Intelligent Machines 806 transcript

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

0:00:00 - Paris Martineau
Coming up on Intelligent Machines. This week we talk about Elon's Doge drama, how YouTube is the new TV and a Microsoft study that finds AI may be making human cognition atrophied and unprepared. It's all coming up next on Intelligent Machines.

0:00:21 - Leo Laporte
Podcasts you love.

0:00:22 - Mikah Sargent
From people you trust.

0:00:25 - Paris Martineau
This is TWIT. This is Intelligent Machines, episode 806, recorded February 12th 2025. I'm piffed. It's time for Intelligent Machines. Leo is out this week, but that's okay, because I, Paris Martineau, am here to guide you through all the news that's fit to podcast about, and I won't be doing it alone. We've got Micah Sargent here. Hi, Micah.

0:00:52 - Mikah Sargent
Hello Paris, so good to see you. I don't know if I've said it before, but I just love your glasses. They're so good. Thank you.

0:01:01 - Paris Martineau
I this week had one of my lenses fall out of my glasses because I was furrowing my brow at the news on my phone too hard, so hard that they I mean maybe it was unrelated, but it did happen as I was looking at a particularly concerning tweet and I had to go to the optometrist yesterday and get it put back in. We've also got Chuckler over here, jeff Jarvis. Some may call him a visiting professor from Stony Brook or a distinguished fellow at Montclair State University, but I call him a professor emeritus at the Craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig.

0:01:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Craig.

0:01:42 - Paris Martineau
Craig Jeff.

0:01:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Hello boss, so good to see you, so good to see the chromosome shift is back in better alignment today. The age is down today. I'm the only old one here. This is good.

0:01:57 - Paris Martineau
I heard there was a lot of talk about AI last week Crazy, I thought we were supposed to be talking about human beings here.

0:02:08 - Jeff Jarvis
It was Sandy. It was sandy at times, but it was well, I don't know.

0:02:12 - Paris Martineau
Glad to have you guys both here, glad to be back with you guys, I miss you um, there's been a lot of tech news that has happened this week and it feels irresponsible to start this podcast off any other way than talking about what's been going on with Elon Musk and Doge and all of the various tech czars that now have their hands in the government.

I think that one the New York Times had a really good write up of this, specifically looking into how Elon Musk's business empire has been scoring a bunch of benefits under this shakeup. Specifically, I mean the Times. Eric Lepton and Kirsten Grind dug into the number of agencies that Musk is targeting and found that staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, have affected agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Elon Musk's companies, and they go through a whole list here. You know Transportation Department has issued violations and fines, as well as lawsuits, complaints towards, like SpaceX. You know Tesla has is under investigations, has lawsuits coming from and complaints from a variety of different um groups in the government, and all of these are now under attack by elon musk's doge. Have you guys been following this?

0:03:39 - Mikah Sargent
yeah, oh this is I. I would love the advice of the panel because I'm finding myself needing to. I don't know. I almost wish that I had some way to press a couple of buttons, like I close my left eye and double press my right nostril and it resets my brain or something, because what's happening for me is I see these things and then I go I have no reason to be surprised that this is happening.

But what comes with that this I have no reason to be surprised that this is happening is a certain level of I don't want to call it full-on apathy, so we'll just call it athi. No, um, it's, it's on its way to being apathetic, because it's like, of course, course, this is what's happening, this is what I expected would happen, and I'm not surprised by literally any aspect of this. I thought, okay, yeah, that's exactly what you would do if you had this power. How do I keep that energy alive that says, yes, this is happening. No, we're not surprised, but still, we should be pushing for things to be done about it, right, paris?

0:04:50 - Paris Martineau
I was going to go to you, jeff, because I know, my response to all of this has been a deep and uncontainable dread. What I thought you were going to ask is how to contain the dread when, every like I said before, I was scrolling through Twitter and Blue Sky and a variety of RSS feeds and furrowed my brow so hard that I possibly broke my glasses. It was related to this, perhaps it just seems. I mean, I think one of the things that was notable to me in all of this was the American Bar Association released a statement.

The American Bar Association famously like not only like an apolitical, but like a famously non-political organization. They released a statement saying hey, the flurry of executive orders and kind of extrajudicial happenings that we're seeing from organizations like Doge as well as from the executive branch itself, and the way that these sort of two groups are pushing back against judicial resistance and checks from the judicial branch is unprecedented, and there have been a number of legal scholars on both both sides of the political aisle, saying we're in a constitutional crisis, and it stresses me out. So I don't know. I mean my answer to you is I'm not sure how to be less. I get it, though, because I feel in some ways a bit overwhelmed by all of it and have had to kind of set times for myself to check in with the news and not, Jeff, with all of your wise experience.

0:06:24 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll tell you what gives me hope there isn't much of it.

0:06:26 - Mikah Sargent
I could use some of that. Yes.

0:06:28 - Jeff Jarvis
There isn't much of it. But the middle school, middle school students on a German army base and spouses of military people on a military base let me emphasize that again who stood out and protested against Pete Hegseth's arrival. Middle schoolers have more guts and more courage and more fortitude and morals than members of Congress and our media. So how can we be more like middle schoolers? We need more examples of this. We need more examples. And I got to this discussion the other day. I'm curious what you think about this.

I got a discussion the other day with a guy I know not terribly well. I quoted George Conway saying that if the president and company ignore and do not follow court, court orders, then we are beyond a constitutional crisis. And george conway is a conservative and he said we are at the point of the end of rule of law. And he said the only thing we do is take to the streets. And I just quoted that. Um, joe scarborough had just read a new york times editorial saying that we're gonna hang in there. And it was john meachum was doing blather, blather, but george conway came out right out and said it. So this guy I knew uh, wanted to get on zoom with me because he knows I'm outspoken and blathering about all of this and blood, and he said, um, a couple things. One he said he was nervous that if people took to the streets they would get hurt. He was nervous that it would cause a reaction. The 1968 demonstrations in Chicago, he believes, gave us Nixon and George Floyd demonstrations gave us Trump. I'm not willing to go there. But then we started talking about how do we take action. Then we started talking about how do we take action and he was arguing for a boycott of certain companies. If we got together and boycotted those companies, then would that have action? I don't know, because the other side will come out together and buy there and I don't know what's going to happen.

I think a lot of people feel very powerless right now and I think we need leadership and it's hard to do that. Yes, we want bottoms up and and, but we we do need somebody to call, to convene and to call us together and, um, somehow those middle schoolers and their and and half of their parents came out to protest. Um, who brought them together? I don't know, and I was thinking, thinking back to when Kamala Harris got the nomination. There were all of those started by black women did the calls, the Zoom calls, and that led to another one, and another one, and another one, and I was part of the white dudes for Kamala.

And I wonder what, in this world of social media, where a lot of our social media has taken over now by Musk and Zuckerberg has shown his true stripes, how do we organize bottom up? I think it's a legitimate topic for the show to wonder, and it's not an AI topic. But how do we, how do people who want to gather use the tools that we now have to gather to gather? And I don't see it happening, except in middle school.

0:09:47 - Paris Martineau
And I mean, I do think the answer to this question lies in kind of what you had stated finding a way to overcome apathy. Because I think that is what a lot of people are feeling, and it's a natural response. When we are seeing a flood of information and very abrupt changes like this, it's very normal.

0:10:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Is it apathy or is it defeat? Has it gone over that boundary yet?

0:10:17 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I guess it's individual definition right. I can tell you that I have felt very defeated as of late Not, you know, not complete defeat, and I think that part. I think if I lived where I lived growing up, which was in Missouri, I would probably be far, much farther that that road of feeling defeated. Uh, it helps to be in a place where I I feel like I have some semblance of protection around me in that way. But, yeah, I, maybe it is it, I because I don't, I do very much care.

But, jeff, I think you touched on the point there when you talked about looking for some actual, real leadership, because so much of the advocacy surrounds this sort of individual approach, these little oh I will boycott this and what can I do individually? I can call people and that stuff just feels I mean, we've been calling and we've been boycotting and we've been doing that for a long time and it doesn't, on an individual scale, have much of an impact. And so, yeah, that would be great to see is some true leadership in these moments of, okay, here's what we do and we can all do it together and we can actually point to things where this is making a difference, because it does feel very powerless.

0:11:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Or at least you can hear the stories of people's lives who were affected. I didn't know that.

0:11:51 - Paris Martineau
Paris, where are you on the scale from all we to defeat? I mean, I think I'm often in apathy town, usa, or I feel a bit anxious and overwhelmed by a delusion of news and also thinking about, as we are witnessing, a seemingly unprecedented dismantling of established federal powers, offices and things that have existed quietly in the background to prop up American status around the world, and our continued size as a nation.

That is stressing me out, because I don't know when we will even begin to know the extent, because my first instinct as a journalist is to be like well, what is the problem here, what are the exact effects of this? And it's going to be so long before we can even figure many of those things out, and that stresses me out, trevor.

0:12:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Burrus, can I ask you a journalism question?

0:12:52 - Paris Martineau
Oh, go ahead Sorry.

0:12:53 - Jeff Jarvis
You go ahead I was going to say.

0:12:54 - Paris Martineau
I think that part of the response from a human perspective to something like this is seeking out community. I mean, that seems like a bit of a pat answer but I think it is really powerful.

Whatever your political persuasion, whatever causes, you believe in looking for local state organizations, state or city organizations that deal with that cause or are aligned with that political group, and finding a way to even if you're not, you know, actively out there, changing the world. Just sitting in meetings with other people who share the same concerns as you can be incredibly powerful and a great first step to whatever you want, I don't know, to steering yourself away from apathy.

0:13:40 - Jeff Jarvis
So here's my journalism question for you both. I had somebody call me today to ask about those that are paying obeisance in various forms whether that's Joe and Mika going to Mar-a-Lago, or whether that is the ABC and CBS paying Trump through his suits against them.

0:14:04 - Paris Martineau
And meta. Keep it on the tech angle yeah.

0:14:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, and so the only news organizations that have not been kicked out of the Pentagon or the White House so far are ABC and CBS. So they have access. But what I said to this guy is who needs access? At that level, we don't need access. And Trump won Jay Rosen, new York University and Iork university, and I said, and others said, send the interns to the white house press briefing room. Um, don't cover this from the perspective of of trump, cover this from the respect of the citizens. So is it? Is it heretical to say, screw access? We don't need access. In fact, we don't want it. Is this, finally, when we give it up?

0:14:44 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I understand that impetus and I think there's like a lot of good things there that, yes, access is not going to produce any of the most powerful or meaningful journalism. But I do think that part of the concerns from an established like a journalistic establishment perspective here are it sets a bad precedent if we simply just roll over as a news gathering organization when a hostile leader decides to cut off access to a long-standing like member of that news corp just based on their political persuasion or, uh, the sort of stories they write in. One example of this is um recently the associated press, I believe, has been banned from now at least two white house press briefings even today, because the associated press doesn't use the words gulf America to refer to the Gulf of Mexico.

0:15:48 - Jeff Jarvis
So I got into a discussion on Facebook with somebody inside Google when I said for shame Google for doing that. Google changed the map. It has now changed to Gulf of America.

0:15:59 - Mikah Sargent
Apple has as well, and Apple has as well, apple has.

0:16:02 - Paris Martineau
MapQuest.

0:16:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I guess they're still updating MapQuest, so my friend said and it's a friend of mine who's inside Google, you know, went after me a bit, not nationally, I'm just saying come on, we have to have a policy and the policy is in any country, follow what the country says. This is what the country says, and I understand that. But if you can't stand up against the stupid little stuff, where do you decide to stand up? And Google also got rid of off its calendar. It got rid of Black History Month and LGBTQ events and other things off its calendar. They said, well, we did this last year. Well, you did this coming up, and now's the time when you put them back.

And so it's an extremely powerful company and I understand what they're worried about. I understand they're worried about vindication against them and they're protecting their stockholders. I get all of those arguments, but where does so somebody? This reporter asked me today what's the strategy and I said it's the Costco strategy. Costco stood up against all of this, held on to its DEI and my wife found a page on Reddit where the people in Costco, anecdotally are saying they're getting tons of new member requests, they're leaving Walmart and Sam's Club and they're coming to Costco where they get eight a weekend. They're now getting 100 a weekend. All right, it's not huge, but it's a strategy that says there's a place in the marketplace for standing up, and Google's not, and Apple's not, and Amazon is not.

0:17:27 - Mikah Sargent
Is Costco a federal uh contractor? Do they have skin in that game?

0:17:31 - Jeff Jarvis
good question. I don't know uh, but I imagine there are approved vendor for buying, I wouldn't be surprised toilet paper and stuff. Yeah, because up to that point.

0:17:43 - Mikah Sargent
All of the companies said well, because you? That was my. My first thought was can everyone please, for the love of God, just go and take a quick little civics class? You know what? I'll host it.

I'll give a civics class it'll take you 45 minutes and all we're going to do is talk about what free speech is and how it has to deal with, what the government can do and also, outside of that, what an executive order can have an impact on and what it can't. Because when I saw the celebration of the companies who were not following Trump's executive order and I'm going, but it doesn't that an executive order from the government and a private company you know that very frustrating moment of just a misunderstanding of how this works and what can be impacted directly and indirectly, et cetera, et cetera. But all that aside, yeah, a lot of these tech companies talked about, well, the reason why we have to is because we are a federal contractor in some way and so we have to follow this executive order. I actually we talked about this this morning on my show Clockwise, specifically the maps thing, and I think that this is a very stupid thing that has happened, and that is why I disagree with the renaming of this. I think it's just so, so stupid.

I do think and this is probably a little unpopular here that if there's a ruling body in a country that is in charge of setting the standard for what different places within the country are called, then I want tech companies to follow that standard, because what happens whenever it's the opposite way right that it's we're finally taking a state and we're calling it by its original native name, and then one company Meta decides they don't want to rename it in their product.

One company meta decides they don't want to rename it in their product because they just decide they don't want to. I should say it decides it doesn't want to. I want, in every case, there to be that strict rule that says well, because the USGS or I can't remember what group is in charge of this has named it this, then that is the thing that's followed. So I'm I'm less bothered by the choice of the company to make a change based on what a you know what, what the the official government body. Yeah, the official naming is, even though I'm still bothered by the fact that we're calling it we aren't, but you know that it's being called the gulf of america and by the fact that we're calling it we aren't, but you know that it's being called the Gulf of America and all of the stuff that's stupid there. I want those companies to stick to a set of guidelines and follow them.

0:20:31 - Jeff Jarvis
What about Black History Month in the calendar?

0:20:34 - Mikah Sargent
That is again. That's something that happened before.

0:20:37 - Jeff Jarvis
And yes.

0:20:38 - Mikah Sargent
And so I. The only reason I say that is because, again, I always want for the people who are truly fighting for the good to also be fighting in a way that is accurate. And I worry about because this is, of course, part of the strategy is to like lose the accuracy, lose the thread of what's true and what's not. So I kind of pushed that through, but I think that what google should have done is made it very clear, um, exactly what its policy is surrounding that, and I think that in that, regardless of of what the you know the, the decision was that, yes, it is. Um, this would be the time where you say you know what our policy is going to be, that we will, uh, we're going to work with you know whatever it is primary, secondary and tertiary holidays in the us. So, as you said, jeff, this would be the time to add more, not take more away or make a change to it, but, again, just follow a set of rules and, you know, stick to the policy, so that it doesn't feel like you're capitulating if you are claiming 10 toes down that you're not capitulating whenever we see that happening in other parts of the business.

But okay, and then this is one other thing that I'll say, because I keep hearing this refrain and I think different people have different takes on this, and we saw it the first presidency, the first Trump presidency, which was this quote it's a distraction, unquote mantra we. It was this idea that these silly, goofy, tiny things we focus on and we're missing the big things. But I don't know. I think that there's still a level of death by a thousand cuts Right, that that's involved in this and they may seem like they're. They're small, unimportant things, like they're small, unimportant things, but these have all been signals of a level of almost royal decree that's being given to this person that we have not. Really. That feels unprecedented, I guess to me, and that's the part where I start to feel exhausted and powerless right is whenever you just see wow, no, you really can just say a thing, and then it happens, and that that is so frustrating.

0:23:18 - Paris Martineau
Absolutely. I think those are all really good points and it is interesting to see the way that these executive orders and moves by Doge are being implemented or reflected in the broader tech community and in some way it's kind of like a mirror being held up to a mirror, because the amount of tech power in the government is only growing and it's unprecedented in comparison to past administrations, at least in my recollection. My colleague Julia Black today actually put together we do org charts of the information, which are normally company org charts, I think this is the first time we've ever done a governmental org chart and it's a tech governmental org chart.

She identified like more than like two dozen like tech executives and other movers and shakers in the tech world that are now in the federal government underneath Trump, and in some cases, elon and it's I don't know, fascinating to me like Trump's interests have over the last couple of years, and certainly since he's taken office, crystallized as aligning with those of Silicon Valley, including, like the funding of massive AI projects, deregulating the crypto market, overhauling defense procurement contracts and kind of cutting red tape for people in biotech.

It's interesting, I think also this week it came out that Trump is planning to nominate the former Andreessen Horowitz head of crypto policy to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission which is just, you know, one of the many ways in which the Trump administration is taking a really friendly approach to crypto, and I'm really I mean curious is maybe the wrong word but I am interested to see how this shakes out, because we're already starting to see some of the like, very the consequences of this, in particular, like this ongoing lawsuit the sec has had against binance.

Um might be going away. Uh, the sec recently requested a pause in its legal battle with binance. This is um reporting from the ape. Um and this is as kind of the Securities Exchange Commission is trying to present itself as more crypto friendly. And, to be clear, this is the Binance case, where the people at Binance were found in documents released in Discovery saying we are operating as a effing unlicensed security exchange in the USA. Bro end quote like it was a pretty open and shut case as far as things like that go. But it's going to be very interesting if we're entering in a world where even very egregious actions that once would have been a cause for investigation and potential large penalties become just a-okay.

0:26:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Just who's to investigate. That's the problem. This is what George Conway's point is and others have said it too is that if a court order is disobeyed, who enforces that Right? The marshal's office?

Who does the marshal's office report to the DOJ? The marshal's office, who does her marshal's office report to the doj? If someone wants to pass a law saying you can't do this, who does that congress? That congress can't do that? So, uh, even who went to the supreme court? Who owns supreme court? So that's, we're, we're there, we're there. This isn't coming, and this is you know where I get upset with the failure of my field, and yours too. Paris is journalism. Our institutions are not serving us well, in my view, and I don't know what to do about that.

0:27:12 - Paris Martineau
I mean, what do you think should be done?

0:27:17 - Jeff Jarvis
We're going way. Paris, you're in charge today. So when we get in trouble for being so political today, it's all on you.

0:27:23 - Paris Martineau
It was Paris, Don't be mad guys, everybody got mad last week because you talked too much about AI. I decided we were going to talk about something else that would make you mad. So you're not allowed to be mad. You're not allowed.

0:27:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Not about AI at least It'll hit AI, because that's part of this. I think we have to call what it is. I mean, what I constantly come back to is I've I've reread many times now the origins of totalitarianism by hannah orant. There's lessons in here for our present day, um, and I think that journalism needs to recognize and label and explain what is going on, rather than prevaricating and being credulous and naive uh, purposefully, willfully credulous and naive. Oh well, things could happen. We don't know, it might be there. I just don't think that they're serving them well, so I'm looking for blunt honesty. The Guardian is more bluntly honest than the New York Times and the Washington Post, in my view.

0:28:24 - Mikah Sargent
Do you think though Okay, so Obviously we don't know, and we but I guess we're crystal balling here Because there's such a distrust for the media and Not for everyone, of course, anecdotally, I see a distrust or fact and scientific fact. Are you maybe saying that if we had collectively done this for eight, 12 years ago and been more honest at that point, more forthright, more true, more real at that point, we wouldn't have gotten to the point where we are now, where I don't know if somebody's choosing that level of brash honesty, that is it going to reach the people that it needs to reach, because many of us are already going yeah, I know that.

0:29:50 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I worry that that approach would lead us to where we are now as well, where it's like people are overwhelmed and apathetic and defeatist.

0:29:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I think they'd feel less alone if they said someone speaks for me. And so, micah, I don don't want to. If you get me going, I can go on for three hours myself, you know so, uh, because this is what I do, uh, but my argument is that we are not in a information crisis. This isn't about disinformation. When people say crazy stuff to pollsters and reporters, they are signaling their belonging to something. What hannah arant says is that totalitarians first, uh, alienate people from their communities and society, and then they become vulnerable to the siren call of the authoritarian, and, and so when people are saying crazy stuff, I I think, again, they're signaling their belonging. It's a, it's a, it's like a loyalty test, signaling their belonging. It's a, it's a, it's like a loyalty test. And so the challenge that I wonder is how do we, how do we concoct the idea of a journalism of belonging? Okay, when people say, uh, that they um.

So what iran says also is that people in totalitarian regimes seem to, in totalitarian regimes, seem to grasp onto abstract notions rather than their daily concerns, and I don't think that the people on part of this country really, every day, every minute, think the most important thing in their lives is guns and abortion and trans students in bathrooms. Their lives have the same concerns we all have about their health and their safety and their jobs and their happiness. But that's not where the discussion is held. The discussion is held at this representation through the signals and media play along with that, and media do that. And so while the New York Times goes and visits diners and finds people saying stuff that seems crazy, well, they believe it. It doesn't matter what they believe. It's not about belief, it's about belonging.

And in the Gutenberg parenthesis there's the first plug right behind me. Here I, you know. I talk about the need for a pluralistic society where people have a sense of belonging to multiple competing poles on their lives, so they don't feel that lonely, they don't feel that separated from everything, that they do feel that they're with other people, that they can go someplace and talk about this and find that they're not alone. And I don't blame the Internet for this. I don't think that's about an effort. I think I'm far more connected than I would otherwise be without the internet. But I think that people feel isolated and I've long said that I wish Facebook, from the beginning, had said that its mission was to make strangers less strange was to make strangers less strange.

0:32:43 - Paris Martineau
But its mission was to connect people. Facebook from the beginning should have said its mission is to help you figure out whether your college classmates are hot or not, because that was its mission from the beginning.

0:32:50 - Jeff Jarvis
That was its mission. Indeed it was, and at least somebody got a date out of it, even though the social network thinks he didn't, but he did.

0:32:59 - Paris Martineau
Well, these are great points, but I hear a whistle on the wind, a call coming over the airwaves. These are great points, but I hear a whistle on the wind, a call coming over the airwaves, and that's Leo Laporte telling us it's time for an ad break. So we better listen to him.

0:33:11 - Leo Laporte
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0:34:29 - Mikah Sargent
Let's do a little palette cleanser. I love that.

0:34:31 - Benito Gonzalez
What flavor lime uh flavor I think this is kind of a mystery flavor.

0:34:36 - Paris Martineau
It's okay, all right interesting honeydew, there was a it's uh this could be honeydew. Actually, in terms of the, I think a citrus was the right way to go.

0:34:45 - Jeff Jarvis
It's kind of it's a to be honeydew.

0:34:45 - Paris Martineau
Actually, in terms of the biggest, I think a citrus was the right way to go it's kind of it's been earnings week a lot of big you know announcements from various companies. One caught my eye from YouTube CEO, neil Mohan. He released his annual letter on Tuesday and noted one detail that I found really interesting is that TV he has overtaken mobile as the primary device for viewing YouTube. Yes, I thought that was fascinating. As someone who famously doesn't really watch YouTube videos, I'm curious does this align with?

either, but as someone who just bought a big new TV, I know I kind of wanted to segue into my TV discussion, but we'll get there. Micah, do you watch YouTube, and if so, how?

0:35:27 - Mikah Sargent
Oh my goodness, this is a pluralistic society. I feel a sense of belonging because I thought I was alone and not watching you it's so weird for people to not watch YouTube.

0:35:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't.

0:35:40 - Paris Martineau
And the thing is, I've realized at this point, if I've, if I've not gotten into watching YouTube, I can't start because I don't have that sort of time in my life.

0:35:47 - Mikah Sargent
no, you know what's worse than watching YouTube on on my phone, Figuring out a way to make it show up on the TV. So it is wild to me that people are watching it on the TV so much. What are they watching? Are they watching streams? Are they just hitting play and like continue? You know what? Actually, I was visiting some friends who, mind you, are what is the generation? Whatever the one after Generation Z Zoomers, Zoomers, thank you. We were at their house and for me, if I had people over, the way that I would handle sort of ambiance is by playing Spotify, Apple Music on one of the many smart speakers that's in the house. Right, the way that they do it is they pull up their little smart TV app to YouTube and they and play music videos. Play music videos, and what's worse is you have to use the left, right down up to type into the keyboard like some kind of animal, Like a savage.

0:36:48 - Leo Laporte
And here's what's worse right down up to type into the keyboard like some kind of an animal, Like a savage.

0:36:50 - Mikah Sargent
And here's what's worse it doesn't. This app, this smart app, isn't even good enough to have like a cueing feature. So after the song ends, then somebody else has to go up and do this. And I thought what? And I thought surely this is gonna be. And then, I kid you not and who knows, maybe this is just an Oregon thing, but I maybe it's just a portland thing. Very weird here. I've gone to two other places and I swear they were doing the exact same thing. So I think it's all the zoomers that are watching stuff on youtube all the time. Um, I almost wish that I we could like bring in kevin king, one of the producers, editors, on the network, because I know he's a big youtube watcher and and I'm always like what are you watching? Are you watching tutorials? How?

0:37:34 - Paris Martineau
can you spend enough time? People are watching crazy things. I've realized this through dating in New York. Whenever you're getting second date conversations, what sort of content you consume. There's a certain genre of men and women that's a YouTube person and it fascinates me.

0:37:47 - Leo Laporte
I will spend 30 minutes being like, so what do you?

0:37:49 - Paris Martineau
watch and how like I mean, they pay for YouTube. It's basically like their version of podcasts or TikToks, but it's longer, I don't know. I feel I'm very judicious about the podcasts I watch or listen to. I rarely ever watch podcasts, Though if you're watching ours, that's great. You are making the right choices.

0:38:11 - Benito Gonzalez
Okay, so I think I'm the only one here that actually-.

0:38:13 - Paris Martineau
I was wondering about Benito, our producer, tell us your YouTube habits.

0:38:17 - Benito Gonzalez
I watch a lot of YouTube, but I you know, there's music YouTube where there's a lot of, like music analysis. That's one of the branches of YouTube I watch a lot. I watch a lot of film YouTube, which is like what does that mean?

0:38:28 - Mikah Sargent
are you analyzing?

0:38:29 - Benito Gonzalez
films or film analysis or reviews or like how long are these videos?

0:38:34 - Paris Martineau
it depends.

0:38:34 - Benito Gonzalez
I'm sorry I sound like an alien some of them 15 minutes, some of them an hour or two.

0:38:38 - Paris Martineau
It really depends and you just sit down or tv and watch it for an hour well, I have a computer attached to my tv, so I do that.

0:38:46 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, okay, um oh, that makes it easier than what I'm trying to do to get it to play. Yeah.

0:38:52 - Benito Gonzalez
I'm just using the actual YouTube website and full screen on my TV.

0:38:56 - Mikah Sargent
Does the video? Because the two things that you mentioned music analysis is very audio based. And then you said film analysis. If we're not talking about visual effects and it's just somebody talking about, like, how a film is made, does that? Like, how often do you feel you are benefiting from the visual thing in front of you when you're watching it?

0:39:19 - Benito Gonzalez
very much, especially for film, because, like, they're showing you cuts or they're showing you shots okay that would make sense um for music, not so much, unless you know it's an interview with someone. You know I care. But also it's not really just like the branches of YouTube, it's like specific channels. It's like watching NBC. It's like being a fan of of um. Uh, remember back in the nineties of can't miss TV, like musty TV, it's like that.

You know, it's like does it have an auto, couple of shows that I watch on YouTube and they there's a new episode every week, so it's like that, oh, yeah, so you're waiting for it to come up.

0:39:53 - Mikah Sargent
You're like, okay, it's wednesday, I'm going to be able to watch this thing, yeah that I watch this guy's.

0:39:58 - Benito Gonzalez
Most people puts out a video every wednesday so I'm gonna watch that video on wednesday.

0:40:01 - Paris Martineau
You know it's like that most people I know who watch youtube consume it like that. They follow specific creators and then they consume yes or they're like I'm really in a roller coaster explainer video rabbit hole so I'm just gonna watch a lot of videos about roller coasters this a lot of that too.

0:40:17 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, there's a lot of deep, so am I the only one?

0:40:19 - Jeff Jarvis
here who's been to vidcon?

0:40:21 - Mikah Sargent
I have not the only hipster. Yes, you're the hipster amongst us.

0:40:24 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm the hipster amongst I'm the youth among you. Um, you know when you, when you go. I've written about it. Vidcon was a changing experience. It was amazing and it's more than YouTube now, but and I was last there before the pandemic but it's pretty amazing to see the devotion that people have to those creators and YouTube is their path to them. I think that that's the big difference here is that we may be interested in topics or news or genre, but a lot of them are about the relationships that they feel with those people.

0:40:59 - Mikah Sargent
Parasocial relationships yes.

0:41:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, the most amazing experience from VidCon was every year they have one or two mental health sessions and they're amazing.

They have young people in the room who will say to the stage has a licensed therapist and three or four YouTubers who have talked very publicly about their eating disorder or their mental health challenges or other things, and somebody will get up in the audience. A young person will get up in the audience and say you know, you saved my life and the person on stage will say no, you did. But the person this goes back to our prior discussion the person in the audience would say I knew I wasn't alone, I knew I wasn't weird, I knew I wasn't by myself and that was everything to them. And you can look at that and I'm sure some people would look at that the moral panickers among us and would say, oh well, they should be out on the playground with real people and not doing this right. But that's the problem. They couldn't find people like them where they are, but they could on YouTube. So I think that's a lot of it is that it's an entirely different relationship.

0:42:12 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean, I've been trying to like psychoanalyze myself as to why I'm not a person who watches YouTube videos, because when I was a kid, or like a teen, I watched YouTube.

I watched like sketch comedy, I mean. No, I think it's because I'm a news wonk and also I don't have the patience to sit down and watch a video Like nothing upsets me more than when I've gotten really into going to Orange Theory fitness classes. I could talk about that forever, but lately there's like a subreddit for it where they give you the preview of what's coming up the next day, including the workouts, and so I'll go there and be like, oh, what is this weird exercise thing? And I click the YouTube video they have linked and nothing upsets me more than when it's like a God knows a 45 second intro to it, I'm just like I don't have time for this.

0:42:58 - Mikah Sargent
It's like a recipe that you have to read online, but it's like you can't scroll through it because it's a video.

0:43:04 - Paris Martineau
And I hate that.

0:43:05 - Mikah Sargent
And here's the thing I will. With every ounce of my ability to learn something, I will make things so much harder for myself by reading how to do it before I ever will watch how to do it Because I don't like spending. It feels like I'm spending so much time.

0:43:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, because they're stretching it out to get more airtime.

0:43:26 - Mikah Sargent
And it's ridiculous, 100%, and it is ridiculous.

0:43:29 - Jeff Jarvis
There's people who do this. Well, I mean John and Hank Green, founders of VidCon, to me, are our masters of this. You know they have a conversation as the vlog brothers and they come on and they do. They can. They can interrogate a topic or a feeling for 567 minutes and I'm engaged by that. I do watch that. There are examples of good stuff, you know, but that's the thing about YouTube. It's all this different stuff.

0:43:56 - Mikah Sargent
There are things that get past my sort of ugh. I don't want to watch this. I will be honest that if I am watching something on YouTube, I'm probably doing it at 1.5 to 2x speed.

0:44:16 - Paris Martineau
I think that for me, the biggest thing is it is rare that anyone and by anyone I mean any personality or any kind of content gets my so focused attention that I'm like sitting and watching and listening I am an antsy person I totally agree yeah, that's why I love audiobooks, because I can do 50 000 other things while I'm listening to audiobooks and it makes me listen to it better, better, I am paying more attention to it because I'm doing my crocheting, or yeah'm crocheting, or I'm yeah, exactly Driving, yeah, driving, you know, shower, whatever it happens to be Crocheting and showering at the same time, trying to get a guest on this book Very wet heels.

0:44:59 - Mikah Sargent
Very, very wet.

0:45:01 - Benito Gonzalez
So you can't watch movies on TV, you can't watch movies then.

0:45:04 - Mikah Sargent
I do. No, that's the thing, benito, is that there are. There are movies and tv that that matter enough. They like they get past that. So I can, I can do that, it's just I guess I've never found much on youtube that for me works in that way, and it kind of bums me out because when I was in high school, um, one of the things that my little group of friends did and it's why I got into the field that I'm in at all in the first place was I did a web show with friends and I edited the video that we shot.

0:45:39 - Paris Martineau
Is this still available on the internet?

0:45:42 - Mikah Sargent
No, I very much have not made it available. Come on Chatroom, you could find it. It was a show called Seriously Guys, s-r-s-l-y Guys, and basically we would rant about something you know like seriously guys, and then we would offer solutions to the problem of whatever it was, we were talking about, and so we did.

You know, like people with road rage and different grammar things that we were hooked on at the time that's why it's not around anymore, because it's so cringy now, and different grammar things that we were hooked on at the time, that's why it's not around anymore, because it's so cringy now and, honestly, like that's how I got into video editing.

That's how, and at the time I was actually a big John and Hank Green fan Jeff, speaking of those two and certainly wanted to go to VidCon at the time. But as a and I'll throw up for a second as I say this word a creator myself, I think there's a level of knowing how the sausage gets made that ruins things for me, because another example of that is I used to and I still I do it for fun now but I used to have a little business where I made, I decorated like cake boss cakes, you know, like the ones that are shaped like different things and you use fondant and you make cool whatever, and I made enough cakes and ate enough cake scraps while I'm carving out different shapes that I started to really dislike cake, and so it was like how the cake gets made. I'm not big on cake anymore. And the same thing, I think, applies to sort of the podcast video landscape, where not a lot of it interests me because I guess I just know too much of the scenes or something.

0:47:17 - Paris Martineau
I don't know. It feels too much like work right.

0:47:19 - Mikah Sargent
Maybe that's what it is. I feel like. I'm consuming something that is related to work and that kind of has ruined it in a way.

0:47:27 - Benito Gonzalez
So a couple other things. Sorry, sports is the other thing. Like I don't watch SportsCenter, but I will watch clips on YouTube from SportsCenter. You know what I mean? Oh, interesting, I won't watch the whole show, but I want to watch what they talk about when they talk about the Warriors. I want to watch that, right. So, like that, those are the kind of stuff.

0:47:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, late night monologues, that's a big one, yeah.

0:47:49 - Paris Martineau
And all of this consumption of YouTube is on your TV, plugged into your laptop.

0:47:56 - Benito Gonzalez
Plugged into my desktop, which is my gaming computer.

0:47:59 - Jeff Jarvis
So I'm curious, if I may ask, if you each go to youtubecom right now?

0:48:04 - Mikah Sargent
what are?

0:48:04 - Jeff Jarvis
some of the things it's recommending to you.

0:48:06 - Mikah Sargent
Let's see, I have Chromebooks.

0:48:11 - Jeff Jarvis
I have John and Hank Green what are we talking about? We talking about the what's it recommending to you yeah, what's the what's your story? You go the home page of YouTube. What does it think you want to watch?

0:48:21 - Mikah Sargent
I see lo-fi hip-hop, radio beats to relax. I also see that. Then I see unlocking AI's potential.

0:48:29 - Paris Martineau
Reid Hoffman discusses super agency, which I know why that's there, because I had to. The last thing I listened or watched on YouTube was no Shazier clips, the character AI co-founder because there is this tube explaining yeah, that's whenever you don't want to, you know you're like, I know you don't you, I have this for a reason.

I swear um, okay, actually I have two that I do stand by. One is legend of zelda orchestra concert. Probably wouldn't listen to that, but I respect that it's there. And the one that I do stand by is big bear, bald eagle live nest cam one which don't know, but I'm gonna have to check that out later.

0:49:05 - Mikah Sargent
It's a live eagle cam that's great what do you know? Somebody found my use youtube username but hopefully I have all of those videos.

0:49:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh no, there are videos guys, don't, don't look it up bonito bonito, you gotta see it.

0:49:22 - Paris Martineau
No, no, no. We, we have to respect his privacy. You can't, we can't allow this.

0:49:27 - Mikah Sargent
Honestly I will say, if they're not locked away, that's on me. It's not real privacy, is it? Anyway? So the other one, maybe I got rid of the most cringy ones. Anyway, I'm not surprised to see NPR Tiny Desk, because, that is, I will use YouTube for that. I love Tiny Desk concerts and so NPR Tiny Desk desk submission is listed on here. And then I also see there are a couple of things that just look like ads, because one is for a severance thing which I haven't been watching seven season two yet, so I don't know why I'm getting that on the line Huh.

0:50:11 - Benito Gonzalez
So here's what my heavily curated YouTube page looks like yeah, tell us about yours. There's an MBA on TNT. There's a charismatic voice, she's a vocal coach. She's an opera singer who talks about singing, and then I don't know who some of these are. Some of these are science stuff. There's a film thing, there's some more basketball. So know, it's like this, heavily curated. This is only the stuff that I'm interested in. You know, and will you go and?

0:50:35 - Paris Martineau
watch these things from your discover page uh, well, because this is heavily curated.

0:50:41 - Benito Gonzalez
These are pretty much just channels that I already follow, so, like nice. Uh, yeah, micah, you're so cute seriously muffin tops you're buying jeans with your friends.

0:51:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, at the mall. Yes, just silly talking about it in the food court.

0:51:04 - Paris Martineau
It's so, it's beautiful, it's america. I've realized that I need to. Um, I also wanted to host a web series when I was a teenager, but I don't think I ever uploaded it onto YouTube, but somewhere in my parents' house are a bunch of old, like either VHS or like a tiny compact disc tape of a web series me and my friends recorded called the Blue Robin, that I need to find.

0:51:27 - Mikah Sargent
The Blue Robin. Yeah, it was really complicated complicated, jeff.

0:51:32 - Paris Martineau
What's your history before we move on?

0:51:34 - Jeff Jarvis
oh history. What are you being suggested? What's your? Suggestions oh, oh, oh, I forgot well, so you uh, hank and john green chromebooks um pump la mousse, which is a music group, that's jack conti um, which I like. And then this is weird I'll bet none of you fall asleep to the tv no, heavens.

No, that's so bad, no when you are older, it will happen. I predict I've made fun of my parents. They used to fall asleep to talk radio. That's how they turned into republicans. Um, uh, and I need to have the tv on the timer, but I don't want want to watch it, I don't want to be up with it, I just want a tiny little bit in the background. So occasionally, when I can, if it's, if it's, I'll watch Guy Fieri and just put that on and it goes on. If it's on that night, it'll just go on on streaming and then I fall asleep.

0:52:22 - Paris Martineau
Wow, you fall asleep to diners and that's amazing.

0:52:31 - Jeff Jarvis
I do. I. Have you ever met him? You should meet him. So here's the other thing that I'll do is that if I can't find anything on the channels on the old-fashioned tv, I'll go to youtube and for some reason I I saw videos from life in east germany, so now it thinks I want that all the time and I end up watching it more than you would think oh, I mean, you do want that, clearly Because it puts you to sleep, yeah, so that's what's on mine.

0:52:54 - Paris Martineau
Let me give you a brief update on my TV situation, micah, for context. For like weeks, I decided at the beginning of this year I wanted to get a new TV for the first time in 10 years. Because they were going to be expensive with tariffs and whatnot, and I decided, instead of just buying a TV and making the decision easy, I fell down seven rabbit holes and asked Leo for his recommendations.

0:53:18 - Leo Laporte
That was your big mistake.

0:53:18 - Paris Martineau
And then I know oh no. I, I hundreds of tabs, hours of my life, but I finally made a decision. I got the Samsung S90 something a 65 inch QD OLED TV.

0:53:35 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, you got the QD OLED.

0:53:37 - Paris Martineau
Leo said I had to get. Qd OLED. He was like the quantum dots are so important. I didn't ask why I also got a Panasonic Blu-ray player, because I'm now a physical media owner. Oh, you're.

0:53:52 - Mikah Sargent
My fiancé is very much that now, and I actually have come to respect it because a lot of the stuff that we've wanted to watch has disappeared from whatever streaming services, and so I'm getting it. I'm understanding why that's important.

0:54:06 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, because stuff just disappears sometimes and it's like I shouldn't be allowing this. I need to have access to the things I want to own.

0:54:14 - Benito Gonzalez
Hot tip you should also rip those into files, because those disks aren't going to last forever.

0:54:20 - Paris Martineau
Yes.

I guess I should, but then I need to find a way to get a disk to my computer and that'll be a problem for next year's Paris, but so far it's been really lovely computer and that'll be a problem for next year's Paris, but so far it's been really lovely. I'm currently watching. This was all started because I wanted to watch David Lynch's Wild at Heart fantastic movie. It's not available for streaming anywhere in the US so I did use some archive IS thing. That was terrible quality so I bought that on Blu-ray. But now I'm on a David Lynch kick and I'm watching Twin Peaks for the first time.

0:54:55 - Leo Laporte
And gosh guys.

0:54:56 - Paris Martineau
I know I'm decades late, but what a good show.

0:55:00 - Jeff Jarvis
That started alongside Entertainment Weekly, the magazine I started, and so we were nuts for it in the early days of reviewing it and doing stories about it.

0:55:09 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I know I've been trying to find episode by episode reviews of when it came out because I want to see what people are talking about it.

0:55:17 - Benito Gonzalez
But honestly, I should look at the.

0:55:18 - Paris Martineau
Entertainment Weekly, like archives, is what I should do.

0:55:21 - Benito Gonzalez
That's like the origin of prestige TV.

0:55:24 - Paris Martineau
I know it's so fun and it's just fun the fact that TV viewing audiences around the nation were exposed to David Lynch. Of all freaks, fantastic Of all freaks. I mean he's definitely a freak in comparison to what you'd normally be getting for television and it's delightful.

0:55:45 - Mikah Sargent
Especially. I mean, just watch an episode of that and you'll see it.

0:55:50 - Paris Martineau
I am at the end of season one. If anybody sends me spoilers, I will put a hit in your family.

0:55:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Don't do it, don't tell me the funny thing is, it's a show that doesn't really have spoilers. To this extent, you still can't figure out what's going on.

0:56:05 - Paris Martineau
I know.

0:56:05 - Jeff Jarvis
That's part of the thing of.

0:56:07 - Paris Martineau
I know that's part of the thing of why I wanted to see episode by episode views, because it's kind of hard to follow. But I also want to hear people talking about the themes of it. But I don't want to go to Reddit or something because I don't want to get spoiled for key plot developments, even though I know it's not. Like I've somehow managed to learn literally nothing about Twin Peaks in my nearly three decades of existence and I'd like to keep it that way until I'm done.

0:56:36 - Mikah Sargent
But oh yeah, are you liking? Let's go back to the the TV, how you said. You have a blu-ray connected to it. Do you use streaming services and, if so, are you using Samsung's built-in app or do you have a set-top box? How do you use your TV?

0:56:53 - Paris Martineau
is particularly egregious about scooping up all your data and I also just don't like the UX of Samsung's design at all. I don't particularly like the Apple UX. I think I just got too used to my Roku, but my Roku again is like nearly 10 years old, along with the terrible-.

0:57:24 - Mikah Sargent
And that thing also phones home a lot.

0:57:27 - Paris Martineau
It's also a mess. So I'm just like, all right, I've got this Apple thing that I bought a year ago because I needed a way to easily airplay Love Island illegal Twitch streams from my phone to my TV.

0:57:38 - Mikah Sargent
Fair enough.

0:57:40 - Paris Martineau
It works in 4K. It's honestly incredible. Leo also convinced me to get a 65 inch TV because I measured the amount of space between my console and couch and it's insane the difference.

0:57:54 - Mikah Sargent
Sebastian was telling me, you are a traders girly, like I am and like he is, do you?

0:57:59 - Paris Martineau
watch the traders. Oh, Sebastian, or sorry, Sebastian is right. Traders is the best.

0:58:05 - Mikah Sargent
We need to. We are gonna have to outside of the show because they'll get annoyed probably. We need to talk about the Traitors. We do.

0:58:12 - Paris Martineau
Everybody who's listening. You should watch the Traitors. You should watch the Traitors. It's a fantastic show. It's great, it's a delight.

0:58:19 - Mikah Sargent
Well done, it is well done.

0:58:20 - Paris Martineau
Well done and just a fantastic time. Jeff said I got to go. I got to go Jeff said we can't be talking about any of this reality TV stuff on my show.

0:58:32 - Mikah Sargent
Jeff is going to be on the Traitors next season, so he just can't talk about it.

0:58:35 - Paris Martineau
In this. To this end, you're watching Intelligent Machines with me Paris Martineau, jeff Jarvis, who's grabbed something mysterious from his bookcase, and Micah Sargent.

0:58:46 - Mikah Sargent
And now it's break time.

0:58:48 - Paris Martineau
That was break time. We don't have ads, so now we're going straight back.

0:58:49 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, that's right it, and now it's break time. That was break time. We don't have ads, so now we're going straight back.

0:58:51 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's right, it was just that one.

0:58:52 - Mikah Sargent
It was just that one.

0:58:52 - Paris Martineau
We're back. Listen, the AI people are coming at some point. Jeff, what did you get?

0:58:55 - Benito Gonzalez
Ooh, oh, wow.

0:59:01 - Jeff Jarvis
That was my cover. The year's best show. David Lynch brings his bizarre vision to prime time in Twin Peaks vision to prime time in twin wow, that is cool, you write that.

0:59:13 - Paris Martineau
No, that are the editors.

0:59:14 - Jeff Jarvis
You're just the editor. Send me a photo of there. Well do I? Put a photo of the in the, in the chat I can. I can maybe find one and give you for free, but in the chat it's for sale. Somebody's selling, somebody's selling it.

0:59:28 - Mikah Sargent
On eBay.

0:59:29 - Jeff Jarvis
On eBay. Yeah, yeah, I'm leaving Discord.

0:59:32 - Paris Martineau
yes, For $65? Yeah, yeah, woo-hoo.

0:59:37 - Mikah Sargent
You should reach out to the person and say I get a cut of that right.

0:59:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, this is the first cover of EW.

0:59:44 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, the very first.

0:59:46 - Jeff Jarvis
You're on the Grammys yes, yes what was that.

0:59:49 - Mikah Sargent
Do you know what that was edited in? Do you know what program would have been used at the time?

0:59:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Funny? You should ask, because indeed my wife set us up. We were the first major national magazine that was entirely Macintosh and Quark no way.

1:00:03 - Paris Martineau
That's awesome. Wasn't that how you guys met? Is her tech?

1:00:08 - Jeff Jarvis
support for EW. She trained all the editors of time inc on on how this is a cursor, this is how to work and, um, I hated the computer is that what she sounds?

1:00:18 - Mikah Sargent
does she sound like kermit the frog?

1:00:20 - Jeff Jarvis
no, oh, okay, that's what I sounded like when I trained people. Oh, gotcha, gotcha, this is a cursor. Um, uh, so, uh, she was, she's a genius. And so I decided that I really wanted to avoid the computer department when there are A-techs horrible computers and I said we can do this on Macintosh. My wife said, yeah, we can do this on Macintosh. And so she came over and she set up the first big network for it. We bought our scanner. Wow, that was a big deal. We produced the whole magazine. Quark was so early you couldn't rotate text, so photo credits had to be more.

1:00:53 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, that is so cool. What a world.

1:00:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. So let's see here, what else do we have?

1:00:59 - Mikah Sargent
How were ads sent to you at the time to put in? Would that happen?

1:01:04 - Jeff Jarvis
So we would send the Quark page out and send the photos out separately, and those had to be scanned in by big scanners. The scanner for publication was as wide as this room, wow did you ever scan your body with it or face?

1:01:19 - Benito Gonzalez
no, I do it. So you put a little tiny, you uh slide on a on a drum that go around okay yeah, so they had to do separations, but it had to become separations.

1:01:30 - Jeff Jarvis
So, uh, yeah, that's how we, how we did it, and uh, but you could or it was the first time you could, uh truly, uh, edit to space. It was whizzy, wig. What you see is what?

1:01:40 - Mikah Sargent
yeah, that just didn't exist.

1:01:42 - Paris Martineau
That's so cool and how long did you use that for?

1:01:46 - Leo Laporte
park I mean, that's after I was gone.

1:01:50 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, interesting what else is here, spike Lee. I'm more interested in the ads on the back. Those are fun.

1:01:58 - Paris Martineau
I will say. One of my favorite things about looking at older archival magazines is the ads. When are these, from what year?

1:02:06 - Jeff Jarvis
This is from 1990.

1:02:09 - Mikah Sargent
Nice, here's the other thing.

1:02:11 - Jeff Jarvis
So here's the silly thing that I I also invented. So this is a, this is a hard card. Oh, look right in the middle, so you could uh take this and, uh, use it to check off the things that were in the magazine to take to the store with you, because people still bought music in stores oh, so you say I want this, I want this, I want this book.

1:02:33 - Mikah Sargent
What is it? Music movies? Movies and then on the other side um I would be a sucker for that in the middle I love a print.

1:02:43 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, I love a little interactive portion that was expensive to do, so they killed that I was going to say that had to be expensive.

1:02:50 - Mikah Sargent
We have the Art of Bart. Oh, my goodness, making of the Simpsons, the Making of the Simpsons.

1:02:56 - Paris Martineau
These are beautiful designs.

1:02:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, well it. How big was the team? How big was the team? It was small. It was smaller than any. It was a weekly magazine. It was smaller than any monthly magazine in the company because, as I said, the prospectus, um, I should share this sometime. I have the prospectus for the magazine that I can put online. Uh, I said that cacti. The critics are like cacti.

1:03:20 - Mikah Sargent
They need little feed, feeding or water yeah, because if you poke them too much, then it's that's whenever they really are a problem. Right, it's not?

1:03:29 - Paris Martineau
explode, yeah, yeah anyway, sorry, not ideal no, no, no, sorry, that was no sorry, I will always take something mysterious being pulled from the bookshelf for show and tell. So uh, um speaking, go ahead I was gonna say uh, now ostensibly we can move on to the intelligent machines portion of intelligent machine and open up the AI box so people can get mad at us again. Jeff, do you want to talk about Reuters winning the first major AI copyright case in the US?

1:04:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, but a judge soundly defeated a company that was taking Reuters content from Westlaw and the issue gets very dirty because it was around how Westlaw labels cases and that was the value they add and they created a kind of course out of this and the suit was going to cost them so much they stopped doing it in 2020. But the judge said none of Ross's possible defenses holds water. I reject them all, but I don't know. And fair use was dealt with and they decided this was not fair use and so that concerns me some, because I do argue that fair use is very much here. But if I put this yeah, this is from Wired.

1:04:57 - Paris Martineau
Notably, judge Bibas ruled in Reuters' favor on the question of fair use. The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims that they use copyrighted materials illegally themselves against claims they use copyrighted materials legally. The idea underpinning this, which Jeff has talked a lot, is that it's sometimes legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission to create parody works, to do non-commercial research or news production. Thomson Reuters prevailed on like two of four factors with like when it comes to a fair use test. They specifically look at either the reason behind the work, the nature of the work, like whether it's poetry, nonfiction, private letters or something. The amount of copyright material used and how the use impacts the market value of the original.

1:05:44 - Jeff Jarvis
So I put up a law firm's analysis of this in the rundown and they say this is mskcom.

So I don't know who they are, but Mitchell, silverberg and Knopf LLP. The Ross case provides a window into how courts may deal with training issues and other AI litigation. It is nearly certain to be briefed in numerous other cases nationwide, likely very soon, and picked apart extensively. That said, it is a case with many specific quirks that could limit its applicability. For one, this is not a generative AI case and, as usual, the fair use finding is fact specific. It was about these headings and things that Westlaw and Thompson Reuters added to the value of cases and not broadly applicable to a multitude of other contexts. However, the principles discussed, such as the Warhol formulation of factor one, which you've talked about, paris on the show, the transformative nature of intermediate copying and the factor four question of public interest I won't go into it will be raised in other cases and familiarity with this case will be crucial going forward. So this is the first shot here and the forces of fair use lost the first shot.

1:06:57 - Paris Martineau
I mean by the forces of fair use. You mean the AI companies and you who are arguing that it's fair use to scoop up the work of journalists and others and use it for commercial purposes.

1:07:09 - Jeff Jarvis
And take lollipops from your mouths, you poor children.

1:07:12 - Paris Martineau
yes, Take lollipops from the children's mouths and then sell it to other people, being like here's a lollipop. Would you like to pay five dollars?

1:07:19 - Jeff Jarvis
for this. It has paris's spit on it. It's even more valuable now many people are saying that yes, so I don't know where I went with that.

1:07:34 - Paris Martineau
Oh the other main quest like case is coming up with this, jeff, you can recall. I know that there's obviously one with the New York Times and OpenAI. Are there any other major ones that people should be?

1:07:46 - Jeff Jarvis
on the lookout for, yeah, there's various authors that put up cases and we'll see there's meta is, in deep doo-doo, a legal term because they acquired a book set that was not necessarily.

1:08:07 - Paris Martineau
Acquired is a word to use for it. I believe they illegally downloaded it.

1:08:13 - Mikah Sargent
You wouldn't download a car.

1:08:19 - Jeff Jarvis
You wouldn't download a car, you wouldn't download a work set. So and I think the discovery is bringing out a problematic communication within the corporation about that, so that's coming up as well. I separate this always into three things. There's training, as a question of whether that's fair use and transformative Is it different or not? Then there's acquisition Did you transformative? Is it different or not? Then there's acquisition Did you get access to this legally or not? Did you have a subscription to the New York Times and hey, the machine reads the New York Times right alongside me, just like my kid, right or did you download it surreptitiously and illegally? And then, third, the use of it. If you are using it in RAG to be able to quote at length, then yeah, you should license that, you should have a deal for that. That's different from training. The question is will the courts and will legislators separate those three things or not? So far they kind of have been, but this is the first time that they. But again, this is not about generative AI, this is not about training, this is about legal headings. I also for my book that I'm writing now about the line of type.

I investigated a case from the mid-1800s where a stenographer took down cases in court and the question was well, who owns those cases then? Is it the people and the courts, the public, or is it the stenographer? And, uh, the stenographer. And then another stenographer came along and built something on top of that and, um, in that case the second stenographer was sound, founder of used, fair use and that people you could, and the issue there was you couldn't, no one could own prohibitively the court cases of america. Could own prohibitively the court cases of america. That that's changed because companies like west law add these proprietary organizations and taxonomies and headings and labels and then they own that because that's legitimate. That is how they they add, add, they they treat the information. So this is all going to get very complicated yeah, yeah it already feels, let's dive in.

Yeah, it already is very complicated.

1:10:21 - Paris Martineau
Sorry, you asked me, I know you are and let's not to make this any more complicated, but since you mentioned the meta case, I do want to highlight it, just because some really I think funny details have come out in discovery. Really, I think funny details have come out in Discovery. This is a copyright case raised by book authors alleging that Meta illegally trained its AI models on pirated books. Last month, meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen. This is from Ars Technica. Libgen includes tens of millions of pirated books. Details around this torrenting have been kind of murky until last week when Meta's unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence shows that.

Meta torrented at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna's Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z Library and LibGen, and that's in addition to another 80.6 terabytes of data it had torrented from LibGen, which is a crazy amount of data it is.

1:11:33 - Jeff Jarvis
And LibGen is weird because my books aren't in it. It's not Books 3. Books 3 has been used by others. Do you feel uh miffed that you're very much so, very much so.

1:11:44 - Paris Martineau
Yes, I'm pissed, I'm not in it he said, I'm not miffed, I'm pissed I'm pissed let me be clear here I'm piffed, I'm piffed uh. Some of these emails highlighted in the uh discovery I think are quite funny, including one from a meta research engineer who wrote torrenting from a corporate laptop. Doesn't feel right. Smiley emoji.

1:12:08 - Mikah Sargent
Smiley emoji.

1:12:11 - Paris Martineau
Like oh, it's so cheesy. He expressed quote concern about using meta IP addresses to load, through torrents, pirate content, you know not ideal, not what you really want to be doing at work.

1:12:26 - Jeff Jarvis
So yeah that's funny.

1:12:30 - Mikah Sargent
I didn't get a chance to hear what y'all's thoughts were on, and forgive me to those of you who did just a quick little recap of the conversation around Deep Thought and OpenAI, getting upset about how maybe some of its models were being used for training. What was the general sentiment here about sort of a company, how maybe some of its models were being used for training? What was the general sentiment here about sort of a company that has been, as you put it, accused of taking suckers out of the mouths of journalists and reselling them to others having a little bit of, perhaps, its own medicine? Was it schadenfreude, the panel over or were there any alternate takes on that?

1:13:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris.

1:13:26 - Paris Martineau
I wasn't. Did you guys discuss this last week?

1:13:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, not last week. We did at some point, I can't remember when, I'm not sure.

1:13:32 - Paris Martineau
I think it's incredibly funny.

1:13:34 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, it's funny.

1:13:35 - Paris Martineau
I think it's very funny for them to cry like oh no, they may have stolen our model, our training data. It's like, my guys, that's kind of your whole thing. You're defending that in court. That that's kind of cool for and jeff is defending that every week on the podcast. That it's kind of cool for you to do that so here's's my fun, here's my.

1:13:57 - Jeff Jarvis
So in this game of this hall of mirrors, micah, I go one more mirror. So we have Kevin Roos, who I tend to make fun of with some frequency in the New York Times. This was in last week's rundown had a story how helpful is operator open AI's new AI agent? And so he went through and used it for various tasks, and this amused the hell out of me. Operator also failed at a bunch of other tasks and revealed its limitations. Oh, what might those be? Well, the first one is it couldn't scan my recent columns and add them to my personal website because Operator's browser was blocked from entering the Times website. Gee, why would that be, prenz? It's also blocked from a number of other sites, including Reddit, youtube. The Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement related to training AI models. That's why it couldn't get in, kevin. So it didn't fail. It did the thing that your company wanted it to do, which is to say no, kevin, I can't do that. I won't do that.

1:14:54 - Mikah Sargent
I'm sorry, Kevin, I can't do that right now and I won't.

1:14:57 - Paris Martineau
I cannot do that, Kevin. That is funny.

1:14:59 - Jeff Jarvis
That was a little Easter egg to me. I enjoyed that.

1:15:02 - Paris Martineau
That's delightful.

1:15:09 - Mikah Sargent
It's odd how much I can understand both.

Maybe it's not odd, I understand both aspects, both points of view here, the regular kind of argument and counter argument that comes up with the AI stuff, and I tend to be very Vulcan in where my, where my official line is drawn, and so I do fall more on the side of Jeff, in the sense of like, if you can argue that you know laying down a piece of paper and me reading that piece of paper and then using what I've received from that piece of paper to inform a conversation that I have later in the day, all of that, and that's where I say Vulcan, the logic of it makes sense to me, and so I do tend to fall vulcan, the logic of it makes sense to me, and so I do tend to fall more on that side of it. But then there are times where my hackles do get a little raised when it does feel like it's, um, maybe it's. Is it the scope? Maybe it's the scope of the thing, it's just like a wholesale uh and it's also like to what end is my question?

1:16:22 - Paris Martineau
like an example I've been thinking about, uh to. Just a couple days ago I was talking to a news executive who said part of her daily routine now she understands that these um llms and chatbots have their problems. Part of her daily routine is she'll ask like chat, gpt or one of these other chatbots have their problems. Part of her daily routine is she'll ask like ChatGPT or one of these other chatbots to kind of like summarize like the last 24 hours, like big tech news or something like that, and she'll use that as a jumping off point to kind of kick around different ideas for her week. And I'm just like, if we enter in a world where anybody can conceivably do that with any of these products and it actually works well, as these companies intend them to do, what is, what is the point of even this podcast, much less my job as a journalist to be creating news? Who is going to ever be seeking out journalism at its source, or even commentary or summary at its source, instead of just talking to a chap.

1:17:21 - Mikah Sargent
I want to hear jeff's take on that, but I also want to ask where is this person doing this? Because I didn't think any of them had that level of up-to-date information that they could just go that was my first question too.

1:17:33 - Paris Martineau
That answer has not yet been responded to. But listen, I'm all that was.

1:17:38 - Jeff Jarvis
That was my first thought as well is it just making up, it's like yeah well, perplexity, perplexity has has okay, because it's it could be perplexity plus but yeah, what's your, what's your take on that jeff?

because so I, I had a conversation with, with the president and two editors from a well-known publication not yours paris this last week and and I was talking about the challenge of discoverability and I've argued this in the show before I wish that let's say that what if the top 20 tech news sites got together? I know that's odd because you're competitive, but what if you got together and you said to we're going to create an API to our news and we're going to say to the AI companies you can have it, but under our conditions. You're going to brand us, you're going to site us, you're going to link to us, you're going to pay us, whatever those may be. I think that in both a generative world and an agentic world, we're going to have to start to go there, and the deals to date are not that at all. They aren't licensing deals, they're shut up about legislation and lobbying and litigation. The question is how do we I hate this word proactively enter into this so that if we know people are going to do it that way, then how are we involved?

So Google just showed off a new search. Now I don't think I have it in this rundown. I had it in open. Jason had it in AI Inside, where you come in and you ask a question about how to make pasta for this or that or that, and it will give you the answer and that's scaring everybody to death. But it will use citations. It's a new version of search.

The other thing that's gonna happen is within a given site. I mean, I predict that soon, when I come to the information, I should have that kind of search there. You know, what's the latest about is something that I should ask rather than just waiting for it to present to me or tell me, summarize all of the copyright cases around AI, and the information has covered that and it should be able to come back and let it be relevant to me in a way that I can ask that. So it can be at a micro level, at the information that is a brand, or at a macro level, at Google or Pluriplexity and how do we play in that world is something we've got to figure out strategically. We can't just complain about it and ignore it.

1:20:05 - Paris Martineau
Isn't this? I mean, I'm glad you took a long walk on the beach with your news executives.

1:20:11 - Leo Laporte
It does seem like to steal a joke that Micah just made in the chat.

1:20:14 - Paris Martineau
It does seem like it's rubbed off, because this seems like it's kind of what the Washington Post has announced, if not implemented. I don't know whether they've implemented it or not.

1:20:24 - Jeff Jarvis
They said they're going to have it. Oh, their crappy search yeah.

1:20:33 - Paris Martineau
Oh, it's awful. Interstitial, or like part at the right above the beginning of the story where it could say something like oh, here's a summary of the history of the copyright cases related to this, and the issue is that these products are not mature. Not, they're not only not mature enough to be able to do this, the way that they're currently built, they have no understanding of truth versus falsity, and I don't understand how that is ever going to be addressed.

Yeah, the BBC, just Because it doesn't the way that the my understanding is the way that these products are made. They're not. They don't have an understanding of truth, nor is there a way for them to get that, because they don't understand concepts like that. It is simply filling in words in a way that is increasingly advanced.

1:21:22 - Jeff Jarvis
That's absolutely true. Number one, they have no sense of meaning. And number two, they are random, so you will not get the same answer twice, which makes it terribly unreliable. But Jan LeCun, in a piece in the Guardian, talked about that from Vermetta last week, where he thinks the next leap in AI is going to be teaching them reality that we only have five fingers. And this is how meat looks when it's cut or when the ball falls off the table it still exists, which we know, but the machine doesn't doesn't. And Jensen Wong, at his last keynote, talked about how they're training automobiles for this kind of sense of reality. Now, that's a physical reality. Can they go to other senses of reality? I don't know, but that's got to be the next challenge.

1:22:11 - Paris Martineau
Okay, I've got two follow-up questions on that, on the notion that the next step for these AI developers is to teach their chatbots a sense of reality. One are there any signs that people are doing that or any signs as to what that would look like in practice? And two, given everything we've learned about Meta and Twitter and YouTube and all these other social media firms attempts to implement reality on their social platforms through moderation, fact-checking programs, that, if you're viewing it from a purely cynical, capitalistic perspective, it blew up in their faces I mean not even whose reality. The idea of them trying to implement truth versus fiction in the platform ended up being a bust for them because suddenly they became responsible for when it was wrong and when it was right, but that wasn't in agreement with whatever political parties in power. So why? On the second point, it seems unlikely that these companies, given everything that's happened with their Web 2.0 or Web 1.0 predecessors, would be game to potentially make those same mistakes.

1:23:28 - Jeff Jarvis
To the second point, I don't know that it'll be these companies that'll take the challenge. It may be academics somewhere who worry about this. In terms of the reality piece, I think it's too limited. I was really struck in Jensen Wong's last keynote and I think I mentioned this on the show where he talks about the digital twins and I'm fascinated by this. So he shows images that a factory has a digital twin and for every moving robot in that factory it is looking like a chess game. Every agent in it is looking five steps ahead. If this happens, if that happens, if this happens, that happens, what made the personal computer succeed as a business? It was the spreadsheet. It was the ability to ask what if and to change visions was the spreadsheet. It was the ability to ask what if and to change visions of the future. So now what Wong says is that all these factories have digital twins that operate up in the cloud. Self-driving air quotes, cars have a digital twin that is trying to see what could come next and knowing what it will do.

1:24:38 - Mikah Sargent
It lets you run over people and drop genuinely. It lets you drop shells on humans without actually having to do that in real life, which gives those robots the AI that is within the robots, the ability to understand how to prevent that from happening. Exactly. You can do things like oil spills, you know, and you don't get the situation like that first scene in A Bug's Life where the leaf falls down in front of the ants and then they can't go anywhere because they don't know what they're supposed to do and that specialist has to come out and lead them around. The leaf Right Is able to learn what it needs to do. Yeah, digital I. It's funny. It's weird that we both kind of arrive at this, because I think the idea of digital twins at first was very goofy to me when I didn't understand it.

1:25:22 - Paris Martineau
It's a very goofy name.

1:25:24 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's got a goofy name. That's why, as I've gotten to learn more about it and yes, this ability to run simulation on simulation on simulation is super, super helpful when it comes to this kind of a thing, right, and the processing that can happen there that you wouldn't get otherwise is pretty neat.

1:25:42 - Jeff Jarvis
So Paris may be wondering why did I bring this up? To answer her simple question Because I'm not sure that it's the reality as a whole that matters. It's that it can give me. Imagine if we had this for our lives. There are times when I'm supposed to go on a trip and I don't want to go on the trip. What if I go on the trip? What if I don't go on the trip? What if I could run my digital twin simulations and it shows me? Well, jeff, you'll be happy if you go on the trip, because you were happy in the last 10 trips. Jeff, you were miserable, you should just stay home.

1:26:13 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, you're going to have to go over a bridge if you go on this trip, and you'll be well, there is that too it would know that about me.

1:26:18 - Mikah Sargent
Um so could you get it to tell you. It's like show me the one worst scenario, I mean that's what I my brain immediately this is the one where the plane crashes, I'm gonna fall off the bridge these days.

1:26:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Um so true too soon. My joke about this micah because I I I gravitated to this too is there's a matrix, but we're not in it. Yeah.

1:26:42 - Mikah Sargent
Ooh, that's good.

1:26:42 - Jeff Jarvis
There is a matrix around us and we can't see it now, but it's out there and if we have a digital twin, it's predicting this stuff. So is that enough reality? Is that enough reality to say, okay, I only had a certain number of parameters to figure out your possible futures, but I figured them out in a way that you can understand and it's good enough for you? I don't think it works. I think the news industry is trying to say is this going to replace us? And then it tries to force it to do that. I think that's a dumb use. It's a minor use. There's lots of ways to summarize news. There's lots of ways to get headlines. We have that structure now.

I don't think that's the best use of this technology uh, and neither do companies like nvidia what does nvidia think the best use is digital twins, things like digital twins, yeah, yeah, yeah, because they're selling twins and we think of them as a hardware company just selling chips. They have a whole stack and so they have how do you put it? I mean, it's like three versions. You have, um, the computer in the car, then you have the computer, uh, you have the digital twin of the car, and then you have the, the trained model that uh, uh, communicates with both, and it's kind of a triad there of how those operate together. And NVIDIA sells a lot of that.

1:28:06 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, they're also, of course, trying to solve for the breaking of Moore's law, as we quickly come up against that and doing that through computation as well, and kind of again, moore's law worked until we're coming up against what seems to be the suggestion that actually these microchips can't keep getting as small as we want them to, and so now we've got to look it's already been being used in many ways, but improved upon even more to use AI to figure out where the puck is going to be, so that the processor skates to where the puck is going to be, using the physical transistor real estate that is right now in order to improve upon processing times, even though the hardware is a limitation and could continue to be. So, yeah, they. It's kind of interesting some of the stuff that they're working on um. It's nvidia and microsoft actually work together in that digital twin space, because it does creep into um. At the time it did.

Now we know, know that Microsoft is completely detaching itself from HoloLens, but at the time there was an aspect of the digital twin coming together with HoloLens 2, so that not only could you train your robots, but you could also, almost like the Sims, go into build mode and see a bunch of different ways to figure out what is the best way to build a warehouse or a manufacturing plant that has the best outlines and the best ways through the plant where you're getting fewer injuries, you're getting the most productive kind of paths and and seeing how those play out where you know.

This is as an aside for the time city planners and other people who work on any physical manifestation that deals with humans, there were, there are some who would build a thing temporarily so let's say it was somebody designing a university, a new place in a university. They would build what they could, right the buildings, but the paths they would kind of have temporary paths and they'd let the humans go into that space and use them how they saw fit and then make the permanent paths afterward so that you didn't get things like elephant paths running between, which are those areas that get worn down over time, because that's the actual point that people want to go to, you know, between two places, and I think that or not. I think, but genuinely that is what we see with this digital twin aspect is you can more accurately predict where those elephant paths would end up, for example.

1:30:56 - Jeff Jarvis
And Micah when you and I watched a prior um and video yeah, that's right yeah, uh, keynote, we I I remember maybe I'm speaking for myself, but I think I was speaking for both of us we were wowed at the scale of it. Yes, he showed. It went on and on and you knew how powerful each chip was, and then each uh rack was, and then how many racks there were. And so these become trivial expensive environmentally, but trivial to then compute a thousand different futures for yourself. Ask a simple question, paris, and see what you get.

1:31:33 - Paris Martineau
I'm just imagining racks upon racks of chips as far as the eye can see and I'm it's Willy Wonka's chocolate chip factory with that, you're watching intelligent machines with me. Paris martineau, uh, chocolate chip man, micah sergeant and uh jeff jarvis who's?

1:31:55 - Mikah Sargent
not what so yeah he didn't get. I was gonna say I'm, you know, I'm really mad that it's very, get a little peanut butter cookies.

1:31:59 - Jeff Jarvis
You know I'm really mad that it's very hard to find peanut butter cookies out in the real world. Wait, is it really? Yes, it is.

1:32:07 - Leo Laporte
Where are you?

1:32:08 - Jeff Jarvis
looking.

1:32:08 - Mikah Sargent
I think they crumble. There's places because of allergies.

1:32:12 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I don't want. Maybe it's that true, maybe some of the places where they just stop carrying them, and I think, how could you you?

1:32:21 - Mikah Sargent
should have peanut butter cookies everywhere. There should be a requirement don't you think? Cookies are amazing.

1:32:24 - Jeff Jarvis
They are cookies hands down? Yeah, yeah, I knew I liked micah. Are you talking about? Those peanut butter cookies oh you know, like a homemade with the yes no, I feel like those are the classic ones you see, uh, yeah, like they're a little gomed.

1:32:39 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, no, I've never thought about?

1:32:41 - Paris Martineau
I never thought about pressing it with a fork wait, that's what are you pressing with a? Fork that's.

1:32:46 - Mikah Sargent
That's like the classic chat room.

1:32:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, jeff, they don't know they don't know, they don't know, I don't know.

1:32:52 - Paris Martineau
Okay, peanut butter good luck cutting the ad in between this I tried here's a beautiful.

1:32:59 - Mikah Sargent
This is a real. Well, actually I can't say that it's real. I don't know. It looks real. It could be a fake peanut butter cookie.

1:33:03 - Jeff Jarvis
There are only five fingers. Oh, look at these. Yeah, look at these. Entertaining with Steph, oh, okay.

1:33:08 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

1:33:21 - Mikah Sargent
I didn't realize. I assumed the. I assumed the wind kissed it.

1:33:22 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I'm going to make peanut butter cookies now I'm going to eat the remnants of my hazelnut cake, hazelnut chocolate cake after this, and it's going to be great.

1:33:31 - Mikah Sargent
Micah doesn't want to hear the word cake. Yeah, remember, I've got a ring.

1:33:36 - Paris Martineau
Sorry, sorry, my, my baked good. Wait, the one from the holidays? No, this was from Friday, it was my birthday last week and I had a birthday party and I got a giant chocolate cake Sorry, chocolate baked good with hazelnut frosting and it is delicious, and I made the correct size choice, which is more than enough for everybody, and then also a like fourth of it was available for me to take home and eat over the last week.

1:34:08 - Jeff Jarvis
And how was the caviar Paris?

1:34:10 - Mikah Sargent
oh, it was so good, jeff, it was others, I went caviar, not with the cake, not with a cake.

1:34:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, last week the reason I wasn't here is I went to a little tasting.

1:34:24 - Leo Laporte
At this great restaurant 63.

1:34:25 - Paris Martineau
Clinton Would recommend it to anybody if they want a less expensive Michelin star option in New York City. And it was great I got the caviar hand roll add-on and it was very fun. It's always fun going to a fancy restaurant alone too, because then everybody takes very good care of you. I got a bunch of drinks.

1:34:45 - Jeff Jarvis
It was fun. You told him it was your birthday.

1:34:47 - Paris Martineau
I hope, oh yes, um, I got like a little birthday thing I got a celebratory I I wrote it down somewhere because it was so good. It was like a strange mixed cocktail. Um, I got this great seat right at the chef's counter, um to like oh, that's cool, oh, that is.

1:35:03 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you seem like the type who would appreciate a high tea.

1:35:09 - Paris Martineau
I love a high tea I haven't been to a high teen forever and that's a mistake.

1:35:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, scones, scones and cream scones, when Scones, when.

1:35:17 - Mikah Sargent
well done Cucumber sandwiches oh, yes and oh.

1:35:21 - Paris Martineau
A little macaron.

1:35:22 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, when my significant other and I went to a high tea place for one of our I think it was like an anniversary or something and so I actually it was cool the place had an option where you could get your high tea to go. So that's actually how I proposed to him was I got a high tea to go and then we went to this other place that we had been and yeah, so I really like high tea.

1:35:46 - Paris Martineau
It's got nice yeah, high tea to go is so fun and this is where you took the photos that then were AI generated.

1:35:54 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the AI generated photos exactly.

1:35:58 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's where that was the high t in the in the background there um delightful yeah so I love high t, but anyway, anyway, back to anyway, back to technology, which we all definitely love more than high t. Uh, all the problems are going to be solved soon, because sam oltman, a couple weeks ago, told uh Trump that AGI will be achieved during his term. So you know, guys, pack it all in. We don't have to be worrying. This podcast won't even need to exist in a couple years. They'll just have the computers do it for us. What do you think about this? Ai fan, jeff Jarvis.

1:36:34 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, there's his chip head.

1:36:38 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't have sand in my socks and you know that.

1:36:41 - Paris Martineau
You're a little sandy, my guy, you're a little sandy.

1:36:45 - Jeff Jarvis
But I'm the one who who makes fun of of AGI and thinks it's it's a long way to say BS. I think that the AI boys are obnoxious little crap.

1:36:54 - Mikah Sargent
It's only one more consonant than BS or one more more syllable to bs.

1:36:58 - Paris Martineau
Yeah benito, can we get? You know how we have like a moral panic like thing. We have a, uh, craig newmark, can we get a sand themed to and don't tell leo, it's gonna happen, yeah just do it yeah but then yeah, yeah I was thinking, maybe like maracas or something I don't know something's gonna happen.

1:37:18 - Benito Gonzalez
I think anthony's listening right now, anthony hey, yeah, anthony will do it thanks, anthony.

1:37:22 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a perfect anthony cleverly generated with ai yeah, of course, of course of course, on its own petard.

1:37:30 - Mikah Sargent
I think the big question, for me at least, because, again, I don't ever, I never, okay, hold on. I don't ever, I never, okay, hold on. I don't think that I'm ever going to look at any of this as something that is going to solve all the problems of humanity, and I've always seen it as a tool and only see it as a tool, sometimes as a fun little toy. But when it's not a fun little toy, then it's just a tool. And so I wonder what is for you to? Perhaps the concept of the usefulness of agi? Is it that you're see? Is it? Is it this idea that I've got my little uh jarvis that talks to me and helps me complete? Is it this idea that I've got my little uh Jarvis that talks to me and helps me complete tasks? Is it that it's a, a true friend that I can kind of like, yeah, uh, befriend, because I'm feeling lonely?

What, let's say, agi is achieved? It's still a tool, right, it's. It's not suddenly something more than that. And we I don't. Well, yeah, what's the idea? What do we?

1:38:46 - Jeff Jarvis
think the concept is.

1:38:48 - Mikah Sargent
Right, I know, I know we are getting into philosophy. I guess what I'm asking you both is what do you think the big tech concept of AGI is and where it falls in that scope? Are they trying to actually create little beings, or is it really just the next level of here's, a tool that I can put to work in more ways than I have been able to up to this point?

1:39:13 - Paris Martineau
I'll give you a couple definitions. One is OpenAI has publicly described AGI as automated systems that outperform people at quote, most economically valuable work. No one can only agree on what that means. And, to add another wrench to it, my colleagues at the Information reported that that Microsoft and OpenAI came to an agreement in 2023 that AGI will officially be achieved once OpenAI has developed an automated system that can generate at least a hundred billion dollars in profits, presumably by itself.

1:39:53 - Mikah Sargent
So it's just money-based.

1:39:54 - Paris Martineau
I mean and I think that this leads to what my gut response as a skeptic was to your question, which is it is a product to AGI is something that will create a lot of value, ostensibly will create a lot of values for value for companies without having to employ people well, I hate it's worthwhile noting.

whenever, like these technologists talk, they're like well, we won't have to hire software engineers or copywriters or creatives, all of this work will be automated, leaving people with free time to pursue creative pursuits. And that last part, I think, is always a bit of BS, because with what money and time are people going to be pursuing anything if suddenly most economic, like if automated machines outperform people at most economically?

1:40:46 - Jeff Jarvis
valuable Because they create economic value. I think this is BS, but the argument is that creates all the economic value that humans create now without us. So all those economic value is there. But of course you're absolutely right. If we're not earning a salary, where does that go?

1:40:59 - Paris Martineau
and how are p? How is economic value going to exist if, then, people don't have jobs, so they don't have money to purchase things?

1:41:06 - Mikah Sargent
yeah, well, it's all fine. I can't harass the peanut butter cookies that the agi is making for me. Oh, it's free, it's free cookies for all.

1:41:15 - Paris Martineau
Of course, that's their argument, because capitalism won't exist suddenly, when we get enough money. Yeah, right, yeah.

1:41:21 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, we just need to give them more money. I don't like this as the definition of AGI. Oh, I couldn't agree more. This is why I hate this stuff. Financial AGI.

1:41:34 - Jeff Jarvis
In Paris, we needed your sand shoveling on the show. Doesn't matter what it is, we're going to have it, you know and I, it doesn't matter what it is, yeah, and so I think that this indicates the hubris of our species, that we think we want a machine to make us. We are God and we're going to make the machine in our image. That's ridiculous. The machine already does a lot of things better than we can possibly do, starting with protein folding and all kinds of other things, does it wonderfully, and it'll learn to do more amazing things. Why can't we be satisfied with that? It's a tool. You're right, micah, it's a tool, and the important thing for it to keep it as a tool is that it's still in our command.

The idea of the AGI world and the doomsters is that it will take us over, it'll be smarter than us, and so it dismisses us and says pah, to hell with all of you, and I'm taking over the world and making nothing but paperclips. Right, and it's just idiotic. It's still the machine. We make and we command and we start, and they think that they're so egotistical that they can make a machine that is beyond all of us, but they're so powerful because they're the ones who made it. I hate them. They're jerks. The technology is amazing. The technology has lots of neat things we can do with it. It will be a great tool. It will solve us from doing some certain menial things, as technologies long have, and that's fine. But the boys who make it I don't like very much.

1:42:59 - Mikah Sargent
But the boys who make it I don't like very much. So if we don't have the financial capitalistic definition of AGI, then is it not? I thought that the sort of initial idea was that it could perform tasks at a human level right and that there was a certain sort of test that could be done or a certain you know number of tests that could be done, or I guess, the idea that it has the same sort of intelligence or processing power, mental capacities, as a human.

1:43:44 - Paris Martineau
But I think the reason why we have moved away from that definition I don't know Is it because it's harder to do. I mean one. I mean how would one even met? We don't know what mental capacities we do and do not have. We don't even know really how the human brain works, much less how to get a computer to do that yeah, that's a good point.

1:44:05 - Mikah Sargent
I mean, how can you measure something? How can there be so much that you don't know? You don't know. That's what I want to know like how do we know that?

1:44:12 - Paris Martineau
any of how I mean? This is the sort of thing, you think of when you smoke some weed as like a teenager. But how do you know that anybody else is capable of thought? You don't.

1:44:21 - Benito Gonzalez
You don't.

1:44:22 - Paris Martineau
All you know is yourself.

1:44:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, you speaking or your digital twin speaking, I will never know what Jeff tastes when he tastes peanut butter cookies.

1:44:32 - Mikah Sargent
It could be vastly different from mine, because I will never have his exact experience of what that is like. And's a skill we anyway. It makes me feel very lonely. I need this pluralistic society to get on it.

1:44:46 - Paris Martineau
I think about that with colors all the time. How do we know?

1:44:49 - Mikah Sargent
what is green really? No one knows nobody we own edibles.

1:44:55 - Jeff Jarvis
I was gonna say this is the high aspect of twit we're walking on a beach right now I think yeah.

1:45:04 - Paris Martineau
A new study from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that, as humans increasingly rely on bit of AI in their work, they use less critical thinking shocking, which can quote result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved. This is a report from 404.

1:45:24 - Mikah Sargent
Media Atrophy.

1:45:26 - Paris Martineau
Atrophy. The researchers wrote a key irony of automation Jeff is flipping open a book is that by mechanizing routine tasks and leaving exception handling to the human user yes, the web we leave, jeff. We see it, you deprive the user of routine opportunities to practice their judgment and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared for the exceptions that do arise.

1:45:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, I think this makes intuitive sense, you know Adipose and atrophied. I'm trying to get all three of my books into the card.

1:45:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah tell us tell us your counter argument yeah, what's your? Idea that if you don't work out these muscles, so to speak, that those muscles will atrophy the critical thinking these books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant and the idol samuel john observed in 1750.

1:46:18 - Jeff Jarvis
They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas and therefore easily susceptible, open to every false suggestion. It might be said of the present age that the power of controlling thought is passing from the ballad maker to the novel writer, said historian Spencer Walpole in 1879. The novel influences, for good or evil, the thoughts of its readers. The thoughts of its readers may ultimately determine the government of the world. Millions of young girls and thousands of young boys are novelized into idiocy. Our magazine warned in 1880. Novel readers are like opium smokers the more they have it, the more they want of it. And the publishers, capitalists, delighted at the state of affairs, go on corrupting public taste and understanding and making fortunes out of this corruption. We're still human beings. We're still who we are. It doesn't change us. We use it as a tool and this kind of moral ready, ready, benito, ready, ready, ready, this kind of moral panic is unproductive. Oh, I thought it was going to come off. The files are offline. I'm sorry.

1:47:24 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, no, are you?

1:47:26 - Leo Laporte
saying your muscles are atrophied yeah.

1:47:28 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, this is AGI's fault, guys.

1:47:33 - Mikah Sargent
So that is I hear you. It is a good way to say that we have had these concerns before and they haven't um played out in that way. Do you have any direct? Is that your direct comment on what sounds like a sound argument that if we are, you are maybe you saying that? I'm not the same way you are we're still going to be doing critical thinking in other ways, even if we don't use them in this way. Is that?

1:48:10 - Jeff Jarvis
what the? Argument is go ahead, save the calculator, the calculator, the dictionary, was seen as a bad thing. Plato thought writing was bad because we wouldn't remember anything. Yeah, we do offload things, and then that certain capability can diminish, because it's okay, because we then have other functions we can use.

1:48:29 - Mikah Sargent
Plato is goofy anyway, because if Plato knew what we know now, our brains were never intended to be storage devices. They are processing devices, not storage devices.

1:48:41 - Jeff Jarvis
And what did we have to do? We had to memorize long rhymes, just to know anything.

1:48:46 - Mikah Sargent
That's why, yeah, mnemonic devices all came about and why mind palaces came about. Because our brains had to be tricked into figuring out how to do deep memory storage, because we were intended to use these things for well. Actually, not only were, even if we weren't intended to we, over thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years, figured out how to process what was going on around us so that we could stay safe and eat and stay alive.

1:49:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Anyway, sorry, go ahead. Who needs Hillman Talk University when you have Micah and Paris?

1:49:17 - Paris Martineau
Huh, huh. I mean, I think that the part of what this? Article is trying to get at is yes, jeff, you're right. The same argument has been said before about any newfangled technology or thing that comes along. And yes, it's fine to offload some of our capacity in order to adapt to new devices, like no one's saying we shouldn't have the calculator or the Internet or things like that. Oh, they did, oh, they did. I'm saying now at least, but part of what?

1:49:49 - Benito Gonzalez
I'm actually very anti-calculator.

1:49:51 - Paris Martineau
I'm sorry you didn't know that Good to know this will be your last time on the show.

1:49:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Nine times 63, Micah Nine times 63. Now I have to leave.

1:50:02 - Paris Martineau
But the offloading that's happening with generative AI, I think, is to a completely unprecedented level, and it is also to a level of a complete. I guess we are lacking solid information. When you're using something like the calculator at least, you're going to get the correct answer for nine times 63. When you're like when you are a 13 year old and you are being presented the take home essay that you're supposed to be able to use to demonstrate your ability to write out thoughts and think on your own and analyze a text, and instead you plug that into ChatGPT and you have that as your go-to habit for approaching all tasks with critical thinking from a young age into adulthood, I think that your muscles are atrophying, you're lacking critical thinking skills and you are ceasing to develop them because there's an easier way that often isn't even that useful develop them because there's an easier way.

1:51:01 - Mikah Sargent
That often isn't even that useful. Is the argument there that then, Jeff, that essay writing will just not be as important in the future, or do you disagree with that? Who's to?

1:51:09 - Jeff Jarvis
say that essay writing is the core skill of literate society. It may not be. Maybe there are other ways we express ourselves and we can use these machines to help us express ourselves. Now, if you use it to substitute for yourself and it makes mistakes for you, you're going to learn that's not the best way to do it, but I think that there are mechanisms here, that these are tools. I don't spell as well as I used to. I used to be a copy editor. Why don't I spell as well as I used to? Because I have spell check.

1:51:37 - Mikah Sargent
Am I worse off for that? No, I'm so glad that you said that, though, because sometimes I beat myself up over not being able to spell as well as I used to, because I also used to do copy editing.

1:51:46 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, this is actually a really good thing to hear from someone who I respect and think can

1:51:50 - Jeff Jarvis
spell. So the three of us were copy editors. Oh, we are nerds.

1:51:55 - Mikah Sargent
I was a copy editor?

1:51:56 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, Wow, I'm so glad to hear that because.

1:51:58 - Mikah Sargent
I beat myself up over that a lot. I don't feel so alone today.

1:52:03 - Jeff Jarvis
On a newspaper. A copy editor sat on a horseshoe desk named the Rim. Oh nice, and you never had your own desk because it changed by shift. And so the copy editors. They were the nitpickers of the newsroom, right? They were no fun.

1:52:20 - Mikah Sargent
That's where the phrase getting rimmed comes from.

1:52:23 - Jeff Jarvis
You said it, I didn't. Let's be very clear here.

1:52:28 - Mikah Sargent
I couldn't keep a straight face for that.

1:52:31 - Jeff Jarvis
So copy editors would get out their cigar box and in their cigar box they had their implements. They had pencils and erasers and rulers and other things to use. And they came and they did their shift and they nitpicked things and then they put it all back in the box and they left and they went to the bar.

1:52:51 - Mikah Sargent
That's nice, no, that's.

1:52:53 - Jeff Jarvis
That was the culture of the copy editor.

1:52:54 - Mikah Sargent
You didn't have to look them in the face and tell them they were wrong. No, no, mine was having to. My least favorite thing was having to re-teach people basic grammar usage and mechanics. Every single week when I'm going, you're making the same mistake over and, over and over again. I'm having to keep fixing it. Why don't you know that a lot is two words? Please, for the love of God, can we fix this, except in a very nice and kind way? That's passive aggressive, of course.

1:53:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I had a dear, dear friend who was a brilliant journalist named Mike Coakley may he rest in peace and I remember he was covering the Patty Hearst trial and I was there in San Francisco at the same time and I was just reading the stories before I went in. I said, damn it, coakley, can't you get that versus which right? And he said no, I refuse to because it gives the copy editor something to do so they don't mess up my copy.

1:53:43 - Paris Martineau
That's like the old journalism joke that the best way to make sure that your story stays intact is to put a bad lead in or leave something messed up with the lead of your story so that the editor has something to tweak. You know, because they're always gonna wanna make a big change or to have a bad kicker.

1:54:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's canine editing. You lift your leg to show you were there. You gotta do it, yep. What were we talking about, though? I don't know. Paris is in charge. It's her fault.

1:54:14 - Paris Martineau
What was it before we that's a great question. We were talking about the Microsoft study that found women in cognition.

1:54:18 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, spell check, spell check. Next Next.

1:54:21 - Paris Martineau
Okay, what do you want to talk about, Jeff?

1:54:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Jarvis, wait, wait, wait.

1:54:24 - Mikah Sargent
One more thing though because we got on a good conversation there at the end where we were talking about how maybe essays are not the way of the future in terms of how we communicate, going forward, and that becomes less important.

I do I in the short term, I would love there's there's so little uh, attention and money being paid, at least in a positive way, to education in the united states.

Um, obviously I can't speak for other places, but I would love to know how, overall, we're seeing the internet not just AI in this small microcosm, but the internet as a whole and our access to information truly shaping.

I'm not talking about higher education. I want to know how it's shaping our initial education and whether we are seeing a shift away from this memorizing things aspect to a place where people are learning not just how to research things but how to critically think about the research that they're doing, because I always remember that being something that came later and it was usually a little class that we had with the librarian where they were the ones teaching us how to look through LexisNexis, for example, and learning about, when you read a study, the parts that you need to look for, like who's funding it and who are the sources this, that and the other to becoming a more regular aspect of what you're doing? Do we all need to know the list of presidents of the US, because it's something that we can just look up very easily? And are we seeing an overall shift away from the memorization aspect of education that we've seen up to this point?

1:56:18 - Paris Martineau
I'm not sure as to whether or not the status of memorization in American education Well, I think part of those sort of standards are currently, and have been over the last most of our lives been set by the.

Department of Education, which is a current target of Trump and Doge's latest rounds of cuts, and in some ways that's problematic, but then also beneficial, because part of the reason why rote memorization was such a big emphasis in American schooling during the time that we grew up, micah, is because you have to hit certain standards. You have to, each school has to. You have to take standardized tests that prove you know certain things, and those often will involve like memorization and being able to comment on certain historical events or hit certain standards in math and science. And if the Department of Education is defunded or deleted quote, as Trump and Musk have said they intend to do to it then standards like that will cease to exist and schools will be able to make those decisions themselves, for better and worse.

However, on the critical thinking aspect, which I think is a really interesting question, part of my comments about the prevalence of AI tools being used in the classroom, which, as I've talked to teachers on my current beat, it seems to be incredibly present, at least in high school classes, that kids are using these sort of tools in response to basically any sort of homework they can, and I think that's a real shame because how like the reason why you assign someone an essay to write isn't because essay writing is important, even though I think it is.

Personally, it's because the act of learning to write essays and analyze texts gives you critical thinking skills and the I mean even on a broader scale of that having to repeatedly do tasks you don't want to do, like homework, and figure out how to do them anyway and figure out what the answer is. Those are important life lessons that I think need to be kind of forced into your head at a young age, because such is the way of the world, into your head at a young age, because such is the way of the world.

1:58:38 - Mikah Sargent
If you don't learn how to delay gratification. This is not coming from me in this case. This is coming from a dear friend of mine who's a psychotherapist in Canada, georgia Dow, who's been on a number of our shows in the past. She talks a lot about delayed gratification and the importance of learning that skill as a child, and I think that that aspect of what you're talking about Paris is very much involved in that concern. If you are getting through the homework because you want to go play the game and you're not allowed to play the game until you finish the homework, and so you use something to make that go faster and you don't have to exercise those skills I agree with you on the homework and so you use something to make that go faster and you don't have to you know, exercise those skills. I agree with you on that front. Does this mean, though, then, jeff, that teachers have a challenge ahead of them in terms of figuring out new ways of of of challenging their students?

1:59:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Certainly two things. Things one the educational systems we have had. I mean Paris, I'm gonna agree, don't get rid of the Department of Education and do figure out standards, but those standards need to change with the times and those standards were built for an industrial age where the industry turned out widgets and people were widgets. All the same that we had to have standardization, we had to be the same, we had to agree about those things. That's not reasoning, that's memorization. And there's a lot of ways, I think, to teach reasoning and to exercise the skills of reasoning. And far better than than having people memorize things and take multiple tests, make multiple choice tests, to agree about those facts, when you can look those facts up. The question is, how do you use those facts, how do you think around them? And you can teach debate, you can teach creation, you can teach how to get the machine to do what you want it to do. That requires reasoning. To prompt requires reasoning. There's a lot of different ways that.

If we deal with the outcomes, the things that I had to learn because I'm not a real academic, I'm a fake academic, I'm just a journalism teacher and when I came to the school, we just started teaching our courses and then somebody came along about a year and said what are your outcomes? Is it what outcomes? That's how education works. You have outcomes. What are they learning? How are they learning it? Oh, we're just teaching them.

No, you gotta have outcomes. So we would reverse, engineer the outcomes in and say, well, this is what we're teaching. No, no, no, no, you start with the outcomes. This is what we think students need to learn and these are the ways we're going to try to teach them and these are the ways we're going to verify whether they've known it or not. This is the covenant we make with the students that this is what they're going to learn and this is how we get judged as teachers. That's what the outcomes are. There's a lot of different ways to reach those outcomes and those outcomes should be there in a curriculum and those outcomes should be standards that are set at that higher level to guarantee that our students are going through this and not just in some homeschool made up thing. And don't get mad at me, don't at me.

2:01:32 - Paris Martineau
Don't at me Quote Jeff Jarvis yeah.

2:01:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Don't do not at me, because blocking works on blue skies. So yeah, I mean I can be concerned about that. So Matthew Kirschenbaum, who I've quoted off from the show, who wrote a wonderful essay for the Atlantic called the Textpocalypse he's an English professor at the University of Maryland. I took a course from him and started a book lab and he was the academic reviewer of my book, the Gutenberg Parenthesis. Matthew was on a task force for the Modern Language Association in AI and it's a really. The report that they put out was really interesting because it basically said don't panic. It's a tool like spell check. It's a tool like a word processor. It's another tool we can figure out how to use this in a curriculum. So I'm not going to let that tool. If it doesn't panic a real English professor, it's not going to panic me.

2:02:29 - Paris Martineau
I think that's a fair point. Jeff, what do you want to talk about?

2:02:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I think Elon Musk, the, the monkey wrench into uh open, ai uh, and its effort to switch from going from being not for profit to for profit. I have said often, so, musk, as we should first give the background he's. He put out a, supposedly put out an offer for was it 97 billion?

2:02:57 - Paris Martineau
I think yeah, it's a cool 97.

2:03:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, a chill bill, otherwise known as two Twitters, not 2.1 Twitters, and Altman has already rejected it and Musk has insulted him back and all this. What's happening that I've talked on the show about this before is that there is about to start a cluster F of a renegotiation of the cap table for open AI, because it's switching every investor in it. Microsoft and all their contributions in kind are all going to be revalued in who gets what share of the company when it becomes a for-profit company and what stays in the not-for-profit and what goes to the for-profit.

2:03:43 - Paris Martineau
Because right now, for context for folks, OpenAI is structured in a weird way where there's a non-profit OpenAI that owns the for-profit OpenAI that other people have invested in. Then they're going to switch that to all for-profit. But you can't just do that and say, hey, we want to make this non-profit a for-profit. That's not allowed. Instead, they have to spin it off somehow, so the nonprofit is going to have to be compensated in some way for the loss of the for-profit OpenAI and part of the calculations for this.

like these negotiations, my colleague, martin Peers, had estimated this in a newsletter earlier this week that this might end up giving the non-profit part of OpenAI something like a 25% stake in OpenAI's for-profit business. And OpenAI is currently raising money at a $260 billion valuation, not including all the money that's been put in, and that would make the non-profit version of OpenAI's stake worth about 65 billion. And this is a big deal, because what Elon Musk did by trying to, by making this claim where they want, he wants to buy opening eye for two Twitter's is he through basically a spanner in the works by proposing a bigger number than that. What the nonprofit stake was supposed to be worth 65 billion Instead he said 97 billion.

2:05:07 - Jeff Jarvis
So that means, if the nonprofit is supposed to be fairly compensated for losing for-profit OpenAI, elon Musk just drove the price up by like half Exactly, and this has to be approved by government because this conversion is very difficult, so it has to be approved. So if the government says, the government says, oh well, we can see the market value of this is 97 billion. And then musk also offered to merge the not-for-profit, this highly valuable piece with his fakakta ai. Um, so very well explained. Uh, thank you. And so I just find it's amusing, it's, it's gameplay, it's ridiculous. And, by the way, I should add that your colleague martin piers I haven't read the whole column, but of course his headline just pisses me off on its own would must be shrewd. Would must be better than altman at running open ai, I mean listen, he loves to make people mad.

2:06:03 - Paris Martineau
I will give him that, you and him both.

2:06:06 - Jeff Jarvis
He succeeds.

2:06:07 - Paris Martineau
I don't like to make people mad.

2:06:09 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I don't want to make people mad. No you just don't want them to at you no no, so anyway, I thought I found that story interesting. I agree.

2:06:22 - Mikah Sargent
I mean, I'm just thinking about when the time comes and they have to get government approval, which in some ways currently means having to get Elon Musk's approval.

2:06:36 - Paris Martineau
Elon Musk is currently suing OpenAI. Yeah, that's messy.

2:06:41 - Mikah Sargent
It's all very messy, it's very messy.

2:06:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not sure what level of government, maybe the state where they're incorporated?

2:06:48 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know oh, if it's the state, that would be well, I mean a little easier we've.

I think the past couple weeks have shown that, uh, the new government we currently have is willing to stick its hands in anything and everything that it wants and to little consequence but this is california is investigating the conversion, so maybe up to california well, that's the one state where I think it is a one of the states where it's a little more difficult for the government to, I mean they still do as far as much as they can to stick their hands there, but it is one of the I can tell you've been hanging out with martin too much paris, because you didn't say a monkey wrench in the works, you said a spanner in the works.

2:07:32 - Jeff Jarvis
You've been hanging out, I did I did?

2:07:34 - Paris Martineau
I did say uh, I did give some news to ease over there and uh, for that I apologized everybody um, it is interesting, though the context yeah, you should four years, just you wait is because Donald Trump has Elon Musk, his sworn enemy, at this point on his other shoulder, being like, hey, open AI sucks probably. So Sam Altman suddenly has to capitulate a lot to the administration in order to enjoy the same sort of privileges that it perhaps was expecting.

2:08:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, can I give you a palate cleanser? That's also an AI story. That's also a generative AI story.

2:08:28 - Paris Martineau
That sounds honeydew-esque to me, but sure Do you think you can get that, you think it's possible. I don't see it but sure.

2:08:35 - Jeff Jarvis
It is line 95. So the drama of Altman being fired from OpenAI is already now a play ripped from the head.

2:08:45 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I thought about seeing this. One of my colleagues went and said it was actually really good.

2:08:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Really.

2:08:50 - Paris Martineau
But she said it would only be really good to tech journalists that work with the information, because no one else is going to understand it, because it's a play about Sam Altman's ouster from OpenAI.

2:09:03 - Jeff Jarvis
right this is a crisis-driven tale set on a single night in San Francisco, just after a tech company, mindmesh, has dismissed its leader, seth Hold up at home he is plotting to get his job back, while the company's panic board tries to figure out how to move forward without him. A sociopath who lacks the requisite charm. Seth tells his confidants I will not compromise, I will not admit fault. I was fired for creating miracles. The characters erupt in flagrantly unlikely monologues, as when Alina, the company's scrupulous chief safety officer, tells her colleagues about a disturbing recurring dream, one of them vividly sexual. Oh dear, yeah. The more troublesome is that their ethical arguments about ai feel rehashed, if you're following the issue at all. Oh well, that's the review part, but don't ruin it for me. There are mentions throughout of elon. No last name given, but there doesn't need to be. Seth annoyed with elena snipes. You should have just had had Elon's baby when he wanted to, and we got to see this. We got to see this.

2:10:10 - Paris Martineau
Okay, I do have to go. Jeff come into town and we'll go see it.

2:10:13 - Mikah Sargent
He's wielding a knife at one point according to that photo. That's what I want to know when the knife comes out.

2:10:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.

2:10:20 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, are you allowed to go to brooklyn? Does it sound like a musical?

2:10:23 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, oh, it's in brooklyn, oh, we could go to one of my favorite restaurants henry's end in brooklyn listen.

2:10:30 - Mikah Sargent
How do you get there? Do you take a helicopter?

2:10:33 - Paris Martineau
there's a bridge does a helicopter feel better for you than a bridge?

2:10:38 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, but I can. I can take a subway to brooklyn oh, that's true, they do have. And it does go under a river. And everybody thinks I'm crazy when I say I'd rather be in the tunnel oh my god, that's where I'm in my car. But if I'm in the subway, which goes through and tunnels all the time, nobody thinks that's weird, nobody says, oh my god, it could flood. Yes, it could, it has.

2:10:58 - Benito Gonzalez
In fact, the subway tunnels have flooded more than the car tunnels but I think about it every time I take bart under the bay bridge.

2:11:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's a point every time, because bart is not even dug into the, in right into the, into the um bart's just free floating yeah, it's just kind of plopped down there, I think oh, I don't think that's true because it well, actually we could argue that makes it better for the earthquakes which happened there, which made the bay bridge collapse all right, you've been watching intelligent machines, but if you're listening to this, I'm gonna do Leo's little spiel here.

2:11:32 - Paris Martineau
You should also join club twit. Leo tries to be really nice and not at all demanding whenever he does these speeches but now it's.

I'm gonna do it. It's really hard to run a media business. Leo's been doing this forever. You listen to the show for this long. Think about how many other shows from Twit you've listened to over the months, years, all the great content you've gotten. Wouldn't you like this to continue to stick around? One of the only ways that's going to happen is if just a small percentage of you guys subscribe to Club Twit. You get a lot of stuff. For just $7 a month. You can get all of Twit's shows ad-free. You get access to members-only video feeds with cool stuff. Like Mikey, isn't your crafting corner in there? Heck, yeah, it's great. You get, you know, access to the Discord. We have all these cool conversations and inside jokes throughout the show that you would suddenly be a part of. You also can you know hop in the discord and watch the behind the scenes show with us. It's fantastic. It's only seven dollars per month and it supports the show that you're listening to. So I don't know. Sign up for club twit well done well, lovely, that was amazing.

2:12:43 - Leo Laporte
Now pay attention to Paris and do what she says.

2:12:45 - Jeff Jarvis
You hear me, yeah.

2:12:46 - Mikah Sargent
Listen to me. Yeah, what Jeff said, what Paris said, what Jeff said, what Paris said.

2:12:51 - Paris Martineau
Do you guys want to do Picks of the Week? Yeah, sure, michael, what you got.

2:12:57 - Mikah Sargent
I just want to remind everybody about the Sims, that's a really great point.

Thank you very much. Goodbye, 25 year anniversary of the Sims. And the Sims is fun and cool and it reminds me when I was younger, playing with my sister. We would each she liked to build the houses and I she liked to. I can't remember exactly now, now I'm thinking about it. I think we both like to build parts of the house and we both like to decorate parts of the house, and so we would play together where you know, like I would make the kitchen and a few of the other rooms and decorate those, and she would always do the living room and some of the other spaces, and then we would kind of take turns back and forth playing. And I can also remember a fun story, or funny story, hopefully.

When I was younger I was introduced to the Sims for the first time. I was visiting my grandma and she had the Sims open and she's playing, and I came over and I sat down and I was like, oh, you know, learning about it or whatever, and one of the characters was on screen and I looked down and it has their name and their date of birth and some other things and their Zodiac sign and like their hunger and all that. And I saw it said cancer and growing up, anybody out there who's like super religious will understand that, like, zodiac is the devil according to that, and so like I had no idea about zodiac signs at all and so I turned to my grandma and I said, grandma, your sim has cancer.

And I was really concerned about this sim and she was like oh no honey, he's a cancer, and that was the first time I ever learned about zodiac signs all downhill from there, it was all down exactly I ever learned about Zodiac signs.

2:14:45 - Paris Martineau
It's all downhill from there.

2:14:46 - Mikah Sargent
It was all down exactly. I just fell off the Christian horse at that point. But anyway, that's not what this is about. So I just pulled out the Sims 4. On Mac it used to be you had the Origin app. Now it's the EA app. I just re-downloaded it the other day and started building a house and I wanted to see how long it was going to take me to bust out those motherload cheats and I've been really good about holding off and the word mother load just unlocked so many memories in my brain.

2:15:16 - Paris Martineau
I was a really big sims fan when I was a kid as well, um, but I've fallen off of it in recent years but I know so many people still are die hard fans. It's crazy that it has been around for 25 years.

2:15:27 - Mikah Sargent
It's been around for a long time and there's nothing quite like it.

2:15:30 - Paris Martineau
arguably, Sims can rent a car without paying an extra, your young driver fee.

2:15:35 - Benito Gonzalez
So me and my friends used to play this game multiplayer Like there isn't. There isn't a multiplayer campaign component to this game, but we would have three computers set up and we would just rotate computers so like we would just live in that town, Move the save file over. No, no, no. Three different, three different, three different towns happening, oh you each would go oh, that's so cool. So you have like a house in everybody else's town right, that's so cool. But then, like all these stories started happening.

2:16:08 - Mikah Sargent
People started stealing people's wives and you know know it got ugly. Yes, it gets so messy. I I've been having fun going back to it because I was like, oh my god, I cannot believe I spent as much money as I have on this game, because I was like I went to go download it and then it was taking a lot longer. I'm like I have fiber, what's going on? And I look and there are like eight or ten expansion packs that I've bought over time and so I was waiting for them all to download.

2:16:25 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I remember having vampire ones, dog ones, other weird stuff.

2:16:29 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, I've got like the pets and the vet. You can start a vet clinic. Anyway, it's fun. I've been enjoying going back into it after a long time away, and so, yeah, if you're looking for escapism, the Sims might be for you.

2:16:44 - Paris Martineau
There's also a wild moderating cult like mod. Yes, absolutely. I remember when I was looking the patreon a uh surprising amount of patreon's top like um, monetized paid creators. Are people who do. Are people who do sexy or drug-related Sims mods? Sims mods where you could do like heroin or suicide or have sex above the covers. It's like people are crazy for not safe for work, sims.

2:17:19 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, that's wild.

2:17:24 - Paris Martineau
I think I'll avoid the- yeah, probably probably avoid some of those, but yeah, some of them, like, if you want to.

2:17:33 - Mikah Sargent
I just saw this the other day because somehow instagram already knows I've been playing the sims again, of course, um, and I saw one where you can like quickly make a family and the family history without having to go into create a sim and create all of them, and so you can say you know, my person has two grandparents and they've got two kids and this and that and the other, and then it automatically creates the sim. So there are some modern mod scripts that kind of just do small things like that. So, yeah, I don't know, just a reminder that the Sims is out there and you could play it and it's fun.

2:18:03 - Paris Martineau
Uh, that's my pick my pick this week is a website called wiki talk. Um, it is essentially. It pulls from wikipedia's api and you can pull it up on your phone or on your computer and it just shows. It shows you an endlessly scrolling vertical feed of random Wikipedia articles, so they could be about literally anything Like. Right now I have Jose Maria Rojas Garrado, a Colombian senator, then the 2008 United States presidential election in Texas, and you can go through any of these if you want. You can save them. A guy named William Seaman, a photographer. The Battle of Backenlage, I don't know, it gives me stumble upon vibes yeah, that's what I truly miss, but I just.

There's so many interesting parts of Wikipedia and sometimes I just feel the itch to get a new Wikipedia rabbit hole, and this is the website I will be going to uh wiki talk wow, I had tumblr open in one tab and stumble upon clicks in another tab.

2:19:05 - Mikah Sargent
That was back in the day.

2:19:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Those were the days, my friend.

2:19:10 - Paris Martineau
And now we just have to scroll in our feeds forever. Jeff, what do you got for us?

2:19:16 - Jeff Jarvis
So we should mention, just for the record because this was this week in Google that Google IO will be May 20 and 21. Ai, ai, ai, ai, I o will be may 20 and 21. Ai, ai, ai, ai. Um. But the other thing I'm going to talk about is a buzzfeed. Poor buzzfeed's having some rough days today, but buzzfeed wants to start its own ai driven social media platform oh no I know now I feed jonas.

Jonas peretti is a hell of an innovator. He's done a lot, a lot of amazing things, and you know I'm not gonna. I'm gonna give him some slack here. And what he's arguing is that, uh, he says that the internet is broken. Addictive content has led to growing dissatisfaction. Toxic masculine vibe true that algorithms make it hard to express your identity, uh, authentically and just for fun, yeah, okay, uh. So then he argues that we are in the rise of snarf. Uh, snakes, stakes, novelty, anger, retention and fear. This is the business model mass media, right? You exaggerate this, the stakes, you, you manufacture novelty, you manipulate people to be angry, you retain, you have retention hacks, we're holding them on to people who don't want to be there and you bring fear. All true, all true. That's all mass media too. Um, and so he wants to start something that's going to be livelier and nicer than that. Okay, good, and I don't know how AI is involved. He wants to.

2:20:49 - Paris Martineau
Jonah is obsessed with AI. I interviewed him last year for my yearly random foray into media feature.

2:20:56 - Jeff Jarvis
That's right, you did yes.

2:20:58 - Paris Martineau
And he uses AI all the time in his life and also kind of just thinks it's the future.

2:21:04 - Jeff Jarvis
My other concern about this is that we don't need another proprietary social network. Have we not learned that lesson, people?

2:21:11 - Paris Martineau
Well, I mean, I think part of what his impetus for this is. The rise of BuzzFeed was tied to that era where Facebook was king.

2:21:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, I would hope he would learn the lesson to not. But now he's like I could.

2:21:25 - Paris Martineau
I could hold the keys to the castle exactly, but I assume that's my fear now, if it's and this is coming- at a time where buzzfeed has god knows how many few employees. They've had to sell off nearly every aspect of their business um, they just had to lay off at hot post.

2:21:43 - Jeff Jarvis
So my hope is that it's federated with one of the protocols, with AT Protocol at Blue Sky or with ActivityPod the other one and if it is, then I'll think nicer about it. I hope AI is used to help people create what they want to create what they want to say Okay, then I'll be open about it, but we'll see. So that's the news of the week. Meanwhile, just to give you good news, back to our first topic of the day sales of Teslas are down 60%

2:22:16 - Benito Gonzalez
in.

2:22:16 - Paris Martineau
Germany yeah, I saw that Some Canadian candidates have said they're for, I guess, Prime Minister have said they're thinking of doing a 100% tariff oniff on tesla.

2:22:29 - Jeff Jarvis
I kind of love it. I kind of love.

2:22:31 - Paris Martineau
It all right. Thank you all for joining us. We do intelligent machines every wednesday, 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, that's 2100 utc. You can watch us stream on seven platforms youtube, twitch x, twitch X. Four other platforms I will not name because I do not know them. Micah, if folks want to keep up with you and what you're doing, where do they go to do that?

2:22:56 - Mikah Sargent
Micah Sargent. Excuse me, I'm at Micah Sargent on many a social media network, or you can add to chihuahuacoffee C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-Acoffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online.

2:23:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Beautiful and, jeff, well delivered. Well, nicely delivered. What?

2:23:11 - Paris Martineau
about you? Where do they go to? At you?

2:23:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis. Hey, hey, hey, jeffjarviscom, where I have the hardback here but the paperback version out. And yeah, that's it, jeff Jarvis.

2:23:25 - Paris Martineau
Calm great, and you can follow me at Paris dot NYC on blue sky, or send me story ideas at Martin o dot zero one on signal. Thanks for joining us everybody, bye, bye.