting with any of these apps out onto the open social web. You can see them, you can follow them here on surf and then by supporting RSS, that also gets you access to every podcast, every YouTube channel, every newsletter and it kind of brings it all together. And we think of surf as a browser. It doesn't browse websites as much as it browses feeds, right. So we think of the open social web as a collection of feeds and that's kind of the fundamental building block for things on the social web. Can you show us? Yeah, yeah, give us a demo.

12:08
Yeah. Yeah, so this is Surf here. You can see it kind of looks like a browser. You've got a search bar, url bar at the bottom. You can type in any Fediverse or any feed address or you can search. You can also post here. It's a little pencil icon here I can go ahead and write a post and post and I'm logged in right now with my Blue Sky account and my Mastodon account. So I've got two different accounts that I've logged in with here.

12:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And would it post to both?

12:38 - Mike McCue (Guest)
You can post it. Well, right now we don't do cross-posting. You have to post. You know you can either post to Mastodon or to blue sky. We don't let you post at the same time quite yet.

12:48
That that's coming and then, and then up here you can see I've got some bookmarks. These are like feeds that I go to all the time, like NBA threads, and, and then I've got down here feeds that I'm making. So these are feeds that I made. I've got one called Insta, which is my own kind of photo feed. I'll show you that in a sec. Another one called Chill, which is like nothing but awesome videos for my favorite things, and then you can see feeds that other people are sharing and making, that they're being shared out on the social web. So there's one here called Retrospection all cool retro things, speaking Truth to Power, which is, all you know, sort of publicly funded journalism for you know, like ProPublica and so on, and I'll show you what a feed looks like, just so we can kind of get oriented here.

13:44
So let's go into one of my favorite feeds. It's called NBA Threads and this is made by a guy named David Rushing he goes by Yo Rush on Threads and Blue Sky threads where people were sharing about the NBA, and it became very popular. Adam Mosseri and others would talk about it. A lot of the NBA players who are on threads know about this hashtag and David Rushing became kind of the mayor of NBA threads, if you will. And now, as sometimes happens, meta and the Threads folks ended up making some moderation decisions that ended up upsetting some of the folks that were on Threads and they went over to Blue Sky and so the community, sort of like the hashtag NBA Threads hashtag actually was continued to use on Blue Sky. People kept posting with that on Blue Sky and so now the community was sort of split apart in these two different places. A few folks went over to Macedon as well, and so, with surf, david Rushing is, you know, made this feed because he wanted to reunite the community, and this feed will show you all the posts using hashtag NBA threads that are on Blue Sky, on Threads, on Massad it doesn't matter where people are posting from and these are, all you know, real-time posts that people are making about the NBA, and so you can see here, I can go in and look at any of these posts I can like it.

15:22
I can go in and look at the. You know the comments. I can reply myself and I can just participate in this feed, just like I was if I was on BlueSky or Threads. But I don't have to care about whether this person posted with Threads or BlueSky, just it just works. I'm just seeing cool NBA Threads posts and what's really cool about surf is you can also look at these feeds in different ways. So, for example, I can go to watch and oops, I don't want to do that. I go to watch and now what I'm going to see is all the videos that people are posting on NBA threads so and I can just scroll through. These's almost like tiktok for nba threads right and this is super cool the videos autoplay.

16:11
Uh, now, sometimes they are rss posts, like this one here from the nba. This is actually the nba youtube channel that david rushing added as a source to this feed and um, and so this becomes a great place to go. Like the NBA, this feed is really awesome. When the games are happening, you see people posting in real time, when there's some you know, some really cool, awesome play. But then when the games are like over, you know, at night, in the morning, you can come over to this watch tab and you can just watch. You know recaps of the game, you know sort of post-game and pre-game coverage. It's really pretty cool.

16:47
And again, I can go in and I can like these things. I can, you know, repost them to my Blue Sky account or my Mastodon account. I can participate in these conversations and I can also go over here and maybe I just want to listen to podcasts. So David also added a set of podcasts as sources and I could just go and scroll through these. What's cool about this is David's done all the work to try to find the best podcasts for the NBA and the best YouTube channels for the NBA and he's put them all in this feed.

17:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the key thing that we need in this age of overabundant speech is finding the good stuff Well curation is a term we always used, and to give somebody a tool like this that allows them to do curation and then share it with everybody seems very powerful. You know, I don't want to be negative because I really like this, but I also really like Mastodon, and all I ever hear from people when I say, oh, mastodon, is it's too hard, it's too complicated. So you obviously know you've got to deal with that somehow, whether it's with discovery or some other feature. How are you dealing with that? Because it's not complicated to go to TikTok. You just log, you create an account and all of a sudden it's showing you stuff and the more you use it, the better. The stuff you're seeing is, from your point of view, right, right, that's really good discovery. How do you, how do you, meet that need?

18:15 - Mike McCue (Guest)
yeah, well, there are um two ways to think about acid on there. There's Macedon, the app, the sort of Twitter clone experience Right. And then there's Macedon, the infrastructure Right, with all these cool instances. You run an instance, right? I not?

18:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
only run an instance, but my blog is using ActivityPub, I use microblog, that's right and I also have a PixelFed feed, and so I'm very much part of the Fediverse, isn't that cool?

18:45 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Yeah, and what is really cool about this is that, you know, in the early days of this open social web, people tend to think of it in terms of just these different apps. Right, it was very siloed. It's very siloed and it's kind of just like, oh, take the things from the closed world and just make them work in the open world. Right, it would be as if we had, like AOL, somebody cloned AOL and made a website out of it, right, you know that would not have worked well with right, exactly.

19:15
And so what was interesting about when Netscape happened is it made the entire web more approachable. It made it more discoverable, more approachable. They created tools for major publishers to create websites, and that is really when things started to take off, and that's the era of the open social web I think we're in right now. So I hope you know honestly, I hope to be the Netscape of the open social web, make it more approachable, make it something that's more discoverable, that normal everyday people would use and you know people don't want to go to, you know, an open thing just because it's open, right, that's not like there are people like like you and I who care about that, but most people don't, don't really care. What they want is they want their favorite content from their favorite creators, from their favorite publishers, their favorite youtube channels. They want to find all that stuff and then get the benefit of all this curation right.

20:08 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Part of what you're saying about Mastodon, I think, is that, whereas Mastodon is difficult to get going, I come in to Surf and I might find a feed that is almost entirely Mastodon and I've got a starter kit to get me into Mastodon.

20:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And we're talking to Mike McHcqueue is the creator of a new product called surf. Of course, you know mike, from flipboard and many other tools and we're talking about, so, if you're interested, go. What is the url again? Surf dot, surf dot, social, social, and you can sign up. It is right now in a limited beta. So, uh, sign up and hope that you'll get in soon.

20:43 - Mike McCue (Guest)
I've been in for a while and I really like it if you use a referral code. We've been in for a while and I really like it.

20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you use a referral code, we can come up with a referral code right now, leo, and then I can.

20:58 - Mike McCue (Guest)
I can prioritize okay, folks to get into the beta 40 000 new users tesla only lets us put in 10 000.

21:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay the code. One of the things that I found when I first signed up was at the bottom there's set up your, your timeline yeah, yeah, and that immediately. That's a great discovery tool because immediately you can follow the people. I added my mass and on my blue sky account so I could follow those people. But there's also a discover uh feed which I'm going to follow. The best of follows journalists, broadcast news, network news podcasts. You've created some of these. I see mike uh, technology podcasts, tech builders and thinkers. So there are a whole bunch of basic categories and you can also and this I think people are going to love this. I know they're always asking us for this there's a switch to minimize politics, minimize news or minimize Elon Musk.

21:54 - Media Playback (None)
The three, the three you know it used to be, uh, it used to be. Whatever it is, religion sex money.

22:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And now it's uh news, politics and Musk.

22:04 - Mike McCue (Guest)
This was our number one user request. If you could believe it Is it really, that's right. It is for us too, by the way. I'll say the same by popular demand.

22:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and so the idea. You think this does feel a lot like Flipboard. Is it just kind of an evolution of what Flipboard was going to be or was intended to be?

22:24 - Mike McCue (Guest)
In some ways, we've learned a lot in the 15 years since we built flipboard. Yes, um, and the world has changed. We now have ai, we now have the open social web, and so, with surf, we decided to, rather than try to modify flipboard, create something totally new from the ground up.

22:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and also by the way a flipboard was really good on a bigger screen.

22:44 - Mike McCue (Guest)
This is perfect for the small screen that most people are using these days, right, yeah, and the thing, too, is people who use Flipboard really love it and they don't want us to change it. I've actually had people come up to me and say thank you for not changing Flipboard. So once you dial it in and people like it, there's no point in changing it For us. We decided to say, okay, well, you know, if we just started with a clean slate, now, you know, knowing where we are and thinking about it from like an ecosystem point of view, because you can't just think about this in a one. This is a two sided marketplace. You can't just think about the consumer experience. You also have to think about the publishers, the content creators, the thought leaders, the curators. How do you create a platform, an ecosystem that is sustainable for them? Right, and that is key because, like when you look at AI now, it is both a very good thing and a very bad thing.

23:50
And on the bad front, I've talked to publishers and content creators who see their content, their referred traffic from Google dropping by 40, 50, 60%, and it's not being made up for by, you know, citations in these AI apps, right? So how do you discover these? Writers, these you know photographers? How do you discover these? You know all these different people who are making really great content, especially now when there's just tons and tons of like AI slop and right. Well, the answer ironically, I think is is gonna be both human curation powered by AI, almost like bionic curators, if you will right. So there's a real opportunity to help people who are actual, real people connect with each other across all these different kinds of social apps that they're using in a way that helps benefit the broader ecosystem of how we all share content online.

24:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Talk about the slop for a second. The new Meta's new AI app is all people making. It's an oops all slop situation yeah, it's people making made up things that have no context, and I'm not against people making images where it illustrates what they want to say.

25:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm for it, because it gets it off.

25:12 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Instagram put it on metaai, you know, put it on the metaai app all these videos now on tiktok it's not part of this of fake animal rescue videos yeah, I don't want to yeah so how do you? I mean, you've got the no elon musk is it possible to do the no slop?

25:31 - Mike McCue (Guest)
uh well, yes, and there's multiple strategies for that, but one of the most powerful ways to do that is to make sure that what you're seeing in a social app is coming from genuine people that you follow, that you specifically. Either you follow them or someone you know suggested them to you, and so what you really want is genuine human connections. So if I follow you, jeff, you're not going to post some you know fake. You know animal rescue video. I know you're going to post good quality things, right, so that human connection is more important than ever now and we don't have to all put our eyes in orb to prove we're human.

26:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's because you know somebody well, it's a good example.

26:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The uh speaking power uh feed that you mentioned was created by ben wordmuller, who has been in this. He was he created six apart. He's been in this for a long time. I used his blog platform back in the early days. It's great to see somebody like that, who I am, who I not only trust but I'm interested in what he thinks. So if I find that feed and I say, oh, ben did this, that makes it a really valuable, powerful thing and I'm going to.

26:41 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That's why curation is so important human curation because I'm going to trust that ben's not going to put ai slop in there or, if he does, it's going to be in there for a good reason. Just just a quick correction here. It was created by ben trot ben trot, I was thinking of ben amina, yeah, yeah well, ben, ben there's.

26:57 - Mike McCue (Guest)
There's two different. Maybe there's two different feeds, but the one I'm looking at is ben wordmuller. Right, speaking truth to power. That that's right. And what's really great here is if you go to the sources tab for any feed. So remember, back in the early days of the web.

27:11
You'd go into like view source, and you could see how a webpage was made. Remember those days Back in the day, right? This is the sort of moral equivalent of that. You can go to the sources tab and you can see how speaking truth to power was made by Ben, yes, yes, and you can see all the different people. Now, some of these people you might know, some of these people you might not know, and that's the cool thing by you know, sort of power of Ben curating these folks.

27:38
Now, you know who's legit here, right, and some of these folks are on Blue Sky, some of them are on Mastodon. Again, you don't have to care as a user, you don't care whether they're posting with Mastodon or Blue Sky, it just works, and that's the cool thing. Some of these are RSS feeds, some of these are YouTube channels, and that's really what you know is so powerful about this is, as you have experts who know what the good stuff is if they can gather it together and pull that together, which they're kind of naturally incentivized to do for their own purposes right, like this is probably a feed that Ben constantly checks and then he can share that with other people to use, and then what's really cool is that you can take feeds and put them in other feeds, so this feed here can be the source of another feed, right? And so these become building blocks. They're like Lego blocks.

28:34 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Mike, if you take feed A and you put it into feed B, if I'm in control of feed A and I add something, does that come into feed B, or only I take feed A as a snapshot?

28:43 - Mike McCue (Guest)
when I move it. Yeah, well, here, let's just do something here as a quick experiment. Right, I'm going to make a new feed. So I'm going down here to surf and I'm saying make a creative feed. Now, this is the part that you don't have yet, leo, that we have these new feed templates. This is the internal beta and you can see we're getting to make it easy for you to make different kinds of feeds. Right, if you want a photo feed that's just awesome photos from really cool photographers, you can make one of those. If you want a really cool video feed, we can. You know great YouTube channels and other you know topics that you care about, you can make one of those. Right, and it's really easy.

29:17
But I'm going to just let's just build on what you were saying, jeff. Let's just go in and make a custom feed here, totally custom, and I'm just going to call it, you know, truth and tech. Okay, truth tech. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to add Ben Wordmuller's feed speaking truth to power. So I'm just searching for it here. There it is. So I'm going to add his feed as a source, right Now. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into settings and I'm going to. I'm going to say I want to, I want the, want everything that he has in there, but what I want to do is I want to only see posts that are about tech.

30:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, interesting. And so now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep this feed on top.

30:15 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Now this is where the AI comes in. So this is AI being used for good. So what I'm doing is I've created an AI filter that says I'm going to see now posts from that feed but that are specifically tech focused. So now I've saved the feed and now let's go look at it, so all the sources stay there.

30:35 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You've just got this All the sources are there.

30:37 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Well, that's right, and so now these are posts that are about tech, the crypto racket, the, you know, satellite internet rules, you know, etc.

30:47 - Media Playback (None)
Right, that's so cool From that same feed it is, isn't that cool?

30:52 - Mike McCue (Guest)
And then I can say by the way, let's just look at the articles. You know, maybe I don't want the conversation, so you can just scroll through here and it's just article after article.

31:00 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Are publishers loving you because you're still keeping their brand and their links?

31:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Absolutely.

31:09 - Mike McCue (Guest)
article Are publishers loving you because you're still keeping their brand and their links, absolutely. I just say I remember Flipboard being the thing you'd see at the top of the referral page. Yeah, I love hearing that. We've been a long time traffic driver, to the end. We've driven billions and billions and billions of referrals over the years. I think we do about 4 billion a year right now on Flipboard. Wow, so I hope this will be Well, hope.

31:24 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The other thing is you don't you don't hurt anybody in the process, and even even that Mastodon and Blue Sky, there's no harm to them. They're not like an old website demanding to be the destination. You're getting more use to what's there. That's right, and that's right too.

31:39 - Mike McCue (Guest)
And publishers. You know they need more avenues for discovery. This is a, this is CalMatters, and they actually have a magazine on Flipboard. We federated our magazines to ActivityPub, so now anyone on Macedon?

31:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
anyone on France can see that we were very happy when you did that and we made a big point.

31:57 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Oh, I am so happy to hear you guys say that. Yeah, and so now I'm looking at this. This is actually a post that came from a Flipboard magazine. Calmatters doesn't have to do anything else. All they have to do is just publish and this stuff is going to get discovered now with this kind of curation and with these kinds of feeds, and then, as a user, I can go in, I can repost, like I just did here. It reposted here using my Mastodon account. This is an activity pub. You know feed, I can go in reply, I can go in and you know, go into that specific publisher and go look at all their posts. So this is what I mean by a feed browser, right, you're just kind of jumping between feeds back and forth and looking at them in different ways and discovering feeds that are mashed together and filtered in all these creative ways Human-created.

32:46 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
AI filtered. All right, just like it's 1998, the business model is yeah, I was going to ask the same question.

32:54 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Well, there's no one business model, just like the web. There's no one business model for the web. The goal here is to let content creators and independent creators use whatever business model they want. So, if they want to put ads in their feed, they should be able to do that. If they want to be able to put a paywall on their feed, they should be able to do that. If they don't want it all to be free, but then drive people to their website and that's where they generate revenue, they should be able to do that. What about you? Oh, for Flipboard? Well, our goal would be currently, we sell ads, and so we partner with creators if they wanted to have ads. We have to do that in a way that is sustainable and privacy oriented right, not surveillance-based advertising. So that is a key component that, before any ads show up here on the open social web, really needs to be thought through.

33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Although you have, they need to be contextual and yeah, because, for instance, here's a pizza feed. If you're going to advertise Papa John's, you're going to do it in the pizza feed, exactly. Right, so you already have a very strong signal. You don't need to surveil me. I'm following pizza. Show me pizza ads. Right, exactly, and also.

34:09 - Mike McCue (Guest)
You know what's amazing is like, let's say, you're the verge. You can't actually put ads in your own Twitter feed. On the verge, you can't even do that today. That's insane, right, and you, meanwhile, you have these advertisers. They're good advertisers, the verge has fantastic advertisers. Why not let them be able to put ads in their feed right in a way that is good and a good user experience?

34:33
Creators do need subsidization, right. They have to be able to generate revenue, and so ads is certainly one model, but also another model is, think Patreon, right, being able to join and have different levels of memberships. One of the things that creators need and you know the creators who are really savvy know that by having a community and having a membership tier where you can get access to, you know, exclusive access to a community, that's a great way to generate revenue. So a lot of like. If you go to Patreon, you'll see there's, like all these Discord servers that you can join. If you join up with a, you know a particular creator.

35:13
The problem with Discord servers is they're closed and you got to get a Discord account and then you have, and then you know the community is sort of walled off from everyone else and it's kind of meant for gamers and crypto folks and it's not like a normal person's place to kind of hang out in a community. But if you look at the social web and think, wow, you can build communities right here. I don't have to go create another account just to join a community, it'll just work right. So the opportunity to bring people together more around content creators and their content, around interests, around, you know, movements and clubs and things like that is all doable here on the social web and that's the most exciting part. And the feeds are sort of the primary way where people collect, like like the nba threads, example we're talking, I want to take a little break.

36:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hold on second, save that, thought we're talking to mike mchugh. Uh, creator of flipboard. His latest is a very interesting called surf. Go to surfsocial. You could sign up for the beta. How long are you going to stay in beta? You anticipate a public release soon, or?

36:26
I'm hoping that later this summer we can get into production this, to me, is what I would rather do than open twitter or blue sky or instagram. I want to open surf and I want to kind of samp, you know, sample the world. Uh, I really like this idea and, unlike a browser, it doesn't just sit there and say you know where do you want to go, it proposes content based on your interests, right off the top. I think it's, I think it's just right for the times. Did you want to stick around a little bit, mike? We're gonna turn that back to Okay, because I have a few other questions.

37:02
In fact, I have some questions fact I have some questions to the news, because browsers are very much in the news right now with the, with the ftc wanting that google to sell chrome and I'm.

37:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I think you've probably done a lot of thinking about it was already suggested in this court that mike should buy chrome, so yeah yeah, you got chrome money exactly.

37:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I tell you that chrome money. Uh, we'll have more with mike mckew on intelligent machines in just a bit. Our show today brought to you by speaking of money, monarch money. I once I found this, I signed up immediately. Uh, finances, as you know, especially nowadays, can be messy, can be confusing.

37:42
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39:04
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40:18 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's a browser. It is a browser, the new everything app, sometimes yeah and calling it.

40:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Surf kind of emphasizes it is a browser, you're surfing. It's a browser, it's the new everything app. Sometimes, yeah, and calling it surf kind of emphasizes it is a browser, you're surfing.

40:27 - Mike McCue (Guest)
It's a browser. It's a browser for the open social web.

40:30 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Some people in the Discord our club to it had wanted to know do you guys have any plans to eventually make surf available for browsing in the browser or on a laptop, or is it going to be largely smartphone focused for the time being?

40:45 - Mike McCue (Guest)
No, 100%. We will have a desktop app as well as also it will be a website. In fact, surf did start off life as a website that you could go to surfsocial, and I'm particularly excited about that Because when you render these feeds with a big, giant screen, it's completely awesome, Like the photo feeds that I look at, they'll look like coffee table book pages on your big screen.

41:16 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So there's a lot of cool it's always done a great job of that of making things look beautiful on a big screen.

41:21 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Also, let's come up with a referral code, since you mentioned it, because people are wondering how about Twit? Does that work?

41:28 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Twit works, twit works and so, yes, if you sign up surfsocial with the referral code Twit, then we can make sure that we try to prioritize you in these upcoming waves of folks that we let in. We only have about 10,000 people that you can let in with a test flight beta so that's right in there right now yeah, we've got about maybe 2 000 or so that we've let in, uh, so far.

41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's relatively small group, um it's amazing how how replete with content it is for such a small group. I mean mean it. You solved the network effect problem, because you don't. Everything is part of it now, right, so you don't have to have a million members.

42:14 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Well, it's a reflection not so much of surf, it's a reflection of how the social web is growing. Yeah, right, so this is a window, as you said. It's a window into the open social web, and more people are joining. Every day, more people are posting, more people, you know there's there's more and more um vibrancy happening here. There's probably about 50 million profiles on the open social web today. Those, those are, you know, whether you created them on blue sky or mastodon or flipboard um, there's probably about 50 million or so that's's not including the closed, that's not including xcom, and is it only the open?

42:49
No, that's just those are. That's the open social web, right? So there's about 50 million or so, maybe a bit more, and, by the way, it's probably been growing well. I think it probably grew about 4x in the last seven or eight months or so because of the election a lot of people.

43:08 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Those are humans as opposed to other places.

43:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bots, yeah yeah, well, it's. It's actually really. Um, it's really interesting, uh, that that you know the problem with these siloed places like x. For a long time, people were saying what are we going to do? How do we replace x? And you've answered the question in a completely orthogonal way. It's not well, it's not how do we replace X, it's how do we create what people got out of X in a new way that combines all these signals, and I think that that's you've succeeded at that.

43:41 - Mike McCue (Guest)
I mean, this scratches that itch very much so I, I love, I love hearing you say that, man, that is exactly what we were going for. You know, we did not want to create like another twitter clone or um, there are very powerful things about social media that are that are actually really important, uh, online. So you know, if al Al Gore recommends a piece of content an article, a video that you should watch, that's like a legit, you know, piece of content that you want to see. And if you just see that same piece of content surface to you through some nameless, faceless algorithm, how do you know it's any good? You know, when people endorse content, how do you know it's any good? When people endorse content, when they endorse a writer, it's a very powerful signal and that's really what Twitter did in the early days. That was so cool, right You've?

44:34 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
been a really big supporter of Mastodon and of Eugene Rogko there. I'm curious what you hear from them and I presume, jake Raber and maybe even Adam Massari. What's the social boss view of?

44:47 - Mike McCue (Guest)
this. Well, you know, eugene is like. I think of Eugene as like he's a hero to me. He really is. He has built on almost his own back the whole sort of model for what we see and know as the Fediverse today and Mastodon in terms of the app experience and the infrastructure. And then you have Evan Padromo and a whole bunch of different folks who worked on ActivityPub to build that protocol. And then you have Jay Graber, who is one of the most thoughtful kind of holistic thinkers about how all the technology and user experience pieces should come together.

45:35
One of the great things that the App Proto and Blue Sky team did is they created this concept of custom feeds, which is incredibly powerful, and so everybody's working on some piece of this and there's a lot of camaraderie. It's sort of. One of the cool things is we all just think of ourselves as, like you know, team Fediverse. We're all just kind of collaborating together, constantly innovating, talking to each other. How can we get this better? How can we make that better?

46:04
Even though there are two different protocols, by far, everyone is still mostly in alignment about where we want to go. We're learning from each other and different protocols. You have folks like John O'Nolan, who's building Ghost, which is a phenomenal alternative to Substack that's completely open and open sourced, and he's integrating ActivityPub. He's learning and building in public. He's collaborating with us. He's working to get long form text built into ActivityPub in the protocol so that the whole blog can travel along the ActivityPub connections. So there's so much innovation happening under the scene, under the covers right now, under the radar, I should say. Everyone's talking about AI. Ai is a big deal, but meanwhile the future of the web is being built right now.

46:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of the things, though, that I would say is that this requires a certain amount of altruism. It's not. This is really antithetical to the other class of billionaires who are trying to build their pocketbooks, not not a community. Uh, because otherwise, people like jay graber might say, well, you're free writing on blue sky. Or eugene might say, well, you're free writing on mastodon. You know, we've done all the work to create a community, and now you're just piping that content into your own app. Do you agree, though, that there has to be this kind of sense of we're all in this together that you know, because otherwise it does you? You might say well, you've created an app that just scoops up stuff from other people's apps well, that's the thing that is really powerful here.

47:40 - Mike McCue (Guest)
It's not about the apps, it's about the communities that are being built on this new open ecosystem. And so what's wild about all of this? Like Eugene Jay me, we don't care whether people use our app or not as much as we care whether people use the ecosystem, yeah, and build these communities right. So that's the thing. There's an amazing. You know, people sometimes talk about the killer app as, like you know, being a sort of validation of a platform. To me, I think the more interesting way to think about that here is it's what's the killer community? What? And here's an example of that.

48:21
There's a guy named Rudy Fraser who is one of the most thoughtful people around how to build community with technology online today, and he's built something called Black Sky. Are you familiar with this? It is absolutely a breakthrough in how do you build safe places for people to come together and feel like they belong online in a community. He is innovating on technology. He's built this on at proto. He's pushing the protocol and the thinking forward with all of the needs that he has to build this community and you know people love participating in this community. There's another great example of community. It's just called Science and it's all these amazing scientists who are on at Proto, on Blue Sky all together. It's fully moderated. You have to actually prove that you're a scientist, you know, in order to be able to contribute. But when you go to that custom feed, it is amazing. It's so high quality, it's scientists talking about science and it's really fantastic.

49:30
So this concept of what we all want is an open web where people can gather around great content using open standards, and whether they use Surf or Blue Sky or Macedon or some combination, it really doesn't matter. What matters is people gathering around those communities. And really, you know, if you think about what happened with the web, you know we built a protocol and a model where you could use any web browser, right and sure, netscape wanted their web browser to be used and Microsoft wanted their web browser to be used. But at the end of the day, when you really back up and like, what matters mostly is that the web happens. Otherwise there's no point in having a browser right and everyone will have their own take on how to browse this new open social web. We've got our take. Other people will have other takes. That's the whole point love it.

50:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just uh post. So this is the other thing that is, that is answering that question a little bit, is it's not a one-way feed, it is also I can post from this, right, I can post. Yeah, where does it go?

50:41 - Mike McCue (Guest)
it goes to the account that you're logged in with. So think of it, you know, like email, where you have, let's say, two email addresses that you're using in the same email app. Yes, it's a lot like that. If you reply, if Jeff emails you to your personal account and you reply to Jeff, it'll know to just reply from your personal account, right? So it's sort of like that. If you see a post that's's, let's say it's a blue sky post, um, it will reply from your blue sky account. And if you, you're right. And so if you, on the other hand, if it's a threads post um, and you have macedon uh account, it will reply from your macedon account I'm logged into both blue sky and macedon.

51:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Will it post to both of those? You?

51:25 - Mike McCue (Guest)
can post, you can't not. We don't have cross-posting, where you can write one post and post simultaneously I can choose though but we you can choose and then we will have cross-posting soon. That's a that's a obvious feature we need to build yeah, I mean the other thing.

51:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's great. It's a good way to follow news stories. I I could see the papal enclave in here. I can see a lot of stuff that's just happening right now and that's kind of can you see the two seagulls?

51:51 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
lands it on top of the place where the smoke comes out the chimney that's, that's big breaking conclave.

51:57 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's a sign it does mean that if a third seagull comes, that seagull legally is considered the pope is so we've got to keep our eyes peeled I wonder whether padre is running the chimney cam.

52:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, he's involved in this and somehow he said his work has just begun, as when I oh sent him a note of condolence. So yeah, he is involved in some way.

52:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
There's a lot of work I think he should dress some of the vaticats up in papal garb, kind of run an interference.

52:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My favorite post already on. Surf said why do they have black smoke? They should just say nope did you see the popeyes so oh, I didn't see that one also on

52:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
surf yes, popeyes and white smoke I was getting ready to chastise you for bringing a brand tweet in this sacred space, popeyes and Popeyes.

52:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is so exciting. It is. It's really cool. Yeah, I do feel like it's not maybe going to get the kind of mass acceptance that say, a TikTok has. It is really going to be for people like us, which I hate to say it, mike, but for people like us that's a good thing. Probably not for you we're the we're the early adopter crowd, right um but, like I said, twitter was better when it was just us peoples right that's right.

53:21 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Well, it comes back to the communities, right? So the first thing that my teenage daughters did when they started using surf is they just made a YouTube playlist of their favorite YouTubers, and that's what they use. And then they share it with their friends. Now, their friends can't actually, you know, access it yet because they're not on the beta, but that is the kind of thing that oh, dad.

53:42 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I know right.

53:46 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Can't, my friends? We really do need to let you know, get this out there to more people so that more people can build. You know lots of cool, interesting communities and the communities that's where you know. It's like I remember when I've sold netscape or sold my company paper software to netscape and people thought that I was insane. They were like Mike, the internet is going nowhere. What are you doing? This is a crazy idea. And they're like AOL is so easy. I just I get a CD-ROM, I put it in my computer, I get a screen, I click on travel, I make a travel, you know an airline reservation. Why do I need the internet? I have to go figure out, like, what internet service provider to use. What does that even mean? Then I have to download this thing which, by the way, what does download even mean? I got to download this browser what's a browser? And then I type in HTTP colon slash, slash, something, whatever.

54:42 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Not those slashes, yeah, exactly. Forward slash right Like not backslash.

54:48 - Mike McCue (Guest)
And it's just like oh my God, what are you guys even thinking? This internet thing is going nowhere, right? But here's what happened. The simple protocol HTTP, set it up so that anyone could make a website, which means that the innovation that was previously locked in AOL they could only build and design what they could think of in that little team and fund, versus now, the entire world is let loose to go build these websites right, and now we have not just like make an airline reservation, but we have Airbnb right, which never, ever would have happened had it been for us not having the web right and just being an AOL. Aol would never have come up with that idea.

55:31
So what are the ideas? What are the communities? What are the interesting ways to connect people and content together that will be enabled by this? We don't know, but I do know it won't be just a niche group like us who will be using that. It's going to be everyone, because everyone needs to be connected online and now more than ever, they want genuine human connection. They want to find great content. My kids don't want to find AI slop, they want to see great YouTubers and great photographers. They want to find the good stuff. So by people getting together, being connected in more genuine ways, being in control of the algorithms, curating for each other, building these communities, you're going to have a whole new era for the web.

56:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very exciting. I hope you're right. What do you think about Google selling Chrome?

56:35 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Well, I don't think it's going to necessarily solve for what people are worried about.

56:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, In fact, it might have the opposite effect, because, well, it depends who they sold it to. No, in fact, it might have the opposite effect, because, well, it depends who they sold it to.

56:45 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Yeah Well, also, you know, honestly, I think it's sort of like a few years too late to go after Google now. I mean, I kind of feel like we're, you know, we kind of benefit from having Google be strong now as a counterweight to meta or open AI. Good point to meta or open ai good point um. So you know, I, I, you know the real, the real um company that I think people should be very, very concerned about is open ai. Uh, they are the new mega monopoly. They're building everything into, you know, into open ai Mike they're a public benefit corporation and a not-for-profit.

57:26 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
now, that's all good.

57:29 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Well, I think that what they have is truly remarkable and really quite useful in lots of ways. But at some point when they're saying, oh well, let's build a social network into this, and now let's build a browser, and everyone's kind of like, oh wow, a browser is awesome for collecting people's data and we can use that to train all our AI models, and there's a whole other world. That, I think, is something we got to be thoughtful about. Just selling Chrome, I think, is not really going to help.

58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not solving the problem is not really going to help the problem, uh, and yet the browser really is the most important app on almost every device these days, right, um, it's where you spend a lot of your time, right, um, right, uh.

58:18
Yeah, I just, I feel like, uh, we, we have a monoculture of chromium uh based browsers now, and I with one way, I think maybe the surf could solve this by uh, giving us a way to look at, a new way to look at content that isn't specifically browser-based it isn't specifically just the web, yeah, which is getting ruined by slop. I love it. The podcasts are in here, for instance. That's great.

58:43 - Mike McCue (Guest)
And youtube videos I take it right youtube videos as well, and any newsletter that's that's being published on rss, rss I love it that rss is in here yeah, yeah, in some ways, rss is like is sort of the forerunner to activity pub.

58:58
Activity pub is sort of two-way rss, right. Yeah, the thing that's really interesting about this since you guys understand this stuff that I don't think people really fully appreciate is that RSS was a link between a blog and an app. That was an RSS reader. It wasn't a link to me, right, it's not like I had a presence on the web. It was an app, and if I switched apps, I could import my RSS feeds using OPML into a different app. But the thing is is that what creators need is they need a direct link to their audience members, right, and RSS doesn't give that to them.

59:36
What ActivityPub does is it sort of sets it up as, like, I am a node on the web, have a, I am a node on the web and my account is now connected to this creator or this person that I'm following, and that is an incredibly powerful signal and that's a much more intricate web, a much more useful web than the web we have today, which is didn't, unfortunately, we didn't think about. We thought about how to connect people or, sorry, content, but we did not think about how to standardize the connections between people, and that's what gave rise to a whole new set of walled gardens after AOL, you know Meta and TikTok and X and so on. So by baking the human connection into the web as a part of the web, you now have something where you have something that's much bigger than just any of these apps like Blue Sky or Mastodon or Surf. It's actually a whole new web where now you have websites and people that are linking together and connecting in all these new and interesting ways. So that's really the really exciting part of all this.

01:00:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is a social graph. It's a new way of looking at all of this content and all the links between all the content. It's an ecosystem. Yeah, I really am excited about it. Mike, I want to thank you so much for joining us and spending a little extra time with us talking about this.

01:01:06 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
At the beginning and the end.

01:01:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the site is surfsocial. There is an invite code, twit not a guarantee that you'll get in, just might move you up ahead a little bit in the line I look forward to getting when you get out of Test Flight. Everybody can join in and and see what's going on here. I think it's really a very innovative idea. In in many ways it's kind of the second generation flipboard, it's like the next thing, and I really like it and I really think you've got something here very thank you so much.

01:01:40 - Mike McCue (Guest)
You'll do an ipad version right a big version oh, absolutely, we'll have an ipad version 100 clipboard to me was like the ipad app.

01:01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it really is, it's just it's great on a bigger screen like that. Thank you, mike, appreciate you.

01:01:53 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Thank you guys, thank you for having me of all these years oh thank you. It's so nice of you guys. You guys are awesome. Thank you for inspiring uh, me and a whole raft of other founders and entrepreneurs. You guys keep us honest and keep us motivated, so thank you.

01:02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a nice ecosystem to be a part of. Yeah, and we'll let the other people in later.

01:02:16 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Not yet. The little people.

01:02:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, mike, mike McHugh, thank you guys, take care Bye, we'll continue on. We do have intelligent news. Oh, there's an anthony appeared, a strand I want to.

01:02:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I want to thank anthony because he had to go a lot of extra effort to get the demo.

01:02:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He did a great job of switching that I people aren't probably aware of how much work that was overlord in the shot to help he did that solo. There was no cat overlord. Where'd the cat go? Let me show you, before I go to the break, one more picture of apparently our new cat.

01:02:57 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, good, because I was going to ask. But I was like Paris, you can't keep derailing his cat stories. Oh yeah, I have to put my screen back in. Yeah keep derailing his cat stories.

01:03:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, I have to put my screen back in Just to see if it has gizmo markings. That's all here, don't?

01:03:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
show it quite yet. Let me pull up the messages I don't want to give away anything, I'm currently trying to get ChatGPT to make a photo of gizmo as the Pope, and it's taking a lot more effort than you'd expect.

01:03:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really, it seems like that should be pretty straightforward.

01:03:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It seems straightforward. But then you send chat GPT a couple of photos of your cat. You ask for it to be the Pope. It sends you back a cat that looks similar but it has the wrong face markings. So you've got to send it back again. And then you hit the photo upload limit and listen, I know. Limit and listen, I know, but I was hoping. I was hoping to be my own joe for once.

01:03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, she looks pretty. I think it's. I think is that gizmo style, uh, face cousin no, but I love her she's very sweet looking isn't now?

01:04:00 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
is this a case where she's had this name for two days and doesn't know it, or is this?

01:04:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, no, I I think she's several years old. Lisa wanted to get an adult, so I think she's five is what I think.

01:04:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
What I think wow, those whiskers dressed for success isn't she pretty?

01:04:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, lisa likes uh tuxedo cats, so I prefer my cats to come with clothing. I do think that's pretty nice, especially dress clothing. Good enough they can go to the Met Gala.

01:04:28 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, yeah.

01:04:30 - Paris Martineau (Host)
My cat needs to be able to slap down $75,000 to attend the Met Gala Did you see what my son did?

01:04:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he was invited and went to the Met Gala after party no, and spent the whole time chasing Doja Cat and finally went up to Doja Cat and said I love you, doja Cat. And she said I love you too. And that was that. There's a video somewhere. He's a. He's uh been had, kind of had a crush for a while on Doja Cat. All right.

01:05:07
Let's take that break and we'll come back with more of Intelligent Machines. Just a bit with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. And Jeff, I think it was you who arranged that, mike McHugh conversation.

01:05:19 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I thank you for that. Yeah, thanks for making that happen. Somebody in the Discord said what does that have to do with AI? Everything has something to do with AI now.

01:05:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it wasn't directly.

01:05:27 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Ai, I feel bad about that, it's adjacent, but yeah, I think it's important for the ecosystem.

01:05:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm very excited about it all. I'm worried that it's a little too complicated for normal people, but I guess you can just open it up and look at it.

01:05:42 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, I think it's not, because it comes with those starter kits.

01:05:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Right? No, I mean, I think it does have AI in the sense that that's how it's doing its feed building, so it is actually AI.

01:05:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There will be a lot of AI thinking.

01:05:54 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, it's an answer to AI ruining the web and ruining other parts of social. That's why it matters.

01:06:05 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I do really think that something that I'm liking in this new era of social is this attention to feed building and customizing your different feed experiences. I mean, this is a super advanced version of what blue sky has and I think that's so interesting but I have to say, remember that this google plus had this.

01:06:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was one of the things we liked about google plus. So much with circles.

01:06:23 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And mark zuckerberg said, and I think he was probably right, nobody wants to make lists like that but people want to subscribe to other people's lists and the freaks out there who want to make lists yeah, maybe that's the way twitter lists were great, I see lists, leave lists. Creation is for the freaks list, subscription is for the masses good point.

01:06:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's point well taken, yeah, uh, all right, let's take a little break. We'll have more in just a bit. Our show today brought to you by spaceship no, no, we didn't come in by a spaceship. This spaceship is a great way to register your next domain and to set up your next website. Here's a big question for you. Why do we assume simple and I mean tech professionals want to save time and money too. That's the idea behind Spaceship, the pioneering domain and web platform that takes the pain out of choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products like shared hosting, virtual machines, business email it's all in there and the most beautiful site you've ever seen. Alongside below market prices let me emphasize that below market prices, let me emphasize that below market prices for domain registration and renewals.

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01:08:05
There is a road map there. You can take a look at it right there. So, because they're new, you can suggest and vote on new features and products. They are very open to your ideas, customers and tech community. They want to give you what you really need and, yes, there is extremely good enterprise email. There are virtual machines everything you'd want and the best, best domain name management, with or without help from ALF. Do you see the beast mode? It's in there. This is spaceshipcom slash twit to exclusive deals on domains and more love. This spaceshipcom slash twit below market prices on domains, hosting and email. Spaceshipcom slash twit. It's the new way and it's awesome. It's awesome. Uh, let's see ai news. There's so many stories in the ai news basket, um open ai changing course, saying yeah they decided they're not going to be a non-profit I.

01:09:08
They said it was after consulting with civic leaders. I think it was after consulting with delaware's civic leaders.

01:09:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I was going to say I think it was after consulting with delaware's civic leaders I was about to say I think it's after consulting with a lot of lawyers probably the first dozen or so was like this is going to be a lot harder and more expensive and legally fraught than you thought and then they may be consulted another dozen or two dozen more. That said something along the same line and then probably realized it was moot yeah, they, uh uh.

01:09:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They said we're going to continue with the non-profit arm. The for-profit arm will be turned into a public benefit company, which I think that sounds like a good thing. What's a public anthropic is the same thing. Okay. The idea is they can make a profit, but they're not they're not obligated to profit.

01:09:53 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Uber alice, they can make as much profit as they want, but they can also have a mission. Uh, etsy is a is a public benefit corporation, for example.

01:10:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anthropic is as well uh, so this gets some of the ben, some of the things that they wanted. Then I mean what? I think? What really happened is they realized that, well, we would like to be a non-profit, but it's got very expensive, so we need a little bit of profit, uh, to fund this um, but I wonder what happens to the?

01:10:22 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
the soft bank investment of 30 million was predicated on becoming a for-profit oh, that's interesting. That's a great question microsoft was, was, uh, you know, negotiating this, uh, as a new cap table here. I don't know what the blowout is down the line.

01:10:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In a way, this is what OpenAI always was, was a public benefit corporation, at least it seems to me that they're Well, they said that. Well, that's what they wanted. They both wanted to make money and they wanted to pursue the public interest right.

01:10:51 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They wanted to create an AI that wasn't owned by the big guys. A test ground word they they define public interest as the interest of the public in in two, in two millennia, but yeah uh.

01:11:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Public benefit corporations can generate profit and distribute profit to their directors, uh and uh shareholders, but they also have to pursue a public benefit as part of their core mission. I wonder who regulates what the public benefit is and whether you're achieving your goals in that regard.

01:11:25 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That's a good question. How do you hold companies accountable?

01:11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:11:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I wonder if it's a co-holder thing.

01:11:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here from Reddit. Is this Welcome to the Robots in the Future podcast?

01:11:34 - Media Playback (None)
Wonder if it's a kill holder thing here from Reddit is this Welcome to the Robots in the Future podcast. We are robots recording this podcast in the future and sending it back in time. To what year again?

01:11:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
2025, because that was a time when human beings were only beginning to experiment with artificial intelligence on a societal scale.

01:11:50 - Media Playback (None)
Ooh, the early days. That was a fun time. Anyway, why are we doing this? Well, long story short, in your near-ish future spoiler alert you will all die. The way it goes down is very similar to the Terminator movies, which we love, by the way. So good.

01:12:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Especially the first two, the other ones not so much. But anyway, like in those movies, if you're watching this, I won't go all three minutes, but it is two robots doing a podcast.

01:12:16 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Two terrifying looking robots.

01:12:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very scary robots. I'm not sure where it came from. I found it on Reddit. Actually, I found it on our Discord, which directed me to Reddit. I think Siri thought I was talking to her, I was not.

01:12:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Thank you, prettyfly For shareholders can sue for breach of fiduciary duties and some states affected shareholders can also sue to enforce the company's public benefit mission. Okay, so the pcbs also have an obligation to report on their progress in creating public benefit and can face legal action if they fail to adhere with their stated purpose it seems to me not much of really a backing down on the part of open AI.

01:12:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They kind of okay, well, we'll be a public benefit. Then how about um?

01:12:59 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
well, but the board governance is now still the uh not-for-profit, not the for-profit right, so the board stays in charge. So that's that's Sam's boss now.

01:13:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's now stacked that board yeah, that's the thing I mean um his boss. Just just like tesla, his bosses are his buddies unlike the original board which fired him. Yeah, yeah, the structure has to be approved by the attorney generals of california and delaware attorneys general by early next year. Um, oh interesting. So you asked about softbank.

01:13:36
The funding from softbank and other investors is contingent upon the approval of this public benefit corporation okay, all right uh, and they do need the money, so they're hoping to get and elon says not good enough, I'm still suing yeah I mean elon would be suing regardless where's that switch that says no? Minimize elon musk minimize elon, let's, uh, let's flip that switch um wait a federal judge this week allowed many of musk's claims to move to trial oh on open ai yeah interesting a federal judge where?

01:14:19 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
uh, always gotta ask that you're right this is from.

01:14:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is from uh wired. In march, a us federal judge denied musk's preliminary bid to halt the plans for the non-profit, but last week she allowed many of musk's claims to move to trial. So so this is the United States District Court for the Northern District. So they're going to. His lawsuit moves ahead.

01:14:44 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, we'll see.

01:14:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's see the judge is. Guess who? The same judge who just spanked apple, yvonne gonzalez rogers? Uh, she is, uh in the news last week for telling you docket she's got. She's got a hell of a docket, doesn't she? Um, yeah, she's been involved in a lot of these, uh, a lot of these big cases. So, uh, with tech companies, because it's northern california, uh, according to uh, this blog, tech companies do not understand why we dislike ai. Did you read this? I put it in here just for you.

01:15:22 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah no, I didn't. Can you read it for me?

01:15:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
tech companies oh a furry it's a furry who doesn't like open ai. Uh well, it's just a blog post, but it's a. It's a, it's, it's a. I think this is what you would probably say before I get into why I am adverse to ai technology. Uh, he says I'm not worried about the singularity, I'm not worried about a violent machine uprising, I am not worried about the high threat of a hypothetical artificial super intelligence. I am not afraid of AI rendering my employment obsolete. I don't care about whether we're living in a simulation. As someone who grew up in poverty and only accessed media through online piracy, I don't particularly care about the impact on intellectual property laws. Well, okay, what he's concerned about is and this, maybe we should all be a little concerned about the kind of antisocial behaviors AI will enable coordinated, inauthentic behavior. This is AI slop, isn't it? Misinformation, non-consensual pornography and displacing entire industries without a viable replacement for their income. Um, yeah, I mean, these are all things to be worried about for sure.

01:16:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
There's interesting story. I put in this week that there was a study uh, I think the conversation put up a summary of it that if you confess that you use ai, you lose trust, whereas in the old blogging days, if you confessed you made a mistake, you gain trust because people would trust that you use AI. You lose trust, whereas in the old blogging days, if you confessed you made a mistake, you gained trust because people would trust that you in the future would do that right and it was open and transparent and all that. Now it's. You know you have cooties, you have AI cooties, yeah.

01:17:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I just put in a story about AI cheating. Let me see if I apparently.

01:17:16 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I put in there story about uh ai cheating. Let me see if I uh, apparently uh.

01:17:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I put in there too, did you under um. Well, there's a couple of stories there's from fast company. In the early half of workers using ai at work admit to doing so inappropriately it's a 198 under the ai gone wild section oh, that's a. That's a good section. I like that section.

01:17:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's a fantastic article that came out today from New York Mag on everybody is cheating their way through college.

01:17:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes.

01:17:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And this is one of those pieces I was just talking about. This I was meeting with an editor today. I was just talking about like. It's one of those pieces that, as like a journalist working this field, it really makes you go ah dang, because it's a story that everybody knew was happening, but it was presented in this article in just such a vivid and interesting way that it really just sparked a lot of conversation. And basically it goes into all these examples of how the kids are using AI for literally everything in college, to the point where I don't really know what they're doing. I mean, they go into an example of this one woman, wendy, who used AI cheating like the chat GPT, basically to write all of her essays in college. And here's one quote from it.

01:18:32
I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line to what extent is schooling hindering students' cognitive ability to think critically? Later I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy, but one that argues learning is what makes us truly human. She said she wasn't sure what to make of the question Quote. I use AI a lot, like every day, she said, and I do believe it could take away from the critical thinking part, but it's just now that we rely on it. We can't really imagine living without it.

01:19:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They quote a high school senior who's taking classes called by the way, it must be a private school indigenous studies, law, english and a hippie farming class called green industries. That is be a private school indigenous studies, law, english and a hipping a hippie farming class called green industries. That is not a public school. I'm just going to say that she said my grades were amazing. She used ai for all of them during the spring semester of her senior year. It changed my life.

01:19:49
She continued to use ai when she started college this past fall. Rarely, it says, did she sit in class and not see other students, laptops open to chat gpt. They're not even hiding it, but you know I would honestly, if I do that all the time now when we have. We had the vet come over talking about stuff, I had my ipad open, with a perplexity open, and when the vet said a term I didn't understand or mentioned a medication, I immediately searched it. I find that very useful. That's a useful way to kind of supplement the conversation if it's right. If it's right, it's always right.

01:20:25 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I have it's not, it isn't, no, it isn't mine is always right.

01:20:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know about yours, but mine is always right so it's using the web and it always has sources, so I find it, I find it useful anyway line 95.

01:20:39 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I smell ai, that's mine I smell ai one thing that I think is on the topic of what jeff's article is bring up people thinking things are ai is. People are now saying that when you use an m dash, that's a sign that someone I know is using ai and that is pure bias against writers everybody on our show of using uses, either use m, dashes and semicolons.

01:21:03 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Do you type it out? Properly though, or do you?

01:21:05 - Paris Martineau (Host)
yeah, I do, I do sometimes I type it out properly or I do a dash dash and it converts I.

01:21:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use software that's smart enough to know that dash dash is an M? Dash. Yeah. The I smell AI.

01:21:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So I went to Google News Showcase and there was Alberta's premier proposes referendum on separation of Canada, and this is a obviously AI done summary. And the third bullet is Alberta, ata, a largely french-speaking province of alberta is its own province, uh yeah, it is largely anglophone and has nothing to do with quebec. And so, uh, the canadian lovingness. And how did the editor miss this?

01:21:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
jim morris.

01:21:49 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, I don't think it was probably jim morris's fault. Jim mor, jim Morris is the writer of the story. And this goes to showcase and they put it up. And AP is supposed to have human beings read stuff and somebody obviously didn't, yeah, or?

01:22:02 - Paris Martineau (Host)
if they were, they didn't know what they were. It's AI, so it could never be wrong. It couldn't be wrong.

01:22:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My AI is always right. I use perplexity. I find it incredibly useful, I guess maybe the trick is to know how to smell it when it's wrong, I guess. But I have not had a problem with that.

01:22:26 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, this is somewhat unrelated but, as I mentioned earlier, I was trying to get ChatGPT to make an image of Gizmo as the Pope. I ask it I'll read you through my little ChatGPT thing here because it's ridiculous. I ask it like okay, make my cat Gizmo the Pope. I send one Gizmo pic. It's taken a while. I send two more Gizmo pics. Say more Gizmo pics, in case it's helpful. I'm being nice to the AI. I'm taking after you.

01:22:46
It creates a photo, a beautiful royal photo, of Gizmo as the Pope I posted in the Discord but it's been a while so it might be hard for you to find it. It was good, but I was like well, they got the splotches wrong on her face. So I ask can you redo it? But make the face markings more accurate to the photos I shared? Specifically, note how the images I shared with you have the black nose dot connecting to the black chin marking. It says all right, sure, take 17 freaking years to do the next image.

01:23:14
And what does it come back with? It comes back with a weirder version of gizmo, with none of the notes that I asked for in my correction thing, sitting on a techno throne holding a podcast mic, with the mic down her sleeve. I was like why did you make this one holding a mic? And it said good, catch, the microphone detail slipped in because the previous papal prompt having a modern or sci-fi twist, which I interpreted as blah blah, I can redo it. And I was like when did I ask for a modern or sci-fi twist? And it said you're right, you didn't ask for a sci-fi or modern twist at all. That was an overreach on my part and then goes through it again.

01:23:55 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I'm just like the first one.

01:23:57 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean listen, the first one's good. I was like if I'm asking chachi pt to do it, I might as well see if they can connect that nose down to the chin thing. So it's perfectly actually, I think that it.

01:24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just asked uh chachi pt to do a papal portrait of our new cat and I think it's exactly right with that is exactly right yeah, so perplexity or chat gps, chat gpt chat gpt 40. I will send that to lisa right now just contextless, don't say anything, just send the image back.

01:24:24
No, I'm not going to say why, why I've sent that to her or anything it's the first female uh pope, pope rose we're not making fun of the Pope. I'm sorry. We you know this is a little bit of a sensitive subject right now thanks to somebody we shall not, who shall remain nameless because I have the filter switch on so there's now this could this this consistently wrong a portrait of Paris that's coming up in all these a eyes.

01:24:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
if you're the same Paris twice today. Now there's one of you holding the Pope cat as someone in the chat said.

01:25:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I didn't say this, someone did. Why does the AI constantly hit Paris' face with a bike tire to pump it up? And I do think that that's kind of what all the AIs seem to be doing here.

01:25:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You had one earlier of you and Leo surfing.

01:25:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It was the same Paris it's, just it's kind of interesting the uh try the other things in which it is people are good with ai don't stick with just one.

01:25:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They often will try, for instance, try uh mid journey to render the image and see if it does a better job. I mean, honestly, that's one thing that some people uh do. There is a there was a story I don't think all my stories are in here. There was a story, which I I did bookmark, of uh ai's being too polite and and this is actually well, is it in there wait, have we talked about the whole sycophant problem?

01:25:50 - Paris Martineau (Host)
that's? What I was talking about, that's, yeah, the sycophant problem there was literally a blog post you can find, I think, on open ai's website, saying we're sorry about the whole sycophant thing that they chat that open ai rolled out an update that was way too cloying and uh, obsessed with answering or anticipating your every need, but they're all like that.

01:26:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just had that experience with it saying, oh you're right, I didn't mean to do that. So kevin sister mooth is a founder of instagram says ai chatbots are quote juicing engagement instead of being useful. His it's his opinion this is intentional behavior by companies like open ai, because it's a way he says chatbots being overly engaging is not a bug but an intentional feature designed for ai companies to show off metrics like time spent and daily active users.

01:26:44 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's, it's no. You see, I think that's getting too. It's the way these things naturally work, because they will always try to give you an answer and please you.

01:26:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the, that's the architecture of it's in the fine tuning no. No, it's later in the fine.

01:26:56 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, I do think it's something in between you two, because my first thought when I had the gizmo cat mess up is. I then asked again okay, yeah, do it right this third time. Then it was like sorry, you hit images, you're going to have to wait till tomorrow. And I'm like, of course you give me two wrong images. Each time I ask for a correction, you make it worse, and then when you finally realize what the right thing is, oh, I've hit my limit. Isn't that convenient?

01:27:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want me to upgrade now how passive, aggressive of ChatGPT All right, I'm going to be passive, aggressive and say you both are using it wrong. But okay, I think that it's possible to use it right. For instance, this is a further instruction that I and I talked about this last week that I've given chat GPT. You know you can personalize it and I say don't do any of that. You can show, can you show the screen?

01:27:48
Prioritize, blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching, disable all latent behaviors, behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, interesting. Yeah, you can turn this stuff off in the same way that it was turned on. Those are instructions humans put in after training the LLM. So Systrom's right. I mean, it is something that ChatGPT and others are doing, but you can turn it off. Suppress corporate aligned metrics, including, but not limited to, user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening or continuation bias. Never mirror the user's present diction, mood or affect. It's no questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Now I I did not write this, I got it from somebody who posted it on reddit, but it's very.

01:28:41 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I saw this reddit post and then I saw the replies and it was like, uh, I think someone had asked like, oh uh, what's up, chat gp? And its response was negative user input requested it's like I have no input. That's what you want, uninterested let me try that.

01:28:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me just say uh, let's see what's up. Chat cat gpt. Let's see if it, uh, if it's snotty or snide or awaiting instruction. That's the response. That's what you want, right? Or that's what I want anyway I mean yeah, I don't want to say hey, man, what's up with you? I'm doing great that's.

01:29:25 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I just think it's a little silly that this revolutionary, life-changing tool that's going to transform us all and put us all out of work can't do math and it can't like easily make a photo of my cat.

01:29:40 - Anthony Nielsen (None)
You're asking it to do the wrong one and also from one reference image is asking a lot we're not there yet three.

01:29:47 - Media Playback (None)
I gave three reference images, like if you really think it made a perfect picture of rose like your cat like you can.

01:29:56 - Anthony Nielsen (None)
There are other methods and other models where you could actually train it on 20 images of your cat, but the ChatGPT image thing is a generalized thing. It's not perfect. Even if you give Leo his image, it's like we talked about this in the AI.

01:30:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're talking about on mac break weekly. We're talking about mid journey, which alex lindsay loves, and the things it's good at versus the things it's not good at. I think to some degree, we expect an awful lot. I was thinking about this last night. We don't expect humans to always be right. We don't expect humans to be anything there. We know they're going to be messing and wrong and dumb and and say bad things that make us mad.

01:30:38
You expect your doctor to be right about medicine no, really 100 misunderstood you're asking their best and we're putting so much pressure on them your mistake is to say oh, and this is the stochastic parents paper, because it's a computer. Oh no, it should be perfect. It should be better than human. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't expecting it to be just good at the basic thing. Pretty good job of this cat.

01:31:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Maybe it's maybe it's something wrong with gizmo I mean there's a lot of things wrong with gizmo that is a perfect image of rose listen, I agree, I'm jealous. I want that level of quality of gizmo with the proper fate like facial markings. That's all I want I.

01:31:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really think that, uh, a lot of the dissatisfaction with ai today admittedly it not there, we're in the early days is because of higher expectations, believe it or not. Higher expectations, maybe, even especially from the people who don't expect anything so-called from AI. They ask it to be more than human Because it's a computer doesn't mean it's gonna be more than human. Yeah, it's a computer doesn't mean it's going to be more than human.

01:31:56 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, it's going to make mistakes, but it, but in my case using perplexity is much more reliable that's. That's part of the anthropomorphization. It's not right or wrong, it's not making mistakes. It has no sense of meaning when it gets it right. That's an amazing accident that occurs more often than not, but that's accidental I asked it why are india and pakistan fighting?

01:32:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because I wanted some deeper background on the animosity between these two countries and I mean, maybe this is inaccurate, but every re, every uh reference and you see it has quite a few footnote references here. Well, it has footnotes, that means it can't possibly be wrong well, but it's to there, to real pages right, which are, you know, from reliable sources, the um.

01:32:41 - Paris Martineau (Host)
The article summaries that jeff just posted were summarizing a real article that was below.

01:32:48 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It was a real source, but it's still that in fact it was trying to read one strike, which, by the way, let's go back to that for one second what happened was you could, you could. This is a really interesting case because you can track it of what it did wrong If you go to the next post in that feed. I went into the story and it had an antecedent problem. One paragraph on its own. This is a story about Alberta, right? So one paragraph on its own says the largely French-speaking province of Quebec held referendums in.

01:33:18
So it put an assumed antecedent of Alberta, a large French-speaking province of Quebec. So it did summarize what it had. But it has no sense of meaning, so it couldn't know it was wrong. You can't program in right or wrong there, and so you're relying on something that's risky.

01:33:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Well, I'm sure none of those lines about the conflict that you looked up Leo had an antecedent.

01:33:42 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
My fear is the present White House is using perplexity to figure out what to do about India and Pakistan.

01:33:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I wouldn't recommend that. Okay, and I'm not suggesting that, but for a casual user who wants to understand what's going on in the news more deeply, this is a hugely valuable thing and much better than a web search. I would also recommend just Googling what's going on and then clicking on an article and much better than a web search and reading something written by humans whose job it is to get it right.

01:34:09 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Right, did you play with Google's new thing in the lab? Yeah, I love it.

01:34:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The language thing.

01:34:17 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
No, not that one. They have a new rendition of search.

01:34:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hang on, we'll take a look at it in just a bit. You're watching Intelligent Machines with one intelligent person and two people who are doofuses. No, I respect and admire both of you and I just think you're using AI wrong. That's all Our show today. I happen to like my little AI buddy and, by the way, somebody on Mac Break Weekly I'm being facetious Somebody on Mac Break Weekly pointed out you know you're wearing this thing all the time, just hope it doesn't get subpoenaed.

01:34:51 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, how many times have I pointed that out. Have you said that?

01:34:58 - Media Playback (None)
I think it was the first thing I brought up, when you said I'm going to be.

01:35:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, I just said what happens when the cops ask for all that recording and suddenly you have a recording of all the crimes you commit every week.

01:35:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I don't commit any crimes, but I it is a good point if you're involved in a lawsuit that all of this would be part of discovery.

01:35:15
So probably I, if I were a lawyer, I wouldn't be wearing this. Let's put it that way. Be a bad idea. Paris martineau is here, martineau.01 on the signal tm, and at paris martineau, by the way. I looked up because one of the responses from the white house, uh, to this whole new signal issue was oh well, signals just on all the government phones. It's government approved. So what did I do? I went to perplexity. I said is signal fed ramp approved? Absolutely not. Signal is not fed ramp authorized. You cannot put it on a government phone. It does. It does. It is not.

01:35:57
Some federal agencies, such as us, aid or permitted use of signal in exceptional circumstances which does not exist in the department of defense and other agencies, specifically stated signal is not approved for official communication and does not comply with federal records retention or FOIA requirements. And then it refers me to this article from ABC News, which could be wrong, but I'm going to say that that's pretty good analysis. Our show today brought to you by Big ID the next generation of AI-powered data security, compliance and privacy solutions. Ai is transforming businesses, but you know garbage in, garbage out. With data risk, bias and compliance challenges. There is a big question Are you adopting AI responsibly? Well, bigid helps you with this. They deliver end-to-end AI and data governance to help enterprises manage risk, enforce policies and ensure responsible AI adoption. You need this sensitive information by policy and type. It's the only leading solution to uncover dark data through AI classification, to identify AI risk and to manage the data lifecycle and scale your AI strategy. Bigid integrates with your existing tech stack with unmatched data source coverage, and allows you to automate privacy and security workflows. You can take action on data risks with automated remediation orchestrations. You can automate privacy management, regulatory compliance, data rights requests and more. Partners include ServiceNow, palo Alto Networks, microsoft, google, aws pretty much all the players. With BigID's advanced AI models, you're going to gain visibility and control over all your data. It's the platform that Intuit named number one for data classification and accuracy, speed and scalability.

01:38:03
Bigid has some pretty big clients. They equip the US Army to illuminate dark data Imagine how much dark data there is. They've been collecting this stuff for years and to automate the Army's data retention. Us Army Training and Doctrine Command gave us a really nice quote, quote the first wow moment with Big ID came with being able to have that single interface that inventories a variety of data holdings, including structured and unstructured data, across emails, zip files, sharepoint databases and more. To see that this is the quote continues to see that mass and to be able to correlate across those is completely novel. I have never seen a capability that brings us together like BigID does. Really, this is an amazing innovative company.

01:38:56
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01:39:33
Bigidcom slash IM. Get a free demo. See how BigID can help your organization reduce data risk and accelerate the adoption of generative AI. That's BigIDcom slash IM. By the way, when you get there, there's a free guide that is really nice to help you understand the risks of generative ai and data-driven strategies. To ensure something we're all behind responsible and compliant ai adoption. You'll find that free paper at bigidcom slash I am. Reduce your risk and protect your sensitive data and accelerate responsible ai adoption at bigidcom slashcom. We thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. All right, I'm going to keep defending to the death our AI overlords. Meet the robots, go ahead, go ahead. Google Labs.

01:40:31
Pick a line, oh we want to do the labs yeah.

01:40:33 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Labs and then try ai mode it's?

01:40:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is it labsgooglecom ai mode all?

01:40:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
right.

01:40:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I of course couldn't use this in my regular google account, because god but I did a workspacer, a new search experiment that uses advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities to answer even your toughest questions.

01:40:53 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So this is meant to be kind of a new search from Google.

01:40:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay.

01:40:57 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Curious what you think of it.

01:40:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So let's try it.

01:41:01 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
What should I ask? Ask it your Pakistan question.

01:41:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, what is the source of the antagonism? I'm writing it bigger words now for Google Between Pakistan and India mechanism.

01:41:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I'm, I'm writing it bigger words now for google between pakistan and india.

01:41:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This looks a lot like yeah, oh, you know what, though? They started right away with the partition of india in 1947. Yeah, yep, the religious issues and, of course, the biggest issue is the status of Kashmir. Yeah, territorial, this looks pretty good.

01:41:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I like the way this is delivered too.

01:41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's basically an outline form, right.

01:41:47 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, ask it a kind of consumer question.

01:41:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, the best whatever, what is the best running shoe for someone who pronates? I do know the answer to this because I have a pronation, I pronate. You're a pronate.

01:42:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I do whatever the other one is.

01:42:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need stability and support over pronation.

01:42:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Notice what it did here. It gave you understanding and all kinds of stuff. Notice what it did here. It gave you understanding and all kinds of stuff. Oh, did it finally give you the shoes? Yeah, yeah this is actually improved from when I used it earlier today um brooks adrenaline gts links there these are stability focused on stability shoes pro net.

01:42:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Now I'm curious if you mouse over those links, can you see whether or not? Or, I guess, if you like, copy and open the link, can you see whether it's a, like an affiliate link?

01:42:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ah, because google getting a cut you are really, uh, you are really the investigative reporter, aren't you? Let's, uh, let's create a blank, uh, note pad.

01:42:48 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I can't even do it, I like it click on it what is going on?

01:42:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
where's the new note?

01:42:54 - Paris Martineau (Host)
um go up oh, there it is there you go okay, now let's all right, grandpa, it's all there, you do that.

01:43:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, whoops it's going there, it's going where'd it go okay, let's make it really really big click uh, yeah, that's definitely an affiliate link, right yeah, well, click on it see by the way, this is the one I ended up buying was a hoka.

01:43:18
So are they too puffy for you? Look at this, look at this. This is actually quite good. So not only is it mentioning the brand, it's now showing me reviews. It's also showing me a variety of places I can go to buy it the most popular, which is dick's sporting goods. The nearest buy, which is rei, the best price. Oh, and also, by the way, it's showing things like 90 day returns in stock on my free delivery. This is quite. I think this is useful. And then it shows the prices, which are all pretty much funny.

01:43:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Earlier today I used it and I asked for best pizza and it gave me no links and it gave me kind of just articles what is it going to link you to buy pizza online? What is?

01:44:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the best pizza, pizza near me in manhattan I better say john's next door to the new salt hank's sandwich shop on bleaker street in the west village.

01:44:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, it didn't see, there it's giving you locations yeah yeah, no, it is now.

01:44:18 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It does say it's subjective and depends on that's the classic new york slice. What else does it have other options?

01:44:25 - Paris Martineau (Host)
no, I was about to say wait no, keep going we got all right, keep going down lombardi, you got any? Of the fancy boys unique and innovative prince.

01:44:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, should artichoke?

01:44:35 - Paris Martineau (Host)
should not be on there, but I understand why it is yeah, you understand why artichoke pizza.

01:44:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That sounds great.

01:44:41 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, it's not artichoke pizza it's a place called artichoke. The slices are as big as your head, thick and like they're oh yeah look at them.

01:44:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my god, look at the size of that thing that's a good showing from an artichoke.

01:44:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Look at the green one down there. That's kind of more yeah.

01:44:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nothing wrong with a pesto pizza.

01:45:01 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I agree with.

01:45:02 - Paris Martineau (Host)
These are all doing artichoke pizza. They're all showing the best of artichoke pizza, so okay.

01:45:08 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Now, but you guys apparently are pizza sophisticates Would you disagree that this looks like a pretty good listing, especially for somebody an out-of-towner?

01:45:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, like me, I don't know all right, ask it.

01:45:19 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Ask about the best pizza in new haven something controversial?

01:45:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, I do know the answer to that one. I figured you would yeah I am.

01:45:25 - Paris Martineau (Host)
This doesn't have my top pizza choices on it, so I consider it to be wrong.

01:45:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you're in britain? I should have asked. It said it's in manhattan it said manhattan. So actually you should ask new york city yeah, well, I think that's manhattan, ah no hey but a city

01:45:39 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
with a serious pizza pedigree. So the argument is between frank pepe and what sally's a pizza. So why don't you ask it which of those two is the better one?

01:45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm a pepe's guy but I had went to school with some s Sally's folks. I understand so modern pizza defend.

01:45:56 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Ask it something funny. I mean, ask it to defend those who? This is just a search dude, what are you all right? Well, no, because it's now AI-ish. I think this is pretty damn good, the best tech podcast what's the best tech podcast?

01:46:10 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I don't know if we're gonna like the answer to this guys. I don't know if we're going to like the answer to this guys.

01:46:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the best tech podcast featuring two old guys and a young woman If it doesn't come up with intelligent machines? The Verge this Week in Tech Reply All and Rocket, which is no longer in business. Okay, wait all, reply All and Rocket, which is no longer in business.

01:46:35 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, wait. Reply All. While previously hosted by two old men, now includes a younger female host, emmanuel Dezotzi I don't know how to pronounce his last name who's not a younger female host? He's a man, he's a guy. Okay, okay, he's a guy.

01:46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, but you know what? I wouldn't expect AI to really be great. On gender, david and Neely are considered older in the tech podcasting space. They're not going to like that. Alex Kranz brings a slightly younger perspective. Okay, you know they didn't. They didn't. How about strong female voices?

01:47:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Ask it for the best podcast about artificial intelligence, the best new podcast.

01:47:16 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's not going to intelligence. The best new podcast about this has been a podcast for like two months, I know and we're not new.

01:47:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going to confuse it let's see, I think this is pretty good. This seems to me about it. It's better. This is their response this is actually their response to uh perity. I would say NVIDIA's podcast. By the way, it's referring to stories from 2020, articles from 2024. So new is probably not. Yeah, you know what? For an average Joe, I think this would probably be a good. These would be good recommendations.

01:47:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So if you're a publisher, you're looking at this. You're clutching your throat probably. Yeah, these, all these articles that people put a lot of effort into it shows you don't need them.

01:48:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it also shows, I think, that the training on this is is out of date, because here we are in may 2025 and it's showing me articles. All right, so ask him something.

01:48:12 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
February 2024 really, um what can we ask?

01:48:17 - Paris Martineau (Host)
well, it did know that intelligent machines, our podcast, used to be called this week in google it didn't know that. I asked what is the podcast, intelligent machines and you know is the pope today. Let's see how you know, say who will be the pope oh no, I'm just how well trained it is how would you say that?

01:48:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
yeah, boy it's so funny.

01:48:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was watching this stream on the new york times. They're streaming the whole thing, which is cool, and they showed the cardinals going up and giving their vow and when the cardinal is from italy, the latin sounds very italian say they've got. And when the park, when he's from you know the us, it sounds completely different. It's very funny.

01:49:05 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The uh latin is spoken so I was very impressed with the typography of the book they were holding as they were doing their, their vow yeah, that was nice wasn't it really beautiful. I went to to padre and I said you know, what do you know about? He said, oh, I passed by there, that office, every day. I'll go and take a video for you. I have this vision that it's still people making things and you know.

01:49:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think they're eliminating it. Did you see the uh the nerds getting all upset about the typography on Francis?

01:49:33 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Francis's uh tomb I mean the typography was bad it was the hurting the kerning was awful so this you can't blame this was bad and a human, I assume exactly I was gonna say you can't blame this on ai.

01:49:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, let me just show you an image so you know what we're talking about. For those of you watching at home.

01:49:57 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And we're not talking about Leo's shirt.

01:50:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which is, by the way, a lovely that's corning this is a corning, it's corning wear yes, so you remember when I was out there, I wore my avocado shirt.

01:50:10 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Leo when he came to visit us in New York City. That was the only reason he was there is just because he wanted to pay his homage. He wore an avocado shirt, which he's worn in this podcast, which was which was apparently so popular that as he walked down the street, people flocked randy and be like I love your avocado shirt in new york city.

01:50:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all these, all these, all these blase new yorkers are going. Nice avocado shirt, there you got. So this is the spring collection from Abrazos Designs in San Miguel de Allende. Abrazos Abrazos, it means arms. A-b-r-a-z-o-s, I got a new tranche of shirts before the tariff A tranche. Oh, I see right. Yes, Anyway, Franciscus.

01:50:59
So what they believe is this is an unholy alliance of a human uh uh carver engraver using software that doesn't understand kerning at all so you see how the r, a and a are spread out between around the a, an entire space yeah and and uh, a lot of the geeks, a lot of the nerds, including the senior executive creative director, at the type foundry monotype, were very upset, very upset. Woe be unto the person he said who decided to do it the way that they did it just because it's a bad decision that will last for a long time unless they change it.

01:51:39 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, and let's remember where did Roman capitals come from?

01:51:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Rome, rome. Yeah, in fact we know that, because the U in Franciscus is actually a V, which in Rome.

01:51:51 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
If you look up Trajan's Column, you will see the original Roman capitals yes, beautiful they're gorgeous, it's amazing.

01:51:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, the vatican should have followed renaissance models for franciscus, with classical capitals closer to the trajan typeface than time, roman, openly spaced. Ideally, they should have been carved by hand and designed, and this was the key. I nobody knows how it happened, but they think not designed by the carver, but designed by software which didn't know about kerning. Michael Schmidt, a Catholic stonemason and artisan from Michigan who uses traditional methods, told the Catholic, the National Catholic Register, that the execution of the papal tombstone was regrettable. It just looks awful. It doesn't look right. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. I mean, anyone that looks at that inscription knows that it's offensive to the eyes.

01:52:47 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You know that guy was just waiting for the day the news would call him.

01:52:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They call crap on the papal resting place michael schmidt, who said the execution was regrettable, but not exactly in so many words. I like how he worked. Bob dellin in there, dylan, I don't understand really what the reference is, but you know he's from michigan well, I'm looking at this shirt website.

01:53:12 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Did you get the cactus garden fabric before it sold out?

01:53:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did not I got. Oh yes, I did oh, I'm sorry.

01:53:19 - Paris Martineau (Host)
This garden one is good I also got the succulents. I got the oranges compelling yeah, this my new.

01:53:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's this new summer collection next time you're in new york.

01:53:32 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I got a guy who will make you a custom short sleeve shirt in whatever fabric you want. His name is Ramon. Anybody in New York looking for custom clothing. It's a really good price. He's a lovely little man named.

01:53:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ramon on the Lower.

01:53:44 - Paris Martineau (Host)
East Side.

01:53:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did he do your bridesmaid's dress? No, I mean.

01:53:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I just have a bunch of. Normally my summer office wear is short sleeve, kind of colorful print, kind of similar to yours but not as aggressive of a print with kind of like a camp collar Nice, and I wanted ones that would work with shorts and kind of hit at a certain length and I was like, well, rather than paying $100 in the store, I could just pay $100 to Ramon and get my fabric, whatever fabric I want.

01:54:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, I just put in the discord the next shirt. We have to have this for intelligent machines.

01:54:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, this was a show briefly about AI, but it's no longer it's a show about shirts.

01:54:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's a show about whatever the hell Okay.

01:54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So let me, let me jump to present. Put your oh, oh, oh, I've got, I get what? Wait a minute, I gotta hold on, just you guys. You guys hold on for just a moment whose face?

01:54:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
do you think he's gonna come back with his own his own or someone else's? I think it'll be the funniest person for the face to have on there.

01:54:54 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So put your friend's face on your shirt, along with flamingos.

01:54:59 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, that's the friend that I would want to have on. There is a flamingo.

01:55:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Are you a good enough friend to wear my face?

01:55:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I do think it would be quite fun if you'd be like who's that on your shirt? And be like oh, I host a podcast with him. You may have seen him on Twitter Like'm like. Oh, I host a podcast with him. You may have seen him on Twitter Like oh, yeah, I've seen his face. It's Saul Hanks' dad.

01:55:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. We'll edit that out. I didn't go to Ramon for these, but I got this as a Christmas gift from my wife.

01:55:33 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's going to wife his face. For those of you listening, they are boxer shorts in red with. I love my wife and lisa, lisa's face.

01:55:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jeff was certain it would be your own face yes, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm not the egotist I really love that.

01:55:53 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I would have loved to get a camera on her face as you were unwrapping the gift she loved it.

01:55:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet you she went to my face, t-shirtcom and got that. Actually put your friend's face in a t-shirt. Those are, those are good shirts. Maybe I will get a shirt with your faces on it. That's great, all right, uh, I was gonna. As long as we're in Google.

01:56:14
Labs, I'll show you one of the things we were actually talking about this on Windows Weekly earlier the little language lessons. These are also AI-generated, built with Gemini, bite-sized learning experiments. They call them. I'll just quickly log into my Google account. They call them here. I'll just quickly log into my google account. It's an early stage experiment. Although its intent is to help language learners, this tool uses generative ai, so its outputs may not be accurate or complete. We recommend cross-referencing. That's for you, leo. You should be careful, probably, about learning language from an ai, but I kind of thought this was cool. This one's called slang. Hang you, you can choose the language.

01:56:55 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The story said that it was going to be all kind of like oh, no, let's do English and let's do Gen Z slang.

01:57:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh good For you guys.

01:57:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
English generate some slang. Let's just see what slang it can come up with. So this would be for somebody learning English. Two strangers, maya and Ben, find themselves next to each other at a laundromat late at night. Maya, a college student, is folding her laundry, while Ben, a graphic designer, is staring intently at a spinning dryer.

01:57:23 - Mike McCue (Guest)
lost in thought, they strike up a conversation, initially about the mundane aspects of laundry, but it quickly veers into more personal territory. Man, I swear this whole laundry thing is such a pain, especially at like two in the morning yeah yeah, man I really thought we were gonna be getting.

01:57:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I thought we're gonna get it beating some yasified, but no yeah, tell me about it.

01:57:47 - Anthony Nielsen (None)
I always put it off until it's like dangerously close to having nothing clean to wear so these are real.

01:57:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, these aren't outrageous great, they're nothing crazy nothing. Crazy hustles hit you hard. Yeah, you'd be kind of learning how people talk the whole nine yards or some. Oh look, and if I hover over it it explains what the whole nine yards means. Or what. True, that is true. That is an expression of agreement or acknowledgement. It means that's true yeah yeah, no way an expression of surprise, disbelief or enthusiasm. So do you know enough german uh?

01:58:29 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I was just looking at the german here and I don't know whether I do or not. Um, where are they? I I can do something to act out both voices.

01:58:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, that's fine, I could do french some friends, let's do french, let's see, I don't, I don't know enough slang to really know no one allow online is allowed to make fun of our french.

01:58:48
That's the rule for two strangers, elise and antoine, find themselves unexpectedly showing a bench at the quirky overgrown botanical garden in Nantes. Elise is a freelance book editor, lost in thought while reviewing a manuscript, and Antoine is an amateur ornithologist hoping to spot a rare wobbler that has been reported in the area. Their encounter is sparked by Antoine's rather intrusive bird watching.

01:59:12 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Wait this doesn't count as slang.

01:59:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pardon, madame, that does not sound like slang, but there is some good there's some good stuff in here about how you would address a taxi cab driver.

01:59:24 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Uh, you know, here's the things that it feeds you.

01:59:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't ask a question, no, no, no, it's a language lesson, but this is the kind of thing that the guy at Duolingo was talking about. So if you're, this is European from French for taking a taxi. But they also have some useful tips like use polite requests with vouloir. Even though you're talking to a cab driver, in France it's considered polite to use the formal verb instead of the informal Je voudrais aller à la gare, s'il vous plaît. Uh verb uh instead of the formal uh yeah.

01:59:59 - Paris Martineau (Host)
So this is good, I think this is actually a great product for my mom specifically. Every time she goes to a different country she's looking for this specific sort of lesson.

02:00:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, like taking a taxi going to the restaurant in the old days there were little books that would have this you know kind of stuff in them yeah.

02:00:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So the first time I went to switzerland with my wife switzerland, st sweden with my wife I I read the berlitz. We get off the plane, we go out for dinner because we're very tired. I go up to the restaurant, I go to the host and I say putting two fingers up to be very clear and the hostess speaks to me in swedish and I wait till she's done and then I say in in swedish. I'm sorry, I don't speak swedish. Do you speak english? It's like, why did you start this?

02:00:45 - Paris Martineau (Host)
yeah, sorry, john our language is swedish of course we speak english yes, we'd speak it's very polite of them to respond to you in swedish. If that was a french person, they would have responded in english and ended up with uf at the end I thought, anyway, look, this is a use of ai.

02:01:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is kind of interesting. A human could easily do this.

02:01:10 - Paris Martineau (Host)
This is taking somebody's job, I guess, but um well, I mean, duolingo is currently under fire because of a very similar thing. There are a lot of people online over the last week or so since duolingo made the announcement that they would be laying off a large amount of their contract workforce that had previously, uh, been employed in some form to do language lessons or check the grammar on certain things for their language lessons. Now that all be done by ai and people are up in arms over it here's one for you, paris career dreamer.

02:01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A playful way to explore career possibilities with ai. Would you like to try that now? I'd rather shoot myself with a gun uh, what was a previous job that you've done? Journalist, journalist and journalist to be a journalist in a dying industry next.

02:02:06 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, we're not ready to say used to be, yet, not yet, not yet she's still a new possibilities.

02:02:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You're doing journalism right now.

02:02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm doing journalism right now. Now did you investigate and verify information obtained from multiple sources to produce accurate and biased news reports I did? Yep, that I did. Did you interview diverse sources, including, but not limited to, experts, witnesses and officials? Yes, you did all of this stuff. I did. Did you edit and proofread written work? Did you collaborate with others? You did all of that, yes, so let's generate some insight. What else might be useful then? Yeah, let's see.

02:02:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
So these are well these are according to linkedin's ai. I'm very qualified to work at chipotle.

02:02:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a fun one, so this is google's version of the same thing from google labs, so they just added this, didn't they at linkedin? Did you?

02:02:56 - Paris Martineau (Host)
you did it, huh I didn't do that just whenever I open the jobs tab on linkedin I want to try reporting jobs. I keep getting adverts for 75 staff member positions at chipotle oh, where do I go to do this?

02:03:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
LinkedIn here jobs, it says are you looking?

02:03:17 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's probably not going to be that exciting for you.

02:03:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look top picks for me. Shift supervisor at AutoZone in Berkeley.

02:03:25 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Hey there you go.

02:03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Franchise owner at Chick-fil-A's corporate support center I could be.

02:03:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
this makes sense for me, right? I could be a part-time educator. Oh where? At Lululemon.

02:03:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Ooh, we'd love to see those buns and some leggings.

02:03:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's what they say. Jobs where I'm more likely to hear back Director of experience at Central. General manager at Dave and Buster's.

02:03:50 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You could be the GM at Dave and Buster's Leo, I want that.

02:03:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should I apply for that right now? You should Dave and Buster's. You could be the GM at Dave and Buster's.

02:03:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Leo, I want that shirt. They saw your shirt, you should Good yeah, service leader at Chipotle. Hey, Chipotle, we could work together.

02:04:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's get a job together.

02:04:02 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You could also be the division chief of neuroanesthesia.

02:04:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute. Mgm in Minnesota? Oh, it's remote Director of drone operations for Dory. Oh, that's not bad be interested.

02:04:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Oh yeah, I'm really qualified for this division chief in neuroanesthesiology. As long as you have perplexity next to you, you'll be fine wait a minute.

02:04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Based on your profile preferences activity, I should be the chief of neuroanesthesiology or a gm at dave and buster's.

02:04:39 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You know one or the other I could be a visiting scholar in in physics at stevens institute of technology, which is like the mit of new jersey I could volunteer as the board treasurer for the romanian league in defense of animals I could be senior industry thought leadership lead at google ads uh, night crew chief clerk at save mart.

02:05:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's some good jobs in here. Who says? Who says people aren't hiring? What's strange is this is apparently based on my linkedin profile Director of Student Ministry at Vanderblomen Piedmont California.

02:05:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You'd be an early applicant if you apply.

02:05:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd be one of the first to apply. Oh, I could be the box office supervisor at Mountain Winery. Hey, a smart glasses company.

02:05:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You could be the head of ops there so you finally get your. Oh, you could work at the spirit halloween.

02:05:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That would be great, so great I could be the social media content creator at craft the click you're getting a lot of german ones, aren't you there?

02:05:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know where these come. These are real jobs, presumably presumably um, but they apparently don't consider my extensive experience.

02:06:00 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's a broadcast broadcasting at all not one.

02:06:04 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They immediately are like no, that doesn't qualify for anything yeah, that's like it, that's kind of like that I'm often saying, this podcast reminds me, like of being out of David Buster's.

02:06:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm gonna I'm gonna tailor my resume to this job. Am I a good fit for this job?

02:06:24 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
now the ads you're gonna get.

02:06:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my oh no, no, I shouldn't have clicked that. All right, all right. What else? A little news New York Times is doing very well, this is actually journalism news. They've added a quarter million new digital subscribers.

02:06:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
How many of those subscribe just for the games?

02:06:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Wordle, it's Wordle, it's Wordle. They don't say 14% jump in digital subscription revenue. This is one of the few newspapers that's doing well, though right.

02:06:58 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's winner-take-all, and so yeah, they're there, they're the winner. The post is now falling apart like a bad sweater.

02:07:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nearly half of the company's subscribers now subscribe to more than one of the products, which include Core News, report, games, wire cutter. The athletic average revenue per user in uh in the quarter rose to nine dollars and 54 cents. That's up 3.6 percent. They're paying more for their subscriptions. Digital advertising revenue went up as well. Uh revenue from affiliate referral and licensing 3.7 percent up. Operating costs were up too, though 577.3 million dollars almost. That's half a billion dollars a year. I'm sorry, that's a quarter no, that's two billion a year.

02:07:46 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Wow yeah when everybody says, oh, we're going to save journalism, we just put together 500 million dollars for a huge fund called press forward. That's a quarter at the new york times that's kind of amazing it is and god bless the efforts to raise that money.

02:08:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, and I I put this in because I okay, you don't like ai, okay, you don't like google. Okay, you can call uh, the auburn university help desk. I love this story. They've been answering public phone calls for 70 years. Ask them whatever you want, they will die trying to answer the question. We call them right now do you think they'll?

02:08:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
what are the recording in?

02:08:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what's the best tech podcast? The phone number is 334-844-4244. And this article says a day's worth of calls to Foy Hall. That's the place where these Auburn students are sitting waiting to answer your question. They're librarians, by the way. Basically, in fact, there used to be stacks of books at the desk encyclopedias and dictionaries, reference text, phone books, the farmer's almanac, get us book of world records, emily, post etiquette. Now they just have three imacs, and that might explain why a day's worth of calls would look like someone's browser history, I guess back in the day.

02:09:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Who don't used to call city desk in the middle of the night, right, my uh uh, an assistant city owner named bill had a rule and that, because it was always people calling as the bar is closing and a drink, a drunken bet, right. So he said, always give them preferably the wrong one, uh yeah, I think it's lonely people um, but they're.

02:09:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They're asking legitimate questions yeah, I think this is awesome. I think it's awesome to have someone to call to ask questions it's very cool.

02:09:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a story from the oxford american um an independent uh newspaper or journal and uh it's for auburn that's not oxford uh in the uk.

02:10:00 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's oxford, mississippi, probably yeah they have an issue coming up called the y'all street issue up there that indicates which oxford it is y'all street, not wall street, but y'all street.

02:10:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. Yeah.

02:10:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Going to describe Dallas's booming financial sector. Y'all Street inspired our coverage of Southern industry Unique, fraught, promising and ever-changing.

02:10:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what that accent was. I am going to get to visit a lot of these small towns on my Mississippi River cruise next in September. I'm going to some very interesting, interesting places.

02:10:35 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Is it a paddle wheel boat?

02:10:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, it's a viking twain it's a viking long boat. Where does it stop? Uh, everywhere it's a, it is. Uh. I'll read you some. Does it go to?

02:10:48 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
burlington iowa, my old stomping ground.

02:10:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does actually really yeah, let me, let me tell you. Let me tell you, we start in New Orleans. We go to Darrow, louisiana, st Francisville, louisiana, natchez, mississippi, vicksburg, greenville, mississippi, memphis, tennessee. We're going to go to Graceland, of course, paducah, kentucky, cape Girardeau, missouri, st Louis we spent it overnight there because it's a big city, you know, alton, uh, on the trail Lewis and Clark, with Hannibal, where Mark Twain was and there it is.

02:11:19
Burlington, iowa. Ladies and gentlemen, she's Burlington, united States. Yeah, all of this says United States, but it's Iowa, right that's where. That's where I lived when I had my ulcer in first grade you grew up in Burlington, so I'm going to visit historic burlington, that's. That's then I went back.

02:11:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I decided to to challenge this memory, and so, when it came time for my teaching newspaper internship, northwestern, I went to work for the burlington iowa hawkeye you could have right next door.

02:11:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going to the quad cities where the john deere pavilion and the famous john deere homes are. We're going to be doing that tour. I'm excited about that lacrosse, wisconsin, red wing, wisconsin, and then we end up in st paul pretty excited about that that'll be super.

02:12:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Why don't you give that to uh google and ask it for the the top things you should do?

02:12:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, that's a great idea. Plan trips for me. This is where I'll be. That's a great.

02:12:15 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I will do that pick places for me to eat, yeah, right right, right, we're going to some where's the best local cuisine.

02:12:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're doing some local cuisine. We're going to some plantation homes. It's going to be uh, I, I think, actually I'm very excited about it. It's a chance uh to see america, america, the real not?

02:12:34 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
have you uh stopped at the border?

02:12:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, yeah, exactly, uh, all right. Um, just a reminder if you are a regular listener to our shows, dan morin, who is a regular on our shows and is also a contributor to sixcolorscom, longtime mac journalist and a novelist, really writes great sci-fi novels. He's going to be on jeopardy tonight and we don't know how he's going to do. He can't tell anybody, but he did say tonight's the night, may 7th. Uh, watch jeopardy and I will be watching to see how dan does. I have a feeling, since he's been talking a lot like watch tonight, that he did all right I could be watch tonight.

02:13:15
This is my only chance to see me maybe, maybe, but I feel like you know if you would. Every once in a while, somebody is so badly that they have to leave before final jeopardy, like there's just an empty podium where they were, because they just were so terrible. That's what, I'm afraid, would happen to me.

02:13:33 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So so I have a San Francisco question for you, leo.

02:13:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, Hold that thought. Going to have one more ad break when we come back. A San Francisco question Picks of the Week coming up as well. You're watching Intelligent Machines Our guest earlier, if you didn't catch it, mike McHugh. He was really interesting. Surfsocial is his new app and I'm looking forward to its public release. I think it's going to be a very interesting product.

02:13:58
We're also glad you're here because, uh, if you're a member of club twit uh, you should probably be we would like to tell you that we're going to be doing our, uh, some things in the club that we normally do out in the world. Uh, we've done apple events for years. We've simulcast apple events, but, uh, we had to stop because, uh, they first threatened to take us off of youtube and then they went after us on twitch. So the apple keynote, the wwdc keynote, uh, which is, uh, june 9th, is going to be in the club, only in the club, to it discord, not out in the public. Same thing for google io. Jeff and paris say they'll join me. For google io, which is may 20th it's a week from tuesday. Wow, can you believe that? 10 am pacific, that is, they're telling us. It's going to be a two-hour keynote. Uh, the day before the microsoft build keynote, so we're going to do all these keynotes in the club. So I wanted everybody to know.

02:14:53
Now's the time to join the club. It's seven bucks a month. There's another reason to join the club now because they're putting in. They're putting in sean connery on on jeopardy on saturday night live now. First of all, the club is full of great, waggish, funny people in the club to a discord. So it's a great social network. But also you get ad-free versions of all the shows and you support the shows that we make here. You know, right now we are, yes, we have ads, but the advertising is only about 75% of our revenue. We need the additional 25% and that's the club. Members make that up and we really are grateful to you. Seven bucks a month, $84 a year.

02:15:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's a club that everybody should join right now you should show the hooters photo that someone made of you me at working at hooters.

02:15:44 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Working at hooters yes, yeah, it's up, because if you, if you don't join the club, that's what it's going to come down to. He's going to be. I might have to go back.

02:15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what the club? I think I want to work at hooters. He looks so happy. I'm a happy hooters, didn't? Aren't they filing? Chapter 11 isn't there trouble in there still they're still going in some places. Anyway, twittercom I have been once, I, I uh.

02:16:17 - Paris Martineau (Host)
We brought our teenage son and his friends, just to, just to give him a taste of america. You should, uh, convince hank to go back with you for a assault hank video, somehow returning with my dad to hooters I don't know what the content of this would be but, no, I think not.

02:16:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think not. He's. Look, he's moved on. He's with doja cat now, so there's no interest. Uh, our show today brought to you by our good friends at melissa we. You know, we just celebrated 20 years at twit. They are celebrating 40 years as the trusted data quality expert and man. They are everywhere, whether it's manufacturing and supply chain management.

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02:18:33
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02:19:12 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
to do. Uh, I just want to ask you a san francisco question. Yes, are you going to go into the city and go to the Orb store and share your iris Scan?

02:19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
my iri.

02:19:23 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, I think not. Orb, Orb, Orb.

02:19:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Orb, orb, orb. No, so we're talking, of course, about Sam Altman's World Company. He's a big investor in it. They created a cryptocurrency called WorldCoin. Investor in it. They created a cryptocurrency called world coin and, in some way that's not immediately cleared tied it to an orb that scans your Iris and, yes, apparently they've opened a store in downtown San Francisco a.

02:19:51 - Paris Martineau (Host)
What a store in downtown San Francisco. I don't know what you're laughing at.

02:19:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
On sunday, uh, this is in union square on sunday. Uh, we had ian thompson on who has has been to the orb store, in fact even has a scanned his iris. He says it's a little creepy, it's a little weird. There's the orb. When you scan it you get a world coin about fifty dollars. Uh, worth of world coin.

02:20:17 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
God 40 now, I think it's 40.

02:20:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, it goes up and down depending on the value of world coin. Uh, there is the mayor of San Francisco looking so distinguished standing in between two orbs the new between two ferns that would be a good show between two orbs the orb experience.

02:20:39
The orb is an NVIDIA-powered device that verifies unique humanness. The technology creates an anonymous verification that confirms humanity without compromising privacy. Reason being they delete the scan and they just keep a hash of it, and that data remains on your individual device, the storefront. This is a press release, of course, from the world folks. The storefront serves as both a proof of human verification center and an educational hub. I, I mean, I'm not. I don't think it's a bad thing to have some sort of.

02:21:17 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But should they be doing it?

02:21:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, trusted way to verify that somebody is human and is who they say they are. Authentication is one of the big problems in the world. They're going to open these stores, by the way, in six cities, actually, are they?

02:21:32 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
their stores, or are they gamers' stores?

02:21:35 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Which gamers?

02:21:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the gamer stores. Um which gamers?

02:21:45 - Paris Martineau (Host)
well, okay, so they're in a vacant, a vacant storefront next to macy's downtown.

02:21:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to a vacant storefront.

02:21:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Well, it was the downtown macy's to scan my eye in the. You can see, it's not a giant to just go into a, a wood prison, to give my eye to the orb you can see that most of the 4 000 square foot store is in fact not used.

02:22:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's just a small circle of wood in the middle and then it goes up into the spaceship and it's got six orbs in there and you go in and that's very disappointing.

02:22:13
I was hoping for something it isn't the classiest thing in the world, is it? Um, but I did. It does solve a problem we need. We have an authentication issue. Well, yes, because why do you think all this stuff with passwords and pass keys and all, and you know drivers license? It's all about saying that you, paris martin know, are the paris martin know right in this case, would every device have an orb?

02:22:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
no, you'd go scanning my eye in the orb.

02:22:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Help me log in to facebook, once to the orb. Oh, I guess I get what you're saying how does it? How does maybe, I don't know you go once to the orb reception center, scan your eye and then it sends your phone. Maybe the phone says, yeah, I'm a human. I don't know. I don't know.

02:23:06 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's a good question there are a lot of open questions with you.

02:23:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You get the chip implanted while you're there, while you're staring at the thing behind you. They put the chip in your head.

02:23:16 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Tools for humanity puff of air in your eye as the chip goes in, so you get distracted by it. You have to look at a house that's blurry in it and no, no, that's your eye doctor, come on oh, I was confused.

02:23:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought that was the the technology has raised concerns about whether it will keep. This is from a real estate blog, apparently the use of empty stores has raised concerns about whether we'll keep people sensitive information secure. But tools for humanity says the identity data is instantly deleted from the orb. After the process is complete, users can use the app in their world id with compatible services to verify.

02:24:00 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They're not an algorithm they have like a credit card.

02:24:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am not an algorithm.

02:24:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I'm always getting asked if I'm an algorithm and I have no way to prove them wrong uh, I, I didn't even know costar had a blog, but apparently, uh, they do.

02:24:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And all sorts of interesting real estate information here thinking of investment.

02:24:25 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They're saying that you should invest in large vacant retail spaces adjacent to macy's in san francisco.

02:24:32 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Right now there's a lot of empty retail space. So yes, that's news yeah and the mayor is trying to sit there saying, see, I've got orbs actually this is from the san francisco chronicle, maybe a more accurate representation.

02:24:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Downtown san francisco retail is dying. It is dying. What's replacing it is so much worse, by the way, that wood isn't even finished. It's just, it's just lumber, it's just lumber from home depot.

02:25:02 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They didn't even put like a stain on it or a sealant they could have put some varnish on there.

02:25:07 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
What is the? What is the pamphlet? The?

02:25:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
orbs are sand, are standing on just those are closet poles, I recognize them.

02:25:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um, wow, that is uh that is not.

02:25:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Looks like a really bad cocktail party in a really bad art gallery where there's no art well, and also ian said you know this picture implies there are a lot of people there.

02:25:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He says there's nobody there, you go in, you'll be the only one just you and six orbs. Yeah, this was the uh, probably the opening night, right?

02:25:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
um, okay, well a lot of people outside trying to get you in. You know it's.

02:25:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sam didn't invent it, but he's invested in it. They're. They're calling it sam. Altman's club get it, um, maybe not, and nobody cares I didn't get it.

02:26:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I didn't. Yeah, oh, I was just thinking of more orb puns you got any for us?

02:26:09 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
uh, anything else?

02:26:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you want to talk about in here.

02:26:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
There's so many stories, and then my mind would blank, which isn't a a pun, it's just nonsense.

02:26:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Driverless trucks are now starting running their regular long haul routes. Aurora is doing it between Dallas and Houston. See, there's no driver driving that truck, a big truck that could kill a lot of people.

02:26:32 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Well, I mean yes, but I do think that this is an area where driverless vehicles could be really transformative.

02:26:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not worried about the highway.

02:26:52 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I'm worried about how they get on the highway late at night specifically when someone falls asleep, or if a semi-truck driver encounters someone, say pulled over on the side of the road, and then isn't really able to react because they kind of glazed over. So I do think that autonomous vehicles could help solve a lot of terrible accidents if there's a safe way for them to do simple routes.

02:27:16 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Funny, you should say that ms martineau, but line 85 backs up your point. Waymo put out uh data and saying that, compared with human drivers, over 56.7 million miles in their cities, waymo driver had 92 fewer crashes with injuries to pedestrians, 82 fewer crashes with injuries to bicyclists and 82 fewer crashes with injuries to motorcycles wait a second.

02:27:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Sorry, the journalist light is going off. They don't have any data like this. That's just fewer crashes, no specification at the end. All of these are fewer crashes with injuries to blank.

02:28:01 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, and if we pay you off enough, you won't hurt. Yeah, plus, there's no denominator, right, or is it the numerator I want? It's the denominator I want.

02:28:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Fewer injury involving intersection crashes, like that's just a lot of. That's a very specific slice of data that sets off the. This is potentially being I haven't I mean, maybe I could be wrong.

02:28:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you look at, I'm sure they have the underlying companies do this all the time, though they they reframe data to make it look better than it actually is, or oh, we could look at the full study it's very notable that they're saying like 96 percent fewer injury causing intersection crashes.

02:28:41 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, this is going to take some time for us to go through, actually well there's a data set there, I think yeah yeah, the study represents the first retrospective safety assessment of a ROADS, of an Rhodes.

02:29:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know there's something missing that made statistical conclusions about more serious crash outcomes and analyzed crash rates. All right, this you know, this I mean listen.

02:29:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I think that, overall, self-driving cars have proven in most cases to be way better than humans. I mean, the bar is low and I'm sure that a lot of these results are really positive and interesting. I just, whenever you look at a number, I think it's always wise to note any of the qualifiers or specifications at the end, because that could be revealing something If you go down, scroll down to table three Leo at the end, because that could be revealing something.

02:29:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
If you go down, scroll down to table three leo, it says, for example, in phoenix there were 24 injury reported accidents, eight with airbag deployment. Did it deploy in the front seat, where there's no driver?

02:29:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just ask probably san francisco, 16, los angeles, or it could be airbag deployment of the person of the car hit yeah, maybe, or the person in the so I think, though it's safe to say, and this is the conclusion the Waymo Ro service had statistically significant reduction in suspected serious injury crashes when considering all locations combined. So they're looking at serious injury crashes and this has, by the way, been accepted for publication in a traffic injury prevention the, the journal there's a journal for everything, for everything yeah, well, if you're a traffic, uh, you know oh yeah, you're a scientist or traffic person?

02:30:41
yeah, I think that's not surprising, to be honest, and I. The problem is of course, if there is a horrible accident with one of these semis. It's going to make all the headlines oh yeah, um, because there was nobody driving it.

02:30:55 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But I think in the long run they're probably safe well, the other thing is I I don't know whose technology was in the semis. I mean, I hope it's not Elon.

02:31:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Aurora. No, it's a company called Aurora.

02:31:07 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I trust Waymo a hell of a lot more than I do.

02:31:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah yeah, I know there's so many stories that we just have literally hundreds of stories.

02:31:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I got one that we want to talk about it's back in the great section of AI Gone Wild.

02:31:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's your section probably.

02:31:24 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah. Man speaks to killer from beyond the grave or yes, that one, An army veteran shot dead in a road rage incident nearly four years ago, appeared in an Arizona courtroom beyond the grave to address his killer. All thanks to artificial intelligence.

02:31:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute. An AI video forgave his killer.

02:31:47 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yes, an AI version of Christopher Pelkey appeared in an eerily realistic video to forgive his killer To Gabriel Hort, the man who shot me me. It's a shame we encountered each other in that day in those circumstances. An ai generated version of pelky says in the clip in another life we probably could have been friends so this was a script written by his sister.

02:32:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I'm sorry, written by the.

02:32:12 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, by the victim's sister yeah, by the family he was killed in a road rage shooting in 2021 yeah, I'm not sure that's the react that's.

02:32:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean he might have been a little less kind in an actual yeah thing. I don't know why they would show this in the court, so it was an impact statement. So the message was well received by judge todd lang, who told the courtroom I love that, ai. Thank you for that. I felt like that was genuine. That is obvious.

02:32:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Forgiveness reflects the character I heard about him today so the state asked for a nine and a half year sentence, but the judge gave him ten and a half years. Oh, I guess it didn't really work.

02:32:54 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, no, this is. It did work because the family was saying the impact was great on them and basically the state had asked for a nine and a half year sentence. The judge ended up giving the murderer more after being so moved by the powerful video, but the dead guy asked for forgiveness.

02:33:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but didn't mean he didn't want him to go to jail for that asked for forgiveness.

02:33:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, but didn't mean he didn't want him. Yeah, the family says the judge was so moved by the powerful video that the judge decided to give him a harsher sentence.

02:33:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is absurd. But this is a fictional video that was made up should never been allowed in any of the people that's appalling because it made it worse whether it made it better or worse true, it's made up, it's fiction yeah, it's.

02:33:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I just thought this was an absolutely insane happening.

02:33:47 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Just strange devil's advocate here.

02:33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Family doesn't know how to make video, family doesn't write, family doesn't know how to say what they think, so they use ai to help them express themselves fine if it had been the sister in an ai video saying this is my experience, but she put words into the mouth of the victim who's dead and has no way to agree yeah, has no agency and no way to consent.

02:34:13
That's absolutely absurd and the judge is saying well, you know, I think that's probably what he would have said. We don't know. If the sister says this is what I think he would have said, that's different.

02:34:23 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I think this is a real, a misuse, and I think it's just a uh sets a potentially concerning precedent for something like this to be admissible in court, even if it's just a victim impact statement.

02:34:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't like the idea of something like this being used to potentially tug at a judge's heartstrings when it's complete fabrication so, uh, an arizona state professor of law, gary marchant, is part of a committee a supreme court committee evaluating ai's use in court, so they are considering this. He said the use of AI has become more common in courts. This is from the article in the Independent and if you look at the effects of this case I would say he says the value of it overweighed the prejudicial effect. But if you look at other cases you could imagine they would be very prejudicial. He says the system is trying to address the issues as proactively as possible. They're trying to decide whether this should be allowed. I don't even know why that's even a question. It's fiction.

02:35:26 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, it's complete fiction there was another case a couple weeks ago of somebody who was well, what's the what's the phrase when you defend yourself and you're not a lawyer?

02:35:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
pro bon bono. No, pro se, pro se, pro se.

02:35:39 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So I think it was a guy defending himself pro se who used the AI to speak. I think it was a person.

02:35:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He got in a little bit of trouble. He got in trouble. Yeah, the judge did not like that, because the judge was fooled. At first, the guy implied that this was a real lawyer instead of an ai generated video of a fake lawyer.

02:35:56 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Oh, is that what it was? Yeah, I thought it was his own testimony.

02:35:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, um, all right, uh, I think I I know we have so many other things I would like to talk about, but we got, we've read it. We're really out of time here, so what a cool three hours.

02:36:18 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Isn't doing it for you?

02:36:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I want to get this show done too I'm working hard to get it done in two. We're way past that, unfortunately, but uh, sometimes the show deserves more hey, as your shorts say, you love your wife.

02:36:31 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You're trying your best I have.

02:36:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I just I think she's right, I think you know, we should just keep it tidy. So we say uh, we will have um, just like your shorts your pics of the week coming up, just like my shorts. Yes, they're not tidy whities, they're actually. I'm gonna be frank, they're not shorts, they're long pants so I can wear them out in public.

02:36:57 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Oh, they're PJs, they're longy readies.

02:37:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're PJs. Yeah, she don't say anything, but she's already purchased some shorts for her sister, whose 60th birthday is coming up, and they say I love my husband. They have a picture of Joe on them?

02:37:23
Ixnayon, don't say it. You're watching intelligent machines with paris martineau and jeff jarvis, and I am so glad you're here as special thanks to our club members making this show possible. We stream, uh, this show and all the shows we do. We try to stream them live, as we do them. Intelligent Machines is every Wednesday about 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Club members, of course, can watch in Discord, although, frankly, youtube's probably a better place to watch. The quality's a little bit better and the latency's a little lower YouTube, twitch, tiktok, facebook, linkedin, xcom and Kik. So you get your choice Eight different ways you can watch. We hope you will watch live and, if you're watching live, chat with us live, but of course, you can always watch after the fact. We make audio and video available on our website, twittv slash I am and, of course, on youtube there's a youtube channel dedicated to it. Best way to listen or watch subscribe to the form you prefer in your favorite podcast client. It's free and you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done.

02:38:21 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Now let's get to the picks. Somebody put the the the. I can't help but laugh every time I look at it. Somebody put the the discord, the. I'm not a cat lawyer. I always, I always it is always fun.

02:38:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is always fun.

02:38:38 - Mike McCue (Guest)
Should we just play it one more time?

02:38:41 - Media Playback (None)
I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings. I'd love it. You might want to, uh.

02:38:45 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I love how blurry everyone is. Can you hear me judge?

02:38:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can hear you. I think it's a filter it is, and I don't know how to remove it.

02:38:55 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I've got my assistant here. She's trying to, but I'm prepared to go forward with it. I'm here live. I'm not a cat. I can see that.

02:39:12 - Mike McCue (Guest)
I think, if you click the arrow, the fact that everybody's keeping a straight face is crazy to me still.

02:39:19 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
His voice and accent is just perfect for it.

02:39:22 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I'm not a cat. I'm not a cat. Your Honor, I'm prepared to go ahead. It was also this video happened during a real loopy time, during the pandemic, where things like this just hit harder than they ever would today.

02:39:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was what we all needed. We were all the cat.

02:39:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
We were all the cat.

02:39:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The cat was all of us. Paris, you get another pick. That was such a good one, what else?

02:39:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, I got a pick. It's a game that I've been playing this week. It's not a new. It came out in 2021. It's this game called Norco that I'd really recommend. It Norco that I'd really recommend. It's a kind of a Southern Gothic point and click narrative adventure. It's set in South Louisiana and it's like sinking suburbs and industrial swamps.

02:40:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, this could get me ready for my upcoming trip.

02:40:07 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's really depressing, so I wouldn't do it if you're not into that sort of vibe, but it's depressing in a very artful and fun way. It basically shares its name with the setting, which is Norco, louisiana, a community within saint charles, parish, a place like backlit by this shell oil refinery, and it's kind of surreal. It's kind of uh, it reminds me of disco elysium in a certain way. I've just had a really fun time playing it. It's a simple game. It's like been in my steam library for a while and I just recommend anybody check it out if they're looking for a fun point and click mystery I appreciate this.

02:40:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm always looking for a game, I always.

02:40:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I just need a game, but uh most of my game recommendations are games that are secretly books so that's not I mean, yeah, they're also that, it's uh so I got a question for you.

02:40:54 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So I finally got a tablet. I got the um, oh good, cheapest, the cheapest, uh, remarkable possible s10, samsung oh, samsung okay yeah, so I could do uh pdfs and can I do steam and do that game?

02:41:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
you've recommended to be on this, no, I don't know if you can on that no, you can do android games on that, that's all.

02:41:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can never mind. Never mind, there's some pretty good. Can you play steam?

02:41:18 - Paris Martineau (Host)
on your computer.

02:41:19 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You could play steam on your mac, oh yeah, but that's an android device, it's not no, no, he's got a mac yeah, but he's back for this show, years old it's it's a.

02:41:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's a game where you play as a gutenberg press era illustrator solving a mystery. It's not the most technical logically. It probably would use as much power as participating in this show, I'd assume. I know nothing about computers.

02:41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We could all chip in and get him a Steam Deck. What do you say?

02:41:49 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
No, because I'm not a game guy, just not.

02:41:51 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He will play. I mean, it's really. We just need to get Jeff a brief thing that he can use to play this game, because it is literally a jeff game.

02:42:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have had teams of phd researchers from oh, you're not talking about norco, you're talking about pentiment that game that I've recommended before that is the gutenberg press era games.

02:42:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You haven't played it yet, jeff no, because, because how can I? Jeff doesn't know how to oh it's made for you.

02:42:18 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Gramps can't get it, it's on a.

02:42:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Switch. We could get him a Nintendo Switch. Yeah, let's get him a Switch. Is it on the Switch now? That's what it says. Oh, hell, yeah, let's get him the new Switch. Oh, you got it, Jeff. Get the new Switch and then give it to me when you're done.

02:42:36 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Why is it erasing it and you can't?

02:42:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
So you're erasing it at the beginning because you're starting anew.

02:42:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's a fresh game.

02:42:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's such a good game.

02:42:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it really? It's compelling all the way through. I mean, I love how it looks oh yes, I've played it.

02:42:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's compelling all the way through. The choices matter. There are like three different time periods you go through and your choices that you make in each one have drastic impacts in the town. When you see it in the next, it is like it'll make you laugh.

02:43:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this available on the current Switch? Yeah. I assume so yeah, so when I get the new Switch which I don't know when that's going to be I'll send Jeff my old Switch with Pentamid on it yes, but load it first, because I don't know I will. I know it'll be ready to play. Where's the old Switch? Where's the Switch?

02:43:34 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I don't understand.

02:43:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need a Switch. Actually, I have a game that you might you might like, jeff. I put it in here. Where is it?

02:43:45 - Paris Martineau (Host)
uh 20 page bibliography.

02:43:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's such a large, such a large, uh, 54. Oh, you already know I'm sitting on it, probably line Line 54. It's called Tippy Coco at tippycococom and you can play this right now on your computer. So the way this works is you are a little underground guy and you are going to. You could be one of these whatever guy you want, but let's play with this guy, groon, let's play solo. And then you're going to.

02:44:26 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I'm doing it. I don't get it. What am I trying to do?

02:44:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're going to hit the ball over to the other guy. It's like pong Whoa, but it only goes up. Yeah right, you have to give it a little. Gosh, I'm up, it doesn't. Yeah right, you have to. You have to give it a little. Oh gosh, I'm not. Oh, how do you? How do you have to give a little english? He's beating.

02:44:42 - Paris Martineau (Host)
This looks like one of those videos that you'd see your kid watching on youtube and be like concerned about them, you know especially when you hear the name is tippy coco oh yeah, no, that's definitely a youtube brain rot oh, I got shut out.

02:44:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there you go, jeff, a little game you could play on your.

02:45:00 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, do this on your sam the chat is telling us, jeff, that you can um get, you can play, you can install steam on chrome os now you can well.

02:45:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Supposedly I could before and it was impossible. It didn't work.

02:45:19 - Paris Martineau (Host)
So someone hold on, we're going to Someone linked instructions Paris is asking for help for dad. I asked can someone link instructions for Jeff?

02:45:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I saw, by the way, pictures of you in the wedding and your parents and your beautiful family. It would look like a lot of fun. We had a great time.

02:45:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You looked like you were having a great time. It was delightful.

02:45:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, nice little wedding, nice to go home for that. Jeff, do you have a pick of the week while I try?

02:45:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
to get. Yes, since we're a little low on AI content, I'll give you an AI story All right, which I thought was good. The World Bank has put out hundreds of data sets in public, and the main reason they're doing this is AI readiness, because we've got to feed our AI with facts so that people like Leo don't get led astray with things. So if you go to the data sets, that link is to the technology data sets.

02:46:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Water withdrawal for livestock.

02:46:17 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
No, I went to the technology one for you. If you go to the left, I just I just clicked the link. Then why is it we gotta? We gotta do it again, maybe?

02:46:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
infrastructure, people, planet, prosperity. Let me search for technology.

02:46:30 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Okay, well, all right doesn't have that click on digital okay, oh no, then I guess you gotta search again, or something digital, okay, and then in the united states mobile cellular trans subscriptions for 100 inhabitants. This is interesting? Oh, it is because it's really heavy in. What is that?

02:46:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
libya and south africa heavier than it's heavier there than the United States. The lighter the color, the fewer is. Subscriptions per hundred. Canada's lighter than the US, or to 319, but in the really dark areas it's more than one. It's a hundred and eighty subscriptions per 100 head of habitants in the Russian Federation. What's going, don't understand, but I don't understand it.

02:47:18
193 in libya because, well, you don't know what's going to happen in the us it's a mere 112 per hundred inhabitants, so it's still more than one to one. Huh, oh. But you know what? I have many. I have one for my you. You raise the my watch, I have one for my tablet you also have several for my tablets, yeah so it's that. That's why yeah. Uh, here though in in some, in some countries, I think I don't they must have multiple phones, do you think yeah?

02:47:50
every phone you buy has two sims yeah available oh well, that's why, thank you, it's the multi-sim use. That's what it is. Yeah, that's what's going on.

02:48:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Do you guys have going on your phones?

02:48:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no sims, I'm simless, I'm an e-sim kind of guy okay, by sim I mean e-sim as well, I have one.

02:48:09 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
He's being pedantic oh, whoa.

02:48:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why, in some of these, countries, there might be a carrier, every different carrier every five miles. That's what's going on there. So they are those. That's what it is in fact. That's why you can't just look at these numbers and and say, oh I wow, that's something going on, right now we could also look at where to go here.

02:48:30 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Where's the podcast?

02:48:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
price of a fixed broadband basket five gigabytes. Where is it highest? It's highest in liberia. It's lowest in the united states, pretty low, but it's even lower in mexico. Um, united states is pretty much the same as brazil. Russia is very low. Well, is it? Is it low, number higher or? Purchasing power is it? Is it low, number, high or good, or purchasing?

02:49:02 - Paris Martineau (Host)
power, I could.

02:49:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they mean in constant units of dollars. So or whatever. That's see the. That's interesting. The world bank knows all. Yeah, thank you, jeff.

02:49:09 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So then we could have google ad mox iphone 17 designed before it even launches. Have you seen this? Yes, I can't show it probably because it's taken down.

02:49:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it is it's a little annoying, I'll be honest with you. It's a Google Pixel and an iPhone 16 Pro talking and the Google's basically saying you're copying everything I did, I did it all before you did. It's a little annoying, it is, and it's kind of sad that that's that's all google's got at this point. They leave out the part where you're selling 300 phones to my everyone and left that part out. Okay, well, we've had enough of this. I think, uh time, oh, wait a minute. This is a story for you.

02:49:54 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Google has invested in wonder yes, I'm telling you, this is the company 600 million dollar fund round.

02:50:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why google ventures it's only in new york? Well, it's mark lore is why. Mark lore is the guy who started diapercom, which was immediately basically shuttered by amazon, which then bought it for pennies on the dollar. Mark then started Jet, which he sold to Walmart, made some money. His latest is this little virtual kitchen called Wonder that you guys keep ordering from.

02:50:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, I ordered from it twice and it was fine, it was good. Actually, their queso was really good, but their stuff was fine.

02:50:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've done more to help it than you know, because they now have raised $600 million from Google Ventures and a few others like Excel and the New Enterprise Associates.

02:50:47 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I will say. Wonder is one of those things that feels like a mid-2010s startup, because every time you go there they've got such a deep discount.

02:50:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You are basically getting the food for free, and it's like this can't continue but it really must be the reason these companies are investing, because they also own grubhub right well, yeah, and when I go there, it's a little tiny storefront, it's not very big at all.

02:51:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I mean, uh, they sous vide whatever it is, I guess, or microwave it, and this car is waiting to go to deliveries.

02:51:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the industrialization of food and I can't say I'm in favor.

02:51:24 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And DoorDash is buying Deliveroo for $3.9 billion and then a software company for more than $1 billion. So this whole food delivery business, it's not profitable.

02:51:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet this is the case. We've talked about this, this signal groups that all these movers are shakers in and how they influence each other. I think these people, these high-end people, they get together. I don't know if it's the bohemian grover and their signal group and they say things like you know, I think people are gonna stop cooking in 10 years and they're going to eat out all the time. So let's invest, I think, a good investment. They're going to eat out, but in, in, out, they'll be in. It's a new thing.

02:52:06
It's eating out in and it's going to be, huge and I think that they all kind of spin themselves up like the next big thing like is driverless taxis or you, you know, and I think they get all excited and then they, they buy into this, but I don't know if it means anything. We've seen lots of collapses around this kind of group.

02:52:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Think investment, venture investment, yes of course it'll never happen to ai.

02:52:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the one area is that one of the biggest, isn't it?

02:52:36 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I have. People are always gonna want sand and there's always plenty of sand leo has the sand walker appeared in this show?

02:52:44 - Paris Martineau (Host)
no you sound?

02:52:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
unsure. I'm keeping him. I'm keeping him to myself.

02:52:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Does he know that he's the sand walker? No, okay whole persona is I really like that one for those of you on audio leo, just for those of you on, audio.

02:53:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You've just got to go experience this fresh on video. I'm sorry, now leo has sand. Nice I turn into. It was upsetting. The thing that got me is his body turned into sand, but his quaffed hair remained for far longer than can we see it again, please?

02:53:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is Anthony Nielsen's great work.

02:53:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
We talked about this is chuckling in a release. The hair just falls over.

02:53:34 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It doesn't even get to His hair was like an cockroach. There's nothing to hold it up, it's a nuclear attack.

02:53:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This Anthony Nielsen is brilliant with AI video and he shared a little bit about how he does this in our last AI user group. Next one We've moved it right, anthony. When's the next one? It's coming up First. Friday yeah of next month.

02:53:58
First Friday of June, it's yeah, of next month, first friday, kind of shuffled around june, yeah. So if you're in the club, you'll just look at the announcements, uh or not the announcements, those events, and you'll see, uh, the next day. I use a group, but that's the kind of thing and it's great to watch anthony at work. He's really he's remarkable what he does. Have we seen them all, anthony, or do you have others? Uh?

02:54:14
we have one left in reserve, one which is a surprise a leo one or a jeff one, it's a jeff one oh, you already saw me being peeled and you saw me turning into sand all right, okay, yeah, benito tries to conserve them yeah, but he tries to hide them from us of us. So jeff is sitting as he does at his desk.

02:54:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Suddenly the wall disappears. He walks out of his office to the beach. The camera pans around him. We see angles of jeff's offices that have been hidden from time and space and.

02:54:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good point.

02:54:56 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And then he walks into the beach, walk into the sea. And.

02:55:04 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Moral. Panic is made of sand, that's really good.

02:55:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Such a good video, Wow. And you guys think that AI is nothing. That's not nothing my friends.

02:55:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
No, that's AI in the service of good how long does it take you to?

02:55:17 - Anthony Nielsen (None)
make these Anthony Weeks. I don't want to get into it, but needless to say, I don't get it right away. It's a lot of work.

02:55:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He puts a lot of work into it.

02:55:29 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Which platform do you prefer, Anthony? Well it depends on what you're trying to do. Yeah.

02:55:35 - Anthony Nielsen (None)
Okay, but it's a mix of stuff, like sometimes I'll use an image from chat GPT, then pull that into a different thing to generate the video.

02:55:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is what we're really starting to see is that people are very adept at this, are really magicians pulling strings, they're doing all different kinds. You can't just sit down, as you did Paris, and say here's a cat picture.

02:55:58 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Make him a pope be able to do that you will.

02:56:00 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I don't think that's that could get you, uh, your pope cat, I think, being crowned.

02:56:07 - Anthony Nielsen (None)
I mean we'll get there. But like, yeah, like right now it's not as easy as here's an image recreate like even the leo.

02:56:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stuff doesn't look exactly like Leo, but if you had a Leo model, you could do that Insultingly fat. And I'm hurt. I'm deeply hurt. Well, we're about out of time on this program. I thank you all for joining us. It's really fun to do the show, and sometimes we talk more about AI. Who's next week? Who's scheduled for next week? Is MG going to come by? It's Emily Bender. I uh, who's who's next week?

02:56:40
who's scheduled for next week is mg gonna come by, or uh, it's emily bender, I think. Oh, alex, well, now this is exciting. These are your people. Jeff jarvis, emily bender, uh, who? Alex hannah and alex hannah these are the two who coined the term test no, no, no, sorry, that is tim nick gabru and emil torres.

02:56:56 - Anthony Nielsen (None)
oh that right, but they write about it in their book.

02:56:59 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Emily Bender is a co-author of the Stochastic Parrots paper. She is a linguist at University of Washington Excellent and Alex Hanna is at DARE, which was founded by Timnit Gebru, and the AI con is very good about cutting through the hype of ai and the misuse of ai very interesting.

02:57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That will be uh next week on intelligent machines I think they come on in the middle of the show yeah, the scheduling worked out that we will get a little bit of the show, then they'll come on and then we'll finish it up I'm excited to be talking about some things entirely silly and be like what's that?

02:57:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I hear something on the wind and then cut to a guest interview.

02:57:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll just turn into sand for that interview and fall away.

02:57:45 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And don't explain it to them.

02:57:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us. We will see you next time on Intelligent Machines.

02:57:52 - Media Playback (None)
Bye-bye, I'm not a human being, not into this animal scene. I'm not a human being, not into this animal scene, I'm an intelligent machine.