This Week in Tech 1084 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-free version of the show.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. And it's one of those special shows where I get two of my favorite people on and just let them vibe. And it's going to be a great one. Amy Webb is here. Futurist from the Future Today Strategy group. Harper Reed, AI guru and technologist from 2389. AI. We have lots to talk about.

Leo Laporte [00:00:21]:
Trump and the CEOs going to China, a lot of AI news, Musk versus Altman, Google investing in SpaceX, and a whole lot more. I'll tell you what, don't even worry about what we're gonna talk about. Just make sure you watch this show. Cause TWIT is great. And next

Harper Reed [00:00:42]:
podcasts you love from people you trust.

Leo Laporte [00:00:46]:
This is twit. This is TWiT this Week at Tech. Episode 1084, recorded Sunday, May 17, 2026. Don't overcook the asparagus. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. And you are in luck. If you've never listened to this show or if you've listened for 21 years, that's how long we've been doing it.

Leo Laporte [00:01:16]:
Either way, you're going to be thrilled that we have Amy Webb here from the Future Today Strategy Group.

Amy Webb [00:01:24]:
Yep, that is me.

Leo Laporte [00:01:25]:
Ftsg. She's a futuristic. So good to see Amy. One of the smartest people in the world and always welcome. And her buddy. It turns out the last time they were on, I didn't even know they knew each other. It turns out Harper Reed and Amy go way back. Harper Reed, technologist, entrepreneur and hacker@2389ai.

Leo Laporte [00:01:46]:
Hello, Harper. Hello, Amy.

Harper Reed [00:01:48]:
Hello.

Leo Laporte [00:01:49]:
When we have the two of you, we don't need anyone else. In fact, I'm just going to relax, sit back and let you guys just jam, man.

Amy Webb [00:01:56]:
Harper, should we get this out of the way now?

Harper Reed [00:01:58]:
Oh, we should. I never have the stuff. I always need the thing.

Leo Laporte [00:02:02]:
There it is.

Amy Webb [00:02:03]:
This is how we know each other. Can you screenshot this and send it to the.

Harper Reed [00:02:05]:
What's up? One second. There we go.

Leo Laporte [00:02:07]:
The Leadership US Japan program. Tell us about that, Amy. What is that?

Amy Webb [00:02:13]:
So I think Harper and I told you about this last time around.

Leo Laporte [00:02:15]:
You did? But they're not. Everybody was here the last time.

Amy Webb [00:02:17]:
So it's a terrific organization that brings together American leaders and Japanese leaders who actually live in other places around the world besides just Japan and the United States. And the point is to establish a network and relationships for the purpose of bringing the two countries more firmly together over time. And so. And there are some. I've. I guess this is going almost my 10th year. You sort of do a week in Japan as a cohort, and then you do a week in the United States, or depending on what year it is, there's an alternate. You sort of alternate between the two and.

Amy Webb [00:03:02]:
Yeah. And then you become a lifetime fellow, which is what Harper and I both are. And it's truly awesome. The people are incredible, incredible people doing really meaningful things. Yeah. And we. We see each other in person throughout the year. And it's.

Amy Webb [00:03:20]:
It's a great, great organization. You have to be under 40 to apply, and if anybody.

Harper Reed [00:03:25]:
They raise the age a little bit.

Amy Webb [00:03:27]:
Okay. It used to be 40. You don't have to speak Japanese. You do have to demonstrate leadership and have some kind of interest in Japan if you're not Japanese. But I can't say enough about it. It's really an incredible program.

Leo Laporte [00:03:42]:
Does it involve going to small nightclubs to see hardcore punk bands at all?

Amy Webb [00:03:46]:
Yes, that's exactly what we do.

Leo Laporte [00:03:50]:
That's what Harper just did.

Harper Reed [00:03:51]:
That's what I do. I don't know if there's a general we, but I have. I did do. I did bring some of our, at that point, delegates to see a punk band in Seattle during our session there. But it's been really great. And it's interesting because, as you know, ostensibly this is a soft diplomacy program. And the thing about soft diplomacy is it shifts. The target shift throughout the life, I guess, life of these kind of programs.

Harper Reed [00:04:19]:
And so it's been really interesting just in the, I guess, seven years I've been involved, how kind of the focus has shifted. And it's really fun to participate and meet people that you would never meet before. Um. It's good.

Amy Webb [00:04:34]:
Yeah. And it's not just. I was going to say we've got some, like, Marvel executives. We've got recognizable names that I'm not going to name out loud, but people you definitely have heard of recently in the US You've got me, you've got Harper.

Harper Reed [00:04:47]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:04:49]:
So I, you know, I imagine there's been a kind of a wrenching of the. Of the late lately of the diplomatic focus. What was everything going on in the world. In fact, that's our first.

Harper Reed [00:05:03]:
What do you mean? I don't know what's going on?

Leo Laporte [00:05:05]:
I don't know. It seems like something's happening. The first topic is about China, because Trump and 16, something like that, CEOs were in China this past week meeting With President Xi, President for life Xi, talking about.

Amy Webb [00:05:20]:
I think that was unprecedented too. I don't know that there's been another time in history when we've had such a. A group of CEOs like that traveling with a group of government officials.

Leo Laporte [00:05:30]:
Pretty amazing. Yeah.

Amy Webb [00:05:32]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:05:32]:
And in fact, one of them hitchhiked, Jensen Huang of Nvidia wasn't invited and complained about it. And the President said, we'll meet you in Alaska. We gotta stop for refueling. Jensen jumped on a pj, flew up to Alaska, met Air Force One and joined the exodus. CEOs from Nvidia, Apple, Tim. Tim, Apple was there. Exxon, Boeing, Qualcomm, Blackstone, Citigroup, Visa, all there.

Amy Webb [00:06:00]:
Elon. Elon's son was there. Let's not forget about that.

Leo Laporte [00:06:03]:
Oh, X. Yeah, that one was Elon. And Elon was there too. Right? He always brings his son with him.

Amy Webb [00:06:09]:
Yeah, there's a hilariously awful video of him. He's. He's walking at a normal adult pace and his son is literally racing to keep up with him while Elon's got a death grip on his hand. Oh, which is. Yeah, Jense was left off the list because he's Taiwanese and American. Nvidia's chips are made by tsmc. And the focus of this visit was actually not AI. The focus was from China's point of view.

Amy Webb [00:06:41]:
You know, let's all agree that you're going to let us do what we want with Taiwan and you're going to stay out of the way. So. So that is why he was not. Not on list.

Leo Laporte [00:06:50]:
So why was the. So then the question is, why did they change their minds suddenly? And was it an affront to the Chinese that he was there?

Amy Webb [00:06:56]:
Very much so.

Leo Laporte [00:06:58]:
Oh, interesting.

Amy Webb [00:07:01]:
You know, the way that these diplomatic visits get set up. They're coordinated and choreographed months in advance. And who's on the list is where people are gonna sit. I mean, that's the other thing. Like, literally, it's a complicated chess game just figuring out where people are going to sit because that message is so much. So any kind of addition of anybody last minute is really tricky, but especially somebody who, from China's perspective, is a political lightning rod. Was tough.

Leo Laporte [00:07:34]:
Well. And one of the deals that the Trump administration made was to clear Nvidia chip sales to China. Not the best. The H200, not the.

Amy Webb [00:07:46]:
Yeah, but that was already. Yeah, that's fine. But.

Leo Laporte [00:07:49]:
Well, it's. What's funny is the Chinese. Nobody in China would order one because the Chinese have decided, no, we're Going to do our own and screw you.

Amy Webb [00:07:57]:
Yeah. Look, China is. We have ignored the whole world. I used to live there.

Leo Laporte [00:08:04]:
This is why I brought it up. Because you're. You're an expert on this.

Amy Webb [00:08:07]:
Yeah, well, I don't know if I'm an expert on it, but China for years has been producing exceptional quality, everything. They literally have 70% of the global market share for EVs and also have like literally 100 different EV companies so

Leo Laporte [00:08:24]:
good that America has had to ban them in the United States for fear that it would undermine our own auto industry.

Amy Webb [00:08:30]:
Yeah, I've had a chance to drive in some of them. They're awesome. They are great cars and they're inexpensive.

Leo Laporte [00:08:35]:
Better mileage.

Amy Webb [00:08:37]:
And what's interesting is they are in the process of converting. Like all of those car companies are going to also start producing robots and drones.

Leo Laporte [00:08:47]:
Right. So, in fact, some say they're already better at bipedal robots than we are.

Amy Webb [00:08:51]:
Yeah, sure. Yeah. So anyhow, Chinese AI models are only a couple months behind ours at this stage.

Leo Laporte [00:09:01]:
You think that close, really?

Amy Webb [00:09:03]:
I think it depends on who you talk to. But again, I'm not an expert expert.

Leo Laporte [00:09:06]:
Well, I've used Quen, which is. What is Quen? Huawei's or Xiaomi's, I can't remember. No, GLM is Xiaomi's.

Amy Webb [00:09:12]:
There's a lot of.

Leo Laporte [00:09:13]:
Quite good. They're not quite there. Harper, what do you think?

Harper Reed [00:09:16]:
Well, you're also comparing them to. You're comparing an open model that the weights are available with a closed.

Leo Laporte [00:09:24]:
Yeah, I can run.

Harper Reed [00:09:26]:
That has untold tweaks to get it to be more effective on the backend that we don't know about versus Quinn or GLM or Kimi or any of these that are Kimi's.

Leo Laporte [00:09:37]:
Very good too.

Harper Reed [00:09:38]:
Actively free to run, you know, And I think this is also one of

Leo Laporte [00:09:43]:
the reasons, if you have enough GPU ram, I have to run a highly quantized version of GLM locally with 128 gigs of RAM. But it still can run it. And it's open. Yeah, it's uncensored. Like they've removed the Chinese censorship from it.

Harper Reed [00:09:59]:
Well, I think there's a funny thing that happens, which is we like to think that China is behind, or they say, oh, the models are behind, but we don't have any open models that are better. We sometimes pop up. Like a Gemma pops up or a Facebook llama3 will pop up, GPT, 120GBT, OSS will pop up and that happens. But then they're quickly beaten by the Chinese open model. And so I think you have to actually compare oranges to oranges in this.

Leo Laporte [00:10:29]:
I have to point out both Anthropic and OpenAI say that's because they're distilling our models.

Harper Reed [00:10:35]:
Yeah, but they distilled their own models off of themselves and also the Internet, like everybody. I think that's a funny, I think that's a funny critique.

Leo Laporte [00:10:43]:
Hey, they stole from us. We just.

Harper Reed [00:10:47]:
You can't have it both ways, you know what I'm saying? Like you, either it either is stealing or it's not stealing. And if it's stealing, then let's talk about it. But you can't be like, they stole from us, but we didn't steal from you. Which I feel like is a kind of the narrative. I just think we need to really be. If the US really wants to have a. Let me say it differently. I find it very interesting that China has followed the rule or the kind of pattern that the US followed in the past of releasing what amounts to a free technology to the world.

Harper Reed [00:11:17]:
And the US is with open models, et cetera. And the US has been reliant on closed models. And so if you talk to entrepreneurs outside the us, a lot of them are relying on these open Chinese models. They're not relying on closed US models. And if we're, and it seems like a big blind spot of the US entrepreneurs to assume that Southeast Asia, apac, et cetera, even Europe, Middle east is going to suddenly use OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook, Google models when they get something that is, let's say it's six months behind or even a year behind for effectively free that they have control of, which is like the Linuxization, so to speak, of these models just spreading it out for free. I find that really interesting.

Amy Webb [00:12:00]:
That's correct. And if you couple that with the amount of infrastructure investment that's happening, you know, our, our hyperscalers are going to invest, what is it, like $800 billion on paper right now in building data centers. They're burning cash because we don't have a national strategy. It's all being left to the, to the market to figure out that's not what China's doing. China's got a plan. China has a history of announcing plans and not making good on them, but that's actually not been the case over the past couple of cycles. So they're building out, you know, everybody's going to have WI fi, broadband, so they're making it so that everybody can participate. And the models that People have access to are not cost prohibitive, prohibitive the way they can be in the US So that just creates this interesting circumstance where you've got significantly more distributed access and people can around and find out, you know, like you just time to play.

Amy Webb [00:13:02]:
And the other really interesting thing is the conversation about AI in the US is all about like the robots coming to take my job and then murder me in my sleep. You know, it's all like, it's all apocalyptic or it's this like utopian wonderfulness that will happen. China's having a much more pragmatic conversation. So if you talk to just everyday people there, and I do, they're more worried about whether or not they're gonna be competitive in the marketplace. So they're not like all the jobs are going away. They're more like, man, I really need to experiment, get better with this. Cause I wanna make sure I get the best possible job, but not like there are no jobs. Does that make sense? So it's just a very, very pragmatic different approach that for the many things China does wrong that I disagree with.

Amy Webb [00:13:51]:
I think this is one area that we could study and learn a lot from.

Leo Laporte [00:13:54]:
Did you see Jensen Huang's interview with Dwarkesh on the. He made kind of an interesting point which is self serving, which was that we shouldn't block Nvidia's chips in China. That by doing so we're forcing them to create their own technology and not use Cuda, his proprietary technology, which is bad for the world and bad for America. His contention is if you would just let them buy our chips, it'd be more likely we'd be part of a larger ecosystem instead of China having its own ecosystem, which will ultimately the implication,

Amy Webb [00:14:30]:
I don't know about that argument because there's a lot of everybody wants access to China's market. It's a big market and China has been very smart about not giving access, you know, so like I, that that's a self serving request.

Leo Laporte [00:14:44]:
It seems pretty self serving, but I just, it was interesting.

Harper Reed [00:14:47]:
He seems pretty good at building up the world that he wants to happen and then executing on it. And I'm very impressed with him and his way of do it and doing that. And also how people who work there seem to love it in a way that seems like I have friends that have worked at Amazon for a long time. They don't love it. They're there for money or Facebook and anyone know what Nvidia is like? It's hard, but I really like it. And I don't understand how they created that environment because everything I read about it seems like it's horrible to work at. But people seem to really like they're true believers, which I always admire. When you have a leader that's able to instill that and even if that means bending reality to their wants, like he's done a good job.

Harper Reed [00:15:27]:
Okay, so I have something for you to Google. Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:15:30]:
Yes, I'm good at that.

Harper Reed [00:15:31]:
Spell it.

Leo Laporte [00:15:31]:
Although I don't use Google, but I'll do this. You mean search the web for.

Harper Reed [00:15:36]:
Yeah, I don't use Google anymore either.

Leo Laporte [00:15:39]:
I'll kagi.

Harper Reed [00:15:40]:
It doesn't really work. And I love that their logo is a G. They were like what if we used a G? No one in the search space uses a G. Okay. It is M A L E O U S space AI and you want to hit the Amazon link.

Leo Laporte [00:15:57]:
Malleus.

Harper Reed [00:15:58]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:15:59]:
It's a robot for AI robot for kids.

Harper Reed [00:16:02]:
So this is an example name sounds scary.

Amy Webb [00:16:07]:
And also for the elderly.

Harper Reed [00:16:09]:
This is an example of one of these little. This is a deep seek agent that will. That you can talk to and has a very fast real time like AI agent on it. That's pretty good.

Leo Laporte [00:16:24]:
Does it go to the cloud or is it a.

Harper Reed [00:16:25]:
It goes to the cloud. It's all via. I took it apart and reverse engineered it. It's all MQTT posted to some endpoints in China. A lot of other people have done this as well.

Leo Laporte [00:16:36]:
But when listening to me and sending China everything I say.

Harper Reed [00:16:39]:
Oh yeah, and you have to hook it to your wi fi. This is definitely for people who really want to do that.

Leo Laporte [00:16:45]:
But it's for how long before the FCC bans this?

Harper Reed [00:16:48]:
It costs 40 USD and there's no account, there's no signup, there's nothing. And it works. Pretty effective. Like pretty effective. Like I just wanted. A friend told me about this. This friend of mine in Shanghai was like, hey, there's all of these small little AI admin assistant things. They're all little hardware pieces and there's.

Harper Reed [00:17:08]:
And if you look at the recommended products from this, there's dozens of these. You can just see they all start to look the same. There's little robots. There's also. This is not currently available but I think to kind of what Amy is saying, like they've made it so it is cost effective to build really interest technology that isn't just some insane $200 a month subscription. For the mediocre version that was literally $40. Like I paid $40 with it. It came, I hooked it to my wifi like a crazy person and then immediately started talking to it.

Harper Reed [00:17:37]:
And I think, doesn't it seem like

Leo Laporte [00:17:38]:
this is just give inviting China into your network?

Harper Reed [00:17:43]:
Yeah, but I think you're missing the point though, Leo, because the point isn't that China's in your network. Like, like you already have Govee Lights and like all sorts of other stuff. Like they don't have to have some. The point is that this is a free AI thing that's very effective and it's competitive with.

Leo Laporte [00:17:57]:
Okay, so this one's unavailable, but what about the Heyozoki AI desk robot from deepseek? This one I can buy and have tomorrow.

Harper Reed [00:18:05]:
Yeah, get it, try it. It's fun.

Amy Webb [00:18:08]:
It's a little rabbit adjacent, is it not?

Leo Laporte [00:18:10]:
I have a rabbit. I did buy the rabbit because it can talk to my open claw, which I don't have. But I had my AI agent simulate OpenClaw so that Rabi doesn't know any better and I can talk to it through. So, okay, so you don't know anything about this one, but this is also Deep Seek powered. So I figure it's probably just if

Harper Reed [00:18:28]:
you look for the Deep SEQ powered ones, they're for the most part free and easy and they're pretty good. You're not going to use it for real work, but it's a $20 AI assistant that is pretty funny to use. And this is what we're dealing with because that's distributed all over the world. Whereas OpenAI anthropic, they don't have hardware that you can give to your parent or your kid.

Leo Laporte [00:18:54]:
No. In fact, all we have is this crappy Amazon Echo plus thing which has a sassy voice and then tries to sell me stuff. Or Siri, which is just stupid.

Amy Webb [00:19:08]:
In 2017 or so, we were working with Microsoft. This is. I'm not divulging anything now because it's been a while.

Leo Laporte [00:19:17]:
Statute of limitations is expired.

Harper Reed [00:19:20]:
It's how IP worked. Could you imagine?

Amy Webb [00:19:22]:
Yeah, no kidding. But they had multiple teams trying to figure out AI and they were incredibly siloed. I think if you look at some of the research that was coming out of Microsoft, they had some of the best at that point. They had some of the best research on things like machine reading comprehension and recognition and NLP and stuff like that. At any rate, what happened was they got fixated on a device and wanted to get a sub $40 Bluetooth Alexa competitor, Amazon, you know, Echo competitor in the market and sort of lost where, you know, lost The, I don't know, lost their path, lost their footing. You've got all. And it's hard to bring hardware to the market. So it's interesting to me in the United States that we keep having hardware failures over and over again, which is what's happened.

Amy Webb [00:20:21]:
You don't see that in China, and that's been true in China and Japan, where Harper and I both spent a ton of time because things are more open and there is Significantly more competition. 100 different companies trying to bring EVs to the market. That's completely unfathomable. We cannot wrap our heads around that in the United States.

Leo Laporte [00:20:46]:
But that is ironic because they're communist and we're capitalist. But that sounds like they've got more of a free market than we do. Is that.

Harper Reed [00:20:57]:
I didn't see the air quotes there, Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:21:00]:
Free market.

Harper Reed [00:21:01]:
No, I meant on the capitalist and the communists. Like there needs to be air quotes around, maybe that whole sense.

Leo Laporte [00:21:07]:
So you think Adam Smith would look, look at China and say, that's what I was talking about.

Amy Webb [00:21:10]:
China has adapted capitalism in a different way than we have. And one could argue, again, there's a lot going wrong there. But you could argue that there's a better approach. We are seeing other alternative and better approaches to capitalism and to the markets for the purpose of like innovation and competition outside the US that it's ridiculous that we are. This AI is a very long horizon technology. It's also been in the works for a very long time, but in terms of like getting stuff into the commercial sector, it's only been a couple years and we only have a couple players. It should be the opposite right now at this stage. We should have 100 different legitimate companies in every single part of the ecosystem.

Amy Webb [00:21:52]:
And that is not what's happening. We have a couple of dominant players.

Leo Laporte [00:21:55]:
Chairman said let a thousand flowers bloom and then George Bush said let a hundred points alight.

Harper Reed [00:22:02]:
There's a really good book that I think talks a lot about this by Dan Wong called Breakneck.

Amy Webb [00:22:07]:
Yeah, really good. I've got it right over there.

Harper Reed [00:22:10]:
It's a great, very effective, very great book. But it really puts this idea that we have migrated and he doesn't do it. He does a very good job of not saying one is better than the other, more just saying this is kind of where we are and we may need to fix it, we may not, but we need to choose one way or the other. But he just says the US is a lawyer state and China is an engineer state. And so you have what kind of comes from that. Like you have a lot of laws and regulation in the US which is like all we talk about. But if you look at our leaders, 100% of our leaders are all lawyers. So of course it's like an economist friend of mine always tells me, never ask a hairstylist if you need a haircut.

Harper Reed [00:22:49]:
Right. It's like you do what tools you have in front of you. And whereas China's leaders are all engineers. So it's going to be much easier for them to say my tools in front of me are to light up a billion solar companies and have the competition fight to see which ones of the best solar happens, which is where all the solar innovation is happening. Whereas we are saying oh well we need to regulate to get solar either to out there or to kill wind turbines or whatever thing is happening. But the point being that we're using the tools that we have available and it might not be the right tool for this moment in time.

Amy Webb [00:23:21]:
100% the tools of regulation like this is going to open up a can of worms. So I don't want to do that other than to say that this is not a moment to regulate. We cannot and should not attempt to regulate AI. There are other ways forward but it requires making some tough decisions with regard to who can make money and how and how the returns get distributed and stuff like that. China's just not, they're just not operating in the same space. There are plenty of other problems and also China is not going to be the one innovating and creating brand new stuff. They are going to fast follow. But that fast follow strategy is really smart when you combine that with this long term vision and resources put against bringing everybody online.

Amy Webb [00:24:09]:
You know, I would love to see the United States invest similarly to get everybody look, I mean like all these tools are really great unless you have no service in your house or you know, yeah, you just then, then cool. You're, you, you're learning about AI and you can't use any of it.

Leo Laporte [00:24:26]:
You know what was, so what was the goal of the Trump summit?

Amy Webb [00:24:31]:
The summit?

Leo Laporte [00:24:32]:
Yeah.

Amy Webb [00:24:34]:
It depends on who you ask. From my point of view, there's a big war happening that the United States launched. So there's, you know, that. And China and Iran historically have relations whereas we don't. So I think that there was some amount of. Let's see if we can figure some of this out. China is very, very, this is a little bit of, a little bit of 1914 where we had all of these hotspots around the World starting to heat up because there were these political,

Harper Reed [00:25:09]:
political

Amy Webb [00:25:09]:
problems all over the place. It feels a little bit like that right now. And you could look at this as like she may, she. China may see this as an opening to take Taiwan by force, which they've certainly talked about. They could see this as an opening to use Taiwan as leverage for something else. You know, there's a lot of that happening.

Leo Laporte [00:25:34]:
There's certainly a lot of concern among the US Tech industry about losing Taiwan. I mean, Apple.

Amy Webb [00:25:41]:
Well, yeah, because we don't get. There's no chips anywhere else. They're all made by tsmc.

Leo Laporte [00:25:45]:
And it's presumed if China, if China did invade Taiwan, that they would blow up the chip plants to prevent China from getting the technology. I mean, TSMC says they would. I don't know if they would.

Amy Webb [00:25:57]:
Yeah, that's. That sounds implausible. It's not just the technology. It's the people who know how to use the technology. So it's, it's not just those resources. You've got this incredibly trained, highly skilled group of people who are able to, to work in these places. You can't. Yeah, that's part of the reason why it's really hard to stand up a factory like that in the US Right now, because we just don't have highly, highly, highly skilled people yet to do that work.

Harper Reed [00:26:21]:
And if we do, they are. They are burdens. The wrong word. But they're burdened by regulation, laws, labor laws, etc. That are not from today. Right. They're from factories from 100 years ago. And they were made for very, very good reasons.

Harper Reed [00:26:35]:
Like these were made to protect workers and children, et cetera. And so we have this stuff that, you know, China never had to go through that as a country. They were able to define their labor laws, which, you know, some are bad, some are good in the modern age. And I think that just that's, you know, this is kind of a lot. What the Dan Wong book is about, which I highly recommend. I can't recommend enough if you're interested in seeing that. Yeah, what I like about it is a lot of the books on China, you know, Apple and China or Chip wars are very good, but at the end they basically are shouting, china will Never beat the U.S. and it just is kind of like this hyperbolic kind of thing where it's like Dan Wong is just saying, look, these are two different systems.

Harper Reed [00:27:13]:
Here's the historical reasons why they happened, and here's some comparisons across that might be helpful. And I just thought that was A nice, less hyperbolic way of looking at these two systems and how they interface, et cetera.

Leo Laporte [00:27:24]:
I remember visiting China in 2009. I was a Chinese studies major in college.

Amy Webb [00:27:29]:
Oh, I never knew that.

Leo Laporte [00:27:31]:
Yeah, No, I love the culture. I learned Mandarin, which I've of course forgotten because unless you use it every single day, it's the pearl of spoken word. In 2009, visited China and I had kind of come to the opinion that while the 20th century was the American century, I think we all agree that the 21st century might well be the Chinese century. And our guide, who was a Brit expat, said, oh no, you don't understand the economic issues besetting China. This is 2009 will keep it from becoming the Chinese century. Is that still true or is that not the case? There certainly were economic issues, there's birth rate issues, there are problems in China. There's of course the human rights issue. I don't know if that has anything to do with the economics of it.

Leo Laporte [00:28:22]:
Do you think this could be. It sounds like you're just painting a picture of a Chinese century.

Amy Webb [00:28:28]:
Well, century's a long time. In the year 20.

Leo Laporte [00:28:30]:
20 decades. Let's have a two decade. Decade.

Amy Webb [00:28:32]:
Yeah. I think it really depends on. Look, I'm like a pragmatist. So if I were to look at where a lot of Western democracies are and I would include Japan in this,

Leo Laporte [00:28:47]:
they have a huge birth rate issue too.

Amy Webb [00:28:49]:
Huge birth rate issue. They're also having lots of internal political issues. They just launched a brand new party called Mirai. Mirai something. Mirai in Japanese means future. So it's a. It's a guy and the focus is on like AI, so it's fine. But like Japanese, I don't know.

Amy Webb [00:29:10]:
With apologies to everybody who might be listening this, who is Japanese. Like talk about stubborn, like just absolute unwillingness to try anything new. A lot of people are.

Leo Laporte [00:29:19]:
I have the impression they're tradition bound. Is that.

Amy Webb [00:29:22]:
No, it's just like stubbornness. But that's not across the board. But it is with science.

Leo Laporte [00:29:27]:
In fact, some Japanese people are very forward looking and very.

Amy Webb [00:29:32]:
Yeah, I'm mostly talking about men of like older men still. Still run things. Yeah, yeah. Not. Not younger people, but. But the point is there's so much pendulum swinging in a lot of these countries because of extreme views going back and forth and China is just plowing ahead. So the lack of uncertainty in China is partially what's going to help that country go forward. And I don't think it's great to have a dictator, benevolent or not.

Amy Webb [00:30:01]:
So I'm not saying that, but it does reduce some of the like worked for Singapore, you know, constant back and forth. We're going to invest in coal, we're going to invest in EVs. Wait, no, sorry. We're investing in.

Leo Laporte [00:30:13]:
Every four years we decide something else.

Amy Webb [00:30:15]:
Yeah. And that makes the business climate like impossible to work in. Look, I'm in the room with leaders of major companies in just about every industry and their boards and basically what I'm hearing people say is we're just, we're on pause for the next three years or two and a half years. So a lot of these companies outside of AI, which is a thing, are not investing in innovation because they don't know what's going to happen. And so it's every. Everybody's just waiting. That's a terrible situation to be in.

Leo Laporte [00:30:48]:
Isn't this almost a global situation? Every polity in the world is struggling with the future because the future is so uncertain.

Amy Webb [00:30:57]:
That's. That that is an excuse. So the answer is no. You should always be focused. You need, you need your near term strategy and you need the longer term.

Leo Laporte [00:31:05]:
And there's even if you have no idea what's going to happen.

Amy Webb [00:31:08]:
Let me give you an example. Are you familiar with toto toilets?

Leo Laporte [00:31:12]:
Yes, I have many of them.

Amy Webb [00:31:15]:
We actually have the toto that south park made fun of in our bathroom, in our house.

Leo Laporte [00:31:22]:
I miss it. We moved and we left our totos behind. And that was. Speaking of behinds and that was a big mistake. These opened up, they were warm, they blew at you, they squirted at you. They did everything. They did everything but play music. We didn't have the musical ones.

Amy Webb [00:31:35]:
But yeah, they're awesome.

Leo Laporte [00:31:38]:
They're fantastic.

Amy Webb [00:31:39]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But one of the things that they did was the same porcelain coating. That is what makes a toto toilet really great. Turns out it's also they've been able, they'd been researching and figuring out how to apply that same exact technology for printing silicon chips.

Leo Laporte [00:31:58]:
Right.

Amy Webb [00:31:58]:
So the point. But like they discovered this a long time ago and then just kept chipping away at it and continue to invest in innovation because at some point they like wanted to be ready and their

Leo Laporte [00:32:09]:
stock is through the roof now because they make the interconnects that every data center needs.

Amy Webb [00:32:15]:
That's right. So that is what I do not see us companies doing. I do not see them investing in the future or. And fine. So like this technology may or may not ever actually work, but you're going to learn so much in the process. And everybody who's a part. Who touches that in any way is going to level up in how they're thinking it's going to.

Leo Laporte [00:32:35]:
You know, they were just lucky.

Amy Webb [00:32:37]:
No, but no, even if they were,

Harper Reed [00:32:41]:
even if they were, this is kind of manufactured love luck. You can't just like my favorite.

Leo Laporte [00:32:45]:
Do something. You can't be lucky. And no opportunities exist unless you start to push in the doors.

Amy Webb [00:32:51]:
This has been so my favorite example

Harper Reed [00:32:53]:
of this for a Japanese company is Yamaha. They make everything from musical instruments to rowboats to speedboats to motorcycles. And like they just make everything. There are no companies like that in America.

Amy Webb [00:33:06]:
Well, they're. There are conglomerates that. That's a little tricky too because General Electric made everything.

Leo Laporte [00:33:11]:
It wasn't a good thing.

Amy Webb [00:33:12]:
Yeah. I think that the. What I'm trying to point out is, and I don't want to name any company names, but we have a lot of US Companies that historically did a phenomenal job of doing some research and research, you know, and it doesn't, it doesn't affect your balance sheet. It doesn't cost that much money to do research. But you have to organize the company in the right way so that like some of that starts to spiral out and you may. You get a new product, it's fine if you don't. You get new learnings that then help you think through the next thing. And we just don't have the great labs that used to exist.

Amy Webb [00:33:48]:
And I think that's a huge. We've become like, so like America is like obsessed with optimization. Like we must optimize everything all the time at all costs. And the great irony is like that's 100% of what China used to do, you know, and we flip flopped a little bit.

Leo Laporte [00:34:06]:
I need to take a break. This is such a good conversation. I think so important. I don't want to interrupt it. So hold, hold that thought. Harper and I, I think the T is this way, but. Okay. And then I don't know what that is.

Leo Laporte [00:34:22]:
That's orthogonal. I thought. I don't know. I would actually kind of wonder if either of you have an opinion of what comes after this summit, whether anything was accomplished and what comes after the summit. We're take a little break so Amy can leak. Harper, by the way, this has already been an expensive show and I blame you.

Amy Webb [00:34:44]:
Harper, this is so gross.

Leo Laporte [00:34:45]:
No, no, I had my power bar already, so I'm okay. I bought the robot that you mentioned before the show, the Ricci. And then I just bought this thing that's going to be a spy for China in my house.

Amy Webb [00:34:58]:
Yeah.

Harper Reed [00:34:59]:
That's what we're talking about.

Leo Laporte [00:35:00]:
Yeah. Don't you basically. Are you giving it administrative access to your network now and Deep Sea?

Harper Reed [00:35:05]:
No, but, but if you read the reviews on that site, there is a perfect, a perfect review in that kind of. That I don't even know how to say it. Like. Like, you know when you read a review of something and you're like, this person does not know what they're talking about?

Leo Laporte [00:35:23]:
I think I read that review and

Harper Reed [00:35:24]:
the one where it's like they hacked me.

Leo Laporte [00:35:26]:
Yeah.

Harper Reed [00:35:27]:
You have to. You have to type in your password, which is 192.168.1.1 they hacked me and you'. Like, oh, maybe, but like, maybe not.

Leo Laporte [00:35:36]:
What you. Should I put it inside a VPN or maybe tailscale or something and keep it out?

Harper Reed [00:35:41]:
Yeah, I'll put it on a separate landscape. Just, just play with it. Hook it to a hotspot on your phone. Don't worry about it. Don't hook it to your real big network and just kind of play with it because it's not, it's, it's. It is a little. It's like fast fashion of electronics. It's not there to last forever.

Leo Laporte [00:35:58]:
Yeah.

Harper Reed [00:35:58]:
This is not a high quality product.

Leo Laporte [00:36:00]:
And honestly, I don't really care if the Chinese know my WI fi password. So what? They've got nothing to hide.

Harper Reed [00:36:07]:
They're gonna come and they're gonna take all of your stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:36:09]:
Just don't hack my toto.

Harper Reed [00:36:12]:
That would be. They're already in your router. Really? They're in your router?

Leo Laporte [00:36:15]:
They made my router. But you know.

Harper Reed [00:36:17]:
I know, I know.

Leo Laporte [00:36:19]:
They made everything in my house. Yeah, they made the computer I'm using right now.

Harper Reed [00:36:25]:
It's a great computer.

Leo Laporte [00:36:26]:
It's a great computer. Anyway, we're gonna take a break and come back. This is why we love having Harper and Amy on. What you got there? A little LEGO miner. What's he got? A vacuum Devo guy. Oh, he's Devo. He's got a you must whip it guy.

Harper Reed [00:36:45]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:36:46]:
I thought he had a whip, but I wasn't gonna say it. Now I see he's got a planter on his head. He's got a whip in his hand. Who else could it be but Devo?

Harper Reed [00:36:56]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:36:57]:
Lego Devo.

Harper Reed [00:36:58]:
I always have fun stuff to show you.

Leo Laporte [00:37:00]:
You know what's cool about Lego? You, you can design your own LEGO set. What's that? Oh, that's what I mean. Richie, I can't. What? Did it break? What's going on?

Harper Reed [00:37:10]:
No, it doesn't. It just doesn't have power.

Leo Laporte [00:37:12]:
Oh, the battery died. You know, I had. What was it, the Obsbot. And I've had so many of these things that have. What was. It would look just like that. Had the eyes and it went around, and they turned off the server a few years ago.

Harper Reed [00:37:29]:
I know. I have been thinking a lot about.

Leo Laporte [00:37:33]:
These are just toys. Let's face it.

Harper Reed [00:37:35]:
Well, when you buy hardware. I was just talking to a friend about this. He bought all this wemo stuff, and wemo was just shut down, right?

Leo Laporte [00:37:43]:
Yep.

Harper Reed [00:37:43]:
And he was just like, what do I do? And I was kind of like, well, what do you want? But the way he described it, he's not a technical. Technical person. He's a. But he's been involved in tech companies for a long time, so he knows his way around it. But he was like, I want autonomy over the hardware. I want to be able to hack it if the service goes down. And then I was like, just do ESP32s. It'll be easy.

Harper Reed [00:38:03]:
But it's, like, funny, because that would have been an asinine thing to recommend two years ago. But now he'll just be like, Claude, here's an ESP32 switch. What do I need to do?

Leo Laporte [00:38:11]:
Exactly. I've had Claude take the reference firmware and rewrite it.

Harper Reed [00:38:16]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:38:16]:
And it's trivial to do, and Claude is very comfortable with it and can do all sorts of stuff with it.

Harper Reed [00:38:22]:
We do this quite a bit. Anytime I get a new piece of hardware, especially all this Instagram hardware that's out there, we will rip it apart and kind of see what it's made out of. And if it is an ESP32 board, you can typically rip the firmware and decompile it and kind of basically get an idea of what happens because they don't encrypt the hardware.

Leo Laporte [00:38:43]:
Right. I'm wondering, because the ESP32 has a number of trigger words. High ESP is the default, but there's a couple of Chinese, and then one of them is Alexa.

Harper Reed [00:38:54]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:38:55]:
And I wonder, is this the chip inside an echo?

Harper Reed [00:38:58]:
No.

Leo Laporte [00:38:59]:
Why would it know Alexa?

Harper Reed [00:39:00]:
I'm guessing that they trained like. So you're talking about. I think Open Wake Word.

Leo Laporte [00:39:04]:
Yeah. You can use. Well, that's what I'm using now is Open Wake Word to train it to say, hi, Kenobi.

Harper Reed [00:39:10]:
Yeah. So did you check out the Google or the Colab notebook. The Python notebook where you can train your own word.

Leo Laporte [00:39:17]:
Yes.

Harper Reed [00:39:17]:
You can do it pretty well where you don't have to say the word.

Leo Laporte [00:39:20]:
Well, I did, I had Kokoro, which is a text to speech synthesizer. Very good. Generate like 2,000 both. Hey, Kenobi. And then you also have to do false positives. So generate a lot of just random stuff or hey, you know, hey, Schenectady. And then, so there's a lot of training involved and I have all those samples still. I just have to.

Leo Laporte [00:39:44]:
I have to buckle down and finish.

Harper Reed [00:39:45]:
Yeah, it's kind of a pain in the butt. I tried to do one that said,

Leo Laporte [00:39:49]:
hey, Richie and I, they said use Alexa because it's got the most. That's probably why it has Alexa, because it has so much training. There's such a. I was on a

Harper Reed [00:39:59]:
call with a company the other day that has a big G in it and the guy kept saying, talking about Google because it was from Google and his Google home kept going off like we're talking multiple times. I know, it was so funny because

Leo Laporte [00:40:13]:
I was just like, what a. I've muted all of the smart devices in this room because if not they would go off constantly.

Harper Reed [00:40:20]:
I just noticed your chair. You look like a child.

Leo Laporte [00:40:23]:
Leo. I just switched. I had one of these fancy office chairs and I've just switched it back to my Dr. Evil chair that I had in the old studio. I have to turn around and show you the back.

Harper Reed [00:40:36]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [00:40:36]:
Because I'm an elderly fellow, I'm also very interested in all this stuff from the point of view of it's going to be a support to me in my old age. And so, for instance, at some point I talked about this the other day. Somebody's going to come and take away my car keys. They're going to say, dad, he shouldn't be driving anymore. And I'm just hoping by then I will have an automobile that I will just get in and say, take me to the supermarket.

Harper Reed [00:41:09]:
I love Waymos. I have a good hack to get a Waymo2 lax from anywhere in LA.

Leo Laporte [00:41:14]:
What's the hack? Is it. What did you get?

Harper Reed [00:41:16]:
You get dropped off at the LAX parking lot, which is a short bus from lax and it's on the Waymo

Leo Laporte [00:41:24]:
map because otherwise they won't take you to the airport because there's fees.

Harper Reed [00:41:28]:
And so there was one day where I had some extra time and I was like, I'll see if I can get all the way to lax. And I just was like, take me to the LAX parking garage. And it was like, got it. And I put on my. I think I was listening to some classical music or whatever, rolled down the windows and had a wonderful, very relaxed ride doing nothing. Called a bunch of friends on FaceTime. Like an absolute insane person in a.

Leo Laporte [00:41:49]:
That's where I'm calling from.

Harper Reed [00:41:50]:
Exactly. There's no driver. And then. And then I had to walk a little ways. But it was like a very pleasant experience.

Amy Webb [00:41:57]:
You see the dos attack that guy in San Francisco. It was such a great idea.

Leo Laporte [00:42:02]:
Actually, I have a Waymo story in here because apparently they have added Waymo to Atlanta. And Empty Waymos invade Atlanta neighborhood circle Culdesac for hours with no passengers.

Amy Webb [00:42:18]:
Did somebody do this again?

Leo Laporte [00:42:19]:
It happened in San Francisco in a neighborhood.

Amy Webb [00:42:22]:
But it was a joke. It was a guy who, like, got a bunch of his buddies to all order them at the same time.

Leo Laporte [00:42:27]:
It was fake.

Amy Webb [00:42:28]:
It was a DDoS. It was like a DDoS.

Leo Laporte [00:42:30]:
Oh, that's hysterical. Yeah, this is so the. I thought the one in San Francisco happened because of the directions. You couldn't make a left turn and they. They honored you.

Amy Webb [00:42:38]:
No, no. This was a guy who got a bunch of friends together and they all wonder.

Leo Laporte [00:42:41]:
Take a look at this. You can play this. This is from Channel 2 in Atlanta.

Harper Reed [00:42:45]:
I love this, by the way. This is so good.

Leo Laporte [00:42:49]:
Wayward Wayos.

Amy Webb [00:42:50]:
What happened? They just stuck in there.

Harper Reed [00:42:53]:
This is the type of thing that I cannot wait to happen. Like, I love it. Like, it's my favorite thing. Like, could you imagine being like, I gotta go get a wh. And then, you know, it's coming from some graveyard.

Leo Laporte [00:43:04]:
Look at all the way. Look at all. Oh, my God. This is not Adidas. This couldn't be. I think it's because there's so. I don't know. It's a circle.

Harper Reed [00:43:12]:
I don't even think it matters. Why? I just love it as a thing that is happening. Like, could you imagine being the person that's. Like, the robots are here watching.

Leo Laporte [00:43:20]:
The name of the court is Battleview Drive. So I think it's appropriate. Let's call every Waymo in Atlanta and send it to Battleview Drive. And then, of course, all the local reporters show up. Oh, God, they gotta do this. Steve. Steve. Oh, no.

Leo Laporte [00:43:37]:
Oh, he shouldn't have done that. He put a little child thing in there and it's blocked him. And now they can't go. Oh, no, that was mean. Steve. Local reporter causes Waymo confusion.

Harper Reed [00:43:51]:
We need to give these Waymos some free time. Give them some space.

Leo Laporte [00:43:56]:
Amy, Are you better? Are you feeling okay now?

Amy Webb [00:43:59]:
I just.

Leo Laporte [00:44:00]:
New Band Aid decided to replace things. Yeah, I'm sorry. By the way, Amy at South by Southwest had a funeral.

Amy Webb [00:44:08]:
I did. I mean, I didn't have.

Leo Laporte [00:44:10]:
Well, it wasn't your funeral. It was a funeral for your yearly report.

Amy Webb [00:44:15]:
That's right. Report. Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:44:17]:
Tell us about that. That got a lot of attention.

Amy Webb [00:44:19]:
It did. I. We. So we have been producing this Trend report for 20 years. It would have been the 19th year.

Leo Laporte [00:44:29]:
We've been sending you copies and I love it.

Amy Webb [00:44:31]:
Yeah. And we still, we're still, we use that information to do our work. So it's not that we're not doing it anymore, but A compendium that's 1,000 pages long, it's a PDF, is not useful to anybody. And worse, there is so much happening right now that I need people to unhook from what's easy and engage with what's more difficult. So a trend report is easy to put on a shelf and it absolves too many people of having to make decisions. So I, They. We're not doing it.

Leo Laporte [00:45:01]:
You also made the point that it, you can't just do it at the end of the year and have it be that it's constantly changing. Right, Correct.

Amy Webb [00:45:08]:
So. And also I've been tinkering with this new model there. I frame this in like an economic argument, so I promise this won't be super boring. But there was this guy named Joseph, Joseph Schumpeter, who some.

Leo Laporte [00:45:24]:
Oh yeah, very famous. Yep.

Amy Webb [00:45:27]:
Wrote this book called Can Capitalism Survive? That I read for the. Yeah, well, I read it when I was in, when I was in college for the first time. And I still have it. And it's dog eared and highlighted. At any rate, the idea is capitalism is this perfect storm. This storm that's constant, perpetual storm that's constantly happening. And it sort of gobbles up old, existing technologies and creates new ones. And that's kind of what a storm does, right? It messes up the ocean, the shoreline, whatever, and makes way for new things to grow.

Amy Webb [00:46:06]:
That's what's happening right now. It's called creative destruction. And you have to be willing to see what's happening, which is the exact opposite of what our government is doing right now so that you can make way for what's coming.

Leo Laporte [00:46:20]:
But does that mean that there are periods of time where people are miserable?

Amy Webb [00:46:26]:
No, I mean, look, you're, you're miserable, you know, who's going to be miserable? You know, the people. When there's big storms Harper and I are from the Midwest, so, like, one of the things I learned how to do. When you're a kid in school, you have a tornado drill. Every kid does where I grew up. Right. So we understand weather. If there's bad skies, you know, I'm not going to be the last person holding down the fire fort.

Leo Laporte [00:46:48]:
I'm.

Amy Webb [00:46:49]:
I'm going to evacuate. There are always people who you. There's footage of them on the roof of their homes because they just wanted to wait things out.

Leo Laporte [00:46:58]:
Yes.

Amy Webb [00:46:58]:
The message is, this time around, with the technological storm that's happening, you don't want to be that person on your roof because nobody is coming to rescue you. Nobody. I don't care who you are.

Leo Laporte [00:47:10]:
So what do we do?

Amy Webb [00:47:12]:
You have to spot the storm before. Before it happens.

Leo Laporte [00:47:15]:
Do I dig a survival cellar and put a bunch of canned food in there?

Amy Webb [00:47:18]:
No, but I do. You have to be willing to ask, really, to sort of think the unthinkable. Which means if you're a company that's always made money doing X, or if you're a person who's always done Y, you may not be able to do that in the same way in the future. You just have to think about that now. Your market might shift, everything might shift, and that's fine. But don't dig your heels in and refuse to make any changes.

Leo Laporte [00:47:45]:
Is there something an individual should do?

Amy Webb [00:47:48]:
So we are calling. What you're looking for are convergences. AI alone is interesting, but it is impacting other things. What you want to do is look at the convergence between AI and biology, or AI and robotics, or AI and ticker toys that you can buy on Amazon and then let China, I guess, surveil you. You're looking for these small intersections, and then you have to be willing to adjust and adapt. But most people are not willing to do that. They're just kind of hoping everything will be fine. Or they get really angry, and then you wind up with the political crazy people that are out there.

Leo Laporte [00:48:24]:
Yeah, I mean, this is. Cory Doctorow wrote this last week that the president is kind of in a tough place because he's a populist and got elected by people who were worried about the future and said, help us. But he owes so much to the oligarchs, the people who are creating this unpleasant future for people that he has. Corey says he's looking for an ox to gore. He has no ox to gore. He's got his base who are expecting him to help them, and he's got his donors and supporters who are expecting him to make them more money.

Amy Webb [00:49:00]:
I, I think Corey is brilliant. I think he is giving our current administration way too much credit for doing any kind of true deep thinking or soul searching. I don't think it's happening well.

Leo Laporte [00:49:09]:
It might be instinctual. I agree. It may not have been thought out, but it may be instinctive that. I mean, the populist thing resonated. It worked quite well. Got him a look.

Amy Webb [00:49:20]:
I know people don't love the politics when we get into it. I want to highlight. I am not. I'm politically independent. I have voted on for both, both sides, different parties at different times. This particular administration is acting in ways that are truly unprecedented.

Harper Reed [00:49:37]:
Yeah, I'm not politically independent.

Leo Laporte [00:49:41]:
You work for Obama's 2012 campaign.

Harper Reed [00:49:42]:
Based on my Wikipedia page. It's very convenient actually to have that because then I go into these kind of conversations, I'm like, guess what I believe? And everyone's like, oh, I can guess, actually, it's very clear. I do think there is a thing that, that we need to remember is that populism has driven our elections for quite a while. Not just starting with Trump and not

Leo Laporte [00:50:04]:
just in the U.S. and of course

Harper Reed [00:50:06]:
not just in the U.S. i do think that there is, you know, there's, there's a lot that is happening right now, but I wouldn't say that it seems like there is some grand plan and I don't think that's just a Trump thing as well. I think the cohesive planning that you see from some other countries is where you get a lot of benefit. There's also a little bit less freedom in some cases. And I think that freedom is.

Leo Laporte [00:50:35]:
Can you ask planning and freedom?

Harper Reed [00:50:38]:
I don't know. But I mean, yeah, maybe Amy thinks, yes, yes.

Amy Webb [00:50:45]:
We used to have something called the Office of Technology Assessment in this country, which got gutted. And Those were like 700 academics whose job it was to help do long term planning and make long term decisions. So the answer is, of course we can, but you have to be willing to do it and to tell people no when the answer should be no. You know, but we've, we've. I don't know. I read. I don't know if I should say this out loud. I'm going to say it anyways.

Amy Webb [00:51:11]:
In 9th grade, I read the Communist Manifesto and was like, I'm a communist. We've got everything in this country.

Leo Laporte [00:51:20]:
Everybody sensible at that age is, I

Amy Webb [00:51:24]:
did, I read that. I read Animal Farm. I went down. I became a vegetarian that year. I had very Strong viewpoints. And then two years later I read Ayn Rand and was like, yeah, that.

Harper Reed [00:51:33]:
Exactly. I am Howard Reardon.

Amy Webb [00:51:36]:
Yeah, I was like, I read. I read foundation and the Fountainhead in the same year. And I was like this, everybody, the scientists should be in charge. And this, you know, forget communism. Anyways, I think there is no singular system that works because we're people and people have lots of different nuanced ideas, you know.

Harper Reed [00:52:01]:
Yeah.

Amy Webb [00:52:01]:
But I do think that capitalism has evolved in a way that's no longer healthy in the United States.

Harper Reed [00:52:07]:
Well, I mean, it's a great example.

Leo Laporte [00:52:09]:
If you're not a liberal when you're young, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative when you're old, you have no heart, you have no money.

Amy Webb [00:52:15]:
Oh, brain.

Leo Laporte [00:52:15]:
I was going to say no brain or no money. Yeah, it's roughly the same. Yeah. So go ahead. I'm sorry, Harper, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Harper Reed [00:52:24]:
No, no, no. I was just thinking about the free market capitalism that we act like we have, yet we're banning BYD from coming into the United States, which as someone that does startups. Yeah. Competition is hard, but so are terrorists. It's really, really, really hard. Well, they're all protectionists and I do think that we don't want that. We are soft right now and we need to be. We're in a country in a world that is not soft.

Leo Laporte [00:52:51]:
I should mention, by the way, that the Office of Technology Assessment was not wiped out by the Trump administration. It goes with.

Harper Reed [00:52:57]:
No, it was.

Leo Laporte [00:52:58]:
Gingrich did it in his plan for for America. And it was under the Clinton administration that it happened.

Amy Webb [00:53:05]:
And it was one of my favorite.

Leo Laporte [00:53:07]:
The Contract on America contract of the

Harper Reed [00:53:09]:
Dan Wong book was when he was interviewing some people about the making masks and PPE around Covid and he was talking to an American entrepreneur who said, that's just not our core business. And then he talked to a Chinese entrepreneur who said, oh, I thought our core business was making money. And I think that was a very good distinction of like these two systems and how they're colliding. Like, I have that conversation constantly as a startup founder. People say, oh, why don't you do X, Y or Z? And I'm like, oh, well that's not our core business. And then I look at my friends who are not in the US not in startup culture, not in venture back startup culture, and they are fighting to survive in a thunderdome of madness that I just don't. I would be scared to participate like I do not. I am, I am a raised in captivity wild animal.

Harper Reed [00:53:52]:
These people are like, you know, like gazelles born to run. And it's just like a different kind of world. And I think it's, we're going to have some hard conversations with ourselves in the next five years.

Leo Laporte [00:54:02]:
Here's the article from Semaphore. Rachel Jones writing The class of 2026 is cooked. It is a tough time to be graduating from college right now. There's no question about it. Tech Companies have slashed 100,000 jobs. Cloudflare just fired 20% of its staff to be replaced by AI agents. Meta's firing 8,000 people. I don't know what happens when you, when you graduate from college these days.

Leo Laporte [00:54:34]:
This is a graph of total non farm hires from 2010 through 2026. And you can see the precipitous decline as soon as ChatGPT comes out. I mean the companies may be AI washing, they may just be using that as an excuse to fire people. But I don't think there's any question. I mean if I were graduating with a computer science degree right now, I

Harper Reed [00:54:59]:
don't know, I think there's something I have observed and I think this is kind of funny. I think we forget about capitalism when we have these conversations because as the CEO of a company, if someone comes to me and says I'm a mid level employee, you have to pay me 250k a year or someone comes from me and says I'm a new grad, you have to pay me 120k a year. And with Claude code or whatever their equivalent, why would I ever hire the middle career person? I think that the younger, I think the class of 2026 is not going to get jobs because there's just not, it's like a pretty hard job market in general. But I have more hope for the people who are just graduating who are going to enter factory jobs of technology than I do of people who are getting laid off as a mid career person. Now they can get a job, it's just not going to pay the same. And I think this is going to have a really somewhat catastrophic impact on our knowledge worker communities, our dual income communities, suburbs in general. Because you're going to have a group of people who've made 400k a year with two people or more and suddenly they're not going to make that, they're going to make half of that and that's just going to cause a lot of consternation, I think. Or what does the Tea Party look Like when it's not caused from nafta, et cetera, it's actually caused from Facebook laying off everyone.

Harper Reed [00:56:21]:
And I don't know, but I think about this a lot and it scares me a little bit.

Leo Laporte [00:56:25]:
This is why they're populist movements.

Harper Reed [00:56:28]:
Well, I had a good conversation with a friend who's a big AI doomer and I'm not an AI doomer in kind of the more classical sense. And I was asking him, I was like, well, if AI kills us, how fast will it be? Are we talking how painless will it be? Yeah. Are we talking. Is this like months of me strapped to a table or something? Or are we talking like I wake up one day and I'm a paperclip in a router or something like that? You know? Like, what are we talking? Am I going to turn into a mail server for some? Like, you know, I'm going to wake up in a thousand years as the mail server? Like, what batteries are you saying?

Leo Laporte [00:57:02]:
Don't you know? Didn't you see?

Harper Reed [00:57:03]:
He was very, very confident that it would be very quick, like very fast. And I was like, okay, well, I would much rather have AI Doomer be the end of us all than like human doomers, because it seems to me that the human doomer is just pain and suffering for more people, whereas AI Doomer is like I get turned into a paperclip and yeeted into the universe, which I'm. I'm here for. So that's kind of my perspective. Gotta go, bye.

Leo Laporte [00:57:26]:
What's the future? What? Tell us. You're a futurist.

Amy Webb [00:57:29]:
Yeah, look, I.

Leo Laporte [00:57:31]:
Tell us what's happening.

Amy Webb [00:57:36]:
There are a lot. There's a lot of money to be made from doomerism.

Leo Laporte [00:57:42]:
Yes.

Amy Webb [00:57:42]:
And so the future currently is the people, and we all know who they are who are proclaiming end times are going to make bank in some way.

Leo Laporte [00:57:54]:
I have to put out. That's the same as it ever was. I used to say Dvorak. That was his shtick.

Amy Webb [00:58:00]:
That's right.

Harper Reed [00:58:01]:
Oh, that's right. After the keyboard.

Leo Laporte [00:58:04]:
Yeah. No, he was a cousin to the keyboard, but he was the guy. I mean, he was a computer columnist, still is around. Who said the mouse is never going anywhere. He made a great living being. It's all crap.

Amy Webb [00:58:18]:
That's right.

Harper Reed [00:58:19]:
You know, yeah.

Amy Webb [00:58:21]:
Ray Dalio, a very famous money guy, is out. He, he's always been the. You know, there's a huge cycle coming. It's. It's going to be awful.

Leo Laporte [00:58:34]:
And they always say he was right in 2008.

Amy Webb [00:58:37]:
Sure, sure. Everybody is. Right, Right.

Leo Laporte [00:58:39]:
So it's like a clock twice a day. Broken clock.

Amy Webb [00:58:43]:
Right. Here's what I will tell you for a living. We have these models that we built and we use a lot of data and math and to some degree our experience and intuition, but it's really data based. I cannot build you a model that predicts the exact future. And no AI can do that either because there's too many variables in play and there's too much. You can't hook me up to Willow. It's still not going to happen.

Harper Reed [00:59:09]:
Right.

Amy Webb [00:59:10]:
So I don't believe in the absolute apocalyptic like super intelligence stories because at the moment I don't have data to support those. That could change in a week. But that doesn't seem to be the path that we're on. The path that we're on right now seems to be much more like death by a thousand paper cuts. Which is to say, exactly to Harper's point, there's a whole bunch of middle level people who quite frankly, maybe they're making very healthy salaries and maybe we had some salary inflation over the years, but those people are going to have a very, very hard time finding jobs that are going to pay the same amount of money in a different role or a different company. We have a lot of fresh people out of college who maybe were training for certain skills a little bit like between like 1999 and 2004 when everybody had to learn flash, you know, so like it's a little bit of that over again. So there'll be a little bit of uneasiness. Not to mention, look, there's all these new very interesting fields in the process of being created, like commercialization of space, which has to do with manufacturing and a bunch of other things that just haven't settled out yet.

Amy Webb [01:00:27]:
So we're in this moment of transition. I call everybody alive today the transition generation. We are transitioning from where we were before to the time after. You know, people talk about I had a computer growing up, but no Internet. It's a pretty common story for people in my, whatever, some people in my age group. So I remember I had to build up a bunch of skills for the, for pre Internet, like the Dewey decimal system and learning how to slowly read things. But that, that set of skills truly supercharged me. Once I was a debater, you know, like I was a very competitive debater and all of that research was manual.

Amy Webb [01:01:08]:
So I had to do all of it by literally reading and ingesting that. Yeah. So like that means I have phenomenal research skills. So when the Internet came, I'm like a superhero when it comes to finding stuff better than everybody else.

Harper Reed [01:01:24]:
The Google foo.

Amy Webb [01:01:26]:
Yeah, yeah. So the. I'm a Cusper. My daughter is a Cusper. So she is just the right age where she had to learn how to do everything manually before any kind of AI existed. She is. And she's in ninth grade by the time that she's entering the work workforce and because she's been privileged that she has access to broadband and bamboo printer in our house and a bunch of other stuff, she's going to enter the workforce with an incredible set of skills she had to build on her own plus all of the augmentation because of AI. So there are people out there who are sort of well positioned during this transition and then there's a lot of people that aren't and we don't have a plan for them and we should be making a plan for them but we are not doing that.

Amy Webb [01:02:13]:
That has to happen at a federal level level, I think.

Harper Reed [01:02:16]:
Yeah.

Amy Webb [01:02:17]:
Thanks.

Leo Laporte [01:02:19]:
Let's take a break. More to come. We're talking the future with Amy Webb, futurist. I have all your books on my shelf. I usually pull them down and hold them up. I mean the signals are talking. The most recent one is the. The one about biotech.

Leo Laporte [01:02:38]:
What's the name of that? I forgot. The Genesis Project.

Amy Webb [01:02:41]:
The Genesis Machine.

Leo Laporte [01:02:42]:
Machine, that's right. Yeah.

Amy Webb [01:02:44]:
All about longevity and biohacking and stuff like that.

Leo Laporte [01:02:47]:
Before that, the Big nine, which was prophetic. Talking about AI. Are you working on any new books?

Amy Webb [01:02:56]:
I want to be. As you can tell I've been thinking about end stage capitalism a lot lately and a solution around that which I've got. But Brian said if I write another book he's going to divorce me. So I. We have to. It's about painful.

Leo Laporte [01:03:12]:
It's painful.

Amy Webb [01:03:12]:
It's a balance. I understand I'm going to be writing a prolific substack.

Leo Laporte [01:03:16]:
There you go. Are you. Oh, that's fantastic. That's actually more modern.

Amy Webb [01:03:20]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:03:21]:
Writing a book.

Amy Webb [01:03:22]:
I've been on substack for a while and I've just.

Leo Laporte [01:03:23]:
Nobody reads books.

Amy Webb [01:03:25]:
Yeah. So anyways, there we go.

Leo Laporte [01:03:27]:
Yeah. And Harper Reed who is. I love the. Just your spirit of adventure and discovery. And he's doing it. And if you. If you're just joining us and you're looking at Harper on the video and you're seeing the pictures showing up over the. On the right there, over his left shoulder.

Leo Laporte [01:03:45]:
That is a machine that when you walk into his offices at 2389ai takes a picture of you and then makes this incredible line drawing and prints it out.

Harper Reed [01:03:54]:
We made a blog post about it. You can read about it.

Leo Laporte [01:03:57]:
It's so cool.

Harper Reed [01:03:59]:
It's very.

Leo Laporte [01:03:59]:
Did I build one for my house?

Harper Reed [01:04:01]:
Well, interestingly, it just uses an old Monoprice 3D printer that we just took. You know, it just. It just. With a pencil on it. We did hook up a. A brush to it to see if we could get brush strokes for more of a calligraphy style.

Leo Laporte [01:04:17]:
I kind of like the line drawing thing.

Harper Reed [01:04:19]:
The line drawing, it just looks really good. And then there's a whole bunch of software behind it that's quite fun. We spent a lot of time trying to make it cheaper using local models and whatnot, and it's pretty fun. It's very. And it's also quite funny.

Leo Laporte [01:04:31]:
Picasso.

Harper Reed [01:04:33]:
Yeah. Because it says Mikaso really loud when you hit the button.

Leo Laporte [01:04:36]:
Mikaso esucaso. Wow. A 3D printer to an AI portrait artist. And I guess it's your colleague Ivan Indro Touma Indrautama who wrote this. Yeah.

Harper Reed [01:04:50]:
Yes. And Ivan and I have worked together since 2005. One of the things I think is the most important about careers is to have a crew of people that you love to work with. And I've been very lucky to have that. And so I really am happy about this.

Leo Laporte [01:05:02]:
I love the big button inspire and the other big button. Realize it's simple. It's a simple machine.

Harper Reed [01:05:08]:
Yeah. Ivan also built our little mics that are transcribing everything we say. And he's kind of our hardware hacker. And this week we tried to nerd snipe him into doing the ESP32 wifi mapping stuff so you could see respiratory rate and heart rate of everyone that's inside of the office.

Leo Laporte [01:05:27]:
One of my favorite things, astronauts.

Harper Reed [01:05:30]:
I did this thing when I pitched a company over Covid where I had a heart rate monitor on my screen because I wanted the VCs that we were pitching on video to understand that they had a physical. The words would actually impact me physically.

Leo Laporte [01:05:43]:
They were trying to get the heart rate to go up, I presume, of course.

Harper Reed [01:05:47]:
But what my team found is that if it was a good pitch, my heart rate was up high. 120, 130, 140. If it was a bad pitch, I was at 60 flat. And like, they would just say, like, they would just be like, I don't like it. But it wasn't bad or good for the vc. It was bad or good. Like they were like, Harper's out. And so the team just started to use it as a signal on whether they should, you know, participate or not.

Harper Reed [01:06:10]:
They'd be like, ah, Harper. Harper's heart rate dropped. He's done, he's pulled out of the conversation. You can tell his brain's turned off.

Amy Webb [01:06:18]:
On the flip side, resting heart rate of 60 is pretty great.

Leo Laporte [01:06:21]:
Yeah, no kidding.

Harper Reed [01:06:22]:
So you got pretty good with that. I, I'm, I've been trying to get my cardio in shape. Turns out I'm getting old. Like Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:06:30]:
Thank you.

Harper Reed [01:06:31]:
Sorry, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:06:31]:
Or you could do like Amy does and do gravel bike racing.

Amy Webb [01:06:36]:
I also ride on the road. It's not just gravel.

Leo Laporte [01:06:39]:
Okay.

Harper Reed [01:06:39]:
Yeah, I've been running with noise canceling, headphones on.

Leo Laporte [01:06:42]:
That's a good idea.

Amy Webb [01:06:44]:
That's a great idea. That can't possibly go wrong. I'm so happy to hear that.

Harper Reed [01:06:46]:
I just try and be in my own world without a care to the world, you know, just listening to. I don't know what I'd listen to.

Leo Laporte [01:06:52]:
And then when you hear this, you just go, what is that? A truck coming up behind?

Harper Reed [01:06:58]:
But, but as, but running. I've been running roughly 10 miles a week, which I start from zero. But running. Nobody on the road pays attention to anything. Amy, I think, I don't think it meant. I think you're right. You just have to yell bike. Like you just have to yell something.

Harper Reed [01:07:12]:
No one cares. No one pays attention. It doesn't matter. Yeah. And so frustrating.

Leo Laporte [01:07:18]:
Amy enacted a real world version of the trolley problem. That's the problem. You know, we talk about AIs. If you, if you gave an AI a trolley and there are 20 people tied to the track on one track, but if you take the other track, you're going to go off a cliff and kill everybody in the trolley. The AI has to decide. I guess there's only one. Let's say there's one person on the trolley. Do you kill the one person who's riding on the trolley or do you kill the 10 people and save the one person on the trolley? Well, Amy decided to save the person who wasn't paying any attention and wiped herself out.

Amy Webb [01:07:52]:
Never again. The people in the future. You asked me what the future is. In the future, the people lose and it's their fault.

Leo Laporte [01:08:02]:
Actually, speaking of Chinese models, one thing people seem to agree is that Chinese models are better at video now then ours are very good. They're really. That's what Ron's using, I suspect, to make those propaganda videos.

Harper Reed [01:08:17]:
Which are also very good.

Leo Laporte [01:08:19]:
Which are also very good. Bytedance and Kuaishou's models outperform Western rivals. This is from the Financial Times in realism and scale. So your contention that AI in China may be only a few months behind ours. OpenAI open weight. AI in China might only be a few months behind ours. Well, in some areas, they're actually ahead of ours.

Amy Webb [01:08:41]:
Here, can you scroll down a little bit? Because you can see right there something that was. So in that video, you saw a little bit of a head wobble, which is a tiny. Do you see it?

Leo Laporte [01:08:52]:
Yeah, it's an Indian gesture that is not known in the West.

Amy Webb [01:08:57]:
Right? Well, it is a Virindian, but these little tiny little nuances lend an authenticity.

Leo Laporte [01:09:05]:
This is using Sea Dance, and it

Amy Webb [01:09:07]:
is more than like 15 seconds long.

Harper Reed [01:09:10]:
Yeah, Sea Dance is incredible. It's an incredible product.

Leo Laporte [01:09:13]:
I think you mentioned that. Mentioning that head wobble is really interesting, Amy, because this gesture, you know, we have in the west maybe nodding yes and shaking your head no, but this gesture is very meaningful.

Amy Webb [01:09:26]:
And there's multiple versions of that. There's not a single head wobble. There's different.

Leo Laporte [01:09:31]:
And so the ability to do that in a AI is fascinating.

Amy Webb [01:09:35]:
Yeah, I don't.

Leo Laporte [01:09:36]:
I don't see any uncanny valley in this video, by the way. This. If you didn't know it was AI, you wouldn't. You wouldn't say, oh, that's AI.

Amy Webb [01:09:43]:
It's a little choppy. So I. I would probably think it was. But to your point and that. That doesn't look very good.

Leo Laporte [01:09:48]:
And the text was bad. This is a good text.

Amy Webb [01:09:51]:
Still, I would be curious to know, did they. I have not seen how. I obviously haven't seen the prompts. But what I'd be really curious to know is did they say this is a family in this region in India, or this type. You know what I mean? And then were those cultural cues added in automagically?

Leo Laporte [01:10:09]:
So, yeah, there is. I mean, we're doing. We're getting there in the. In the west as well. There's a really amazing YouTube channel we've been talking about on intelligent machines called Chloe Does History. Have you guys seen the. It is. So Chloe, which who is fully AI generated, is a kind of typical influencer.

Leo Laporte [01:10:35]:
Right. She's doing a lot of selfie videos in historic places. So here she is in Ancient. In ancient London.

Amy Webb [01:10:42]:
No, no, no.

Leo Laporte [01:10:43]:
But it's very credible.

Amy Webb [01:10:45]:
Okay, that is fish and smoke and something I genuinely cannot name. And I have made a mistake coming this way. So the Plan is I'm gonna check in at my room in the inn, get into the market, see how people actually.

Leo Laporte [01:10:55]:
So the guy who does this is a. Is a historian. He's interested in actually recreating history. So he uses authentic photo. Not photos, drawings of the period. And he has many different periods. And then somehow I don't know how he's doing the influencer. This was London in 1536, but somehow he's doing the influencer as well.

Leo Laporte [01:11:14]:
It's Chloe versus history is the channel. Now he isn't really forthcoming. He has a. I bought it. A $69 epub on how he does it, but he's not fully forthcoming in how he does it. But he is using western video models. But yeah, one of the giveaways is that choppy?

Amy Webb [01:11:37]:
Is the history good? Is it like credible?

Leo Laporte [01:11:41]:
He says it is.

Amy Webb [01:11:42]:
Okay. Oh good.

Harper Reed [01:11:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:11:44]:
Well, okay, so this one is her in. This one is her in on the Titanic. Right.

Amy Webb [01:11:51]:
I heard this morning that Captain Smith is attending a dinner party tonight in a private first class restaurant. This is my best chance.

Leo Laporte [01:11:58]:
She's going to try to warn the captain that the Titanic is going to hit an iceberg and so she finds him.

Amy Webb [01:12:05]:
Captain Smith, I have very credible information that there is a significant iceberg risk tonight.

Leo Laporte [01:12:10]:
And he just brushes her off completely. I think some of the history in this is a little bit influenced by the movie Titanic, but I've read a lot about the Titanic and as far as I can tell, it's actually fairly accurate. It's accurate enough. Here's the thing. I think this is impressive from the point of view of if you had a ninth grader who wasn't that interested in history but maybe would be galvanized by this notion of an influence, something identifiable, an influencer stuck in these historic periods, it might be a hook that you could get people interested in. I think that's the creator's intention. So I think it's very interesting. By the way, 1.9 million views of this Titanic video.

Leo Laporte [01:12:56]:
It's a one month old. So he's definitely getting traction on this.

Amy Webb [01:13:00]:
Certainly better than me showing Petra drunk history, which I thought was age appropriate a couple years ago and I forgot was not.

Leo Laporte [01:13:07]:
Maybe not. Maybe not.

Amy Webb [01:13:11]:
It was not.

Leo Laporte [01:13:12]:
Yeah, but this is kind of of that same ilk, which is something like here's a way to make history more identifiable. Here she is in ancient Rome and what he's done is taken drawings and pictures of ancient Rome and brought and animated those and put Chloe in the scene every once in a While there's some anachronisms, there were some guys in sunglasses walking around. I thought that was probably not accurate. But, I mean, for instance, one of the things people don't know about ancient Rome when they go visit the ruins is that all this stuff was very colorfully painted. And so he's recreated the colorfulness of ancient Rome.

Amy Webb [01:13:49]:
I mean, this was the promise of VR, right? We were supposed to be able to travel back in time. And, you know, and I think it's

Leo Laporte [01:13:56]:
just a short step from this to maybe making it a 3D VR.

Harper Reed [01:14:01]:
But isn't this kind of what. What Amy was talking about, where you have these transitionary folks, us, and we're starting to see glimpses of what the future will look like for the people who come after, typically our kids, et cetera. And this idea of, like, I remember when I was younger, like third and fourth grade, I was obsessed with Unsolved Mysteries. And so I would read about Amelia Earhart or pyramids or whatever, and these books that were obviously targeted to towards my age at that time. And I would have this very imaginative interface with these books, for better or for worse. Now I can participate in some way. Or someone could make a product where someone could participate in that, whether it's on YouTube or what have you. I hate that I just said all those words together.

Harper Reed [01:14:55]:
Product, et cetera. I combined a bunch of words that I love. Let's take something for children and make it into a product. How can we monetize this? But I do think that that is a good example. And we have all of these glimpses, right? Like a personal robot. Like the. What was it? I don't remember. The war starts with an F.

Harper Reed [01:15:14]:
They were all over the news this last week, the robot company. They talked a lot about their robot. Or there are all these glimpses. Waymos. Or there's these glimpses of what the future will be. It just hasn't been woven together yet in the same way that those of us who are building on the Internet in 1999, 2000, 2002.

Leo Laporte [01:15:33]:
Are you talking about the Neo.

Amy Webb [01:15:35]:
No, no. He's talking about the.

Harper Reed [01:15:37]:
Is it not format factor?

Amy Webb [01:15:39]:
It's not factor. It's. Was it factor.

Leo Laporte [01:15:42]:
Chat room. What's he talking about?

Amy Webb [01:15:43]:
He's talking about humanoid.

Leo Laporte [01:15:46]:
I have outsourced my brain to a bunch of humans in a chat room. So that's working pretty well.

Amy Webb [01:15:51]:
This is the company that's also working on skin that they're trying to make lifelike human. I cannot.

Leo Laporte [01:15:59]:
It sounds kind of creepy.

Harper Reed [01:16:01]:
Yeah, it is creepy all the time.

Leo Laporte [01:16:03]:
The Neo is creepy. Here's an older fella with his little Neo home Robot. It's only $20,000. You can put a deposit down right now on this. Look at this. Can you imagine having this thing bringing the groceries in?

Amy Webb [01:16:17]:
Figure A.I.

Harper Reed [01:16:18]:
figure, figure, figure. Thank you.

Leo Laporte [01:16:20]:
So creepy. What is it again?

Amy Webb [01:16:22]:
Figure F I G U R E. It made headlines because one of their robots worked for eight hours in a factory. Now.

Leo Laporte [01:16:30]:
Oh. So yeah, we showed that and that was such a bogus video because the

Amy Webb [01:16:35]:
thing everybody forgets is there are still humans involved in a lot of this on the back end watching and manually helping.

Leo Laporte [01:16:40]:
So.

Harper Reed [01:16:41]:
Yeah, but the point is, is that it's a glimpse, right? Because we see the teleoperated one that is doing it. There is something I read about the difference between Waymo and the Tesla. The cabs, like the Tesla cabs are human driven and so when they get into a problem, the humans get them out of the problem. Whereas the Waymos are algorithm driven. When they get in a problem, the human helps guide them out of the problem. But they use their, their AIs to get themselves out of the problem. Which means that it's learning, it's help, you know, it's, it's continuing. And I think.

Harper Reed [01:17:11]:
But, but the, but the, the bigger point here is that this is just a glimpse of the future and we are probably not going to see it woven together in the way that we can imagine Star Trek or some Blade Runner or whatever movie we like.

Leo Laporte [01:17:24]:
No, we always predict it wrong. We thought we'd have flying car get it wrong because we are embedded in the past and we see everything through that window. And so we thought the Internet was going to be a magazine stand, right?

Amy Webb [01:17:40]:
Well it was for.

Leo Laporte [01:17:41]:
It was because that's who was making those websites was people, that's who they thought it was.

Amy Webb [01:17:45]:
This is why the field of strategic foresight where I happen to operate is so important because you want to pick up signals along the way as you know, like this is what Harper's saying, right? This isn't the future. Gives us a glimpse of a change that's going to happen. But how does that fully render. We don't know yet. Are you optimist? I don't, I wouldn't. I'm not a anything. I'm, I don't, I'm a, I'm a whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:18:10]:
Is this, this kind of characterization?

Amy Webb [01:18:12]:
I do because also because don't forget in my field at some point most of most of the people become eugenicists

Harper Reed [01:18:19]:
and they always do.

Leo Laporte [01:18:21]:
Why is that?

Amy Webb [01:18:23]:
Because at some point, because if you are good at this job, two things happen. One, you amass more credibility and power and riches over time as anybody does. And two, you start to believe that your ideas are correct. It becomes a self fulfilling thing and that.

Leo Laporte [01:18:43]:
So you just want to kill the.

Amy Webb [01:18:46]:
No, it's not about. It's not about killing. It's about pros.

Leo Laporte [01:18:51]:
No, but this is where eugenics about like changing our genetic structure to get rid of the sub humans and it's about.

Amy Webb [01:18:59]:
Yeah, I mean, why do you think all these dudes are spreading their seed around? You know, honest, you know, because they believe.

Leo Laporte [01:19:04]:
Yeah, yeah.

Amy Webb [01:19:05]:
Or like Oracle. Larry Ellison. Ellison, thank you. Has an island where, you know, he's working on longevity. And you know that that's what.

Leo Laporte [01:19:16]:
Inevitably Larry Page of Google even said the quiet part out loud when he said we really want an island where there's no government regulation so we can do our thing. He said this years ago. Is that a copy? End up becoming filthy rich.

Harper Reed [01:19:29]:
I don't think it's Sealand.

Leo Laporte [01:19:30]:
Sealand. There was an example we're taking.

Amy Webb [01:19:33]:
Brian is a baron of Sealand.

Leo Laporte [01:19:35]:
Yes. We're gonna take all these disused oil platforms and we're gonna make them into little countries where no one's gonna mess with us. Yeah.

Amy Webb [01:19:43]:
Brian is a baron there.

Leo Laporte [01:19:46]:
Is he. He bought into this. Is he living there now?

Amy Webb [01:19:49]:
That was a. No, no.

Leo Laporte [01:19:51]:
You made him a baron.

Amy Webb [01:19:52]:
Yeah, I did.

Leo Laporte [01:19:52]:
Does he also have a crater on the moon named after him?

Amy Webb [01:19:55]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:19:56]:
That was ridiculous.

Amy Webb [01:19:57]:
Ridiculous.

Leo Laporte [01:19:59]:
Here's the robot you were talking about, sorting packages. But this is such a bogus demo because notice the packages are very uniform and somebody in our discord pointed out, you know, all you need is a camera or a series of cameras on all sides and then you could just flip the thing till it's. All it's doing is putting the barcode face down.

Amy Webb [01:20:18]:
I agree. But its hands are articulated in a way. Some of what's happening there is more advanced.

Leo Laporte [01:20:27]:
I've seen this in the past where it would lose packages over the edge and stuff. It's much better than it was.

Amy Webb [01:20:33]:
We need to unhook from the idea of robots as humans. First, it anthropomorphizes them in a way that's not healthy. And secondly, the vast majority of what's being created is not that. It is all different form factors and types of little machines that should be.

Leo Laporte [01:20:46]:
They're purpose built.

Amy Webb [01:20:47]:
But to your question earlier, this is how you miss the future. You get stuck with this image in your head that the future is walking talking robots.

Leo Laporte [01:20:55]:
Yeah.

Amy Webb [01:20:55]:
And then this other thing seems to come out from nowhere because you just weren't paying attention to all those signals.

Leo Laporte [01:21:00]:
This is the dystopian future of, of the Neo robot where the humans are just sitting there playing with cards while the robot is wandering through your house spinning the globe, giving you flowers.

Amy Webb [01:21:16]:
This is so the dystopian future is the fact that they're playing war. Like that's the worst card game ever. Play literally any other game. Like that bothers me more than the robot.

Harper Reed [01:21:27]:
This also plays like the beginning of a horror movie.

Leo Laporte [01:21:30]:
It is such a horror movie. 100% does come into the house. Human. Would you like another beer? Oh, shaggy one. It's just not. This is not. I don't want this. And look at this little step step thing.

Leo Laporte [01:21:45]:
I don't want this. I don't mind getting up and getting a beer.

Harper Reed [01:21:49]:
You'll have just won't be this like you're going to get something along these lines. Like I like if you like. Obviously there's been a bunch of China talk this week, but one of the things that was really fun.

Leo Laporte [01:22:01]:
Are you an optimist? Are you an optimist, Harper?

Harper Reed [01:22:05]:
I am approximately an optimist. Okay, but. And I think I've said this before, like it seems like we're at the cusp of going the route of some amazing post magical world where it's Star Trek and all sorts of stuff. Or we're. We're in the Mad Max world and I'm kind of pro on both sides. Like Mad Max had better fashion and cooler cars, but Star Trek was pretty good. But as my Trekkie friend Clint would always say, Star Trek. They had to destroy the world before they invented the society of Star Trek.

Leo Laporte [01:22:40]:
True.

Harper Reed [01:22:41]:
And so I think that there's a lot there. But I want to talk more about what Amy just brought into frame here.

Amy Webb [01:22:47]:
So I have been on the hunt for an omnibot for literally 30 years. Do you remember?

Leo Laporte [01:22:52]:
This is an old fashioned robot.

Amy Webb [01:22:54]:
This was the. This was a tomy robot. This, this. So this thing, it had a tape recorder. You could. It was a little security system. It had a tray. It would bring drinks.

Amy Webb [01:23:06]:
So it was a much nicer version than the robot that you just sold. Anyhow, it mostly works. I have to tinker a little bit more with some of the electronics.

Leo Laporte [01:23:16]:
Wander around the house. What does your daughter think of this?

Amy Webb [01:23:19]:
It has a cassette player, right? It has a cassette player. It does have a cassette player and it's a remote.

Harper Reed [01:23:22]:
And it's remote controlled, right?

Amy Webb [01:23:23]:
It's remote control. It does the battery. The problem is the battery is very specialized just to this. And I've been everywhere trying to find one that actually works.

Leo Laporte [01:23:32]:
That's what happened to my Segways.

Harper Reed [01:23:34]:
I had my segue in my segues. You had many segues?

Leo Laporte [01:23:37]:
I had two. I had two. One for each of us. But the battery died. And it turned out the battery for the old school Segway, the really good one is $7,000.

Harper Reed [01:23:48]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:23:49]:
So I had to buy the. The. The replacement. And they're crappy. They were cheaper.

Harper Reed [01:23:56]:
That's too many dollars.

Amy Webb [01:23:58]:
Do you guys not remember the Omnibot? That was.

Harper Reed [01:24:00]:
Oh, I remember the Omnibot.

Leo Laporte [01:24:01]:
The Tony Omnibot.

Harper Reed [01:24:03]:
Wow.

Amy Webb [01:24:04]:
That's what that was. That was the Omnibot. That was soup. It was. Did all of this stuff. You could program it.

Harper Reed [01:24:10]:
Yeah.

Amy Webb [01:24:11]:
This is the. What I wanted when I was a kid. I desperately wanted one of these. And of course, we. My parents couldn't afford it. It.

Leo Laporte [01:24:17]:
Here's one.

Amy Webb [01:24:18]:
It's hard. They.

Leo Laporte [01:24:19]:
They are very bucks. Same problem. The battery will not charge. Same problem.

Amy Webb [01:24:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:24:24]:
So it looks like Robbie the Robot from

Harper Reed [01:24:30]:
so Cool.

Amy Webb [01:24:30]:
The. The commercials were cool. Like, this was. I saw this and was like. It blew my mind. I was like, eight or whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:24:38]:
Yeah.

Harper Reed [01:24:39]:
I think we're all of the same generation here, because, like. Yeah, I remember seeing this and being like, oh, my God.

Leo Laporte [01:24:43]:
I remember this. I'm too old. I don't.

Amy Webb [01:24:46]:
So I've been tinkering and tinkering and tinkering with it. It's clean. It looks good. I just have to get the buy.

Leo Laporte [01:24:50]:
I was probably the parent that said, we're not buying this.

Harper Reed [01:24:54]:
Yeah. No way.

Amy Webb [01:24:55]:
Would you like to know what my parents did? My parents. It was last night of Hanukkah, and there was a small box that was very lightweight. And there was a big box that was extremely heavy. And my sister, who's, like, the world's greatest gift receiver ever. Cause no matter what it is, it's the greatest thing she's ever received. And you. You. It's a joy to give her gifts.

Amy Webb [01:25:15]:
She rips open the paper. There is a pound puppy on the inside.

Leo Laporte [01:25:19]:
Oh, my God.

Amy Webb [01:25:20]:
And she was just like. Like, her head exploded. It was the greatest thing that had ever happened. She got a pound puppy.

Leo Laporte [01:25:26]:
Wow.

Amy Webb [01:25:26]:
I have been telling everybody at school for a week, I got the Omnibot because what else could be in this. This heavy box, right? And I've been asking for it forever. I rip open the paper, sure that I know exactly what's on the inside. And it was a pound puppy with, like, 30 cans of Campbell's soup out of our pantry.

Leo Laporte [01:25:45]:
I love this to make it heavy.

Amy Webb [01:25:47]:
And my parents thought it was funny. And also that we need to have equitable. Like, the gifts had to be the same. And I'm like, what about me signaled I want a pound puppy? Like, why would you do this?

Leo Laporte [01:26:00]:
So anyways, we'll continue reliving Amy's childhood traumas in just a Little bit.

Amy Webb [01:26:06]:
Bit.

Leo Laporte [01:26:07]:
£ poppy and 30 cans of.

Amy Webb [01:26:09]:
But if anybody is listening out there and has access to a battery that might work, please contact me. I will take it off your hands. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:26:18]:
Came to the right place. Probably there is somebody listening with a Tomy Omnibot battery that is still functioning. There must be a way. Maybe you could get your guy Harper to wire up an ESP32 to make this work.

Harper Reed [01:26:34]:
Well, I mean, you got to still have the power. I wonder.

Leo Laporte [01:26:37]:
I'm just.

Amy Webb [01:26:38]:
Oh.

Harper Reed [01:26:38]:
I mean. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:26:39]:
There's got to be a way, right? Can't you just. You're going to have to, I think,

Harper Reed [01:26:42]:
Jerry, rig a battery at this point,

Leo Laporte [01:26:43]:
because any battery from that era is probably dead. It's going to be dead by now.

Amy Webb [01:26:47]:
Yeah, we have.

Leo Laporte [01:26:47]:
Those are nicads.

Amy Webb [01:26:50]:
Correct. I'm also. There are ways to do it, but I don't want to mess up the form factor because it'll look like it's all.

Leo Laporte [01:26:57]:
You don't want a lead acid car battery hanging off its ass. That's. That's no good. Yeah, I understand. Wow. We have learned so much about both of you today, and I'm.

Harper Reed [01:27:08]:
Oh, just wait. We have a little bit more time.

Leo Laporte [01:27:10]:
We're not done.

Harper Reed [01:27:11]:
Don't cut it short now. We're just done. This is, like a nice day.

Leo Laporte [01:27:14]:
I wouldn't dream of it. What kind of soup was it? Campbell's tomato?

Amy Webb [01:27:20]:
No, it was. My mom made very few things, many of them included, for whatever reason, either cream of chicken soup or cream of mushroom soup as a core ingredient.

Leo Laporte [01:27:30]:
In the 70s, you could make anything if you put a mushroom soup in it.

Amy Webb [01:27:34]:
It was the duct tape of cooking.

Leo Laporte [01:27:35]:
It was the duct tape of cooking. You're exactly right. You're exactly right. We'll have more in just a little bit with Amy and Harper. Yeah. Actually, poor Hank made a video on Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg was in New York City for the Met gala. He actually went to the Met gala, which, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:28:00]:
You don't Normally think of a guy in T shirts with a chain being.

Amy Webb [01:28:03]:
It was the, it was the tech gala this year. It wasn't.

Leo Laporte [01:28:05]:
It really wasn't.

Amy Webb [01:28:06]:
It?

Harper Reed [01:28:07]:
I think this goes to the taste thing. Everyone wants to be cool right now and there are people who never. They just aren't very cool. I don't know how to say it.

Amy Webb [01:28:18]:
Like, I think you said that perfectly.

Harper Reed [01:28:21]:
You see the clothing choices, which I think everyone should make their own choices. But I talked to him recently, I talked to a tech entrepreneur and he was dressed in all black with a leather jacket. And I was like, why are you dressed this way? Because I thought it was interesting because I was hoping he was going to participate in fashion, which was my goal. And he was just like, I didn't think about what I put on this morning. I'm like, that is a lie. You literally are dressed in all black. Every single item is black. And you have a leather jacket on and it's not cold out, but it's not hot out.

Harper Reed [01:28:51]:
You know, like, I mean, you're wearing of vibe.

Leo Laporte [01:28:54]:
This is. Yeah, this is a statement you have chosen.

Harper Reed [01:28:57]:
There's a thing there which I think a lot of these tech people have achieved everything in life, but they have not achieved cool, they've not achieved art, and they've not achieved something that people look at as a, as taste. Yet. They're telling everyone, oh, taste is the only thing left. And then they have to be a little self reflective and be like, oh, no, taste. How do I get that? And so then they have to, they have to pay money for it. But as we all know, the best taste isn't money related. Like, it's like it. The money can get you in a door.

Harper Reed [01:29:27]:
Money can do a lot of things. But if you look at the coolest people, it's always these people who don't necessarily have money as a resource, you know, throughout history. Which is, which is why the Met Gala is always a cluster anyway. But I find it kind of funny because I think they are inside of them. I think they're all dying. They're being hollowed out as they are just like, where's my A.P. swatch? Or whatever. They're trying to, you know, they're trying to do it.

Leo Laporte [01:29:52]:
You're saying, money can't buy you love and it can't buy you taste.

Harper Reed [01:29:58]:
It can buy you a lot of things. And there obviously are stylists. That's a big career for a lot of people. Like, I think just because you're an actor doesn't mean you Dress cool. But there's a real trust component when you look at people who have very good stylists. Like Jeff Goldblum for instance, has an incredible stylist. I forgot their name. And Jeff Goldblum looks incredible everywhere he goes, in every context.

Harper Reed [01:30:20]:
And it's because of his trust relationship with their stylist. But every time I talk to any of my oligarchy friends, what they do not have is a level of trust relationship with anyone in their lives at that level because they think they are at the top. And so to have a collaborative, taste based or art based relationship with someone, you have to trust them and love them. You have to believe that you are equal to them or they are even better than you. And most of my friends who've achieved this just don't have that belief. They think they are at the tippity top. And that's right. I don't think they'll get it.

Leo Laporte [01:30:54]:
Well, Mark Zuckerberg decided not to do anything fancy. He's basically in a very pedestrian black tie. His cummerbund is not well adjusted. Priscilla looks great. Priscilla Chan, his wife looks beautiful in a red dress. But before he went to the Met Gala, he decided he wanted a assault Hank French dip sandwich delivered really to his door. So my son made him one and delivered it in person to. To Zuck.

Amy Webb [01:31:24]:
Is this real?

Leo Laporte [01:31:24]:
Yeah. What? It's not AI.

Amy Webb [01:31:26]:
It's not AI.

Leo Laporte [01:31:27]:
Wow. The funny, the ironic thing, he's actually asking Zuck to spill the sandwich onto his. Has a grand piano in his hotel suite. It's like a fashion statement a little bit. But the funny thing is I don't think Hank really appreciated how Mark Zuckerberg is loathed because look at all the comments. Eat the rich, don't feed the rich. This is incredibly disappointing. The Epstein class is really trying to sanitize their image with the common people.

Leo Laporte [01:32:00]:
Billionaires trying to be cool and in touch is gross. Come on, man. You're better than this. Of course, what these commentators didn't realize is they are commenting about this. Hank at least got Mark Zuckerberg to buy a sandwich from him. They're giving Mark Zuckerberg money by commenting on this on Instagram. Right. They're using Mark Zuckerberg's platform.

Leo Laporte [01:32:20]:
Anyway,

Amy Webb [01:32:22]:
when was that?

Leo Laporte [01:32:24]:
The Met Gala. What is it? A couple of weeks ago.

Amy Webb [01:32:26]:
Oh, it was?

Leo Laporte [01:32:26]:
Yeah.

Harper Reed [01:32:28]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:32:29]:
Oh, Hank's doing really well. He's. This is the number one sandwich in New York City.

Harper Reed [01:32:34]:
I need to have it. Yeah, I'd like to eat it.

Amy Webb [01:32:38]:
We're moving Offices. We'll just get it for the new.

Leo Laporte [01:32:40]:
Are you moving to New York? Are you moving to New York City?

Amy Webb [01:32:43]:
I used to. We've always had an office in New York. We just rented out. We took a long, longer term lease on a floor of a building, so. With a kitchen.

Leo Laporte [01:32:54]:
It's in the West Village. Jones at Bleecker.

Amy Webb [01:32:56]:
All right, that's pretty good.

Leo Laporte [01:32:57]:
Got to get there early because he sells out almost every. There's a long line and he sells every. Yeah. He only makes one thing. He makes a French dip sandwich.

Amy Webb [01:33:04]:
Wait a minute. Sorry. The dots just connected. That's your kid.

Leo Laporte [01:33:12]:
Yeah.

Amy Webb [01:33:13]:
I know exactly what this is. Sorry, I don't. Oh, my God.

Leo Laporte [01:33:17]:
Yes.

Amy Webb [01:33:17]:
That is a big, big deal.

Leo Laporte [01:33:19]:
Well, you know what? This is great because I love it. He never played upon his name at all. This is not. He just.

Amy Webb [01:33:25]:
Yeah, no, I just.

Harper Reed [01:33:27]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:33:28]:
Yeah. Stanley laporte.

Amy Webb [01:33:30]:
Oh, my God.

Harper Reed [01:33:32]:
I just want that mustache.

Leo Laporte [01:33:34]:
I know. He's got the Mario mustache, which is. Now, I told him you blew it because you can never shave.

Amy Webb [01:33:42]:
That's incredibly cool. You know, That's a hot, hot, hot commodity.

Leo Laporte [01:33:45]:
It's very hot right now.

Amy Webb [01:33:47]:
Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte [01:33:50]:
yeah. Actually, his next thing, he's buying a restaurant in the city to open a fine dining restaurant that he's gonna call laporte's. And I said, there damn well better be a family table.

Harper Reed [01:34:04]:
Yeah. Are you gonna get a table? You gotta get one.

Leo Laporte [01:34:07]:
Hey, how did your show do, by the way? Amy, maybe people don't know this. We mentioned it last time you were on. Produced was one of the producers of a Broadway hit called Chess. The revival of Chess with a new book that was more timely.

Amy Webb [01:34:25]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:34:26]:
Is it still running or is it over?

Amy Webb [01:34:28]:
It very much is. So it's still on Broadway?

Leo Laporte [01:34:31]:
It wasn't supposed to run this long, was it?

Amy Webb [01:34:34]:
No, no. It has historically failed every single time somebody has tried to revive it.

Leo Laporte [01:34:41]:
People might know the song One Night in Bangkok.

Amy Webb [01:34:43]:
One Night in Bangkok, which was a hit. It's nominated for six Tonys, I think.

Leo Laporte [01:34:48]:
Congratulations.

Amy Webb [01:34:49]:
And if you are not a Broadway person, this is a good show for you. Cause this is not like a Broadway show. Broadway show. This is a show about geopolitics, like the USSR versus the US and the music is the band is on stage and it's more rock music. It was written by the two Bs

Leo Laporte [01:35:09]:
of ABBA, Benny and beyond.

Amy Webb [01:35:11]:
Yep. So I'm actually executive producing a new show about the far future of AI, which is what I thought you were talking about, but.

Leo Laporte [01:35:20]:
Oh, tell me about that you have become. Are you now an impresario?

Amy Webb [01:35:25]:
No, I just. I'm an investor. My role in Chess was that I gave them a lot of money to make the show happen.

Leo Laporte [01:35:34]:
And of course, Leah is one of the stars. Of course, she's famous from Glee.

Amy Webb [01:35:39]:
That guy. So Nicholas Christopher, who just. He's a singular talent. It's. It's great. It's great. Anybody who's coming to New York or in New York.

Leo Laporte [01:35:48]:
You know what? I'm going to go to New York because I've never had one of Hank's sandwiches. And I have. I've got to.

Harper Reed [01:35:54]:
There's not a family table.

Leo Laporte [01:35:55]:
I will. I will call you. I will get tickets because I would.

Amy Webb [01:35:58]:
I will. I will get you tickets. I'll get you house seats. Just let me know.

Leo Laporte [01:36:01]:
That would be wonderful. Yeah.

Amy Webb [01:36:03]:
Give me some dates.

Leo Laporte [01:36:04]:
I will give you some dates. Maybe if you can spare them. I won't bring Jeff Jarvis because he hates musicals, but maybe Paris will go. And I won't bring Hank because he hates musicals, but maybe I'll bring it back.

Amy Webb [01:36:17]:
This is not bad.

Leo Laporte [01:36:19]:
No, this would be a good one to see.

Amy Webb [01:36:21]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:36:22]:
Lea Michele, who is incredible. And what a great personality and singer. Aaron Tveit. Tvet. And Nicholas Christopher, who was in Hamilton and he was in Sweeney Todd.

Amy Webb [01:36:34]:
He is. Again, like, you don't have to be a person that likes opera or Broadway music to enjoy this. It really is. It's amazing. It really is.

Leo Laporte [01:36:45]:
Well, there's Amy's Plug Harper.

Harper Reed [01:36:49]:
I don't have any plays. I just have to.

Leo Laporte [01:36:51]:
I have to say I have been using skills from 2389ai. There's some very good skills it. In your market.

Harper Reed [01:36:58]:
We have a. We have a couple secret ones that are. One of them is called jam, which gets a. A whole group of people to work with you. We have one that's called Review Squad, which is really fun because you can. You can enable a. Well, actually squad of agents to review your code. And it's all news commenters.

Leo Laporte [01:37:21]:
Oh, my God, how fun.

Harper Reed [01:37:22]:
And so they will. So they'll create these really burning things. But one of the things that we've been doing with Review Squad is really fun because you'll just say, hey, let's light up a review squad of people to review this code. And they will go through and do all of this, like, oh, we're going to have someone that has this expertise with this. I'll always add a cat. I'll be like, also add a cat. And then I don't know if it's on there. It might be.

Harper Reed [01:37:45]:
And then I'll say also add Anna Karenina. And it always is.

Leo Laporte [01:37:49]:
This is your Fresh Eyes review. But that's not.

Harper Reed [01:37:51]:
This is like super Fresh Eyes review. It's very good. Let me see if I can find yours.

Leo Laporte [01:37:55]:
You can have Anna Karenina. What does Anna Karen do when she reviews your. I don't know what.

Harper Reed [01:38:00]:
You're very cutting. Very cutting and very philosophical reviews that make you a little bit sad.

Leo Laporte [01:38:07]:
I think you should have Schumpetter in there as well.

Harper Reed [01:38:10]:
I don't even know what you just said.

Leo Laporte [01:38:11]:
Schumpeter, you know the guy Amy was talking about, the capitalism guy.

Harper Reed [01:38:16]:
Oh, that guy. I mean, you can do whatever you want. This is how it works.

Leo Laporte [01:38:21]:
I have Dinesh and Guilfoyle fighting over my code from the Silicon Valley.

Harper Reed [01:38:26]:
That really works a little bit like that. And it's very funny. And I think this is the thing that I keep coming back to is how I think one of the things that we're going to think about a lot when it comes to AI in the future is how do we make it so people trust it, how do we make it so people love it, weirdly, how do we make it so people believe it, et cetera. And I think a lot of these are going to be. We're going to try anthropomorphizing. We're going to see how it goes. It's going to stick in some cases. It's not going to stick in some cases.

Harper Reed [01:38:59]:
But we have found that anthropomorphizing these things has been very, very helpful. And so being able to say you're

Leo Laporte [01:39:05]:
not against it, you think it's okay?

Harper Reed [01:39:08]:
Well, I mean, I think it can. I mean, I have a few friends who are deep in AI psychosis. I mean, some of them are committed to.

Leo Laporte [01:39:15]:
Yeah, I mean, do you think.

Harper Reed [01:39:16]:
No, I'm not a monster. I mean, like, I mean, Richard Dawkins

Leo Laporte [01:39:20]:
thinks it's kind, thinks Claudia is conscious.

Harper Reed [01:39:22]:
Well, we, we talk about this and we call them they, like we refer to them as beings. We don't necessarily. I would not say it's conscious, but I do have a thing here which I think is very complex, which is. I was once in a short argument with a friend about whether they can be funny. Funny, like whether they can make jokes.

Leo Laporte [01:39:44]:
Oh, they could be very funny now.

Harper Reed [01:39:46]:
Well, that's the thing is, is I laugh at them and my friend was laughing at them. Well, that's what started the conversation is it made a Joke and the fact that it made a joke. You know, I think there's some complicated questions about intent when it comes to humor and. But if so, I don't know. I'm not really too worried about it. I don't need these things to be alive or dead for me to have fun using them to do my job in this fun way. I tell people when we. When they're in my office, which I find be really fun to be in.

Harper Reed [01:40:15]:
I'm always like, look, it's hard outside. We have all sorts of crazy happening outside. Inside it's really fun. We have robots that yell at us. They're listening to everything we say and making fun of us.

Leo Laporte [01:40:25]:
And then they're helping us, aren't we, in a weird way. I mean, this is.

Harper Reed [01:40:29]:
I don't even think we're at the tip. I think there are people out there that are just really token maxing, so to speak.

Leo Laporte [01:40:37]:
I was telling you before the show that I log my food and exercise with my agent using ChatGPT and I think this is making a joke. I said this morning, log 25 minutes of Tai chi. And it said graceful and annoyingly virtuous. Which is a joke, right?

Harper Reed [01:40:55]:
Yeah, Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:40:56]:
I logged 5,000 meters rowing. It says. Another neatly documented suffering session.

Amy Webb [01:41:02]:
Why ChatGPT versus Claude.

Leo Laporte [01:41:05]:
I was a Claude guy. You know, I just try them all, but.

Amy Webb [01:41:09]:
And you don't find the constant fragility of OpenAI's models to be so infuriating that you.

Leo Laporte [01:41:16]:
I don't think anything Punch your computer screen.

Amy Webb [01:41:18]:
No, I've never experienced that. Oh, I have. They're. They're. With each iteration, it sometimes is prioritizing speed over.

Leo Laporte [01:41:27]:
Yeah. But Anthropic was doing that in spades last month.

Amy Webb [01:41:30]:
Yeah. I don't know. This la. The. I don't know. This is different. This is different than the fail whale era of Twitter, where it's much different. Just had like too many people like bogging down the servers at once.

Amy Webb [01:41:40]:
So there was a temporary outage. This is not that. This is like you're building stuff and you're trying to deploy stuff and there's fragility because with each new model improvement, something is getting deleted.

Leo Laporte [01:41:51]:
Yeah, yeah.

Amy Webb [01:41:52]:
Right. And like. But you don't know when that's going to happen. It's not like window. Right, right.

Leo Laporte [01:41:57]:
It's going to happen in weird ways. Right. But it's like working with a temperamental intern.

Amy Webb [01:42:04]:
Yes.

Harper Reed [01:42:04]:
I mean, I do think that when we say intern, we're under. Where it can do a lot more than an intern, I found. So I feel like we say intern, but we actually mean like full fledged employee.

Leo Laporte [01:42:17]:
A lot of times I sometimes say idiot savant.

Harper Reed [01:42:21]:
Yeah, yeah, it is. So, so I have come to this conclusion and I've talked about this a lot, which is I really think that we're at a place where tokens are oil and all of these companies are trying to get us to use their engine because they're realizing that if tokens go to oil, kind of like an airline or any of these other things that have just kind of been so commoditized that nobody has loyalty, they have to manufacture processes to get loyalty. So the question Amy just asked is the right question. Oh, why ChatGPT versus Cloud? And you were just like, oh, I use them both. I bounce both back and forth, which is how I do it as well. And sometimes like, it's like, oh, the app works better on my phone, I'm at a park, I'm going to use that one. That app works better on my phone. And I have no loyalty to the

Leo Laporte [01:43:02]:
direction to be commoditized. In fact, more fungible.

Amy Webb [01:43:08]:
I don't have loyalty to any system. This is not a Mac vs PC situation. However, I don't like burning time, which is what's happening. You know, I get something.

Leo Laporte [01:43:19]:
See, I got nothing but time. Well, and I, I'm not doing this for a living.

Amy Webb [01:43:24]:
I mean, I've built, I've built a ton of different skills and tools that I use all the time. It's not for funsies. So I don't like showing up to work and like one of them is named Kevin. Right. I don't like it when Kevin and I both show up to work and like, Kevin is not doing his job correctly, you know.

Harper Reed [01:43:44]:
Right, right, right.

Leo Laporte [01:43:45]:
But isn't it like a normal employee? I mean, doesn't that happen in the, with humans?

Amy Webb [01:43:49]:
Yeah, but I could. But yes, but you know what? If that normal employee did it enough times, then that employee would be on a pip. And like, I mean, there's, you know, I, I, I don't, and you just, you, you don't bring on people that, you know, you're going to have to sink a lot of costs into. So I don't like the unpredictability. I don't get like, nobody's like giving me a phone call and letting me know that there's going to be a new model release or an upgrade, you know, Tuesday.

Harper Reed [01:44:11]:
Well, we have been building into our systems right now and this is pretty new. And this is out outside of the traditional harnesses. So this is not inside a chatgpt or a cloud. This is in our own kind of harnesses, is, and we like to kind of phrase it as you're leaning into the diversity of each model. And so what I have found is that there's a few people in my life who are doing evals that I can say, hey, what is the best model for coding today? What is the best model for reviews today? What is the best model for building specs or documentation today? And the today there is very important because it really does change that often. Often. And what we found is like right now, Codex 5.5 or ChatGPT 5.5. OpenAI's ChatGPT model 5.5 is very, very good for coding, but we also use Opus 4.7 for reviewing.

Harper Reed [01:45:00]:
And so the thing is, this kind of using a diversity of models means that you can do things that are really interesting, like you can have a very inexpensive model, something that's free or locally run, that writes the code in this very granular way, because you had a very expensive model model do the planning, expecting the free model to do it. And so instead of spending a 600 or $1,000 for an entire project of raw API costs, you're spending maybe $50 on the planning and then a slower but much freer version of the doing. And so we really, really rely on this, which has actually made me have a much more. I don't know, more. I don't worry so much about which one I'm using. Like, we don't really have the experience of, oh, Kevin and the bed today. And I have to wait. You know, we have to switch the model, which means we have to change all the prompts.

Harper Reed [01:45:50]:
It's more that, like, Kevin is an average of all of them mixed together with reviewers of different models, et cetera. Now it's much slower. It's a pain in the ass, and it's a lot of evals. I think I spend more time in my life right now doing evaluations than I do anything else of just seeing what is working over and over again. But it is very interesting. And I do think that these model companies are struggling to find relevancy. Like, they're just trying to build products that are going to be outside of tokens.

Amy Webb [01:46:16]:
Right. And this is some of again, so we talked. We started all of this by talking about the open models. You know, when you have these closed ecosystems, you get a little bit more of this friction. From my point of view, the stuff that I'm Talking about is like very narrowly defined, singular tasks that I can just offload and it makes my life easier. So I'm not going through evals or having. It's just stuff that I built to do stuff easier, faster. We have a fairly powerful internal tool that my team built to automate some of the signals and the trends and the modeling.

Amy Webb [01:46:46]:
And we can find stuff literally before everybody else does with a wide margin and start to automate the things that come after that. For that we have a totally modular system that is a mix of multiple different systems. But it's an interesting point Harper made because I think a lot of. Of a lot of leaders who have these expectations that a team is going to go fast on AI because everything is automated don't understand the piece that Harper just explained. It's not. I mean, yeah, it's technically faster than humans typing things, but for any of these systems to be good enough to deploy without breaking down all the time, you need all of those additional steps. And that does take time. It.

Amy Webb [01:47:36]:
You can't. You know, it just does. And I think people don't realize that then they have these outside, you know, these crazy expectations for like.

Leo Laporte [01:47:43]:
It's also been my goal not to be dependent on any one front. Certainly Frontier. Yeah.

Amy Webb [01:47:48]:
Smart.

Harper Reed [01:47:48]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:47:49]:
I. I want to develop skills that are generic enough so that tomorrow I can use chat GBT and. And the day after I can use glm and the day after that I can. Can use Kimmy or all of the above. I really think more and more people are doing what you're both doing, which is having.

Amy Webb [01:48:06]:
Do you think so?

Leo Laporte [01:48:08]:
I don't know. You don't think so? Like there's like a company saying we're going to use anthropic. That's it.

Amy Webb [01:48:13]:
Yes. Most of the. Yes. Because of compliance.

Harper Reed [01:48:18]:
Like all of the.

Leo Laporte [01:48:19]:
That's a good point. They can't. It's not. It's fungible for them.

Amy Webb [01:48:23]:
Or they're using. No, they. They tend to hitch their wagon to a company or like Palantir, which then

Leo Laporte [01:48:31]:
Palantir switches, doesn't it? But, but, but you're always using contracts with.

Amy Webb [01:48:36]:
Correct. So this is the. The better route because all of this is so new is to be as versatile as you possibly can.

Harper Reed [01:48:44]:
Right.

Amy Webb [01:48:45]:
There's a legal and compliance issue that makes that super, super, super hard.

Leo Laporte [01:48:49]:
Yeah.

Amy Webb [01:48:49]:
Yeah. Yep.

Harper Reed [01:48:53]:
It's also contrary to how corporate. What is it called? There's the word starts with a P. Like the buying infrastructure of a corporate giant. Corporate is not like. Let's just Buy all of them and sign you up for it. They want a big pro, pre revenue defined spend where they can save money, get 20% off or whatever. And that just doesn't work when everything is. You're like, oh, we have to switch every two weeks to figure out what the best one is.

Harper Reed [01:49:15]:
And I think that we're just not yet at the end. This is a little bit like data centers back in early 2000s, where you would just be like, oh, well, we're in Exodus. And someone's like, ooh, that's interesting. We just moved from Exodus to. So whatever. Like the data center itself was a. Was a. Each of them were equivalent and you just had little bits here and there.

Harper Reed [01:49:36]:
The difference is you're just changing an API right now. So it really is. You can change it. But I really. Yeah, and it's. Everyone wants to solve this problem in a way that captures more capital, not in a way that makes it easier to move around. So it'll be really interesting to see how this manifests. What will happen.

Leo Laporte [01:49:55]:
The way you guys are talking, Amy, it sounds like you don't really think this is a bubble.

Amy Webb [01:50:00]:
Oh, Leo, don't go crazy here. So, no, the amount of money, the bubble thing is tough. I don't want to equate what's happening right now to the.com era because they're com. They really are very, very different. That being said, I get worried anytime this amount of capital flows into something that is so that everybody has such high hopes for.

Leo Laporte [01:50:31]:
It's not sustainable.

Amy Webb [01:50:33]:
Well, we're also like in the building phase. We're not in the coming up with products that will shift things phase. Companies aren't doing that yet, revenue phase or not. So a lot of infrastructure has to get stood up, and that's unrecoverable investment that you're not going to make back.

Leo Laporte [01:50:52]:
What do you think of Jeff Bezos's contention that this is not a financial bubble, which when they pop, you got nothing. It's an industrial bubble, much like the railroads of the late 19th century and the dot com bust, where you got infrastructure. Maybe the companies that build it didn't survive. MCI's gone. You know, the railroads all went bankrupt, but you got the transcontinental railway.

Amy Webb [01:51:19]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:51:19]:
You got the fiber.

Amy Webb [01:51:20]:
Here's. Here's the difference. Our United States Railway wasn't competing militaristically, diplomatically, or economically with a railroad being built in China. And if anything, we enslaved Chinese people to build our railroads. So it is a markedly. And the same was true of, of the early Internet era was being built. That was a technology that had been around, that didn't start off as a commerce play. It started off as an academic research tool.

Amy Webb [01:51:54]:
This is not that.

Leo Laporte [01:51:56]:
But won't those data centers survive if these companies fail? I mean, if OpenAI goes belly up, I know there'll be a huge financial update.

Amy Webb [01:52:03]:
Well, there's a couple things to consider. Consider. First of all, everybody's making an assumption that the way that AI is growing and the power needs that it has today is what will be required in the future. And we know that's not true. We know that quantum, like the existence of different types of machines, quantum machines, for example, enable AI in different ways that use less power. We know there are other types of compute that aren't here yet, but that are coming. And so it's not the same thing as standing up a steel refinery knowing that you're going to need steel for the next 60 years. It's just not.

Amy Webb [01:52:37]:
And the other concern that I have is, look, I grew up Harper's in Chicago. I grew up in northwest Indiana. I am a Hoosier and I grew up south of the steel mills in a very, very blue collar community.

Harper Reed [01:52:52]:
Ground Point.

Amy Webb [01:52:54]:
Actually, no, no, those are the cool spots. I grew up in Cherryville, which is just next to East Chicago where I was born. And the challenge here is the places in Indiana where some of these data centers are being proposed are the places where the steel mills went. Those factories are no longer there. And once you have a data center stood up, you don't need all of those people anymore. And it's implausible that the state of Indiana is going to require hiring. It's just you're not going to hire local Indiana companies. This is just a different.

Amy Webb [01:53:35]:
Look, I'm not saying we don't need data centers. What I am saying is there is no plan, there is just speed. And that creates a terrible situation because decisions get made under duress and capital is what drives those decisions. And I'm worried about communities like the one that I grew up in that will temporarily get a handful of jobs and then find that those jobs have gone away and there's nothing else there.

Leo Laporte [01:53:59]:
Interestingly, some localities seem to already know this. Hill County, Texas, where there are already plans to build eight different data centers, has just passed a one year data center ban. They realize that this is not good for their community, I guess.

Harper Reed [01:54:18]:
I mean, I think it's bad for your community. Yeah, I think we can see the communities that they have been built on and Keep in mind that I'm pretty pro data center. I'm kind of. That's kind of linked to my ability to participate.

Leo Laporte [01:54:29]:
No, I am too. We saw what happened to anthropic when it was compute constrained. Claude went way downhill. That's why it was such a good deal that they were two things can be.

Amy Webb [01:54:42]:
You can both look, these data centers aren't going to get built overnight either.

Leo Laporte [01:54:46]:
Well that's the other thing. They don't most of them of them

Amy Webb [01:54:49]:
there has to be planning and this cannot and the, the genesis of conversation cannot just be water. A lot of what's happening is everybody's.

Leo Laporte [01:54:56]:
It's water and power.

Amy Webb [01:54:57]:
Yeah, water and power right now. And that is true but there that, that shouldn't necessarily be a constraint because some of the data there are not totally accurate. It's about the local communities and the investment. They should earn an investment of some kind so they should get some type of return.

Leo Laporte [01:55:17]:
Polls show that 71% of Americans don't want to live near a data center.

Amy Webb [01:55:21]:
This is the same. But look, and you know what's crazy? You ask people the same thing about nuclear power stations and they don't care.

Leo Laporte [01:55:29]:
Right.

Amy Webb [01:55:29]:
If you go back in time. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:55:31]:
I mean one gives us power, one sucks at power.

Amy Webb [01:55:35]:
So this is. What does that tell us? That tells us that everybody is grossly undereducated. Not because, you know, because data centers are. Why would you need to know anything about a data center if you. Right, because we've never had to talk about it before.

Leo Laporte [01:55:47]:
Right.

Amy Webb [01:55:47]:
So it's another thing that's become politicized.

Leo Laporte [01:55:49]:
So you don't think data centers are bad for a community.

Amy Webb [01:55:52]:
I think that they can be.

Leo Laporte [01:55:55]:
They are if they burn natural gas.

Amy Webb [01:55:57]:
Unless you mitigate that through a plan. So like any community. Yes, any community where these data centers where there's a. The green light is being given. Given there should be a long term plan and some of those resources should come back into the community. Once those data centers go online, they should contribute x percent back. I mean yeah, you know that you can have. There are all different ways to manage this.

Amy Webb [01:56:23]:
But a lot of the people who are elected to local office in these communities, that's not their full time job. They're like real estate, they do other stuff. You know, they. So they don't know to think through how do we manage this over a longer period of time. Do you know that right now. Sorry, I'm obviously fired up about this because I'm ticked off about it because we need more power but we also need to do this in a way that's not ridiculous. You know that the power demands on the east coast right now are significantly like orders of magnitude greater than they ever have been before during a time when there's already a drought. And we are hitting what's going to be one of the hottest seasons, hottest summers where nobody is thinking this through.

Leo Laporte [01:57:04]:
Why is the power consumption so high? Is it because of data centers?

Amy Webb [01:57:07]:
Yes, it's, it's a combination.

Leo Laporte [01:57:09]:
Well, yeah, well then there's a. That's, you can see why people might not be happy about data centers.

Amy Webb [01:57:15]:
So again, there, there are some other ways. It's just planning. It's planning and also putting these can

Leo Laporte [01:57:20]:
be mitigated is what you're saying. But you gotta.

Amy Webb [01:57:22]:
What I'm saying is, as with everything, we absolutely should have, these companies should make a profit. But we need to do this in a much smarter, more pragmatic way rather than just like let's hurry up and win the bid and go right, that's all.

Leo Laporte [01:57:36]:
Meanwhile, Google and is just taking 6.1% of SpaceX and they're talking about launching data centers in space together.

Harper Reed [01:57:46]:
Well, of course.

Leo Laporte [01:57:48]:
Well, at least the neighborhood won't mind. There are some big technical issues associated with data centers in space.

Harper Reed [01:57:57]:
I find that to be the least surprising information that is anyone has put on the Internet because you're just like, okay, Google is smart. They see where this is going, they see this. Whether or not the technology is there to, or the planning is there, the communities don't want it. So if your business is linked to data centers, you need to solve this problem in one way or the other. And so space is pretty untapped from a data center standpoint. And SpaceX is like, we can do it. Which of anyone who can do things like that, SpaceX is a pretty good bet on that.

Leo Laporte [01:58:29]:
Has plans to launch prototypes with tiny data centers in 2027 just to see if they can, you know, what it takes and then scale from there.

Amy Webb [01:58:37]:
So a couple interesting things there. Satellite based Internet is still spotty, so it works, but it doesn't work as good as what we have terrestrially Lag is an issue, but I just spent. There's a symposium on space every year at MIT at the Media Lab. So I was just there a couple weeks ago mainly because of Petra. So they. I was. She was there and I was her arm.

Leo Laporte [01:59:03]:
Oh, how neat. Is she gonna go there to, to college, you think?

Amy Webb [01:59:07]:
Not to the. The Media Lab doesn't D.O. undergrad.

Leo Laporte [01:59:09]:
No. M.I.T.

Amy Webb [01:59:10]:
though she's maybe. I, I, I would like to say that her, she, no, probably not. Her math is, is good, but not that good. We're looking at doesn't matter if anybody out there is on the admissions committee from Princeton three years from now.

Leo Laporte [01:59:24]:
Please look at education from my lovely school. Does she have a sport? Is she because you got to have a sport now.

Amy Webb [01:59:30]:
No, she doesn't have a sport. She is an Eagle Scout and she

Leo Laporte [01:59:34]:
better than a sport.

Amy Webb [01:59:35]:
She's an Eagle Scout and she's going to the University of Michigan this summer for an architectural program.

Harper Reed [01:59:39]:
Oh yes.

Amy Webb [01:59:41]:
She applied to a traditional urban planning and architecture program and told them she wants to do that but off planet so they let her in.

Leo Laporte [01:59:49]:
She's a uk I love it off planet.

Amy Webb [01:59:51]:
So she's going to be doing.

Leo Laporte [01:59:53]:
My only advice would be for her to get a TikTok account and start making sandwiches. I'm just saying it worked for me. That's all I'm saying.

Amy Webb [01:59:59]:
Not in this household. We are not a TikTok household, Leo. You should know that. I do actually, but the space to stuff. So there is so much commercialization happening mainly in manufacturing and pharma over the next couple of years that from my point of view, the SpaceX Google thing is less about data centers and more about just getting more infrastructure. SpaceX wants to get more infrastructure into space and Google, it would be good for them to position up there as all of this other stuff is being built.

Leo Laporte [02:00:27]:
So okay, it seems like a, you know, this is what you were talking about, which is have a lot of irons in the fire.

Amy Webb [02:00:34]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:00:34]:
Think about the future, think about where it could go and have some plans so that it, you know, it doesn't creep up on you. Let's take a little break. Harper Reed is here, technologist, entrepreneur and hacker. Harper Blog is his blog. It's a Great read. And 2389 AI is his company. Amy Webb from the Future Today Strategic Strategy Group FTSG.com if you are trying to figure out what the future holds for your business, this is a very, very good person to call to talk to. And since you don't do the trend report, can people subscribe to some sort of report?

Amy Webb [02:01:21]:
Well, we actually, we launched something new. It's our convergence outlook. So if you go to our website, FTSG.com on the front page is something that says convergence. It is a very different way that's very effective. There's actually a whole thing in there about data centers and how to be planning differently and what to be thinking about. Differently. It's actually a really, really, really useful tool.

Leo Laporte [02:01:50]:
That's awesome. And by the way, I didn't mention that after you had the funeral for the trend report, you also had a marching band come in to cheer everybody up. I wish I'd seen that. South by presentation.

Amy Webb [02:02:01]:
If it does not make a lot of sense on video. But we, the people. People wait for like four hours to get into that session every year. I'll send you a copy of it, Leo. But we turn the entire thing into a funeral. So if you were waiting on the line, there were. Everybody had black on. You were greeted with a pack of tissues and a pin.

Amy Webb [02:02:19]:
But nobody said why. There were funeral flower arrangements.

Leo Laporte [02:02:23]:
And so I opened sad organ music playing.

Amy Webb [02:02:25]:
We did. No, it wasn't sad organ music. We had Sad. Like Sarah McLachlan arms.

Harper Reed [02:02:31]:
I was about to say angel on loop. Right.

Amy Webb [02:02:33]:
Angel on loop. And didn't tell anybody what was happening. And then I came out in a black cloak, floor length, and welcomed everybody and thought, thank them for being here today. And I gave a eulogy, not just for our trend report, but for all trend reports. And then we had an immobilized memoriam video of Trent report throughout his life. And then I ripped off the ca. And then I said, look, we're at this moment of transition. The world is changing.

Amy Webb [02:03:04]:
Here's why we're burying it. And then I ripped off my cloak and had a sparkly outfit underneath. And the Texas Longhorn marching band came in. Yes. Which was insane. And it was a little party. And then everybody settled back in and we got the down to business.

Leo Laporte [02:03:20]:
Fantastic.

Harper Reed [02:03:20]:
Love it. Love it.

Amy Webb [02:03:21]:
It was good.

Harper Reed [02:03:22]:
I love marching band.

Leo Laporte [02:03:24]:
Anytime you could have a marching band.

Amy Webb [02:03:26]:
And yeah, they were amazing and the students were cool. And for a hot minute, I played quads in our marching band. So there was that.

Leo Laporte [02:03:34]:
You're a clarinetist. And what is a quad? Is that a drum?

Amy Webb [02:03:39]:
I played all woodwinds, but my clarinet teacher at that point didn't want me on the field. Cause I was on my way to music school, so they let me play quad.

Leo Laporte [02:03:47]:
Is that where it's hanging around your neck and you're going boom?

Amy Webb [02:03:50]:
Yeah. And then like, my body just doesn't. Was not meant for that instrument. So I wound up with a xylophone on the side of the field. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:03:58]:
You're not even marching. They do have marching xylophones, but I think that's gotta be hard on the hand.

Amy Webb [02:04:02]:
Yeah. No, I'm just. Harnesses were not meant for women of a certain body. Type, so.

Leo Laporte [02:04:08]:
No, no. Could drag you right into the field, by the way. I'm so disappointed. Cause I love my allbirds.

Harper Reed [02:04:17]:
Oh my God.

Leo Laporte [02:04:18]:
God, I love these damn things. And now it's. I don't know what it is. It's an AI company. It's like the Long Island Iced tea and big chain blockchain company. It's just. That's just a stock market bruise, isn't it? They're not going to make slippers anymore, I'm sad to say.

Amy Webb [02:04:34]:
Supply chains are hard. AI is, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:04:37]:
Is that it? It's really. It's because it's made in China and there's tariffs and it's supply chain issues and stuff like that. I don't know. Is that it?

Amy Webb [02:04:44]:
I don't know. I, I don't know what the unit cost to make a, an all bird sneaker.

Leo Laporte [02:04:48]:
They're ridiculously expensive. Yeah, that's the thing that's so frustrating. I mean, this shouldn't cost 150 bucks. Yeah, but it does.

Harper Reed [02:04:58]:
I don't know why I don't believe in them.

Leo Laporte [02:05:01]:
Like, you don't think they exist? Nope.

Harper Reed [02:05:03]:
Never seen one.

Leo Laporte [02:05:10]:
Well, if you've never seen one, you probably will never see one. So there you go. They're like angels. They're going back home. OpenAI has created a new 10 billion OpenAI. It's so funny because at one moment they're saying we're going to cut down all the extra things that we're doing and we're going to really focus. We're going to copy Anthropic. It's all going to be about enterprise coding.

Leo Laporte [02:05:34]:
And then they say, oh, but we got this new $10 billion company to help businesses deploy AI. Well, it ain't Sora, I guess.

Harper Reed [02:05:44]:
Well, I mean, I, I was asking one of our, one of our investors the other day about this in that I wonder if there is any other business models other than AI advisory and enablement. Because there's this problem in that every SaaS product out there can be whipped up and created that works specifically for your internal requirements of your company. You don't have to use, you know, giant SaaS provider Salesforce is such a good example. Salesforce create a perfect platform that you can configure to do anything and thus has some really big complexities there that it works very, very well. But now you just don't have to have any of the complexity. You just build from scratch the thing that works for your specific use case. And so if you're OpenAI, you want to do enablement, which is much less about building a product with a capital P, it's much more about building process, about building opportunities, about, about connectors, et cetera. And you can see this internally to how their consumer products work.

Harper Reed [02:06:44]:
They've just launched finance, which all that is, is a plaid connector. That's not any product with a capital P. You know, they didn't build like a mint killer or anything like that.

Leo Laporte [02:06:54]:
Just plaid and, and Google and open AI and then it knows everything.

Harper Reed [02:06:58]:
But the point being is that you can kind of do this with, with

Leo Laporte [02:07:01]:
a lot of things you're doing with health too, right? That's what health is.

Harper Reed [02:07:04]:
All the, all the people that are saying that, you know, this is the end of SaaS, I think that's sort of true, sort of not true, it's a little hyperbolic. But it is very clear that like we have been cutting our SaaS costs internally by just building new versions of our own software that works specifically to what we do. But we're also a team of very highly technical people. So I think that's not yet evenly distributed. But what I have found, there's two interesting things I've found over the last six weeks. The first one is every giant company I talk to has the same question, which is, how do we use this? And then they also say, but we are unique. We have these specific requirements. How do we use it with these specific requirements? And it's a little bit of that life of Brian, we are all individuals kind of thing.

Harper Reed [02:07:48]:
But it really is a very specific, they're trying to solve a problem and they really want help. The second thing is we started to see a turn where six months ago people were saying, oh, this will allow us to make our teams much more discreet, much smaller. We can get rid of some people. Now they're saying, no, no, no, no, I don't want to fire anyone. I want to go twice, I want to do twice as much. And I find this to be a big change that once they get a little bit of a taste of turning things up to 11, they want everyone to use it, but not in this

Leo Laporte [02:08:15]:
to the point where they start a metric that says, well, how many tokens did you use today? Whenever you have a metric to measure something, it's definitely bad seeing people at Amazon just make up, excuse me, make up stuff just so that they can have the token usage.

Harper Reed [02:08:31]:
I read that and I was like, I bet it's kind of fun to be like a 24 year old Amazon engineer who has to figure out how to game the tokens. Well, it's just like, yeah. And I have it. It's reviewing my reviews. The reviews are reviewing the reviews of the reviews. It's just terrible.

Leo Laporte [02:08:46]:
I can think of lots of ways to use tokens. Give me an unlimited supply, I'll use them.

Harper Reed [02:08:51]:
So I guess my kind of macro point here is that I think people are going to be using the out of this stuff. And I think the biggest opportunity right now in business that I'm seeing is just people who are acting as the enablers. And whether that is a Deloitte or BCG or OpenAI or whomever, small companies, big companies, the thing is everyone wants to use it. They all see opportunities, whether it's, I hope it's not cost cutting, I hope it's actually just doing more. But the business model I think is very clearly just enabling people to use this more. And obviously OpenAI has some vested interest in making that happen.

Amy Webb [02:09:24]:
I have a slightly different take on what's going on. If you remember early days of Microsoft, you had software being deployed and there was a directional relationship between Microsoft and the consumer used to buy the software. You'd get it in the mail. As time wore on and companies got more complex, you needed these intermediaries to deploy everything. So Accenture built an entire business around being that layer to help the businesses match with the companies. OpenAI is being pretty smart by saying, let's just get rid of the middlemen and we'll just go direct to the consumer. We'll cut everybody else out. And the thing is that McKinsey, years ago, before all of this, was already hiring tons of engineers for the purpose of trying to harness more of those dollars.

Amy Webb [02:10:18]:
So if you think of this stack with Accenture at the bottom, which is enablement, and McKinsey at the top of it doing more sort of strategy and planning and thought leadership or whatever, there's money to be made by going down by capturing more of that value. So that's McKinsey and Bain and BCG. That had been mostly BCG. And McKinsey had been hiring all of these engineers and stuff so they could eliminate everybody else on the chain. Accenture had been trying to push upward, which was what a lot of the act was, were about to do more of the consulting work. And OpenAI, I think very smartly, was like, forget these dudes. We're going to go and do our own thing for the purpose of not just selling more, but being able to direct future moat. I mean, once a business gets locked in, they're not going to be able to get back out.

Amy Webb [02:11:14]:
And why BCG is going to move a floor of people into your business. You are going to get charged exorbitantly for lots and lots and lots and lots of people to do work that quite frankly, doesn't require so many people, but that's part of the billable hour structure. So this was a smart move. Harper is correct. And that people don't quite know what to do yet. My concern would be there's no buffer now, so you better make sure. Sure that somebody internally is. Is being very blunt with you about what you're giving up by going directly to any of these companies.

Amy Webb [02:11:50]:
Because you, you are giving things up. And so you need to be very much eyes wide open.

Leo Laporte [02:11:55]:
Do you think that this is what I mean, this is what the end of SAS was all about, was companies just do it themselves. Right? They.

Amy Webb [02:12:05]:
Yeah, but companies could never do it, do it themselves. First of all, you. A lot of companies don't have. Yeah, I mean, yes, I know conceptually that that's the idea, but you need a bunch of people who know what they're doing.

Leo Laporte [02:12:15]:
Right. And they're hard to come by.

Amy Webb [02:12:17]:
And now you're sort of. Now you've got two businesses. If you're a law firm, you're not

Leo Laporte [02:12:21]:
a technology enablement firm, coding firm and a law firm. Yeah.

Amy Webb [02:12:25]:
Right. So it makes sense.

Leo Laporte [02:12:26]:
This is what individuals are doing. That's what I think is kind of interesting. I mean, this is what I mean. I see myself and I see a lot of people writing our own.

Amy Webb [02:12:34]:
Sure. So a small to medium enterprise. This is if, if you are somebody who's willing to experiment, this is going to be a wonderful era for you.

Leo Laporte [02:12:42]:
It could be a superpower.

Amy Webb [02:12:44]:
Totally. You're going to have access to be able to do stuff as long as you.

Harper Reed [02:12:47]:
Yeah, it is a superpower. And that's why we're seeing so many businesses that are like, I'm making 10 million. ARR. I've been around for a week and it's just me, you know, and it's like, that's why those are the Twitter threads is because. Because you are able to do stuff that normally would take a huge, huge, huge team. But I really want to underscore what Amy said. These are not. Being a tech company is not the core business of many of these companies.

Harper Reed [02:13:12]:
A law firm, etc. And so having to do the AI work, which we are very technical and it is a lot of work. This is what we do. We have a whole company that's venture backed to do this work. And they have a lot of money, but that's just not their. That's not at all their interest. Like, they're like, I need to be lawyers faster. And so if we're just like, well, what if you just.

Leo Laporte [02:13:33]:
Isn't that when you have a lot of AI and you hire McKinsey? I mean, I think there's a handful

Harper Reed [02:13:40]:
of places, I think there's a handful of options, right? Like, one of them is you hire McKinsey. The other one is you enable internal people to actually do that work to like and lead from the inside. There's all sorts of options on. On what is going to solve this problem. I don't think there is an answer.

Leo Laporte [02:13:55]:
But if you hire all those people now you are a dual business. Now you are a law firm and an AI firm.

Amy Webb [02:14:00]:
So Accenture will not. I don't know what it is. Now, historically, Accenture would not work for you if you were not a Global 2000 company, right? So part of. There is an entire enormous group of people who have been left out because they were a small to medium enterprise. So, you know, again, with all this concentration of power, no, McKinsey, nobody's going to bother with them. They're too small. And it was a foolish mistake from my point of view, because you've got this enormous scale that you could have captured. So now all of the power is in their hands.

Amy Webb [02:14:33]:
So if you're a small to medium business and you're able to experiment, or you can do some research and be compliant, which is a big thing, with your local laws and regulations, you get. Have like an awesome couple of years ahead of you in a way that you would not have had before.

Leo Laporte [02:14:49]:
Does. How does Mythos change things now? It's not just mythos, Mike.

Amy Webb [02:14:53]:
Well, at least we're. At least people are talking about cyber security. I feel like nobody wanted to talk about security until something bad happened and then it was, you know, a lot of like, navel gazing. So I'm hoping that CSOs out there listening are all using the Mythos moment as a way to get yourself themselves more, get more funding and get more people and be able to convince your superiors that, yeah, cybersecurity is kind of like a big thing.

Harper Reed [02:15:21]:
There's a couple funny things I think about the mythos hype, which is certainly. It's probably very good. Like, I don't have people who go,

Leo Laporte [02:15:28]:
what are they talking about? Just briefly, let me just say it's anthropic, has a model they won't release because it's so good at finding flaws, even though it wasn't trained to find flaws flaws. And they've given it to 50 big companies to find the flaws in the big companies before they release it to the public. Because as soon as it's public, the bad guys are going to find the flaws. Now there's some evidence that perhaps this is more about compute or marketing. Nevertheless, OpenAI has something similar. Microsoft just announced something similar called M Dash. And it's pretty clear that even existing AI models are pretty good at finding flaws.

Harper Reed [02:16:04]:
That it's also important to look at when this was announced and how it was announced and to look at like this was. Mythos was announced right around the same time that Hegseth was going directly after Anthropic. Right. And so this is not just these things are not announced in a vacuum.

Leo Laporte [02:16:18]:
It was a political move as well.

Harper Reed [02:16:19]:
There was a political move as well. And I think that, you know, if you say to the US government, specifically the Department of War, we have a model that is going to kill everyone. The people who want to kill everyone are going to be very interested in that model. This is a

Leo Laporte [02:16:35]:
exactly what happened.

Harper Reed [02:16:37]:
The other thing I think to really remember is these models are very good. And when I say these models, I say all of the models. GPT 5.5, if you look at the list of things that mythos apparently did, GPT 5.5 also hit very, very high on a lot of those evals, a lot of those benchmarks. And so we are in the place, we are in a space right now where you can use these models to do security exploit work. You can use it hopefully positively to help make everything more secure, to help make sure that the software that we're all using is better. But you can also use it negatively as a dark side hacker or whatever you call them. And I think the reality is we can't unring this bell. This is already out there.

Harper Reed [02:17:17]:
And so Anthropic is taking advantage of this. We talked about the doomerism always sells. This is another flavor of that of allowing for or Anthropic's like, oh my gosh, everything, we're all going to die. And everyone's like, oh great, I'm going to adopt you. Because ChatGPT is over here saying, we are not going to die. And not that I want to kill everyone, but I want the model that's so good that it's going to kill everyone. And it's a very simple thing. I think it's actually going to hurt them in the long run because of what we saw with Hegseth and the government and whatnot.

Harper Reed [02:17:47]:
I think that there's going to be some downsides, but I also think Anthropic is addicted to this. I think this is one of. They love this. Every single model they release, they're like, we can't release it. Everyone. This is going to kill everyone immediately. I was talking about six weeks later. They're like, it's available for all the consumers.

Amy Webb [02:18:03]:
Yeah. But don't forget this was the playbook of OpenAI in 2022 or whatever it was.

Leo Laporte [02:18:08]:
Yeah. They said ChatGPT3 was to. By the way, that was when Dario was at OpenAI. It was Dario's plan. He said it's too dangerous to release ChatGPT3, which wasn't that good. Or maybe it was 2, 5. It was a very early, not so hard, hot version of CHAT GPT.

Harper Reed [02:18:26]:
But regardless, I do think this is a plan and it is a. It is a real. It's a real thing that they're doing. And I. I think as consumers and especially as people who might be making decisions within a business context, it's important to look at where the evals are and the benchmarks are for your business. Does it work really well for your business? Because you might be able to get away with a much cheaper model? Because I. Because I think that. Wasn't there some leaked pricing on Mythos that was just like $10 billion or some insane amount of money?

Leo Laporte [02:18:54]:
Well, that also raises another issue of the haves and have nots. Like if. If the good AI is too expensive for people to use, only the big guys get to use it. That is a really problematic situation where only big companies and, and billionaires can use real good AI. That puts the rest of us at a massive disadvantage. But it's not the. You don't think that's going to be the case, Harper?

Harper Reed [02:19:20]:
Well, I mean, I think it is the. Currently the case now with a lot of things that aren't just AI. Like, I don't think that income inequality

Leo Laporte [02:19:27]:
is a big problem.

Harper Reed [02:19:29]:
Yeah, listen, you can talk housing. There are literally no more houses in Chicago. Like, Chicago is not a small population.

Leo Laporte [02:19:34]:
My daughter is trying to find somewhere to rent in San Francisco, and the AI tech boom has just made it impossible. You just can't.

Harper Reed [02:19:42]:
So I think that there is definitely haves and have nots. But I will introduce this other kind of idea. Like, like if you want to reverse engineer stuff or to be a security researcher, you could probably do Very, very, very well with some of the open source models. It's going to do better than you would have done five years ago by yourself. So like there are haves and have nots. Certainly Google having Mythos and fixing all their bugs or what have you is good. I think that's great. Them not distributing it to people is.

Harper Reed [02:20:07]:
I have some complicated feelings on that. So I don't necessarily know yet, but I do. I really do think that there is a. There is a. Like we. This bell has been rung. We cannot unring it. We have to deal with it and hopefully it makes everyone more secure.

Harper Reed [02:20:23]:
I hope that's the outcome because it's definitely problematic.

Leo Laporte [02:20:27]:
There is a group of our club members in our Club two Discord who have an over under bet going on these lengths of this show and I've already.

Amy Webb [02:20:38]:
Is it too late for me to go into polymarket?

Leo Laporte [02:20:42]:
I just, just was gonna start listening to Lex Friedman's interview with David Hennemeiner Hansen and I looked at the time and it's six hours long and I thought. And they think our shows are too long. Six hours long. Okay. I don't. Maybe there's something wrong with my podcast catcher, but that seems like a little bit longer than our show. This show will not be six hours long. In fact, to that end, let me do the last commercial.

Leo Laporte [02:21:07]:
We could start to wrap things up. But I see. I hate to because I love having Amy and Harper on just talking about. I had this whole agenda of stuff we were going to talk about. Forget it. We're just. This is good.

Amy Webb [02:21:20]:
I think we covered it. I think actually we covered a lot of it though.

Leo Laporte [02:21:23]:
We did pretty well. Yeah. Kind of throwing the stories in bit by bit here and there.

Amy Webb [02:21:28]:
It's more natural that way.

Leo Laporte [02:21:29]:
It is. It's more natural. This is a natural show. It's kind of interesting how many of our advertisers are basically AI these days. AI been very, very good to podcasting. Used to be mattresses and websites. Now it's. Now it's all AI, all the time.

Leo Laporte [02:21:48]:
I just a couple of things I wanted to mention. I really have gotten maybe a couple hundred emails from people. I'm very well known for having a bitcoin wallet with 7.85 bitcoin in it that I made when bitcoin first happened and thinking it wasn't worth anything, forgot my password. And unfortunately it's a long, strong password.

Harper Reed [02:22:11]:
This is true. This is a true story. You're saying true things right now.

Leo Laporte [02:22:14]:
It is true.

Amy Webb [02:22:15]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:22:17]:
It's Sad, but it's true. And every once in a while, I will load the wallet. It was in bitcoin core, so I'll load the whole gosh darn blockchain, which is, I don't know, gigabytes now. 40 gigabytes. Yeah.

Harper Reed [02:22:28]:
It's not small.

Leo Laporte [02:22:29]:
It's huge.

Harper Reed [02:22:30]:
And you still have the 7.5?

Leo Laporte [02:22:32]:
Yes, I do that just to see if the money's still there, because one never knows. And it says, yes, you have 7.85 Bitcoin. Good luck getting it out.

Harper Reed [02:22:41]:
Well, this is your chance. You just gotta wait till Mythos is released and then you just point Mythos at it and say, give me my bitcoin.

Leo Laporte [02:22:47]:
I may not have to wait. Tom's Hardware had a story about a guy who changed his password on his bitcoin wallet when he was stoned 11 years ago and hasn't been able to get into it ever since. It has five Bitcoin. It's about $400,000. It's a little less than mine. He set Claude upon it. Now, people said, leo, you gotta try this. But I have to say there were certain extenuating circumstances.

Leo Laporte [02:23:15]:
He did tweet this guy, well, you

Amy Webb [02:23:17]:
have to get stoned first. Right?

Leo Laporte [02:23:20]:
Stoned. And I missed it. This guy is CPKRM on more bits and stuff on X. Now, I haven't verified this. Tom's hardware. Maybe he has. He says, Holy poop. Omg.

Leo Laporte [02:23:36]:
Claude just cracked this. Thank you, Anthropic. Thank you, Dario. Naming my kid after you, apparently. Claude tried 13. What was it? 13 million. 13 billion. 13 trillion, I think it was.

Leo Laporte [02:23:50]:
Trillion trillion passwords. No, I'm sorry. 3.5 trillion passwords. But it wasn't pure brute force because this guy also gave it a bunch of his documents from that time period that maybe said a little bit about what he might have chosen as a password. He already had some candidate passwords, multiple wallets. He'd been trying to brute force it using BTC recovery, which is a recovery tool, to no success. But he found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook. This is what I do not have.

Leo Laporte [02:24:25]:
And was able to put Claude on it, and Claude was able to decrypt it, and he has his $400,000.

Amy Webb [02:24:31]:
Claude didn't really crack.

Leo Laporte [02:24:33]:
That's right.

Amy Webb [02:24:34]:
Claude just, like, read a bunch of stuff and use probabilistic like.

Leo Laporte [02:24:37]:
That's right, yeah. That's why it's not going to work for me, because I. I don't know what password I use, but I Have no clue. It was probably generated by a password manager because I was using them by then. I just didn't put it in the password manager. Anyway, I will have Claude work on it and ChatGPT.

Harper Reed [02:24:57]:
During that time period, I used 45 bitcoins to buy a Kindle. I read a lot of good books. That is a lot.

Amy Webb [02:25:06]:
That's a very expensive Kindle that you purchased.

Leo Laporte [02:25:08]:
Millions.

Harper Reed [02:25:09]:
Yeah, it is. It was good.

Leo Laporte [02:25:11]:
Wait a minute. Let me just see what bitcoin's worth right now. Just to make you feel really bad.

Amy Webb [02:25:16]:
Did you really do that? Was it a public art project?

Harper Reed [02:25:22]:
No, this was 2011. You didn't know? I had a whole bunch of bitcoins. And I then used 10 to buy a Leica camera and then 10 to buy a Leica camera.

Leo Laporte [02:25:31]:
The 45. That's what it was supposed to be, though. The $45 million today.

Harper Reed [02:25:36]:
I didn't misunderstand. I believed in it. But no, was getting. This is what they told us to do with it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:25:42]:
I was like, pizza with 10,000 bitcoin.

Harper Reed [02:25:45]:
I was like, this is beautiful. I have. I have money I generated from math problems that my office did while I was gone. And I got a Kindle and then I got a camera. I took the camera to my local favorite Leica guy, Tamarkin. Great, great spot. And he was like, no, you cannot buy Leica with a bitcoin. No.

Harper Reed [02:26:03]:
He was so mad at me.

Amy Webb [02:26:04]:
Me.

Harper Reed [02:26:05]:
No, don't do that. So, yeah, it was fun.

Leo Laporte [02:26:07]:
Well, this is why I'm glad I lost the password, because there's no way in hell I'd have 7.85 Bitcoin still.

Harper Reed [02:26:13]:
Yeah, well, you don't have it because

Leo Laporte [02:26:15]:
I couldn't get it. That's true.

Harper Reed [02:26:17]:
It's a good savings account.

Leo Laporte [02:26:18]:
It's a savings. That's what I'm saying. It's retirement. By the time quantum computing comes along,

Harper Reed [02:26:23]:
you have the wallet backed up, though, theoretically.

Leo Laporte [02:26:26]:
Oh, yeah.

Harper Reed [02:26:27]:
So you could probably find someone in your audience that would buy it for a fraction of it, get some liquidity from it.

Leo Laporte [02:26:35]:
The offer is out there.

Harper Reed [02:26:37]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:26:38]:
Mere 10 of its value and it's yours.

Harper Reed [02:26:41]:
I. I think. I mean, I. I love these stories because when bitcoin first shot up, I had all these friends because I used to send them to everyone. I'd just be like, hey, check out this crazy cash. Go download this software and I'll send you.

Leo Laporte [02:26:54]:
Well, that's why I have 7 and 0.85 is because I had a tip jar and people put bitcoin into it.

Harper Reed [02:27:00]:
Yeah. And it was just like a thing. Like it was no big deal. But there was a certain point, maybe 2021, 2022, when all these people I'd sent bitcoins to said, oh, hey, whatever happened to that? And I'm like, I'm not the one that gets to answer that question. I sent it to you and it's gone. But a few of them logged into Coinbase for the first time in 10 years and found a couple hundred grand. It was pretty exciting for a few people.

Leo Laporte [02:27:25]:
Also a story and a new website. And I. It's funny, Hacker News people really thought this website was terrible. I think it's a great website. It's called Worse on Purpose. Oh, Kayana Sapp or Reddit. Yeah, well, and somebody says AI generated. I don't know, but he has.

Leo Laporte [02:27:44]:
Or she has taken a bunch of industries including tools, restaurant prices and backpacks, and talked about how basically private equity is the villain here has ruined.

Harper Reed [02:28:00]:
Checks out these companies.

Leo Laporte [02:28:01]:
VF Corporation, which started as Vanity Fair Meals, they made bras and underwear, bought a company called Bluebell, then picked up JanSport, then the North Face, then they bought Eastpeck, they bought Kipling, they bought Eagle Creek. If you are a hiker, a camper, a bicycler, you probably know some of those names. These are well known back pack companies and basically trashed them all. Made them crap. Actually with JanSport they did a really creepy thing. They kept some of the premium bags high quality and then lowered the quality of all the rest.

Harper Reed [02:28:38]:
Like JanSport and Eastpack were ubiquitous in high schools across America in the 90s. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:28:44]:
Yeah.

Amy Webb [02:28:45]:
Well, the thesis on the private equity is right. The syntax is definitely all the hallmarks of ChatGPT.

Leo Laporte [02:28:54]:
Yeah, there's a lot of EM dashes.

Amy Webb [02:28:56]:
A lot of EM dashes.

Leo Laporte [02:28:57]:
Somebody at Hacker News said there's 32 EM dashes in this article. Dude, I know you didn't write it.

Amy Webb [02:29:01]:
Can we talk about the EM dash for a moment? So that was my. I started off as a journalist and in journalism school, graduate school. And then in my first job, I was constantly. Editors were like, stop using EM dashes. It's a crutch. It's a crutch. What? And then the first book that I.

Leo Laporte [02:29:18]:
It is Strunk and White says it's very strong to use.

Amy Webb [02:29:23]:
I neither think nor speak in normal complete sentences. I'm just a giant run on which, you know. Anyways, so. And like my first book was also just full of just EM dashes everywhere. It's a giant problem. And so this is my natural way of speaking and writing. And the bots out there got hooked on Miranda and now like I have to convince people like, no, this is just the way that I write.

Leo Laporte [02:29:45]:
But Amy has been using the word delve for years. No M I and Keen. I have my computer set up so when I type 2 hyphens it turns it into an em dash. That's how nobody even knew what an

Amy Webb [02:30:02]:
em dash was until all of this. So yeah, that's true.

Leo Laporte [02:30:05]:
Anyhow, whether this is composed by AI or not. And maybe it is. Look, I'm not against that. It's a valuable lesson in the late stage capitalism and it's probably a good idea if you know that the tools that you're buying are not the tools you thought you were buying. They used to be good. There are still a few good family run brands. And he talks about that. Or she.

Leo Laporte [02:30:28]:
I'm not sure.

Harper Reed [02:30:30]:
There's a lot of new brands. I think that's the other thing that's happening is this isn't existing in a vacuum. People are seeing the quality of this stuff go down and now are some people are taking that as an example to. To start a company that does stuff, you know, make new backpacks. I did some backpack research the other day and everyone was like, JanSport is this good backpack. They have a lifetime guarantee. But it sucks. That was like known.

Harper Reed [02:30:50]:
That was a known thing. You didn't have to have a think piece to show that. And so there were dozens and dozens of new within the last five years that were basically copying what was good about JanSport of the past and making it new. I do think that, you know, private equity has not done a lot of benefit. Smart guys though.

Leo Laporte [02:31:09]:
I have a longtime friend who is a PE guy. He has a small private equity company. He was trying to buy Steinway for a while.

Harper Reed [02:31:17]:
Oh, wow.

Leo Laporte [02:31:18]:
Which is a family run piano company. Because it was not. The family was getting tired of it. They. One of his specialties was buying companies that the family were family run but the family wanted out.

Harper Reed [02:31:29]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:31:30]:
And he is a good manager and he said I can take these companies without inshitifying them and turn them into what they should be. I don't think he ended up getting Steinway, but that's wonderful.

Amy Webb [02:31:42]:
If that's.

Leo Laporte [02:31:42]:
I think that's great. Yeah. So he's always bad.

Amy Webb [02:31:46]:
Yeah. You know what's worse?

Leo Laporte [02:31:48]:
What?

Amy Webb [02:31:49]:
Like a rich guy who to Harper's point, like they got to a certain point and nobody can tell them anything wrong. And they, you know. And now they start making terrible decisions.

Leo Laporte [02:31:59]:
We know a few of those.

Amy Webb [02:32:01]:
We do know. I know a few of those.

Leo Laporte [02:32:03]:
Yeah, there are quite a few of those, in fact. What is that? That is some sort of.

Amy Webb [02:32:08]:
That is a tale as old as time, Leo.

Leo Laporte [02:32:11]:
Tale as old as time.

Harper Reed [02:32:14]:
I love those tales.

Leo Laporte [02:32:18]:
Don't judge me, but I did ask. So we're voting in California in the primary on June 2, and I think there are 60 people running for governor. Governor.

Amy Webb [02:32:27]:
I'm not a mess. That governor's race is crazy. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:32:30]:
Because the way our primary works, the top two vote getters, regardless of party, are running against each other. It is just a mess. It's confusing as hell. I did ask my. My chatbot to help me with a ballot guide.

Harper Reed [02:32:45]:
Yeah, that sounds like a great use of it.

Leo Laporte [02:32:48]:
I told it what I care about. Yeah. You know, I gave it my values and I said, please go through, you know, all the voter guides and get back to me. Now I'm not going to vote. Exact. I may, actually, I may. It did tell me how to vote, and I may or may not vote that way, but it sure helped me cut through 60 candidates.

Harper Reed [02:33:10]:
One of my favorite parts about the LLMs is now you have this voter guide. You can paste the voter guide into ChatGPT and say, make me a recipe for dinner tonight based on this voter guide. And it'll just be like, absolutely, let's go.

Amy Webb [02:33:24]:
And like a great idea.

Leo Laporte [02:33:26]:
Happy dinner.

Harper Reed [02:33:27]:
The pattern. The pattern extracting is my favorite thing about this. And we do this all the time where you just have two things that are disparate that should never be mixed and you just mix them and you're just like, okay, so what should we do? We're trying to find lunch. And it's like, oh, well, that's a great idea. The meeting that you just had was blah, blah, blah. So maybe you would like the blah, blah, blah. You know, it just gives you these things where you're just like, that was a jump. I appreciate what you did and I really like that you did this for me.

Harper Reed [02:33:54]:
And I love it. I love it. I think that is my favorite part about these because you can really mix anything with anything and get another thing. What did it recommend, Leo?

Leo Laporte [02:34:02]:
Well, I could tell you how it recommended to vote, but now I'm thinking, I wonder what I should have for dinner.

Harper Reed [02:34:10]:
Well, put in your voter's guide and let's see what it says. Based on my voter guide, what should I get?

Leo Laporte [02:34:14]:
Okay, so the voter guide came from Chet GPT, I think so I Should use maybe Grok for this.

Harper Reed [02:34:21]:
Yeah. If you want to.

Leo Laporte [02:34:22]:
If you want, go crazy.

Harper Reed [02:34:23]:
Yeah. Go wild.

Leo Laporte [02:34:26]:
Or maybe I'll do anthropic because that.

Harper Reed [02:34:29]:
I think anthropic CL probably knows food better than a lot of.

Leo Laporte [02:34:33]:
Who's the best? Yeah, who? You said you always find out what the best one is. Who's the best.

Harper Reed [02:34:37]:
Well, right now I'm mad at Claude because it made every website look exactly the same.

Leo Laporte [02:34:42]:
They do all look the same.

Harper Reed [02:34:43]:
That was all the same. That was a thing. Everything is this beige kind of brown with a nice warm, rich reddish color. Everything has this like vibe right now. So I'm mad at that.

Amy Webb [02:34:54]:
Fonts have serifs which I really need.

Harper Reed [02:34:57]:
So I'm, I have an emotional argument with ChatGPT or with, with anthropic, but I use a lot of ChatGPT because I'm of the conclusion that ChatGPT's Pro model is the best model on the market.

Leo Laporte [02:35:11]:
That's the one I used for the coding thing.

Harper Reed [02:35:13]:
I love using it because it takes forever. You literally have to be like, I'm going to go on a walk. You do this. I'm going to go on a walk. And so I will do a lot of synthesis in many other models and then when I'm ready for the final approach, so to speak, I'll drop it in the chat GPT say go and then I'll go head off my way and come back on be like, oh, that was great, thanks for that, that. But I want to know what is recommended for dinner with your voter guide.

Amy Webb [02:35:40]:
What are you having? Are you suddenly having a vegan dinner?

Harper Reed [02:35:43]:
Is it austerity based site to help me.

Leo Laporte [02:35:46]:
What should I say? Help me plan dinner.

Amy Webb [02:35:48]:
Carrot organic.

Harper Reed [02:35:50]:
Just based on the voter guide. What should I have for dinner tonight?

Leo Laporte [02:35:52]:
Okay, that's what I'm doing. Please use this website to help me plan dinner. It's retrieving the website now.

Amy Webb [02:35:58]:
It'll be interesting if it returns. Instructions on the dinner go to Mom's Market.

Leo Laporte [02:36:04]:
The URL doesn't have anything dinner related on it. It's your best.

Harper Reed [02:36:07]:
That's the best. This is the thing is that the fact is it's going to find a pattern.

Leo Laporte [02:36:12]:
Do you want me to plan a low carb dinner from scratch? It says do you mean a different link? So it doesn't want to do that.

Amy Webb [02:36:19]:
I think it's how you prompt it.

Harper Reed [02:36:20]:
Yeah, I should say, I think what

Amy Webb [02:36:21]:
you need to say is that you should say, this is my voting. Look at this. It may not be Able to scrape that site. Is there a robot blocks?

Harper Reed [02:36:28]:
No.

Leo Laporte [02:36:28]:
I can see it. No. Yeah.

Amy Webb [02:36:29]:
Okay, so, you know, visit this website. These are my preferences plan. What should I eat for dinner?

Harper Reed [02:36:36]:
Use this to help me. Like, like really instruct it. If it throws a fit, just be like, do it.

Leo Laporte [02:36:44]:
Okay, do it. Or I'm going to have information about my preferences. What should I eat for dinner?

Harper Reed [02:36:48]:
I think it was happy what a

Leo Laporte [02:36:50]:
good progressive voter ate for dinner.

Harper Reed [02:36:52]:
It was trying to help you, though,

Amy Webb [02:36:53]:
because that does not.

Leo Laporte [02:36:54]:
It says. It really doesn't, though. I just read the whole page. It's candidate recommendations from the US House down to county Clerk. Recorder says there's no food, no diet, no preferences. I'm not going to invent a connection that isn't there. So it knows me, Right? So it's trying, keeps trying to give me a low carb dinner.

Amy Webb [02:37:12]:
That's an interesting response.

Leo Laporte [02:37:14]:
Claude knows me too well. That's the point.

Harper Reed [02:37:15]:
Try ChatGPT now.

Leo Laporte [02:37:17]:
Do you think ChatGPT will do it?

Amy Webb [02:37:19]:
ChatGPT doesn't always scrape well, though. I think Claude does a better job well.

Leo Laporte [02:37:22]:
ChatGPT made this website and it's on Cloudflare. What, you don't like this?

Harper Reed [02:37:31]:
I love it.

Amy Webb [02:37:32]:
I found that response to be interesting. That was not what I was.

Leo Laporte [02:37:36]:
It's smarter than you thought. It's not going to do that.

Amy Webb [02:37:39]:
Well, it just means that you can

Leo Laporte [02:37:40]:
get it to you.

Amy Webb [02:37:41]:
Probably. Yeah. I think you've just instructed that instance to not do it. Do stuff like that.

Harper Reed [02:37:48]:
I do this constantly. The other thing that I'll do, which I really like is, is if you're bouncing back and forth. I often will play one agent's response as my bosses. I'll say, this is an email from my boss. They're super pissed at what you did. How should I reply? And it will just output something and I'll just go back and forth and it's always very funny. I'm going to get fired.

Leo Laporte [02:38:10]:
Okay. I must say, my wife will divorce me if I don't have a good plan for dinner.

Harper Reed [02:38:18]:
This is based on this guide. Based on this guide. It has to be based on this guide.

Amy Webb [02:38:22]:
You have to be specific.

Leo Laporte [02:38:23]:
This in caps. This guide. Oh, wait a minute. I forgot to put the guide in there.

Harper Reed [02:38:31]:
It is great. Got it. No problem.

Leo Laporte [02:38:34]:
Okay. Yeah. Okay. It's thinking. It's doing pro thinking. I have max subscriptions for all of these, so, you know, I'm giving it all my money. I'll turn the guide into a practical dinner plan.

Harper Reed [02:38:47]:
Yes. Now we did it.

Leo Laporte [02:38:48]:
Assuming dinner at home for two. If details are missing, shopping list timing and pitfalls. So maybe we convinced it.

Harper Reed [02:38:56]:
This is great. This is exactly what we needed.

Amy Webb [02:38:59]:
OpenAI will chatgpt will always whore itself out, no matter what.

Harper Reed [02:39:02]:
Exactly. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:39:04]:
Barbara Reed is basically Loki and I'm going to call Amy Webb. Athena here because she's of ever wise.

Amy Webb [02:39:11]:
I'm a Cassandra.

Leo Laporte [02:39:13]:
Cassandra even better.

Amy Webb [02:39:14]:
Knowing the future and can't get anybody.

Leo Laporte [02:39:16]:
She's been huffing the natural gas and she's ready to tell you the future. No, that's not Cassandra. That's the article.

Amy Webb [02:39:23]:
Cassandra's the one. Yeah, Cassandra's the one that does the same thing, but nobody listens.

Leo Laporte [02:39:28]:
That's right. That's right. You guys are fantastic. What a. What a great time. It's always a great time with Harper and Amy. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for not going to to Japan this time, but staying here to do the show.

Leo Laporte [02:39:42]:
Yeah. Amy Webb is@ftsg.com Please go there and just take advantage of her brilliance. She's Amy Webb on all the socials with two Bs. And I don't know what happened. We wanted to plan a show with Brian about making a secure PC. Is his PC still secure?

Amy Webb [02:40:01]:
It sure is. In fact, today he's not here because he's at his quarterly geek dinner. So that group of super geeks, I love those guys. That's where he is tonight.

Leo Laporte [02:40:11]:
I've been trying to get into the quarterly geek dinner for years, but I'm sure they would.

Amy Webb [02:40:15]:
They all listen, so they would very.

Leo Laporte [02:40:17]:
Okay, well, tell them I will fly out. Okay.

Amy Webb [02:40:20]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:40:21]:
Okay. So Here we go. ChatGPT says make it a Sonoma spring dinner with marinated artichokes, olives, good bread and goat cheese or white bean spread or a kiete or linguine with a. Oh, this sounds fantastic. An arugula salad and for dessert, macerated strawberries with lemon over Greek yogurt, whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. It has nothing to do with my voting guide, but it does know where I live and in fact it even knows my local market and is telling me what aisles to use.

Harper Reed [02:40:49]:
There you go.

Leo Laporte [02:40:50]:
Look at that. By the way, cooking plan. Put the strawberries in a bowl with a little sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice. Right now, because it's gonna take you a while to make dinner. Don't make it a civics lecture. Let the meal embody the voter's guide. Don't narrate the whole ideology.

Amy Webb [02:41:06]:
Don't overcook the asparagus don't overcook the asparagus.

Leo Laporte [02:41:10]:
And if this is for Monday, May 18, don't rely on Farmer's Market. Shop local retail tonight.

Harper Reed [02:41:16]:
Yeah, I feel like that field that makes sense.

Leo Laporte [02:41:18]:
Don't make it too virtuous and have a plan B.

Harper Reed [02:41:21]:
This is great, great information.

Leo Laporte [02:41:23]:
And it says, by the way, at dinner you should say, quote, I reverse engineered dinner from the guide local anti corporate, pro public health and still allowed to have cheese. And you tell me that AI is not funny.

Harper Reed [02:41:38]:
It did it perfect. It did it exactly what you wanted.

Amy Webb [02:41:41]:
You know what? Actually it shouldn't have done it. It should have said it should have done what Claude did, which was to say, I know this is what you want, but. Well, this is one of the arguments, right?

Harper Reed [02:41:52]:
Boring.

Amy Webb [02:41:53]:
I know, but this is how it makes the money.

Leo Laporte [02:41:56]:
I personally like to be glazed. Harper. I know I shouldn't say that. Harper reed is at 2389. AI great. Some great skills there. And you're going to have more soon. If you get a chance to visit him in Chicago, you can get a line drawing created by this weird machine.

Leo Laporte [02:42:17]:
Anything else you want to plug?

Harper Reed [02:42:20]:
Right now we just have a lot. We're just heads down on a lot of stuff we'll be doing. I think we're going to be releasing some blog posts soon, talking a little bit about more of that stuff. But it's been a real heads down spring, which is good because that means things are happening. It's bad because I like showing people what we're up to. So maybe I'll come in tomorrow with a bee in my bonnet saying, let's get those blog posts going.

Leo Laporte [02:42:41]:
I'm gonna for a dinner menu for a heads down spring.

Harper Reed [02:42:46]:
Yeah, it'll be like peanut butter, but

Amy Webb [02:42:49]:
don't overcook the asparagus whatever you do.

Leo Laporte [02:42:52]:
Amy Harper, love you. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Tell Brian I'm coming to dinner.

Amy Webb [02:43:00]:
I will. They would love to have you.

Leo Laporte [02:43:02]:
I would, I will love to be there. We do this show every Sunday, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern Time, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live if you're in the club, and I hope you are because that supports everything we do here. You can watch in the club. Twit Discord. If not, you can watch live on UT, YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. We put it everywhere. You don't have to watch live.

Leo Laporte [02:43:24]:
That's just if you want like the live stuff. Otherwise you can watch the podcast version of the show at TWiT TV. That's our website. There's a YouTube channel with the video. We do audio and video of all our shows. And you can of course subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically the minute Benito and Kevin finish polishing it up and taking out all the swear words. If you're not a member of the club, please do join the club Tuesday. A little programming note.

Leo Laporte [02:43:52]:
We will be covering Google IO's keynote because we don't want to get any strikes Against Us on YouTube. We're very sensitive about that. We are only doing it in the club. So club members only for our coverage, Micah Sargent and Jeff Jarvis will join me 10am Pacific on Tuesday for Google IO Keynote. We also do WWDC that way. It's just unfortunately the way we have to do do it thanks to the sensitivity of these large multi billion dollar, multi trillion dollar companies. Thanks everybody for joining us. 21 years I've been saying it.

Leo Laporte [02:44:26]:
I'm gonna say it one more time. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. And another twit is in the can.