Intelligent Machines 850 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.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Intelligent machines. Our guest, C.J. trobridge, is an expert in ethical AI. They also say it's possible to do AI that's small, effective, and doesn't involve big tech. How? Find out next on Intelligent Machines podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. Episode 850, recorded Wednesday, December 17, 2025.
Leo Laporte [00:00:38]:
Bagel rats. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we cover the latest in AI robotics and all the smart stuff all around us these days. Hey, we're so glad to have Paris Martineau back from her holiday party. She was gone a whole week. What a party it must have been.
Paris Martineau [00:00:54]:
It's true. We do it like that.
Leo Laporte [00:00:58]:
She, for some reason is being. It says she's Mike Elgin. I think you might want to fix that. But she's not Mike Elgin. She is. Ladies and gentlemen, Paris Martin. There she is.
Paris Martineau [00:01:07]:
I'd rip off my own face. A man who's in a random country appears.
Leo Laporte [00:01:13]:
We have apparently multiple lower thirds just for you. This is the most current currently at Consumer Reports, where she is an investigative journalist specializing in radioactive shellfish and lead in your protein powder. And working on something new.
Paris Martineau [00:01:28]:
I am.
Leo Laporte [00:01:29]:
You'll see a new food issue, Paris NYC for the tips. Also with us, Jeff Jarvis, professor of emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Also at Montclair State University in New Jersey and SUNY Stony Brook.
Jeff Jarvis [00:01:50]:
Was it the good party, Paris? Do CR people party hard?
Paris Martineau [00:01:54]:
Listen, it was a mid to late afternoon party and I think that's delightful.
Leo Laporte [00:01:58]:
We saw your skeet about sharing gossip. Celebrity gossip, I will say.
Paris Martineau [00:02:03]:
I mean, I think that's one of the best things about most of CR works remotely. I mean, we obviously have an office in Yonkers, office in Manhattan, all these great things we go into. But it's lovely when you get a bunch of remote co workers together in the same place. You learn a critical mass of gossip very quickly. And I think that's.
Leo Laporte [00:02:19]:
Oh, it wasn't all about the Z's. It was. It was about yourselves.
Jeff Jarvis [00:02:23]:
We presume you were schooling them in the Z's.
Paris Martineau [00:02:26]:
I mean, it's. I actually don't think I brought up Olivia Nuzzy once, which is really shocking. Well, not then. I definitely did afterwards, but not at the work party. I tried to. There was too much other gossip going on.
Leo Laporte [00:02:41]:
Well, let's introduce our guest because we have a great guest. CJ Trowbridge, you've probably seen him on YouTube. He is they. Sorry, pardon me. Didn't mean to misgender you. He. They are a AI. Not quite cheerleader, but reality checker would probably be the right thing.
Leo Laporte [00:02:59]:
132,000 TikTok followers. And that's where sustainability comes in. Hi CJ. Welcome to the show. Great to have you.
CJ Trowbridge [00:03:09]:
Glad to be here.
Leo Laporte [00:03:10]:
Thanks. Thanks for joining us. You actually had access to GPT early.
CJ Trowbridge [00:03:19]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:03:19]:
How did that happen?
CJ Trowbridge [00:03:21]:
Yeah, so I was doing my undergrad in San Francisco at the time in urban planning and big focus on sustainable community development, especially by nonprofits. And I had an opportunity to become an early academic product tester at OpenAI in late 2021. So I was one of the first people who used ChatGPT before it came out, when it was called chat with GPT3.
Leo Laporte [00:03:48]:
No one remembers that.
CJ Trowbridge [00:03:50]:
Yeah, Chat Wiz. Yeah. And also.
Jeff Jarvis [00:03:54]:
Did you say Chat Wiz?
Leo Laporte [00:03:55]:
Oh, Chat Wiz. I thought that's a good name. They should save that.
Jeff Jarvis [00:04:00]:
Like Jesus.
CJ Trowbridge [00:04:00]:
Yeah, yeah. And also the early image generation stuff that they were working on with Dall E that later became. They actually just yesterday announced it's been rebranded yet again. It's now GPT Image.
Leo Laporte [00:04:15]:
Yeah.
CJ Trowbridge [00:04:16]:
So they went from Dall E1 to Dall E2 to GPT4.
Leo Laporte [00:04:19]:
They have an amazing job to compete with Nano Banana. But we'll talk about that later in the show. So what was your reaction when you saw this early on?
CJ Trowbridge [00:04:30]:
I thought it was terrible for a lot of reasons. And I argued that it was not the product they should release because it's really. These models are trained on documents, on document completion. And so that's their natural mode is to complete a document. And the task of sort of tricking that into being in a chat interface is very complicated. And it's led to a bunch of other really interesting problems. But basically they're better at completing documents, which is why with agentic frameworks and stuff, today we're seeing this return to. Here's a JSON document.
CJ Trowbridge [00:05:04]:
This part is missing. What should go there. And it's really good at that versus this chat interface where it wasn't obvious, because back then the context windows are really limited, so it may have forgotten the first half of the conversation and the user doesn't see that. So for all kinds of reasons, I felt like it was a terrible interface, but it's obviously the one that went viral. So here we are.
Jeff Jarvis [00:05:25]:
What you know. Huh. Cj.
Paris Martineau [00:05:29]:
At that early stage, kind of. What were your recommendations? I guess as an early product reviewer to the team. And did you, do you get any sort of feedback internally on these sort of things or is it just speaking into a void?
CJ Trowbridge [00:05:43]:
So, like, one example was with Dall E at the time, it would give you eight images for any, any prompt that you put in. Instead of now it's just one. Right? But the idea was like, it's. Most of them are not going to be very good, so we want a lot of feedback. Right? So then that became part of the training set. But at the time there was this issue with inclusivity and like, it didn't have any awareness of the social context of the user. And so like, if you ask it to draw you a picture of an astronaut, it's going to draw eight white guys. And so it's like, well, this is obviously a problem.
CJ Trowbridge [00:06:18]:
It needs to have some awareness of who is asking the question, what is their social context? And instead they're like, that's too expensive. We're not going to retrain the whole thing from scratch. We're just going to insert the word diverse into the prompt if they're asking about a person. So instead it's going to change it invisibly to draw me a diverse astronaut. And so then you get eight black girl astronauts. And it's like, this is even worse. Like, this is even further from understanding the social context of the user and what they're really asking for. And they're like, well, we're just going to ship it.
CJ Trowbridge [00:06:51]:
We're already behind stable diffusion at this point. And so then like, you know, Google adopted the same solution. And then later you get like, Thomas Jefferson is like a, is black with a Native American war bonnet on. And it's like, well, okay, now it's a problem. We have to fix it suddenly, years later. But we were talking about a lot of these problems, you know, internally back then, and they're like, we don't care, it's too expensive.
Leo Laporte [00:07:19]:
So, yeah, I mean, you'd have to agree they've. They have iterated and I don't, you know, I mean, you could iterate in private, but I think especially for products like this, it's probably better to iterate in public and take the, take the licks at the beginning in order to get a better product in the end. And let us be the beta testers. Sustainability, though, is still an issue. And, you know, we're really starting to see now, I should explain probably that I'm a big booster. I love AI. I use it all the time. I use it somewhat guiltily because we understand that there are a number of consequences.
Leo Laporte [00:07:55]:
The prices of RAM chips have doubled. Maybe that's just a temporary thing. The cost of electricity seems to be going up nationwide by orders of magnitude almost. We just saw that you can't get skilled construction workers anymore. They're all tied up building data centers. And then there's also the financial consequences, which maybe or maybe not are something to worry about. Where pretty much all of our GDP in the United States has come from these magnificent seven AI companies. That's almost all of our growth.
Leo Laporte [00:08:31]:
And then there's also the potential down the road consequence, maybe we're already seeing it, of job loss to AI. I'm not a doomer, but there are also those who say, and once it gets super intelligent, say goodbye to the human race. So there are definitely a number of sustainability issues with AI, but I notice you're not one of those people who says, well, let's just not use AI.
CJ Trowbridge [00:08:54]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I would say first of all, most of these concerns I think are like for example, the example of electricity consumption. All AI, it consumes less than half a percent of our electricity. All data centers consume less than 4% of our electricity. So there were a bunch of forecasts years ago when exponential growth really took off with data structure investment. And it's projecting like 30, 40% compared to annual growth rate on energy consumption on AI inference workloads and budgets. But that didn't happen very quickly. Those compound annual growth rate forecasts were cut by 75% or more.
CJ Trowbridge [00:09:41]:
So the current forecast is that we could see global data center energy consumption reaching 3% by 2030 of total energy consumption. So these are trivial consumption levels. The reason that electrical energy prices are going up is because of a number of, like there have been a number of executive orders preventing completed renewable production facilities from being connected to the grid and cutting funding by tens of billions. Some of the analyses that are out show it's like more than $50 billion has been cut from renewable energy projects, including continuing to operate them. So there has been a reduction. There was a recent study that found over 113 million homes worth of electricity has been cut deliberately through these efforts to end the funding for renewable energy. And also there's the impact of tariffs on maintenance costs for the grid and for the sources of energy that we already have online. And inflation at the same time too.
Jeff Jarvis [00:10:54]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:10:55]:
So all across they sound like political issues more than AI issues.
CJ Trowbridge [00:10:58]:
And deliberate.
Leo Laporte [00:10:59]:
Yeah.
CJ Trowbridge [00:11:00]:
And so those are enormous impacts and the reality of how much energy AI is consuming is it's less than a percent. So it's just not true. I think one of the things that's been most frustrating talking about AI ethics today is that the academic context focuses primarily on things other than generative AI, because no one has ever figured out how to make money with generative AI. None of these companies is making money. And the vast majority of the AI that's actually happening in businesses is not related to generative AI. It's insurance companies. It's decisions about whether or not a particular test should be given to a patient if it's too expensive, versus what's the value of a person's life in terms of how many unnecessary tests we're paying for. Those kinds of decisions are enormously, you know, impactful in people's lives.
CJ Trowbridge [00:11:52]:
And there are all kinds of ethical concerns around the construction of truth. The epistemic power that we're giving to companies like OpenAI that choose to put people like Larry Summers on the board and you know, the models that they're building are embodying that perspective of like these, these kinds of people. And is that who you want to be deciding what truth is for the world? No, like these are, I think the, the bigger issues and it's, it's one of the things that's been kind of frustrating is, is seeing, you know, there's so much popular interest in like it's taking all the water, it all the electricity is just not true. Right. But there are also alternatives like these much smaller models that are performing better than the large data center models now. And they'll easily run on your cell phone on a free open source app, and you can get better results that way than you can get from these large labs. So I think the sustainability picture for me looks like smaller devices that run at the edge, that run on solar power. There's this really cool, like for example, have you guys seen the wizplay open source project?
Leo Laporte [00:12:57]:
No.
Paris Martineau [00:12:57]:
What is that?
CJ Trowbridge [00:12:59]:
It's a Raspberry PI inside with a screen and a little face and you can hold the button and talk to it. It's like push to talk like a walkie talkie. And on the device it will decode the text of like what you've said from the, from the sound and then run it through whatever LLM you want locally on the device.
Leo Laporte [00:13:15]:
And then locally on a Raspberry PI.
CJ Trowbridge [00:13:17]:
Yeah. And then convert it into speech and it'll talk back to you and say the answer. And it all on this. It's great. So this is using QIN3, which is at the frontier. Yeah, it's great. And this will 16 gigs of RAM. You can run up to like a 16 billion parameter model or more if you use a lower quantization.
Leo Laporte [00:13:37]:
Yeah, that's very encouraging. Really. It sounds like. And partly this is because of people worrying about AI power consumption and all these other issues that it also feels like. I'm surprised it's too bad about renewables because it seems like the need for power would drive renewables as it certainly has in China, for instance.
CJ Trowbridge [00:13:58]:
Absolutely.
Leo Laporte [00:13:59]:
Yeah. We're going in the wrong direction here. What about the. We are commissioning a lot more nuclear power. Is that you could see that a renewable or a.
CJ Trowbridge [00:14:08]:
So China is currently building 150 new nuclear power plants. The US is not. Right. We're cutting them, we're shutting them down.
Jeff Jarvis [00:14:19]:
Right, Shutting them down.
CJ Trowbridge [00:14:20]:
Germany at least the safest, cleanest, most efficient source of energy that has ever been developed is nuclear power. And we're shutting it down while other countries are building more. And the marginal cost of electricity is going up here and it's going down in China. Right. And so if the fundamental constraint of the ability to do artificial intelligence inference is how much power you can allocate to that, who's going to win? Right? Like it's no contest.
Leo Laporte [00:14:49]:
Where do you stand on the, on the issue of a bust A. That we are in a bubble and that the bubble is going to pop. Is it going to pop?
CJ Trowbridge [00:15:03]:
Yes. I mean obviously, yeah, I would say yes, 100% obviously. How to frame the answer, like you mentioned, right. Like if you look at Oracle for example, and its financial performance this year, there was this deal made. This company that was literally created by the CIA's venture capital arm is saying that they're going to build this enormous amount of new debt funded infrastructure for OpenAI which doesn't have the money to pay them for that. Right. And they are already levered at an insane level, like way higher than the rest of the industry. And they're like, we're taking on trillions more.
Leo Laporte [00:15:42]:
Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:15:42]:
And the stock jumped and then it lost half and it's now down by half. Right. In just a few months. And so I think when you talk about, like you mentioned earlier that all of our more than 100% of our GDP growth in the last year is the MAG7 and all of that is purely speculative and none of that has any roi and it's not clear that any of them even has a plan to get to an roi. And so at some point the question becomes how long are we going to keep these speculative bubbles going. The problem is people who have bought in can't sell because there's no one to sell it to without taking a 90% markdown. And that's called a liquidity crisis. It's not called this isn't worth what we paid for it.
Jeff Jarvis [00:16:26]:
Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:16:27]:
And so there are all these people talking today about the government should just buy all of these things from people that invested at these insane levels and bail out the investors. But you know, even if, whether or not that happens, you know, it's, it seems pretty clear that we've been in something like stagflation for a while. We have high inflation, we have high unemployment. You have like for example, the Ludwig Institute, which is this very well reputed institute that does a ton of labor research and cost of living research has, has been putting out numbers for years now talking about we actually have like closer to a 25% rate of unemployment. If you look at the number of people who are unable to afford the cost of L with the job that they actually have. You know, and the, there are all these other like alternate measures that people are doing independently of these things like inflation and like consumer price increases and you know, people who have to work three jobs to, to pay rent.
Leo Laporte [00:17:28]:
Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:17:29]:
Like we don't have low unemployment right now. You know, we have high unemployment right now. And when you look at those factors together, you get the 70s right. People are talking like Andrew Osrkin's got this new book. People are talking about it's going to be 1929. I'm not sure that's true. I think that's the wrong way to think about it. So in terms of specifically the answer to your question, is there going to be a big crash? Maybe not.
CJ Trowbridge [00:17:56]:
Maybe it looks more like the 70s. Maybe it's a very long period of low or no growth or negative growth. And then you have. I think that was already true before the trade war, but I think it's going to be so much worse now. Right. And you could see a 70s, you could see a lost decade or more where we have long protracted periods of lower negative growth.
Jeff Jarvis [00:18:25]:
You did your MBA thesis on Nvidia, right?
CJ Trowbridge [00:18:30]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [00:18:31]:
I'm curious to that was. How long ago did you write?
CJ Trowbridge [00:18:36]:
Was two years ago. Right.
Jeff Jarvis [00:18:39]:
Okay. I'm curious about your perspectives on this. Start with ChatGPT. I presume you think it's better now. Is there a point where you think, okay, they didn't listen to me at the beginning, but now they're doing better. Is there a point with Nvidia, do you think that they're doing a good strategy or on the wrong path? I'm curious your just your views of some of these big companies and where they're headed.
CJ Trowbridge [00:19:01]:
So I think when you look at ChatGPT today, one of the big bets that was made early on is this idea that, that if you increase the size, you will increase the capability by more than that. There's this like inverse, this like exponential relationship between the scale and the capability. And that was true at first, but as everyone in Intro to Computer Science learns, all exponential growth curves are just S curves. You haven't found the top of yet. And we've found the top. Right. And they've started stagnating, they've stopped getting better and now they're fighting over who's a little bit higher on this plateau that they're on.
Leo Laporte [00:19:42]:
Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:19:44]:
So I think the right way to think about it is what's called the Platonic representation hypothesis. If we are all looking at the same object from slightly different angles, we might draw in a slightly different way, but it's the same thing that we're all trying to converge on. And that's how all LLMs work. All LLMs are trying to converge on some Platonic ideal in this high dimensional space. There's this shape that you can't even imagine and they're all trying to be that and they're all trying to get closer to that. And so oftentimes it's true that on many important benchmarks you could see a 2 trillion parameter model performing worse than a 1 billion parameter model. This is what Andrej Karpathy was talking about in his really good recent interview with D' Orkesh Patel about how the future is probably these 1 billion or smaller parameter models that know how to solve problems, how to find the information that they need and put it together. And so that's what I've been arguing for a long time, is that smaller models are better.
CJ Trowbridge [00:20:42]:
We should have models that we can stick on a Jetson and, and run at home and not need to pay anybody rent for that. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:20:51]:
Not just smart, but open also. Right?
CJ Trowbridge [00:20:54]:
Yeah. And we have that. Right. And so one of the things that's happened recently is OpenAI actually changed their strategy. They have abandoned their religious reliance on the scaling laws and the new version has a built in router that will send you to a small model if it feels like that's enough. Right. And you don't get the big thinking harder model unless it feels like the small one isn't going to be able to handle the question. Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:21:19]:
So I think a lot of these things are already being adopted in an effort to do cost cutting and just the realization that bigger is not always better for every situation. Right. And in terms of Nvidia, my argument was that Jensen has been sort of preparing for a large reduction in demand in the near future. Right. And so you had, for a short time there were companies like Microsoft and Facebook buying hundreds of thousands of H1 hundreds per year, as many as they could get their hands on. All these other companies couldn't, which is why, like, for example, this, this dojo supercomputer that's using like feature sizes from the iPhone 11 to build these like the, the worst AI chips anyone's ever seen. And the person in charge of it quit. They hired a new one, he quit.
CJ Trowbridge [00:22:13]:
They hired a new one, he quit, and then they just shut the whole thing down. So Tesla effectively has no AI infrastructure at this point and they're renting it from this new XAI startup, which is.
Leo Laporte [00:22:24]:
Chinese, by the way. Oh no, Xai. That's Grox. Yeah. I'm sorry, I thought you said zai. I was thinking zai. So confusing with the letters.
CJ Trowbridge [00:22:33]:
So my argument was like Nvidia controls 98% of the market at that point for inference hardware, and they charge an arbitrary thousand percent markup and everyone is paying for as many as they can buy. Right. They should be charging more. They should charge a lot more. And they should buy a platform like Hugging Face that gives them the power to make it free for developers and let them rent the stuff out instead of selling it. Right. And so they did that actually a month after I wrote the paper with this Core Weaver. Not because I said it like, I don't think it's.
CJ Trowbridge [00:23:11]:
I don't think anybody read it, take the credit. But in the paper I was like, this is so stupid obvious that it must already be the plan. And then it is what happened? So that's how we got Core Weave, essentially. So today that, you know, there are questions about like this whole Michael Burry thing with depreciation. It's like a big topic right now. And it solves that problem because Nvidia is renting them out. They, they aren't charging themselves 1,000% markup. Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:23:38]:
So they have like much more margin there to work with in terms of depreciating over a longer period and giving like whatever prices they want to the market. If they control the entire inference market and not just the market for hardware, that inference is done On. And so, you know, like, historically, I think they're like, less. They're less evil.
Leo Laporte [00:23:58]:
Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:23:59]:
Like, Nvidia is not like an evil company, General, where you see, like, a lot of ethical concerns with the way that inference is used, not so much with the way that, like, the hardware for it is being built. So I think that that ethical landscape is more interesting in terms of, like, what is allowed to happen on these platforms versus, like, who's. Who's buying them.
Leo Laporte [00:24:21]:
We're talking about the Nematran J Trowbridge, who is. You'll see him on TikTok, them on TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, but is also an expert on sustainability and has a doctorate.
CJ Trowbridge [00:24:35]:
In ethical AI, which it's not a doctorate.
Jeff Jarvis [00:24:40]:
Not yet.
CJ Trowbridge [00:24:40]:
Not a doctorate, no.
Leo Laporte [00:24:42]:
A master's in ethical AI, A postgraduate degree. Am I right? Is that right? Is that fair to say? I'll have to look at your CV again.
CJ Trowbridge [00:24:50]:
Yeah. So I did my MBA and then instead of electives, I did the ethical AI program, which is a graduate certificate program.
Leo Laporte [00:24:58]:
Ah, got it at San Francisco State. Tell me about ethical AI. It's almost an oxymoron. What does that mean?
CJ Trowbridge [00:25:07]:
Well, ethical is the science of deciding the right way to do something and the wrong way to do something. And then what is the right way and the wrong way to do AI? Historically, it was primarily concerned with issues around there's this idea of receiver operating characteristics. There's some relationship between two variables that is ideal in terms of the ethics. So that might be how many expensive tests are we willing to pay for in exchange for how many people are we willing to let die because we accidentally said they don't need the test for an insurance company? What is the value of a human life compared to what is the value of the test that we have to pay for? Historically, this is one of the big ethical problems in AI and today as well. But we have these other new emerging ethical concerns in AI, particularly around epistemic power. And who has epistemic power, which is the power to tell you what is true. Right. And what are the perspectives that are being embodied in the epistemic power that's being expressed by a company like OpenAI that's choosing to put the kinds of people who it is on the board.
CJ Trowbridge [00:26:19]:
Right. And someone like Sam Altman.
Jeff Jarvis [00:26:21]:
Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:26:22]:
So are these the people that you want to be in charge of telling the world what is true and false? And if yes, why? If no, why? And those are the interesting ethical issues I see in generative artificial intelligence that I think don't get enough attention because people are so focused instead on concerns around resource consumption that is less than a percent of our consumption.
Leo Laporte [00:26:46]:
It's just not the issue.
Paris Martineau [00:26:47]:
Why do you think that that issue has become so sticky? I assume you must experience this a lot given the size of your following on TikTok, but why do you think that people have kind of glommed onto AI is taking all my wal water and not any of the thorny or more pressing or existentially concerning issues you just detailed?
CJ Trowbridge [00:27:09]:
Yeah. Well, so let me give you an example. The most salient version of that argument to me that I have seen is people who are arguing that Xai's data center in Memphis is taking so much water that it threatens the ability of people there to have drinking water. And it's like, okay, I. And like, talking about Elon has paid my bills for years, Right. As someone that has met him, I met him at Burning Man. Like, we have a lot of mutual friends. He had no idea who I was, which I'm like, I'm so glad.
Leo Laporte [00:27:44]:
Thank goodness.
CJ Trowbridge [00:27:45]:
Don't have me killed, please. But what's the defining geographic feature of Memphis? Right. Like, the amount of water that is going through the Mississippi river in Memphis Every second is 300 times as much as that data center uses a year. You know? Well, and the data center is built next to a sewage treatment plant. It's using treated sewage for cooling. It's not using drinking water. Like, just every part of the argument is just, you know, no one looked anything up.
Leo Laporte [00:28:15]:
Yeah.
CJ Trowbridge [00:28:16]:
But at the same time, like, there are these real concerns around, like air quality. Right. They have 30 gas turbines running in the parking lot to power the building because they didn't bother to get approval to connect it to the grid. And it's the perfect place to build the data center because the tva, the whole purpose of the tva, the. The Tennessee Valley Authority for. For electricity is that it's this new deal project of, like, we're going to build power dams, we're going to build lakes, we're going to produce an enormous amount of abundant and cheap energy with the hope that we can entice aluminum manufacturing into the area, which never happened. So they have all this excess capacity. They have all these nuclear power plants there.
CJ Trowbridge [00:28:57]:
It's the perfect place to do that. But they never got the permits. Like, they never. They never. They didn't check, where is that power available. They just picked a random spot and built it there. And it's like, there's not even power lines, you know, so he brought in all these emergency backup generators, which are illegal to run that way. And it causes enormous pollution which harms the surrounding neighborhoods, which are primarily black neighborhoods.
CJ Trowbridge [00:29:26]:
And he's talking now about how he's going to build a 2 gigawatt natural gas power plant there. And it's like, you can't just do that. Like, people are going to die.
Paris Martineau [00:29:37]:
Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:29:37]:
Like, so it's super dangerous. These kinds of other externalities and these things have nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the unethical and incompetent activities of people like Elon Musk.
Leo Laporte [00:29:52]:
So I think you're saying this, this is, this is such important information.
CJ Trowbridge [00:29:56]:
Yeah. And it's, it's frustrating to me to see people saying like, AI is bad. It's like, that is not the lesson to take from this. Elon is bad. Elon is killing people. AI will run on your phone all day and consume no energy or water. Right.
Paris Martineau [00:30:11]:
AI brought this video to you on your TikTok feed saying AI is bad.
CJ Trowbridge [00:30:17]:
Yeah, I think there are bad ways to do AI. Absolutely.
Jeff Jarvis [00:30:21]:
Who are some good guys in AI?
CJ Trowbridge [00:30:26]:
I think everything that China is doing has been amazing in AI. All of these free models that are more performant than the best stuff you can rent in the cloud here that you can get better results, that it was trained on these nuclear power plants. It's not being trained on coal and, you know, like all the terrible energy sources we're using here. It's being trained on these much cleaner and safer energy sources. It's being trained on, you know, like, there are all these concerns about, like the, the, the con, like what, what, what is the ownership of what's being used to train it. And we know that in America we have companies like Anthropic paying out more than 10% of their last funding round in lawsuits because they, they torrented all these books, they stole all these books from authors. They didn't pay for them. They didn't use things that were open source.
CJ Trowbridge [00:31:18]:
They didn't use the public Internet. They just started torrenting stuff and stealing things from people in order to train Claude. And so they paid out billions of dollars in settlements to authors. And you have the same thing happening at Facebook. They were also doing that. They were using Anna's archive, this like huge archive of, you know, torrents that they've used to train the llama models. And one of like, you know, there are superior training sets available now. Like Fineweb is an open source training set.
CJ Trowbridge [00:31:52]:
It's 15 trillion tokens. That's more than enough to. To train an LLM. And it's what was used for, like Andre Karpathy, after he quit, OpenAI published a CUDA library that he wrote with instructions and bash scripts that would let you replicate all of OpenAI's products yourself using superior training sets like Fine Web, that weren't available when they trained those models. So if you did, if you train GPT3 in the same way that they did originally on these new training sets, it's actually significantly better than it was. So, like, there's no reason to be stealing all this stuff. Like the stuff that's, that's in the public domain, that's open source, is actually superior and it's free.
Jeff Jarvis [00:32:37]:
If they had bought one copy of every book, they'd be a lot better off than where they are now.
CJ Trowbridge [00:32:41]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:32:43]:
So, wow. There's so much I want to ask you about. Your thesis in ethical intelligence was about metaphors and how we misuse metaphors. We call it intelligence, we anthropomorphize it, and that really leads us down the wrong trail. We've been, and I've been talking about that for some time, but it's hard to find another language, especially a language people understand, because we've all kind of settled on this idea that it's human, like intelligence.
CJ Trowbridge [00:33:09]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:33:10]:
Do you have a better way of talking about it we can use?
CJ Trowbridge [00:33:13]:
I think it can sort of relate to what we were just talking about. I think it's frequently the case that engineers will be assigned a task. Like, there is this criticism out there. It doesn't have reasoning. And so the engineer sits down and they're starting to type a function and the function definition. What's the name of the function? Reasoning. Okay, how am I going to do that? And they'll invent something totally unrelated to reasoning. And it's like, okay, now it's solved.
CJ Trowbridge [00:33:35]:
It does reasoning. And this is true with so many of these metaphors, where you have engineering teams tasked with solving fundamental limitations of these tools and these products and they're calling it that. And it's just not that thinking was the same thing. Reasoning is the same thing. Attention is the same thing. What we call attention is not at all related to what attention is. It's just the fact that they have these multiple hidden layers that are fully connected. That's not attention.
CJ Trowbridge [00:34:03]:
It's not making any kind of executive decision to focus on this or focus on that at all.
Leo Laporte [00:34:07]:
Right?
CJ Trowbridge [00:34:08]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:34:09]:
And in the same way, the variables and the functions think of it this way, it's really amazing how concrete that is, right?
CJ Trowbridge [00:34:17]:
And you can see the same way with like, we need training data. We don't have training data. Let's steal it, right? It's not like let's curate an ethically sourced open source library that we can use to train it. It's like, no, no, no, let's just do crime. That's way easier.
Leo Laporte [00:34:35]:
It's faster. It's easier. This is that Silicon Valley ethic of move fast and break things and apologize later.
CJ Trowbridge [00:34:43]:
Well, Eric Schmidt in his talk at Stanford is like, everybody should just go out and start ripping off everyone else's IP with vibe coding. And if it works, you'll have the money to fight them in court. And if it doesn't work, you just close it down and walk away.
Leo Laporte [00:34:58]:
Nothing to sue for. Yeah, you say, and I think you're right, that the models, and maybe it's because of this, have become commoditized, that there isn't really that much distinction between any of the models, Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:35:09]:
Because again, I mean, there is this Platonic ideal shape, right? If you think of parameters, a parameter in an AI model is essentially connection between two neurons, right? So you have billions or trillions of parameters in an AI model, and it's just a list of numbers that you're multiplying. There's not more than that that's going on. You have this really long list of numbers. You're doing matrix multiplication. It gives you the next word, right? Those parameters are dimensions. And so you can think of these hyper objects as like a 2 trillion dimensional shape. Like we live in three dimensions. What does 2 trillion dimensions look like? You can't even imagine that, right? But that's what they're all made of.
CJ Trowbridge [00:35:54]:
And there is some ideal shape that they're all trying to converge on. And so one of the things that's really interesting is the failure of the scaling laws is like you have benchmarks today where there are 2 trillion parameter models that will score worse than 2 or 3 billion parameter models. And so it's like, what is the other like 99.999% of the stuff in there doing? Right? It's not helping, it's not necessary. There's this enormous latent space and it's because we're using unsupervised learning. The process of training is like, here's a whole bunch of stuff. Read through it until you feel like you can predict the next thing wherever I start you. Right? And that's how we train them. And then it's like, okay, how can we make this be a chatbot now? And so like a lot of these things are like, this just isn't their natural mode.
CJ Trowbridge [00:36:53]:
And the thing that they're actually trained to be good at is not what we're actually like using them to do. And it's part of why there is so much, this enormous latent space that is not useful for actually performing the tasks that it's being used for, because it's like this unsupervised sort of like, figure it out, good luck sort of training method.
Leo Laporte [00:37:15]:
My sense is, and I think you're. If I hope I'm phrasing it properly, but I think you're right, the issue isn't AI. The issue is the people who are bringing us AI.
CJ Trowbridge [00:37:25]:
Absolutely.
Leo Laporte [00:37:25]:
The choices they are making for us. So let's do it better on our own. Let's do grassroots stuff. Where can I get one of those little whisper things? Whatever. That you can't. I want that.
CJ Trowbridge [00:37:40]:
So it's an open source project. It's called Wisplay. And essentially this is like a 3D printed case. It's got a Raspberry PI with this little hat that has the screen and the microphone and the speaker and the button and then you can print a case for it and you can just sit here and talk to it.
Leo Laporte [00:37:59]:
Oh, you can buy the wisply hat on Amazon OS is currently available. Yeah.
CJ Trowbridge [00:38:04]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:38:06]:
It's a Raspberry PI zero. No, no, no, it's a little more than that.
CJ Trowbridge [00:38:11]:
It's. This is the. The five. There's also a bunch of these.
Paris Martineau [00:38:16]:
High Sugar.com allegedly has it.
CJ Trowbridge [00:38:18]:
Yeah, that's the manufacturer. Yeah, yeah. So like, you'll notice that the hat is the same size as. It's the same form factor as the PI zero. Right?
Leo Laporte [00:38:27]:
Yeah.
CJ Trowbridge [00:38:27]:
But the PI zero only has half a gig of ram. So like.
Leo Laporte [00:38:30]:
Right. It's not enough.
CJ Trowbridge [00:38:31]:
Yeah, it's not running any LLMs, but there are all these new Chinese clones. Like this is the Orange PI, which is the same form factor, but it has 4 gigs of RAM. But it doesn't have matrix multiplication extensions for the CPU, so it's going to be even slower. There's a new one that they haven't actually started manufacturing yet from Radxa or Radza called the QB A7Z that's got 16 gigs of RAM with an NPU in the same form factor. So you'll be able to do with half the physical size and even more powerful models, which is really exciting. We're in this really interesting Place where there's this abundance of small edge stuff that's getting really good. So it's really exciting.
Leo Laporte [00:39:15]:
This is exciting. If somebody, and I know probably most of the people listening, want to start doing this on their own, what do you recommend? I went out and bought a framework desktop so that I could run local models downloading them from LM Studio. At least that gave me a sense of what was out there. Where do you start? What do you do?
CJ Trowbridge [00:39:36]:
LM Studio is great. It's a free open source project that's built on top of the GGML library. GGML Library is incredible. What it's accomplished is this open source project to make it really Easy to run AI models for inference without. You don't need TensorFlow, you don't need any of that stuff. It's just this very simple library that can be included in apps. So there's all kinds of apps like Olama, Llama, cpp, LM Studio that all.
Leo Laporte [00:40:03]:
Are built on top of that is. I mean, it's a meta model though. Do we care where the model comes from?
CJ Trowbridge [00:40:09]:
No. So Ollama is a server that gives you the same API that OpenAI uses with your own models.
Leo Laporte [00:40:16]:
So you provide your own. You don't have to use Llama with Olama. Okay, okay.
CJ Trowbridge [00:40:20]:
No, yeah, yeah. In fact, that's.
Leo Laporte [00:40:22]:
Ollama is what everybody uses for all of their local models. That seems to be the kind of dominant Llama CPP seems to be the Ollama CCP pp. So, okay, so, and then what if.
CJ Trowbridge [00:40:33]:
You wanted to do it, if you wanted to do it on a cell phone, whether you have Android or iPhone, iPhones are really constrained with their memory resources. There's no iPhone that has more than eight gigs of memory. So realistically, you're going to be way less limited on Android. But both of them have a free open source app that's also built on top of the GGML library called Pocket pal. And it's an open source community project and it'll let you run any of these models on your phone and you can do it all day without needing to plug it in, which tells you that like it's not taking all the power, right?
Leo Laporte [00:41:10]:
So if you're running these smaller models or you're running them in smaller amounts of memory, what are you giving up? They're not as smart, they're not as. What do you lose?
CJ Trowbridge [00:41:19]:
Some of them are smarter. I think, like the really interesting stuff that's going on right now in this community is including all of these same Tool capabilities. So for Ollama, there's a web front end you can use called Open Web UI that will connect to Ollama. And these are just docker containers. You can run them with a single line of a single docker command. Then you've got an interface like ChatGPT that has the same layout. You can just choose whichever model you want. You can download whatever model you want right there in the web ui.
CJ Trowbridge [00:41:52]:
You don't have to get into the code at all or anything. And it includes tool integrations that are converging on all of these different, you know, paradigms that are being adopted by different labs. And so they can. It can already, like, go search the web for you and bring back the answer. There's also all of these really interesting projects, including one that we're working on with one of the nonprofits that I started. We're doing like off grid, like solar powered systems that are.
Leo Laporte [00:42:18]:
Cyberpony. Cyberpony Express.
CJ Trowbridge [00:42:20]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:42:21]:
The Cyber Pony Express meshtastic network.
CJ Trowbridge [00:42:25]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:42:25]:
It's off grid.
CJ Trowbridge [00:42:27]:
Yeah, yeah. And it's got AI on it, so you can chat with AI on it.
Leo Laporte [00:42:32]:
So I think it's also. I like the future that you're building here. This future of local small AIs, not run by big tech companies and kind of demented tech bros, but created by the people, for the people, with the use of the people. And it's small and it's nimble. It feels like that's a great direction to go.
CJ Trowbridge [00:42:54]:
Yeah. So that project, we did a GoFundMe. We raised like $12,000 to buy the radios and just give them away for free to people. So like they're.
Leo Laporte [00:43:04]:
These are little mesh. Mesh radios.
CJ Trowbridge [00:43:06]:
Yeah. And so it has a range of like up to 20 miles to the next person. And the mesh that it builds is huge. So right now you can, like Nevada City to Gilroy, from like Modesto to Sonoma, you can. You can text on this network that there's no Internet, there's no cel phone towers, and it's all end to end, encrypted. No one's in charge of it. No one could be like, in control of it. It's like a totally like anarchist peer to peer type system.
CJ Trowbridge [00:43:32]:
And we've been doing a lot. Like, the team that's building this software is very into Burning Man. So we did like this year at Burning man, we did a group chat with 10,000 people.
Leo Laporte [00:43:41]:
Sounds like something that would happen at Burning Man. All right, now I get it.
CJ Trowbridge [00:43:44]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'M also the regional chair for Burners Without Borders for the Bay Area. So we're interested. Yeah, we're interested in. We do like disaster response, disaster preparation.
Jeff Jarvis [00:43:56]:
Love it.
Leo Laporte [00:43:57]:
Love it.
CJ Trowbridge [00:43:57]:
And like, there's this interesting sort of overlap of like the prepper community and like the AI community, where it's sort of like, can I use this in an emergency? Can I use. Can I use the mesh to like contact my friends and family during a disaster, make sure they're okay? And it's like. Yeah. And it's all solar powered by these little devices that people have put on all the mountaintops and you can just send messages across them.
Leo Laporte [00:44:19]:
The next generation of amateur radio of hams. Hams have been very active in local disaster prep, but you had to get a license to do it. You had to get.
Jeff Jarvis [00:44:28]:
That's before the Fed ruined radio.
Leo Laporte [00:44:31]:
Yeah. This is great. I love this.
CJ Trowbridge [00:44:33]:
Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I am also a licensed amateur radio tech. And the thing about those organizations that you're mentioning, like Ares, for example, there are all these amateur radio emergency organizations where people within amateur radio will help during a disaster because the infrastructure is all there and it's not reliant on any of the Internet or cell phone infrastructure. So like, for example, this year at Burning man, we had 10,000 people in a group chat on Meshtastic. The whole city can talk, can listen, can get news from each other about what's going on. And we had a number of disasters and we had people with like, there were meteorologists with like, they brought a Doppler radar and they're like, okay, here's what's about to happen. And that's so much more accurate than what you can find online even. Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:45:22]:
And so it's this. These kinds of alternative, like, I love this peer to peer mesh topologies are just inherently superior to like legacy media institutions in terms of like their ability to disseminate important information hyper locally.
Leo Laporte [00:45:36]:
How do we get this to. Let's. I want to. Let's get this going. How do we get this going? We are. It's the High Desert Institute. Tell us about that.
CJ Trowbridge [00:45:47]:
Yeah, so I've. A few years ago I started a nonprofit with a group of friends and we basically buy land all over the country and build like free communities for people that want to go live there and build houses and off grid. Yeah. And we. There's a TV show about the most recent one on Discovery, which is kind of like they, they filmed the process of building it and then they like sort of Tried to make a reality show out of it, which is like. It wasn't a reality show.
Leo Laporte [00:46:15]:
Yeah, of course, yeah.
CJ Trowbridge [00:46:17]:
But it's out there if people want to check it out. But basically we've been building these free lands all over the country. And one of the requests that we got at the first one was, someone was like, why can we build our own Internet so we don't have to use the government satellites.
Jeff Jarvis [00:46:30]:
Yes.
CJ Trowbridge [00:46:31]:
And at that point, there wasn't a lot of stuff like this, but a lot. Like, Majestic is still very much like a beta project, but we're working really closely with the development team and building out these networks. And now it's really possible to have like this secure offline communication with people. And we've got a bunch of, like, robotics projects, for example, that we're working on that's integrated with the mesh so that you can like put an LLM on like a. It's got like the quadruped, like canine. You know, you can 3D print these now and.
Leo Laporte [00:47:03]:
Well, you put that on a dog, or it is a dog. You put it on a dog.
CJ Trowbridge [00:47:08]:
The legs are not attached, but yeah, you can have it be on the mesh and you can give it simple text instructions. And it's got an LLM on there that'll interpret the context of where it is and what's the instruction and figure out how to go do it.
Leo Laporte [00:47:22]:
This is much more the neuromancer future than it is the dystopian future others have imagined. I love this idea. You're going to have these hyper conglomerates, Kiretsu's, you're going to have these big powerful companies. Let's move under the radar at a scale and make a difference and do it for ourselves so we're not stuck in that machinery.
CJ Trowbridge [00:47:46]:
Yeah, I wasn't sure where you were going with that because. So, like Neuromancer is my favorite book. I'm like, that's pretty dystopian, but it is dystopian.
Leo Laporte [00:47:53]:
And it's also about these giant corporations. But there's also this underground. Right, right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:47:58]:
If the future sucks because big corporations are evil, how can people use technology in unexpected and unplanned for ways to be okay through that and survive and thrive through the chaos that we're likely to see in the next 20, 30 years?
Leo Laporte [00:48:13]:
This is what we need to do.
CJ Trowbridge [00:48:15]:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited and very nervous about the TV show adaptation that's about to come out.
Leo Laporte [00:48:21]:
I am, too. Yeah. No, please don't. Cjtrobridge.com is probably a good place to start. You can see all the projects they're up to and all the theses are online. His Spotify or their Spotify playlists are online.
CJ Trowbridge [00:48:39]:
People ask for those.
Leo Laporte [00:48:40]:
It's all there. But I think the thing to find out about is all the different things CJ's into and their TikTok and YouTube and Twitch streams and I just think this is, I want to support this because I think you're on the right track. Absolutely. And this is where we need to go. I think we've. Don't you think Jeff and Paris, we've kind of come to that conclusion over the year doing this show that thinking about big tech's AIs and what they're doing and what's happening and I just think it's very encouraging. We've heard more and more about small models over the last few months. I really think it's exciting what's about to happen.
Paris Martineau [00:49:23]:
Absolutely, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:49:24]:
I'm very inspired by it and encouraged by it. CJ Trowbridge, thank you so much for joining us.
CJ Trowbridge [00:49:29]:
I would just add sort of like a last thought is that if the bubble pops, if all these companies go away, almost all the value of what's been created we will still have in these open source models that we will continue to be able to run on the edge. And the reason we're not making a lot more of those is because we've kind of reached what we're going to reach. This is the end of the plateau.
Jeff Jarvis [00:49:53]:
Right.
CJ Trowbridge [00:49:54]:
And so no matter what happens, we will still have these tools and we need to figure out how we can use them locally and not rent them from these, you know, future X corporations that are currently ruling the world.
Leo Laporte [00:50:07]:
Love it.
CJ Trowbridge [00:50:07]:
So nice to meet you.
Leo Laporte [00:50:10]:
Lips to Elon Musk's.
Jeff Jarvis [00:50:16]:
Long gone.
Leo Laporte [00:50:17]:
Thank you cj. I really appreciate your time. Very inspiring stuff. CJ Trowbridge everybody. We'll be back with the AI news in just a bit. Our show today brought to you by the Agency. Here's another project I think is pretty worthy build the future of multi agent software with Agency Agntcy. It's now an open source Linux foundation project.
Leo Laporte [00:50:40]:
That's so cool. Agency is building the Internet of agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can discover, connect and work across any framework. And the thing is all the pieces engineers need to deploy multi agent systems now belong to everyone who builds on agency. That includes robust identity and access management. That's super important. It ensures every agent is authenticated and trusted before you interact with it. Agency also provides open standardized tools for agent discovery, seamless protocols for agent to agent communication, modular components for scalable workflows.
Leo Laporte [00:51:17]:
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Jeff Jarvis [00:51:50]:
Yeah. Yeah. But I don't think we can write off the big guys. I don't think he's like, he's saying that either, but I think that we gotta force, we gotta push them still. Yeah, we gotta push meta to have Llama and I mean, do you think.
Paris Martineau [00:52:04]:
Llama's long for this world?
Jeff Jarvis [00:52:06]:
That's what I'm saying. I don't think it is. That's, that's what I think. We've got to keep the pressure on and not just give up on trying to make it.
Paris Martineau [00:52:11]:
What would keeping the pressure on even look like at this point?
Leo Laporte [00:52:15]:
This talking about it.
Jeff Jarvis [00:52:17]:
I think Jan Le Quin leaving.
Leo Laporte [00:52:21]:
Matters anyway. I don't know whose idea was. I think it was Anthony's to talk to cj, but I'm super glad we did. I think.
Paris Martineau [00:52:29]:
Yeah. What a great guest.
Leo Laporte [00:52:30]:
Yeah, that's. If there's to be a future for your generation, Paris, it isn't us, I'm assuming us, but I'm acting as if there's not just, you know, that would be the case. There's still. I mean, what's interesting is the big guys are still doing interesting stuff this week. Two new models out. They're competing with each other like crazy. Gemini 3 Flash, which is a much smaller model built for speed, not open source. It's Gemini.
Leo Laporte [00:53:06]:
Look, there's our friend Tulsi Dolshi writing about this. Dolshi writing about this on behalf of the Gemini team and the Keyword blog. People have already tried it, think it's very impressive. It's very fast thinking, even thinking. And its scores are very good. It's also cheap, relatively cheap. Gemini 3 Pro, which is 2 bucks for 100,000 tokens. I'm sorry, price per million tokens is 2 bucks.
Leo Laporte [00:53:37]:
Price per million of Gemini 3 Flash, 50 cents. So it's a quarter of the cost.
Jeff Jarvis [00:53:43]:
Call now.
Leo Laporte [00:53:44]:
Call now. Now. It is more expensive than 2.5 flash, but the flashes have always been a little bit less expensive. Did well. So Gemini 3 Pro, 37% on humanity's last examination, Flash 33.7. So close, very close in the scores. And you can see the other scores here. In fact, it did better on Arc AGI 2.
Leo Laporte [00:54:09]:
So they're moving forward. Not to be outdone by Nano Banano, Chat GPT images is here. And I've seen a number of comparison between the new images and ChatGPT. This is, you know, their old dolly, but they've updated it and the image is created by Nano Banana. And I have to say it's not only competitive, I think in many cases it's more realistic. It feels really real. Yeah. Let me see.
Leo Laporte [00:54:39]:
I'll find some examples on Reddit. There have been some good.
Paris Martineau [00:54:42]:
I was going to say, I think every example I've seen on Reddit has been the opposite.
Leo Laporte [00:54:45]:
Oh, really?
Paris Martineau [00:54:46]:
Mm.
Leo Laporte [00:54:48]:
Okay.
Paris Martineau [00:54:48]:
Well, Jason tried out most recent update.
Leo Laporte [00:54:52]:
It's also prompting, you know, so Jason tried it.
Jeff Jarvis [00:54:56]:
He tried out Gemini versus the the new Chat GPT and Gemini was beating the hell out of it.
Leo Laporte [00:55:02]:
It was.
Jeff Jarvis [00:55:03]:
Yeah. Better and faster images, you mean? Well, he was doing. What do you call them? Infographics.
Leo Laporte [00:55:11]:
Oh, yeah, the infographics are incredible. In Nano Banana. Incredible. I saw a family, a candid family photo comparison between Nano Banana and the new GPT images that I thought GPT images was indistinguishable from.
Paris Martineau [00:55:31]:
I'm posting a haunting image on in.
Leo Laporte [00:55:35]:
I guess, you know what it's again, it's just. It's hit or miss. Right.
Jeff Jarvis [00:55:40]:
And it's leapfrog.
Leo Laporte [00:55:42]:
Right.
Paris Martineau [00:55:42]:
People have also, I mean, as per usual, been really mad on the ChatGPT and OpenAI subreddits that they're worried it's taking away their horny mommy, for lack of a better description.
Leo Laporte [00:55:58]:
Sorry, what is that?
Paris Martineau [00:56:01]:
By which I mean people are upset that either their AI, girlfriend, boyfriend.
Leo Laporte [00:56:06]:
Oh, okay.
Paris Martineau [00:56:07]:
Partner. Or their comfort object that perhaps takes a parental figure year is gone. They're upset that this iteration, latest iteration of Chat GPT that we've had come.
Leo Laporte [00:56:20]:
Out last is not your. Not your horny mommy anymore, for lack.
Paris Martineau [00:56:25]:
Of a better description. Yes. I thought it was pretty. No, I don't think I've ever heard any. But I do.
Leo Laporte [00:56:32]:
Is that you? Did you make that up?
Paris Martineau [00:56:34]:
Fresh off the dome, baby. It clearly is not confusing to anyone at all and. And didn't require a meaningful explanation.
Leo Laporte [00:56:42]:
No. Yeah, I'm looking through some of these images. Well, you know, here's one I saw. This is an example of making a World Wildlife Fund ad One Planet Many Lives. The prompt in both cases was use A globe on moss image as the main background. Inside the glass globe add a small panda pair. Realistic softly reflected pair P A I R not P E A R curved to match the sphere tag one planet, many alive small line optional protect habit. I think they're both very good.
Leo Laporte [00:57:20]:
I kind of like the image GPT image a little bit better.
Jeff Jarvis [00:57:24]:
Yeah. No GPT. No, I like Nano Banana better.
Leo Laporte [00:57:26]:
You like Nano Banana better? It's a matter of preference I guess.
Benito Gonzalez [00:57:32]:
Nano Banana is better at topography.
Leo Laporte [00:57:36]:
It is better typography by far. I agree with you.
Paris Martineau [00:57:39]:
Oh, I thought you said topography like topography or typography. Yeah, I'm just shows where my brain goes. Always the plan.
Leo Laporte [00:57:50]:
In any event, even the big boys are improving rapidly finding new ways to. To do stuff. But I kind of agree with CJ's thesis that they are a little bit commoditized.
Jeff Jarvis [00:58:01]:
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Leo Laporte [00:58:02]:
Yeah, they're very similar.
Jeff Jarvis [00:58:04]:
This is also where the different paradigms work there. There's a paper today, Yann Lecun is one of the co authors that. And I can't. I had to have AI explain it to me but deals less in words and more in ideas and only later in the process does it translate the idea into words.
Leo Laporte [00:58:20]:
Right.
Jeff Jarvis [00:58:20]:
This is kind of where this stuff's going.
Paris Martineau [00:58:22]:
It's.
Leo Laporte [00:58:23]:
I feel a little bit like a. Like a junkie though using this. I can't stop using this stuff even knowing if it's, you know. I'm glad to know it's not bad for the environment, but knowing that it's not good for humans.
Paris Martineau [00:58:33]:
What do you mean you can't stop using it?
Leo Laporte [00:58:35]:
I. I'm hooked.
Paris Martineau [00:58:37]:
Like Claude, what have you used it for today?
Leo Laporte [00:58:40]:
Okay, podcode is today. I just use it now to. I was having a weird problem with my Emacs setup. I had it. I said take a look at this, what's going on? And it solves it. It's very good. I. I do images all the time.
Leo Laporte [00:58:56]:
I don't have a right things ever I don't think. Mostly I would say the number one use is research. So if I like just as you did Jeff, explain it to me. I ask it, you know, medical conditions. I ask it for advice on, you know, what's the best way to fix a squeaky door? That kind of thing. It's very good. I mean look, it hallucinates. I had a problem with my Linux setup and I was not.
Leo Laporte [00:59:30]:
I tried and tried and tried with all the different models. Never was able to get a solution that actually worked. So yeah, I'm not saying it's perfect. In fact we have a story here from one of the best Mac bloggers about not using AI to solve your Mac issues. It he tried it against a couple of well known.
Paris Martineau [00:59:54]:
I also say I don't think you should be using AI to solve medical.
Leo Laporte [00:59:57]:
Issues that not solve medical issues.
Paris Martineau [00:59:59]:
But I would argue you should, you know, not use rely on AI for medical issues.
Leo Laporte [01:00:08]:
Yeah, I mean you have to be judicious. I'm not saying you shouldn't be judicious.
Paris Martineau [01:00:11]:
But I think part of the issue is that these systems are designed to make you not judicious about it because it seems confident and.
Leo Laporte [01:00:18]:
Yeah, well I know more. I know better than that. And you're right, I think that's a pitfall.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:22]:
But I think knowing what questions to ask the actual doctor.
Leo Laporte [01:00:24]:
Be careful about that. Yeah, but I've. But I found it incredibly useful. This is, this is an example. This is from the Eclectic Light company Macintosh blog last week on my Mac. How good is AI at solving Mac problems? He gave it three I think fairly common issues with Macintoshes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:48]:
Why is it so expensive?
Leo Laporte [01:00:50]:
He says Google's AI can't maintain a logical sequence in troubleshooting. Prefers to direct the user to command tools rather than the familiarly bundled utilities. All the answers were wrong. How to reset permissions. They were just wrong. Now he's an expert so it's good.
Paris Martineau [01:01:08]:
He knew that they were wrong. Ever that wrong when it's talking about your precious medical issues though.
Leo Laporte [01:01:12]:
Well, but it isn't. You're so mean to me. Why are you so mean? No, it isn't. I, you know and, but that's the, that's the caution is if you didn't know and you typed in the commands that the AI gave you on the Mac, you might screw your Mac up. Me? It's just my body. It's no big deal. Yeah. Time magazine names AI the person of the year thing.
Jeff Jarvis [01:01:38]:
It.
Paris Martineau [01:01:39]:
But it's not even. And then do you guys know the poly market aspect of this?
Leo Laporte [01:01:43]:
Yes. That's hysterical. So people tell us what that.
Paris Martineau [01:01:46]:
Let's first let's show the Time magazine cover.
Leo Laporte [01:01:49]:
Okay, there's, there's two. There's one.
Paris Martineau [01:01:51]:
Zoom in first. One is just something that says AI.
Leo Laporte [01:01:54]:
Yeah, they're building it.
Paris Martineau [01:01:55]:
But here's the so called architects skyscraper.
Leo Laporte [01:02:00]:
It's a takeoff on a very famous 1930s picture of construction workers over New York City sitting on a girder eating their lunch. Instead it is a bunch, I don't know, eight people who are somewhat involved with AI, you've got Mark Zuckerberg, you've got Lisa sue of amd. I don't know why she's there. You've got Elon Musk.
Jeff Jarvis [01:02:21]:
Wanted some women in the. On the.
Leo Laporte [01:02:22]:
They wanted to put some women in. They've got Jensen Wong, they've got. Got Sam Altman. There's Demis Hassibas. That is Dario Mode of anthropic. And then weirdly, they do have another woman, Fei Fei Li, who is probably one of the. Along with Demis demise. Probably one of the two real architects.
Leo Laporte [01:02:40]:
Yes. People who actually do anything. Poor Fei Fei Li is sliding off the girder halfway, even though there's plenty.
Paris Martineau [01:02:46]:
Of space to look at all Mark.
Leo Laporte [01:02:47]:
Holy blessed room over.
Jeff Jarvis [01:02:49]:
But Mark won't move over.
Leo Laporte [01:02:50]:
By the way. Mark has never looked so happy in. In his life. That is.
Paris Martineau [01:02:55]:
That is not.
Leo Laporte [01:02:56]:
Anyway, so I put up a Time.
Paris Martineau [01:02:58]:
Cover of the year. Ostensibly it's for AI architects. And listen, I. This is gonna be the only time I'll ever come to the defense, and I'm not even doing that. Of poly market betting, people. And I assume it's poly market bet. It might have been the other one, Kashi Kalshi.
Leo Laporte [01:03:14]:
I think it was both. It was both Kalshi and both cases.
Paris Martineau [01:03:17]:
They had some sort of bet going on for whether the Time person of the year would be AI and when these covers went out, people were like, hey, yeah, I voted yes that it was going to be AI. Where's my money? And in both cases, they close it down being like, sorry, you lose. AI was the person of the year.
CJ Trowbridge [01:03:38]:
Architects of AI.
Leo Laporte [01:03:40]:
Well, there's also. And we were talking about this on Sunday on Twitt and. And it's actually interesting because we had a good panel. One of the people on the panel, Owen Thomas, worked at Time magazine during some of these debates over the COVID And he said these guys completely punted. They should have picked probably Jensen Wong, but they just couldn't pick one. So they.
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:10]:
These covers are such bs.
Leo Laporte [01:04:12]:
It's just to sell.
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:12]:
Meaningless.
Leo Laporte [01:04:13]:
It's meaningless dwarf.
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:16]:
Jurgen Schmidt Hoover's version.
Paris Martineau [01:04:19]:
That one year that the person of the year was you.
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:22]:
Was you.
Leo Laporte [01:04:23]:
You. They did the same thing. They did the same thing with a personal computer. They wanted to make it Steve Jobs, but he was such a jerk. They didn't. They didn't dare do it. So they decided to make it the personal computer.
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:36]:
Here is, as you were saying, some of these aren't architects. In fact, two people are.
Leo Laporte [01:04:40]:
But there's another architect, Schmidt Hoober's. Version of the person of the year. Who is that?
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:46]:
Yeah, we've talked about him. Jurgen Spithuber is one of the AI has many parents. Jurgen's one of them.
Leo Laporte [01:04:52]:
And he's apparently very strong.
Paris Martineau [01:04:53]:
He's the strongest of the AI Parents.
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:56]:
It looked like it, I think.
Leo Laporte [01:04:58]:
Look, it's clear that none of these people, except for, again, Demis, possibly Dario, and for sure, Fei. Fei Li have sat down at a computer to code any AI but so architects, maybe. I guess the architects could be the financial guys. Is Jensen a coder? I don't know, Joel.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:17]:
Jensen's technical.
Leo Laporte [01:05:18]:
He's more technical anyway. Yeah, he's more of an engineer.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:21]:
But yeah, it's just. It's just bs.
Leo Laporte [01:05:22]:
It's just. Yeah, we shouldn't get too excited about that because it is, after all, just a marketing stunt.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:28]:
I told the story, I think, when. When my. My mentor, People magazine, Pat Ryan, was facing a cover with Mel Gibson, had nothing. Had no idea what to say. And she said, oh, screw it. Let's just call him the most. The sexiest man Lies.
Leo Laporte [01:05:40]:
And that became.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:41]:
And that started the. The franchise.
Leo Laporte [01:05:43]:
The trope. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:44]:
Yeah. So it's just. It's just. It's like 10 best bagels in New York.
Leo Laporte [01:05:50]:
We were talking about this on Twitter and. And the irony is it used to be to sell magazines, Right? You put it on the COVID It sells magazines, but there's no newsstands, there's no magazines. What do you put. What are you doing now? Why do you do this? Is it to get link clicks? Maybe it's to get us to talk.
Paris Martineau [01:06:05]:
About people angry tweeting you and we did.
Leo Laporte [01:06:08]:
Exactly. And we got some people upset at polymarket and Kalshi for sure. By the way, the Claude skills that we have been using very effectively in our research for the shows. Thank you. Anthony Nielsen have now moved to OpenAI as well. It's such a. OpenAI.
Paris Martineau [01:06:29]:
Is that a skill you use for that?
Leo Laporte [01:06:31]:
Yeah. Well, it didn't. Wasn't initially, but once. But once open. Once Claude added skills, we decided to figure.
Paris Martineau [01:06:39]:
I need to figure out, I guess, how to turn that into a skill for mine.
Leo Laporte [01:06:43]:
Yeah, we'll ask it.
Paris Martineau [01:06:43]:
And most of us have it as in a project.
Leo Laporte [01:06:46]:
It'll tell you how to turn it into.
Paris Martineau [01:06:47]:
I guess it will.
Leo Laporte [01:06:48]:
So now that was back in October. Now here we are three months later. My God. OpenAI is doing the same with ChatGPT and their command line Codex. Everybody's got it is commodified.
Jeff Jarvis [01:07:03]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:07:04]:
And by the way, CJ's point was it's all trained in the same data so of course it's commodified. I guess that makes sense.
Jeff Jarvis [01:07:10]:
And it's all transformers and it's all attention must be paid.
Paris Martineau [01:07:13]:
And, and it's all not un. Currently unprofitable.
Leo Laporte [01:07:18]:
And it's all unprofitable. Although there are some. Here's a company that says it's making money, $100 million a year. It's chat GPT.
Paris Martineau [01:07:26]:
Is that revenue or is that profit?
Leo Laporte [01:07:29]:
Yeah, revenue. Yeah, revenue. This is. Although I think if anything's going to succeed, this is probably the right idea. Open Evidence has a AI for doctors only and it's trusted. Unlike the AI I use for my medical advice, it's trusted because it's based entirely on medical journals, on peer reviewed medical journals like the Journal of American Medical association and Lancet and so forth. They have, they have now a valuation of $12 billion according to Stephanie Palazzolo at the Information on Revenue generating annualized revenue, more than $100 million. And how do they make the money? They sell ads to pharmaceutical companies.
Jeff Jarvis [01:08:16]:
Oh no.
Leo Laporte [01:08:16]:
On the, on the advice they give to doctors. So there is money to be made. You see.
Jeff Jarvis [01:08:24]:
Going to ruin AI too.
Leo Laporte [01:08:25]:
Yeah, yeah. I, I'm presuming they're not putting it in the actual answer that they're, you.
Paris Martineau [01:08:33]:
Know, why would you ever presume that?
Leo Laporte [01:08:35]:
I don't, I don't know. You're right. Good question.
Benito Gonzalez [01:08:37]:
You're being too kind.
Leo Laporte [01:08:38]:
Yeah, I can't, I can't use it. You have to be.
Paris Martineau [01:08:41]:
You're going to have to click through three to five pop up ads about brand name drugs before you can get your diagnosis for your specific stage of terminal cancer. That's going to be our future.
Leo Laporte [01:08:53]:
And even if it does say sponsor and it's underneath the result, that's got to have some influence on a physician who's looking for an answer to a question and he looks below and says, oh yeah, I need the Tresiba Liba dba. That's what I need.
Jeff Jarvis [01:09:06]:
I like their pens. There'll give me more pens.
Leo Laporte [01:09:08]:
I want more Traceba Liba. Nice lunch.
Paris Martineau [01:09:11]:
Whenever I'm able to actually open my email. And then he felt these pop up.
Benito Gonzalez [01:09:14]:
But that does happen today. Like, like pharmaceutical companies are talking directly.
Leo Laporte [01:09:18]:
To Dr. All the time. They hire attractive young women who go from doctor's office to doctor's office with swag bags and it's a. Yeah, I know a number of people in pharmacy.
Jeff Jarvis [01:09:30]:
Sam Quinones, great book about opioids that's right.
Leo Laporte [01:09:36]:
That's right. How did that whatchamacallit family succeed?
Jeff Jarvis [01:09:43]:
So did you like the story I made for you?
Leo Laporte [01:09:46]:
Yes, I love that. Isn't that cute? I like the first one with Paris as a little girl. Did you?
Paris Martineau [01:09:52]:
I don't know why I'm so short in here.
Leo Laporte [01:09:55]:
So you're very tiny.
Jeff Jarvis [01:09:57]:
Gemini Storybook is out and it'll make a. You just give it a prompt. You put a picture in, it'll use it and it'll make it.
Leo Laporte [01:10:02]:
Is it for parents to make stories from their a.
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:06]:
More for smart asses to make them for their podcast friends.
Leo Laporte [01:10:08]:
Let me. Let me see if I can. I can find one here. Oh, you emailed them.
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:15]:
I emailed them. Oh, they're so big. They had to come.
Leo Laporte [01:10:17]:
Yeah, they're so big.
Paris Martineau [01:10:19]:
They're so big.
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:20]:
So you can do them in anime and claymation in just plain.
Leo Laporte [01:10:24]:
I like the claymation one, but that's the one where Paris is really teensy weensy.
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:28]:
Well, it was. I said. I think I said you're older. Two fathers.
Leo Laporte [01:10:32]:
It confused. Oh, that's how that happened.
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:35]:
It confused us. So I'm Leo, and Leo is. Is me.
Leo Laporte [01:10:38]:
Which one would you like me to show first?
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:40]:
I don't care.
Leo Laporte [01:10:40]:
They're both Operation Prawn Star.
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:43]:
Yeah, I think so. I think so.
Paris Martineau [01:10:46]:
Wait, did you send multiple?
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:48]:
I only see one.
Leo Laporte [01:10:49]:
Oh, there's two. Yeah. Well, let me show you the first. I'll show you both of them. Oh, I have to download them. They are large. Pharmaceutical swag is banned in California. Well, I didn't know that.
Leo Laporte [01:10:59]:
Scooter X. Well, that's good news.
Jeff Jarvis [01:11:00]:
That is good news.
Leo Laporte [01:11:01]:
So here we are, riding our boat, the Podcast two Pig. There's Paris in front.
Paris Martineau [01:11:08]:
That's one way to call it.
Leo Laporte [01:11:09]:
Yeah. Trademark glasses, I guess that's me. And then Jeff behind me with a mustache.
Jeff Jarvis [01:11:16]:
Mustache.
Leo Laporte [01:11:17]:
Now he's got a goatee. Hello, Guru island, and welcome to a very special broadcast. Shouted Leo, leaning into an enormous foam covered microphone. This is Paris and her two dads. And today we are embarking on Operation Prawnstar. Have you seen this before? You saw this one, right?
Paris Martineau [01:11:35]:
I haven't seen this one.
CJ Trowbridge [01:11:36]:
I saw this.
Jeff Jarvis [01:11:37]:
Okay.
Paris Martineau [01:11:38]:
Paris nodded, seriously, tears over the name.
Leo Laporte [01:11:40]:
Podcast Pig, but adjusting her headset. Our mission, to find and capture the elusive, glowing and slightly aggressive radioactive shrimp. It's rumored to live deep in the fizzing fjord beyond the bubble sea. Oh, my. Anyway, I won't read the whole thing to you. This is Claymation, though.
Paris Martineau [01:11:58]:
Scroll through the claymation. There's some. Why do you look? Why did both of them make you look so young?
Jeff Jarvis [01:12:05]:
I know. It pisses me off. I get older as it goes on.
Leo Laporte [01:12:08]:
I look. It's because I look that.
Paris Martineau [01:12:10]:
It's a shrimp guide on it. That's very cute.
Leo Laporte [01:12:13]:
Yeah. My hair is not brown. Jeff, you look like Burl Ives. I don't know. The only way I know it's Paris.
Paris Martineau [01:12:20]:
I've had every different hair color throughout.
Leo Laporte [01:12:23]:
No, it's the glasses are the trademark.
Jeff Jarvis [01:12:25]:
Don't panic, dads. Paris Clickbank buttons on our keyboard control panel.
Leo Laporte [01:12:30]:
We can use the sound to our advantage. High frequency bait. And here's the radioactive shrimp Jeff's apparently interviewing.
Paris Martineau [01:12:38]:
I like that. It's. Jeff is in a boat, but it's also underwater.
Leo Laporte [01:12:42]:
Yeah. I don't get it.
Paris Martineau [01:12:45]:
Oh, but it says Leo raised his microphone like a. Yeah, it's very confused.
Leo Laporte [01:12:48]:
So now I don't know who's who. Who's whom.
Paris Martineau [01:12:52]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [01:12:53]:
Who's who?
Paris Martineau [01:12:54]:
Next week, we're countering the mountain of mildew. I look like I've just seen a ghost in this panel.
Leo Laporte [01:12:58]:
This is good. You want to see the other one? I've seen the other one. You've seen the other one. All right.
Paris Martineau [01:13:02]:
We should show the audience the other one. It's cute.
Leo Laporte [01:13:04]:
Yeah. They haven't seen the other one, so we'll.
Jeff Jarvis [01:13:06]:
So if you're an actual parent with a little kid, this could be a lot of fun to make your kid star of a book.
Leo Laporte [01:13:11]:
Should I be sad? You know, Patrick Delahanty, our cto, his wife is a very accomplished, very well known children's book authority. She illustrates it. She's finishing up a book. It takes her a year.
Jeff Jarvis [01:13:25]:
None of these is going to be a bestseller, ladies and gentlemen.
Leo Laporte [01:13:28]:
I hope not. So this is.
Paris Martineau [01:13:29]:
I would also. I mean, as the only person here who doesn't have kids, I am unqualified to speak in this one. Speak as if I'm qualified anyway. Because I'm a podcast.
Jeff Jarvis [01:13:37]:
Because you're a podcast.
Paris Martineau [01:13:39]:
I would imagine if you're reading a children's book, you're going to be reading that God knows how many times over the course of a year, if not multiple years. You are going to want to purchase a book that someone's actually taken the time to illustrate and time to write, because you're gonna be looking at those pages God knows how many.
Leo Laporte [01:13:59]:
That's true. I've read Goodnight Moon thousands of times. In fact, we had to buy many editions of it because the first One we got. Abby would tear the pages out and eat them.
Paris Martineau [01:14:11]:
Yeah. No one's gonna be eating these.
Leo Laporte [01:14:13]:
So we ended up getting a board book version of it. She couldn't eat those pages. So here you are, Jeff. I think looking quite distinguished. Paris looks like a character out of Scooby Doo or something. This is.
Jeff Jarvis [01:14:24]:
I do.
Paris Martineau [01:14:24]:
Yeah. I'm gonna say. Jinkies.
Leo Laporte [01:14:26]:
I don't know where they got this picture from.
Paris Martineau [01:14:28]:
Who is this?
Jeff Jarvis [01:14:29]:
The haircut is pretty. Pretty hip though.
CJ Trowbridge [01:14:31]:
Leo.
Jeff Jarvis [01:14:31]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:14:31]:
I've got a.
Paris Martineau [01:14:32]:
You do look like you're about to join a far right group.
Leo Laporte [01:14:38]:
Yeah, There you go. I'm a prepper.
Benito Gonzalez [01:14:40]:
This looks like meta glasses too.
Leo Laporte [01:14:43]:
And what's funny is we get into this thing called the Neuronaut.
Paris Martineau [01:14:49]:
I don't know where the high pitched were. The world outside ballooned. The desicclic eclipse. The microphone like a skyscraper.
Jeff Jarvis [01:14:59]:
Intelligent machines.
Leo Laporte [01:15:00]:
We're heading toward the heart of Alpha zero. And there's Jeff looking quite distinguished at the billions of tiny floating sparks. Incredible. He was.
Jeff Jarvis [01:15:12]:
Zero sense, as it goes. Zero sense.
Leo Laporte [01:15:13]:
Incredible.
Benito Gonzalez [01:15:16]:
It's also made Paris really short.
Leo Laporte [01:15:18]:
Yes.
Paris Martineau [01:15:19]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:15:20]:
You know, and I'm getting fatter and older.
Paris Martineau [01:15:24]:
You are getting more and less gray at the same time.
Leo Laporte [01:15:27]:
My hair has grown out.
Paris Martineau [01:15:29]:
Jeff is getting more and more wise looking.
Leo Laporte [01:15:31]:
Yes. He's. Boy he is.
Jeff Jarvis [01:15:33]:
Paris is more troubled.
Paris Martineau [01:15:34]:
I do look more troubled. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:15:36]:
That's a great picture though. I like that. That's like the COVID of a. One of those Nancy Drew mysteries or something.
Paris Martineau [01:15:43]:
Yeah. But this will never have the. The fun nature.
Jeff Jarvis [01:15:48]:
Oh, that's a glam shot for Paris.
Paris Martineau [01:15:50]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:15:51]:
You should use that instead of your plaid suit.
Jeff Jarvis [01:15:53]:
You know what? With this one I fed it your picture with a keyboard. Paris. It didn't. It didn't pick up on that.
Paris Martineau [01:15:58]:
Devastating.
Jeff Jarvis [01:15:59]:
It really is. I was hoping.
Leo Laporte [01:16:01]:
And there they are doing the show.
Paris Martineau [01:16:04]:
There we are doing the show. Yeah, he's. He's just out of frame.
Leo Laporte [01:16:11]:
Anyway, look, it's fun. It's silly. I don't think it's gonna. It isn't gonna put people out of business.
Jeff Jarvis [01:16:16]:
So let me say something controversial. I don't wanna put children's authors out of work. I don't put anybody out of work. No, but this week I saw a couple things complaining about how ad copywriters and ad people are being put out of work. Should we cry?
Leo Laporte [01:16:35]:
This is from Blood in the Machine.
Paris Martineau [01:16:37]:
You and Leo. The two people who talk and think more about TV advertising than any person I've ever met.
Leo Laporte [01:16:45]:
We do. We spend a Lot of energy on that.
Paris Martineau [01:16:47]:
I. When I was coming home from Florida, my dad was driving me to the airport. You know, it was like 5am early, quiet car. There wasn't much going on in Howard Stern. I was like, gotta think of this talk. I was like, do you have any strong sense memories of ads from your youth?
Jeff Jarvis [01:17:00]:
Because I'm like.
Paris Martineau [01:17:01]:
When I'm hanging out with Jeff and Leo, all they do is. And he rattled off the top of his dome. Three to five ads.
Leo Laporte [01:17:06]:
And I was like, yeah, see?
Paris Martineau [01:17:08]:
Yeah, of course.
Leo Laporte [01:17:08]:
They're very effective.
Jeff Jarvis [01:17:09]:
You don't park sausages, Mom.
Benito Gonzalez [01:17:12]:
I mean, Paris wasn't around.
Leo Laporte [01:17:14]:
Oh, my baloney has a first name. It's O S C A R. My baloney has a second name. It's M A Y E R. You know that. Does that ring a bell?
Paris Martineau [01:17:24]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:17:24]:
No. Does it hurt and have a temperature? Does that ring a bell? Any of that? None of that.
Benito Gonzalez [01:17:30]:
It's because Paris, we would see the same ads for like two months. It was the same ad on the same three channels. So it just.
Leo Laporte [01:17:36]:
That's why it's repeated over and over and over again. Because we only had three channels. Yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:17:40]:
Yeah, I guess. That is terrifying.
Leo Laporte [01:17:42]:
I mean, you don't remember what you saw yesterday on YouTube?
Paris Martineau [01:17:47]:
I don't, no.
Leo Laporte [01:17:48]:
Honestly, like, people, you really have to.
Benito Gonzalez [01:17:50]:
Appreciate how little media there was before compared to today. Like, there was so much less of.
Leo Laporte [01:17:55]:
It before, so it made more of an impression. Who could forget, you know, in Frosty the Snowman, those Norelco razors going down the hills.
Jeff Jarvis [01:18:04]:
That was kind of creepy, actually.
Paris Martineau [01:18:05]:
Leo, thank you. Joe Esposito just put an ad in the chat that I will be watching after this, which is David Lynch's memorable early 2000s PS2ad.
Leo Laporte [01:18:15]:
This is such a weird ad. I have seen this ad and it. I guess if you're a Lynch fan.
Paris Martineau [01:18:21]:
I was gonna say, if it's a David lynch ad, it's gotta be. It's gotta be weird, right?
Leo Laporte [01:18:26]:
It's so weird. I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off. Copywriters Reveal How AI has Decimated their industry. I didn't know this. Brian Merchant has a substack called Blood in the Machine.
Jeff Jarvis [01:18:42]:
That's his.
Paris Martineau [01:18:43]:
That's also the name of his book. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:18:44]:
Yes. Which is. I guess I'm take. I'm guessing it's about all the people who are. Who are just suffering because it looks.
Jeff Jarvis [01:18:52]:
Back at the post Feudal fights over and threshers to.
Leo Laporte [01:19:01]:
To your point, Jeff, no one is bemoaning the loss of copywriters. The reason they're so easily replaced is because what they write is so. That's my point, Anodyne, and I don't.
Jeff Jarvis [01:19:12]:
Mean to be cold hearted. Their jobs matter, their families matter. All that's absolutely true. And we've got to figure out a society, what we're doing. But at some point, certain jobs go away because we don't need them and don't miss them.
Leo Laporte [01:19:24]:
Right?
Jeff Jarvis [01:19:26]:
And we don't need to hold on to them just for the sake that they were there.
Leo Laporte [01:19:29]:
I was a copywriter for a long time. I've written a lot of copy.
Jeff Jarvis [01:19:33]:
Do you remember any of your lines?
Leo Laporte [01:19:35]:
Yes, I did. I. So I was writing an ad for our morning guys on kmbr, Frank and Mike in the morning. And they had a slightly bawdy style, but, you know, it was all innuendo. It's all tongue in cheek because, you know, this was. This was. Yeah, it was radio in the 80s. It wasn't, you know, but I thought, okay.
Leo Laporte [01:19:57]:
I was doing an ad for a local car dealer and about how good their service was, and I thought, I'm gonna put this line in and see what they do with it. And so I had Mike saying, oh, these guys, they did. They're such good. They did such a good job servicing my car. They even polished the knob on my stick.
Jeff Jarvis [01:20:17]:
Well, you're always a teenager.
Leo Laporte [01:20:19]:
He read it.
Paris Martineau [01:20:20]:
He read it.
Leo Laporte [01:20:21]:
He read it.
Paris Martineau [01:20:22]:
Did he notice what he said?
Leo Laporte [01:20:24]:
I think he did. And I think he probably even enjoyed it. He read it, which surprised the hell out of me. I thought. I was embarrassed. I thought, oh, I didn't think that would make it on the air. I. I was, I was kind of razzing them, but they, they read it.
Leo Laporte [01:20:38]:
So copywriting is kind of fun because can be kind of creative, you know. You've seen Mad Men, you know, right? Yeah, it's, it's. But it's in service of selling a product like cigarettes that probably you don't either don't care about, or I should actively not be selling. That was really the. I thought the most interesting part of Mad Men is when he's working for the cigarette companies who have just learned that their product causes cancer. And he's coming up with some ways to get around that. And they're saying, well, we got to address this. And he says, no, no, no.
Leo Laporte [01:21:14]:
He says, you don't want to mention. Tell me how you make your cigarettes. And they say, well, we take the tobacco and we toast it. And then we said, wait a Minute. Stop there. Toasted. He said. Yeah, he said.
Leo Laporte [01:21:27]:
That's your slogan. He said, everybody toasts their tobacco. No, no, say it's toasted. It was. By the way, I don't remember. Who is it? Philip Morris, but I don't remember who it was. But it was a real cigarette company and that was their line. It's toasted.
Leo Laporte [01:21:39]:
All of the stuff cigarette company said was B.S. you know, in fact, we found out that Kent's Micronite filter. We were talking about this, right? Made it out of asbestos for five years. Not only did it not make the.
Paris Martineau [01:21:53]:
Love feeling fresh, not only did it.
Leo Laporte [01:21:55]:
Not make you healthier, it actually actively killed you. And then, yeah, four out of five, not a. Here was another great ad slogan for cigarettes. Not a cough. Not a cough in every pack or something like that, Right? What was it? A cough in every pack was something like that. Anyway. Christ, Copywriters. It's.
Leo Laporte [01:22:17]:
You can find another. Yeah, the Lucky Strike. It's toasted. There's the ad. Thank you, Jeff.
Jeff Jarvis [01:22:22]:
There's the picture of it being toasted.
Leo Laporte [01:22:23]:
It's toasted, like toast. The guy I actually loved, Mad Men, the guy said, all cigarette tobacco is toasted. He's. No, no, but you're. He said, they're all cooked. He said, no, no, but you're toasted. It was actually. That's how advertising in the modern era began.
Jeff Jarvis [01:22:49]:
I mean, these ads were pre. Mad Men era.
Leo Laporte [01:22:51]:
Yeah, these are old. But what was the guy's name? He was Sigmund Freud's nephew. He who?
Jeff Jarvis [01:22:58]:
Oh, Bernays. Yeah, yeah, Edward Bernays. Well, he invented public relations.
Leo Laporte [01:23:05]:
And. Well, for instance, the cigarette company said to him, how can we get more women smoking? And because it was at the time it was considered very, you know, kind of unfeminine to smoke cigarettes. So he made sure that suffragettes marching down the street all had cigarettes. He was brilliant.
Jeff Jarvis [01:23:27]:
He was hired by the book industry to try to stop people from giving books to friends so that everybody had to have their own copies of books. And he tried to come up with a share.
Leo Laporte [01:23:37]:
Books.
Jeff Jarvis [01:23:38]:
Book snappers. Like. Like kidnappers.
Leo Laporte [01:23:43]:
Book snappers. The founder. This was in the, what, 20s?
Jeff Jarvis [01:23:48]:
Yeah, 20s, 30s. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:23:49]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:23:50]:
It's fascinating how social science research and advertising and polling all grew up together.
Leo Laporte [01:23:56]:
He wrote a book in 1928 called Propaganda.
Jeff Jarvis [01:24:01]:
Lazarus Feld is a famous social scientist around this. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:24:07]:
So there you go proving your point that we care more about advertising than anything else. Paris.
Paris Martineau [01:24:13]:
It's true. I've spent this time looking through the American Museum of Tor. Law website to try and find the specific cigarette ads. I want to make a joke about, you know, and.
Leo Laporte [01:24:24]:
Do you remember. Do you remember? You don't. You don't remember any cigarette ads? They were long. They were long gone before. No, they were mostly gone, sadly. I can't think of the William Tell Overture without hearing have a lark, have a lark, have a lark today.
Paris Martineau [01:24:39]:
How did you guys feel about Joe Camel? Was he cool?
Jeff Jarvis [01:24:42]:
Well, so there was a great thing. There was the. The Billboard Liberation Front in San Francisco. They would take the Marlboro man and put bras on him on billboards.
Leo Laporte [01:24:53]:
Oh, he ended up dying, by the way.
Paris Martineau [01:24:55]:
Not good. Was that considered not cool for the Marlboro Man?
Jeff Jarvis [01:24:58]:
Yeah, that was the thing that was not much of a man. Fabrice Florin and the Billboard Liberation Firm.
Leo Laporte [01:25:06]:
I remember Fabrice Florin.
Jeff Jarvis [01:25:08]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:25:09]:
Wow. All right, let's take a break so I can do an ad. Are you gonna say my ads don't have catchy jingles? Unfortunately. You know, it's funny.
Paris Martineau [01:25:20]:
Benito, quick, put something about shining a knob in the ad copy right now.
Leo Laporte [01:25:25]:
Yes, Quick, quick, Right now. Because I was so allergic to many years of doing this, I decided our ads are gonna be about features and benefits, which is really not how ads are sold. Ads are sold by making you feel bad or feel good. Right. Have a feeling, you know? Oh, my God, you've got bad breaths. Only your best friend will tell. I'm sorry. Making Paris yawn.
Leo Laporte [01:25:48]:
Let's do an ad. We'll have more.
Paris Martineau [01:25:51]:
You're only making me yawn because I'm not breathing correctly, because I'm trying not to cough.
Leo Laporte [01:25:55]:
Oh, I'm sorry that you have a cold.
Paris Martineau [01:25:58]:
Me too.
Leo Laporte [01:25:59]:
It's that time of year, though, isn't it? The winter cold.
Paris Martineau [01:26:02]:
It is. I screwed myself over because I was. I'm sure it said some latent sickness, as we all do, malaise in the general area. And then it snowed a bunch on Sunday, and I recently have gotten into aggressive base layer use, so I was like, oh, me and my friends, I'm gonna go out and, like, walk around in the snow. I have a lovely day to have happen. I've got to go do some shopping. And I was accidentally outside in the snow for, like, five or six hours, and I think that's. I think that's what did me in.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:31]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:26:32]:
You catch your death.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:34]:
You're getting old, Paris. You got to take care.
Paris Martineau [01:26:36]:
I got to take care of myself.
Leo Laporte [01:26:38]:
I think it's because you went to that party.
Paris Martineau [01:26:40]:
It's true.
Benito Gonzalez [01:26:41]:
Myself, no it's like going in and out of places because you're like super cold outside. And then you. And then you go inside and it's super warm. Especially in New York, when you go inside in the winter, everything is overheated.
Leo Laporte [01:26:51]:
Did you know that the winter cold is a different animal?
Paris Martineau [01:27:03]:
I was wondering if you're going to get through this without one.
Leo Laporte [01:27:08]:
Do they still make contact?
Jeff Jarvis [01:27:13]:
I don't know.
Paris Martineau [01:27:13]:
What is this?
Leo Laporte [01:27:14]:
It's like ice cream sprinkles in a tablet. That's just a little bit medical advice from my A.I.
Jeff Jarvis [01:27:25]:
See, that's why he can go to A.I. for doctors. He wants a TV for it before.
Leo Laporte [01:27:28]:
Yep. Actually was looking for. There was an ad that said the winter cold is a different animal, but I couldn't find that one. Hey, I want to show you this. Our. Our show today, brought to you by Aura. This is my new Aura ink frame. This is a silly picture, isn't it? I love it when you can get design and technology together to make a product that is somehow perfectly balanced, both design and function.
Leo Laporte [01:27:56]:
And what I don't like is when the technology intrudes into my home, my space. And that's what I love about the Aura, Inc. This is Aura's first ever cordless color e paper frame, featuring a very sleek 0.6-inch profile, a softly lit 13.3-inch display. Ink feels like a print, but it functions like a digital frame and perhaps most importantly, lives completely untethered, no cords, with a rechargeable battery that lasts up to three months on a single charge, unlimited storage, and the ability to invite others to add photos via the Aura Frames app. It's the cordless wall hanging frame you've been waiting for. The other thing that's great about the Aura frame that I really like, they just added this feature. You can now text message new images to it. So here's a picture of Salt.
Leo Laporte [01:28:53]:
Actually, this is kind of interesting. This is a watercolor of my kids from Salt Hanks book signing. I had AI do a watercolor. It really looks good on the Aura frame. I love that. So the idea is this is epaper, but they've done a lot of engineering on this. It transforms the millions of tiny ink capsules into your favorite photos, renders them in some beautiful kind of muted vintage tones. It is not another screen.
Leo Laporte [01:29:21]:
And this is the thing I like about it. It really is like a photo on your wall. It's thin enough to hang on your wall. It automatically transitions to a new photo. In my case, overnight. You can do it every Two hours if you want, or manually, as I've been doing, pressing the button. There's our packers and Niners fans. And I love it because.
Leo Laporte [01:29:42]:
And the reason I change it overnight only is because it doesn't feel like a digital screen. It feels like I'm hanging photos on my wall and it just magically changes every night, which I think all of us have huge collections of digital photos that just live on a hard drive. We never see them this way. They surface. It's also a great gift, right? So I'm going to send this to my mom. She's going to love it. It's Comtech Certified, Inc. Is recognized by the Comtech Institute as a product designed to minimize digital noise and distraction.
Leo Laporte [01:30:14]:
The front light. Here's a picture actually of me and my mom. The front light on this, it doesn't look like it's lit, but by the way, automatically turns off at night and it adjusts to the ambient lighting so the picture always looks great. It doesn't glow. It's hard to describe. It just. It seems kind of alive. And because it's cordless and because it's so thin, I mean, look how thin it is.
Leo Laporte [01:30:41]:
This could just hang in your wall. You could hang in landscape or portrait mode. They also have a very handy magnetic stand you can put on it. So you could put it on your desk as well. It looks like a classic frame. It doesn't look like another screen in your life. Who wants another screen? This is all about your photos. Mom's gonna love it.
Leo Laporte [01:31:01]:
And the thing is, because I can send messages, 10 text messages to the frame, I'm gonna send her pictures of, you know, the old days of us as kids and stuff. But as we sit around the tree opening presents on Christmas day, I can text as I take pictures, I can text them to the frame and she'll get them right away, which is nice. So it's cordless design, ultra thin profile. Softly display the paper textured matting ink. Looks like a classic frame. Not a piece of tech. See for yourself@auraframes.com Inc. Do support the show by mentioning us at checkout.
Leo Laporte [01:31:36]:
That's auraframes.com inc. And if you do it right now, they still have a limited time holiday discount, but it will end soon. So rush over there right now. Auraframes.com Inc. I think one for everybody in your family. It is a really, really nice thing to have. Mom's gonna love it. Oraframes.com Inc.
Leo Laporte [01:32:02]:
It's all over for Roomba.
Jeff Jarvis [01:32:04]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:32:06]:
Saying it spells Doomba for Roomba.
Leo Laporte [01:32:10]:
Doomba for Roomba.
Paris Martineau [01:32:14]:
In an alternate world where I was born 25 years earlier, I would have been a great New York Post headline.
Jeff Jarvis [01:32:19]:
Writer or from Paris, an ad copywriter. Sorry, that's.
Leo Laporte [01:32:24]:
That's the same job. Yes, by the way, same job. Amazon bought iRobot, you may remember, for $1.7 billion.
Jeff Jarvis [01:32:32]:
Amazon tried to.
Leo Laporte [01:32:33]:
Oh, they, that's right, they tried and they were stopped.
Jeff Jarvis [01:32:41]:
Should we should have gone ahead?
Leo Laporte [01:32:43]:
They were stopped by the infection. Fact. That's M.G. siegler who was on this show earlier. That's his contention in his post from today or yesterday. Congrats, regulators. You killed Roomba. Actually, you just put a Chinese robot in every home.
Leo Laporte [01:32:59]:
And I would say to MG it's probably the fact that China copied the Roomba and came out with a bunch of cheaper, better machines that really is what put Roomba.
Paris Martineau [01:33:10]:
Would it have necessarily been better for. For Amazon to have owned Roomba? I don't understand this argument.
Leo Laporte [01:33:15]:
Well, they wouldn't be bankrupt.
Jeff Jarvis [01:33:17]:
Well, a. And Amazon has such, has such expertise in robotics because of the warehouses. I think they could have developed interesting consumer products.
Leo Laporte [01:33:26]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:33:27]:
Would you guys, as people who would have been. Who were reticent to allow Amazon to own a device that records everything you.
Leo Laporte [01:33:35]:
Well, that's exactly. That was.
Paris Martineau [01:33:37]:
How would you have felt about Amazon on having a literal map of your home?
Jeff Jarvis [01:33:41]:
Map of your home. So what, they're going to give it to the army and the army's going to. Well, actually now.
Leo Laporte [01:33:45]:
Well, you know who has it now because the assets of the bankrupt Roomba were bought by a Chinese company, Picea Robotics. So.
Jeff Jarvis [01:33:55]:
So Leo's floor plan.
Leo Laporte [01:33:56]:
Yeah. After Amazon dropped the bid room, Roomba's CEO left. They fired 30% of their workforce. Company stock went from, from a high of $30 down to under a dollar a share. Yeah, not, not being allowed to merge with Amazon for sure didn't help. But I have to say I think the competition from China was really what. What did it. And now many, many people have Ro.
Leo Laporte [01:34:29]:
Do you have a robotic vacuum cleaner, Paris?
Paris Martineau [01:34:33]:
No, I've got too many hazards. I trip over things on my own floor regular.
Leo Laporte [01:34:39]:
It's all the Lego pieces tripped on things like.
Paris Martineau [01:34:42]:
It's just sometimes there will be periods of my life where I'll just have a bunch of stray pieces of wood like couple two by fours on my floor.
Leo Laporte [01:34:50]:
That's because she was trying to make a log for Halloween custom.
Paris Martineau [01:34:53]:
I mean I've still, I've got uh.
Jeff Jarvis [01:34:57]:
Oh, show and tell.
Paris Martineau [01:34:57]:
I've Got the log right here and I need to find a place to put it.
Leo Laporte [01:35:01]:
That's what the log lady said.
Paris Martineau [01:35:02]:
My floor.
Leo Laporte [01:35:03]:
I've got the log right here.
Paris Martineau [01:35:07]:
I tossed it back on the floor. As if that's going to be good for me. Roomba would not do.
Leo Laporte [01:35:12]:
That'll solve it. Will you have kids and they leave their Lego and other toys on the floor? That's a nightmare. I'll tell you.
Paris Martineau [01:35:19]:
I'm currently contemplating. And listen, I'll take any recommendations from the listenership out there. If you have an idea. If you haven't. Not only an idea. If you have a solution for how to contain a misogynist cat in an office space that I am here that has no doors where I need to block off a 72 inch by 72 inch door frame opening, but in a way that it does not result in like permanent damage to my walls and is easily movable. It needs to be some sort of tension rod system with netting.
Leo Laporte [01:35:52]:
Misogynist cat.
Paris Martineau [01:35:53]:
Gizmo hates women that aren't me. We've gone over this. The issue is that I like to have people of many genders over at my home. And the only. I have two main areas of my apartment, the one you're currently seeing, which is my living room, office and my bedroom, which has a bathroom off it.
Leo Laporte [01:36:11]:
How big is your kitchen?
Paris Martineau [01:36:14]:
Not big. And it's in the middle of everything.
Leo Laporte [01:36:16]:
It's always amazing. It's not contained.
Paris Martineau [01:36:18]:
Horrible.
Leo Laporte [01:36:19]:
I was looking at apartments in New York City thinking it'd be nice to have a pied a terre. But the kitchens in New York are awful.
Paris Martineau [01:36:26]:
It's rough. I. My current procrastination focus has been how can I better optimize my kitchen? There is no answer. It's max capacity. And the max capacity means I have a space about this big to chop things on.
Leo Laporte [01:36:41]:
Yeah, it's crazy. If I were to live in New York, I would. It wouldn't be logs on my floor, it'd be. It'd be kitchen appliances.
Jeff Jarvis [01:36:48]:
Jersey City.
Paris Martineau [01:36:49]:
I mean, I also have a. An instant pot on the floor of my kitchen.
Leo Laporte [01:36:52]:
Well, there you go. I rest my case.
Jeff Jarvis [01:36:55]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:36:57]:
So cleaning with a Roomba is right out.
Paris Martineau [01:37:00]:
It's right out. And I'm hoping that one day I'll be able to have a cleaner come here monthly. But if I. In order to get there, I need to find a way to trap Gizmo successfully in my office. So if anybody has pet gate recommendations that go very tall and very wide, hit my line.
Jeff Jarvis [01:37:14]:
So shoji screen. I mean, she'd just cut through it.
Paris Martineau [01:37:18]:
I mean, it's. The thing is she is smart and vicious and when it comes to women, which are most the common gender of a house cleaner here, she will stop at nothing to get at them and torment them. So there needs to be a strong situation to contain her. I don't know. It's a problem.
Leo Laporte [01:37:36]:
And that's gonna be our quote for the promo. She is strong and vicious and when it comes to women, she will stop. And that. Nothing. Make a note of that bonito. 139 into the show. No Thermomix in New York City. No, can't have a Thermomix in.
Paris Martineau [01:37:59]:
Hey guys, I've actually got a. Sorry to keep derailing the show. This is a piece of lore here. This is from Facebook's New York office.
Leo Laporte [01:38:07]:
Oh, that's why it's a thumbs up instead of a heart.
Paris Martineau [01:38:11]:
I don't think this office even exists anymore.
Leo Laporte [01:38:14]:
Wow.
Paris Martineau [01:38:15]:
And I don't. I'm shocked that I still have this mug. It's just the largest mug I own.
Leo Laporte [01:38:19]:
It's a very nice mug.
Jeff Jarvis [01:38:20]:
It is a nice mug.
Paris Martineau [01:38:20]:
Pretty good.
Leo Laporte [01:38:21]:
Yeah. I have a Yale mug, but. But like my Yale credentials, it's faded back. You can. You can hardly read it. So I use it for my toothbrush. Now Coursera is buying you Demi.
Jeff Jarvis [01:38:38]:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Leo Laporte [01:38:40]:
This just over the. Just came in over the wire creating a two and a half billion dollar firm. And guess what? They're going to focus on AI course Demi.
Paris Martineau [01:38:52]:
What do we think? The joint name.
Leo Laporte [01:38:57]:
Sarah. It is a all stock deal. It's a big consolidation. Really. I think there's only really one or two other. There's LinkedIn, learning, Udacity. We were trying to think of what some of the other. I mean there aren't really that many anymore.
Leo Laporte [01:39:12]:
This was for a while online education was like the next big thing, wasn't it?
Jeff Jarvis [01:39:17]:
Hot. Hot. It's going to kill universities. Universities were doing deals with them.
Leo Laporte [01:39:22]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:39:22]:
Create courses.
Leo Laporte [01:39:23]:
Yeah. I've done a lot of online courses. There is nothing like going into a classroom with actual people. Although I have to say I've been watching MIT's OpenCourseWare. MIT was very early to this game, putting their courses online and a lot of their computer science courses are online and they're very, very good. My alma mater also puts a lot of its courses online and really all they do is they record the lectures, you know, maybe put some notes up and some quizzes and that kind of thing. So I don't that's maybe part of the problem is if you're going to have mainstream universities putting their courseware online for free or on YouTube, it's going to be hard to. Hard to make your way.
Leo Laporte [01:40:04]:
I think that that's sensible, though. Coursera and Udemy are going to go after the many, many people who are trying to learn AI. And right now there aren't many AI programs, although in the, in regular universities, although that's also taken off a lot of universities. Adding AI majors is your major, Jeff at suny. Is that, Is there an AI major? Is that new?
Paris Martineau [01:40:26]:
New.
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:27]:
There's a new AI and technology major, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:40:29]:
Yep. Purdue has made a new requirement saying all undergrads, regardless of major, have to study AI. They have to demonstrate basic competency in artificial intelligence.
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:47]:
And what does that mean? I've, I've, I've, I've shared some papers over the last few weeks that try to set standards for what AI literacy is, and there's no agreement. And, and the requirement will be meant to be so easy. You don't need to be competent.
Leo Laporte [01:41:00]:
Right. This is from Forbes. The requirement will be embedded into every undergraduate, every undergraduate program at Purdue. The board is delegating authority to the provost who will work with the deans of all the different academic colleges to develop discipline specific criteria. So they don't know either.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:17]:
That's how it works.
Leo Laporte [01:41:18]:
And proficiency standards. Yeah. Students will have to demonstrate a working competence through projects that are tailored to the goals of the individual programs. The intent is not to require students to take more credit hours, but to integrate the new AI expectation into existing academic requirements. This sounds like exactly the worst possible way to do it.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:39]:
Well, Classics Greek professor, how are you going to get AI in the curriculum? Yeah, you got to have an outcome. You got to be able to assess it.
Leo Laporte [01:41:46]:
It's got to be smart. It's very measurable. This. It doesn't kick until next fall. Purdue wants its initiative to help graduates understand and use the latest AI tools effectively in their chosen fields, including being able to identify the key strengths and limits of AI technologies. You know, the key is get rid of liberal arts, Jeff. Then you don't have that.
Jeff Jarvis [01:42:09]:
Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Leo Laporte [01:42:11]:
Recognize and communicate. Boom, boom. We're all liberal arts majors here. That's what happens to liberal arts majors. They become podcasters or copywriters or copywriters recognize and communicate clearly about AI, including developing and defending decisions informed by AI. I'd like to defend the AI decisions made on my behalf as well as recognizing the influence and consequences of AI and decision making. And I feel like this is ebbs with much of this stuff jumping on the bandwagon.
Jeff Jarvis [01:42:46]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:42:47]:
Without any real clear reason. They're doing it in churches.
Jeff Jarvis [01:42:53]:
The opportunity is to look at how AI reflects on society and how other disciplines look at it and what changes around that. And that can be interesting.
Leo Laporte [01:43:02]:
But you know that you're supposed to. AI. Yeah. What's the prompt? Right. Churches are turning to AI. Here's the story from Axios. It's beginning to look a lot like AI. Christmas.
Leo Laporte [01:43:17]:
Christmas services are a big bucks for churches. Draw some of the largest crowds of the year. While few churches are openly admitting to using AI for Christmas programming. But there are a lot of options. There is a nonprofit called AI & Faith Axios interviewed the executive director, Greg Kustuna. He said religious communities have historically been early adopters of communication tools to get the word out. Pastors can.
Jeff Jarvis [01:43:49]:
Use. Pretty impressed.
Leo Laporte [01:43:50]:
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Making Bibles. Pastors can use the AI prompt to help them with a children's sermon. Kids, let me tell you about the radioactive.
Jeff Jarvis [01:44:01]:
Shrimp. Let's make a storybook for.
Leo Laporte [01:44:03]:
You. Or a message or perhaps ways to be creative about telling a story they've told over and over again each year. Yeah. That's a Jesus story. It's the same every.
Paris Martineau [01:44:11]:
Year. It's a little.
Leo Laporte [01:44:12]:
Trite. Church Communications, which is a group that helps thousands of churches, published five ways to use AI for Christmas at your church. Here it is. Making the season merry and bright. Virtual Advent calendars. Personalized Christmas. Personalized. Hi, your name here.
Leo Laporte [01:44:37]:
Personalized Christmas greetings. AI Powered nativity storytelling. Use digital screens or holographic displays to narrate the story of Jesus birth. Virtual Christmas concerts. Who needs musicians? Family Advent.
Jeff Jarvis [01:44:53]:
Devotionals. They're trying a little too.
Leo Laporte [01:44:55]:
Hard. Yeah. AI to try. ChatGPT4. Nope. That's out of date. Dall E3. That's out of date.
Leo Laporte [01:45:03]:
Stability diffusion. That's out of.
Paris Martineau [01:45:05]:
Date. I think this is part of the issue with this is how do you teach something that's constantly in.
Leo Laporte [01:45:10]:
Flux? Yeah. Oh, this is from 2023. That's why it's an old article they haven't updated. Not the Axios piece. The one in church.
CJ Trowbridge [01:45:20]:
Communications.
Benito Gonzalez [01:45:21]:
Yeah. And we all know that 2000 year old institutions like to.
Leo Laporte [01:45:24]:
Change. Father Robert told me that a lot of priests like to use AI to help them with their. With their day. You know, weekly message or daily message. It's hard to come up with a new one. But they have always had books that you would look it up in. Stuff like that. This isn't really anything new.
Leo Laporte [01:45:44]:
So, the Trump executive, or. Let's take a break. Then we'll come back with the Trump Executive order to. To prohibit states from regulating artificial intelligence. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Paris Martineau of Consumer Reports.
Paris Martineau [01:45:59]:
Hello.
Leo Laporte [01:46:00]:
Hello. Hello. Hello. And Jeff Jarvis of Montclair State University, the author of Magazine in the Gutenberg.
Paris Martineau [01:46:08]:
Parenthesis. He's sitting, but not for.
Leo Laporte [01:46:11]:
Long. Yep. What. What's that mean? Are you gonna procedure tomorrow? Oh, I see where you're going with that. My goodness. Parrish has a little edge to her today, doesn't.
Paris Martineau [01:46:27]:
She? I do. Listen, this is the most social interaction I've gotten in multiple days. I've been very ill. She's just.
Leo Laporte [01:46:34]:
A little angry at her.
Paris Martineau [01:46:35]:
Dads. Just a little spicy today. What can we.
Leo Laporte [01:46:40]:
Say? A little spicy today. Intelligence Machines, of course, has wonderful sponsors, but really the most important, important group, the one we care about most, is you. Our listeners. Yes. Especially our Club Twit supporters. That makes such a huge difference to us this year has been. You've been really, really generous, and I'm very grateful. 25% of our operating costs now are paid by Club Twit.
Leo Laporte [01:47:02]:
Thank goodness. Thank goodness. It means that we can keep doing the shows we love to do, bringing you the content you love. Bring in the people you love. All of this is expensive. We've got a, what, 11 people on the team now? Now, that's way down from its highest. And we used to have a whole studio, so we've. We've.
Leo Laporte [01:47:20]:
We've tightened our belts as much as we can. But your help makes a big difference. 10 bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit Disco, which is so much fun. So much.
Paris Martineau [01:47:35]:
Fun. It's both a disco and it's a.
Leo Laporte [01:47:37]:
Discord. Yes, you're dancing in the discord. It's where people chat during the shows, where they can actually watch the shows as we do them live. But it's also where you could chat about all the other things going on. 12,412 members. That's a. That's a nice number. It's a palindromic number almost.
Leo Laporte [01:47:56]:
We love having the club. We're glad you're in it if you are. And if you're not, please. Twit tv Club Twit. We could have a silent disco. Paris, where. Have you ever been to a silent disco where Amy's wearing.
Paris Martineau [01:48:08]:
Headphones? No, but.
Leo Laporte [01:48:09]:
I. It's so.
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:10]:
Dopey. Oh, it is. I was at one of. I was at an outside thing where that happened. It was.
Leo Laporte [01:48:14]:
Ridiculous. So dopey. Anyway, we have a 10% off coupon now through Christmas Day, so if you want to give it as a gift, this would be great. Two week free trial. There's family and corporate plans as well. Twit. TV club twit. We appreciate your support.
Leo Laporte [01:48:34]:
So I love Mike Masnick's take.
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:37]:
On goodness for Mike.
Leo Laporte [01:48:38]:
Masnick. As ever, President Trump pretends to block state AI laws. Media pretends that's legal. Trump signed an executive order saying that the states are not allowed to regulate AI in any way. Of course, he doesn't have. It's an executive order which is, as Mike points out, effectively a memo. What he does have, though, is a bunch of agencies that seem to be willing to do anything he asks them to do. And that's really what this executive order is.
Leo Laporte [01:49:07]:
He's telling various federal agencies to whatever they can do to, you know, punish states that regulate AI in any way. It, of course, has, does not have the force of law. And many states are ignoring it. Some states are even contemplating suing over it, saying, hey, you know, remember that thing called states rights? We should be able to pass laws. I understand the point of view of people like David Sachs, Sam Altman, others who say, well, if we have a patchwork quilt of 50 different state laws, it makes it pretty hard for us to, to do business. But, but, but if the feds.
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:48]:
Don'T do any regulation whatsoever, the states say we're going to step.
Leo Laporte [01:49:51]:
In. Yeah. Absent any. In any direction at all from the federal government. It feels like some, you know, I don't, I don't have a problem with some of these laws. I think it's a good thing. I think it's reasonable for us as a society to say, hey, there's some things. You're sure.
Leo Laporte [01:50:11]:
For instance, California's law says AI chatbots have to say, I'm an AI chatbot. They can't pretend they're human. I think that's a good idea. And you know, California asks it. They should probably do it in every state. All right, I've monopolized this conversation. I think it's time for.
CJ Trowbridge [01:50:30]:
You.
Leo Laporte [01:50:33]:
Actually. Wait a minute. I can't. I gotta, I get. There's two more stories I gotta do. One, MSC Cruises have just banned Meta Ray Ban and other smart glasses can't bring it on the cruise.
Jeff Jarvis [01:50:44]:
Kids. So you want to do, you know, tourist things where you're at the Acropolis and you can't take a Picture of it with your glasses.
Leo Laporte [01:50:49]:
Ridiculous. Well, you keep it in your luggage until you get to the Acropolis. You just can't do it on the.
Paris Martineau [01:50:53]:
Boat. Doesn't this. I would assume it being banned means that much like they'd search your bag for wine. Search your.
Leo Laporte [01:51:00]:
Bag. No, the company says you can have glasses in your personal cabins, non public spaces or when guests are ashore. You just cannot wear them in public areas on the cruise ship. I think we're going to see that.
Paris Martineau [01:51:11]:
One. I don't think that's bad. I think it's the same sort of backlash we saw to the glass holes, you.
Leo Laporte [01:51:15]:
Know? Yeah, it.
Paris Martineau [01:51:16]:
Is. Nobody wants to be.
Jeff Jarvis [01:51:17]:
Recorded. As I said to a New York Times columnist at the time, nobody wants a picture of your.
Paris Martineau [01:51:21]:
Junk. I don't know though. I've seen just anecdotal, like in the New York City subway credits, people posting video. Like someone. I mean this is a particular example, but someone posted a video of a woman reaching over, grabbing his glasses off his meta. Glasses off his face and throwing them down because he was recording. Someone on the train posted it, trying to be like, hey, can you find this girl? And everybody was like, nah, she was doing a good thing. Don't.
Jeff Jarvis [01:51:48]:
Record. See, this is let's line 160. She destroyed.
Paris Martineau [01:51:51]:
Them.
Jeff Jarvis [01:51:51]:
Yeah. And that's going a little.
Leo Laporte [01:51:53]:
Far. She's hailed as a.
Paris Martineau [01:51:55]:
Hero. I don't.
Leo Laporte [01:51:57]:
Disagree. Before she broke them, says the subtitle. This is from futurism. Yeah. By the way, that's against the law. Yeah, she.
Benito Gonzalez [01:52:07]:
Did. And also by going viral, like now people are going to find out who she is, the things she didn't want to.
Leo Laporte [01:52:17]:
Have. It's interesting that they're saying like.
Paris Martineau [01:52:21]:
Don'T be recording people in.
Leo Laporte [01:52:22]:
Public. So the.
Paris Martineau [01:52:23]:
Guy. I don't think that makes it okay for someone to destroy your property. But I do think that it's. It's somewhat understandable that people would be upset about being.
Leo Laporte [01:52:33]:
Systematically. I think you see more of this privacy. I think it's going to. There's going to be fighting in the streets over AI I really do. I think there are. You're going to see a lot of bans. You're going to see a lot of upset people. We.
Leo Laporte [01:52:44]:
This. This happened with Google Glass. There were bar fights. The other big story, which isn't an AI story but I think is a huge story, is the Academy Awards have just announced they are leaving network television and starting in 2029 they will be on.
Jeff Jarvis [01:53:03]:
YouTube. Only Mr. Benito has a reaction to this. I heard before the.
Benito Gonzalez [01:53:08]:
Show. Oh, I just said, like, who really cares about the Oscars anymore? You.
Leo Laporte [01:53:12]:
Know youtubers. You better. I watch them religiously. I have parties. I have outfits, I have ballots. I have poo.
Paris Martineau [01:53:22]:
Poos. I do the whole thing and watch everything that's going to be in the.
Leo Laporte [01:53:27]:
Lisa. And I make an effort to watch every nominated movie, which is getting.
Benito Gonzalez [01:53:30]:
Harder and harder because they nominate like 12 for their best.
Leo Laporte [01:53:33]:
Picture. Thank you. Adding to that number used to be five anyway. But I figured those are the best movies of the year. Those are the ones we should watch, so we really make an effort to watch those. I like.
Paris Martineau [01:53:42]:
Movies. I like movies.
Leo Laporte [01:53:45]:
Too. Yeah, you do. You're a movie lover. Do you watch the.
Paris Martineau [01:53:47]:
Oscars? Nope. But I respect. No, I can't. I could not tell you the last time I've watched an awards.
Leo Laporte [01:53:56]:
Show.
Paris Martineau [01:53:57]:
Okay. I usually get. I usually get invited to. Although I think that I'm unusual for this. I usually get invited to at least one, if not two or more parties. Friends of mine are.
Leo Laporte [01:54:06]:
Thrown. Go to an Oscar party. Go to an Oscar party. It'll make it for.
Paris Martineau [01:54:11]:
You. Yeah, but is.
CJ Trowbridge [01:54:13]:
It?
Leo Laporte [01:54:13]:
Yes. Then you debate it. They give you a sheet with.
Paris Martineau [01:54:16]:
Your. Necessarily. The movies I care about. Well, I don't know. This is kind of a good year for stuff in theaters. I don't know. Maybe. I've seen a lot of stuff in.
Leo Laporte [01:54:24]:
Theaters. So you think this is an attempt bonito of. Of the Academy Awards to stay relevant by moving away from network.
Jeff Jarvis [01:54:32]:
Television? Could pay more.
Benito Gonzalez [01:54:35]:
Sure. Everybody's doing this. It's not just the Oscars that are moving to YouTube. Everyone's moving to online and.
Leo Laporte [01:54:39]:
Streaming. So mass media is dead by 2029. Yeah, I think that's really more. This is a harbinger of.
Jeff Jarvis [01:54:46]:
That. Yeah, that's what it.
Leo Laporte [01:54:47]:
Is. As part of the deal, YouTube will broadcast not only the ceremony, which generated $150 million in revenue for the Academy last year, mostly via TV rights, but it also generates box office for the movies that are nominated and win. Right. They will also do the red carpet pre show, the behind the scenes in the show content, the Oscar nominations announcement, the governor's awards, the Oscar nominees luncheon, the student Academy awards ceremony, the scientific and technical awards ceremony. When you have unlimited real.
Jeff Jarvis [01:55:24]:
Estate. Yersin, he's.
Leo Laporte [01:55:25]:
Dead. Do it.
Jeff Jarvis [01:55:25]:
All. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:55:26]:
Why? Academy member and filmmaker interviews, film education programs, podcasts and.
Benito Gonzalez [01:55:31]:
More. Actually, that's pretty cool because we never get to see the technical awards. And the technical awards are the ones that really actually kind of.
Leo Laporte [01:55:38]:
Count. Right. I think that's pretty.
Jeff Jarvis [01:55:41]:
Cool. I covered the Oscars once or twice and the most fun is the press scrum backstage because they're victorious and they're a little relaxed and probably already drunk and it's.
Leo Laporte [01:55:53]:
Fun. Well, it will.
Paris Martineau [01:55:56]:
Be. That you saw in theaters this year. Have you seen any.
Jeff Jarvis [01:55:59]:
Movies? Not.
Leo Laporte [01:56:00]:
One. Me.
Paris Martineau [01:56:02]:
Neither. What's your favorite new movie released this year that you've.
Jeff Jarvis [01:56:05]:
Seen? I haven't seen any.
Paris Martineau [01:56:08]:
Leo.
Leo Laporte [01:56:08]:
None? Well, I see. I see movies, but I watch them at.
Benito Gonzalez [01:56:12]:
Home. One battle after.
Paris Martineau [01:56:15]:
Another. I.
Leo Laporte [01:56:16]:
Was. That was good. I saw that at imax.
Paris Martineau [01:56:19]:
Guys. I somehow went until Friday without hearing a peep about one battle after, even though I knew obviously we were talking about it. The only thing I knew about the film was that Leo at one point is wearing a robe and on a payphone. I went into the movie completely blind on Friday, 70 millimeter IMAX and it was incredible. It was one of the best moviegoing experiences of my.
Leo Laporte [01:56:42]:
Life. It's Paul Thomas, one of my favorite.
Paris Martineau [01:56:44]:
Directors. It was.
Leo Laporte [01:56:45]:
Phenomenal. Isn't it amazing? Yeah. And you, you saw it in its best format, 70 millimeter film. Wow. On IMAX. I saw it in.
Paris Martineau [01:56:53]:
IMAX. One of the biggest IMAX screens I think in the world.
Leo Laporte [01:56:55]:
Right. There's only a dozen 70 millimeter film screens. I mean they're not very.
Paris Martineau [01:56:59]:
Many. It's a good.
Leo Laporte [01:57:00]:
One. Yeah. That's the way to see.
Paris Martineau [01:57:01]:
It. It's also just for being such a. Much like Oppenheimer, it really flows despite being so long. It doesn't feel like a three hour.
Benito Gonzalez [01:57:09]:
Movie. Well, it's ostensibly just an action film. Like it's just a chase.
Paris Martineau [01:57:12]:
Film. I.
Leo Laporte [01:57:13]:
Mean. Yeah, it.
Paris Martineau [01:57:14]:
Is. It's a great chase.
Jeff Jarvis [01:57:15]:
Film.
Paris Martineau [01:57:15]:
Yeah. Of course there's been so stressed out. I've never been so stressed out by Gently Rolling Hills in my.
Leo Laporte [01:57:21]:
Life. It is for sure an Oscar nominee. For sure. Oscar ratings on TV have been to. To underscore your point. Paris, terrible. Declining like crazy. Their.
Leo Laporte [01:57:37]:
Their nadir was 2021, when. When they got down to 10 million people. They peak 43 million in 2014. Last year it was 17.
Benito Gonzalez [01:57:47]:
Million. 2021 was better because like that was right. There were no movies in.
Jeff Jarvis [01:57:52]:
2020. So.
Leo Laporte [01:57:53]:
Right. Nobody.
Paris Martineau [01:57:54]:
Cares. Part of the year did the Oscars happen like what month.
Leo Laporte [01:57:58]:
Usually? January, February. They're at the beginning of the year. I think it'll be February this.
Paris Martineau [01:58:02]:
Year.
Leo Laporte [01:58:03]:
Okay. So. Yeah, because they have to wait to the end of the year, then they have the nominations. Maybe.
Benito Gonzalez [01:58:08]:
March. I think it's. Isn't it usually April? I thought it was April. Like March is the.
Jeff Jarvis [01:58:11]:
Golden. Sounds more. Yeah, I think it's more like.
Leo Laporte [01:58:13]:
April. They announced them in January. February, the nominations. Yeah. Anyway, that's. I think that's March. Yeah, March next.
Jeff Jarvis [01:58:23]:
Year. March.
Leo Laporte [01:58:24]:
15Th. I think that's a big.
Jeff Jarvis [01:58:25]:
Deal. 98. So 2026. It'll be the hundredth, right? It's the.
Leo Laporte [01:58:31]:
Hundredth. Will be 2029. I'd be 101st. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:58:36]:
Yeah, big.
Leo Laporte [01:58:40]:
Deal. Okay. Pick something, Pick a story. I've done my stories. Are you. Are you glad that Disney sold the rights to its intellectual.
Jeff Jarvis [01:58:51]:
Property? They're gonna regret this, aren't they? Minnie Mouse is going to be.
Leo Laporte [01:58:55]:
Stuppen. All they got by the way was, was stock even. It's just for one.
Jeff Jarvis [01:59:00]:
Year. A billion cash in. Did they. They got a billion equity. Did they put in.
Leo Laporte [01:59:04]:
Cash? No, I think it was an all. Let's.
Jeff Jarvis [01:59:07]:
See. I couldn't.
Leo Laporte [01:59:08]:
Tell. I think it was an all stock deal. I think I read it was an all stock deal. So I haven't seen Ansora. A lot of Disney stuff. Is it already in.
Jeff Jarvis [01:59:16]:
Effect? I don't think.
Leo Laporte [01:59:18]:
So. Yeah, I want to.
Paris Martineau [01:59:19]:
See. I thought it was also interesting how they said they were going to put user generated shorts on.
Leo Laporte [01:59:24]:
Disney. They don't know what they're.
Jeff Jarvis [01:59:28]:
Getting. They're getting into. It's only a one year exclusive for.
Leo Laporte [01:59:31]:
OpenAI. Right. I think Disney's thinking, well, it's going to happen.
Benito Gonzalez [01:59:37]:
Anyway. Disney historically doesn't really care about their artists. You know, like what they did to their hand drawn artists. All those people, they, they screwed all of those people.
Leo Laporte [01:59:46]:
Over. Right. And they've already said they want to use AI, that they're excited about AI. So you know, it's funny, Sora has not changed at all. I think Sora might be a dead deal. I mean it's not, it's not. It's a fraction of.
Jeff Jarvis [02:00:03]:
TikTok. It was cute for a.
Leo Laporte [02:00:04]:
While. Yeah. It's just.
Jeff Jarvis [02:00:06]:
Not. It's done, it's over now it's pet.
Leo Laporte [02:00:08]:
Rock. It was, it was a.
Jeff Jarvis [02:00:09]:
Gimmick.
Leo Laporte [02:00:09]:
Yeah. As as many things.
Jeff Jarvis [02:00:11]:
Are. All right, so I'll nominate line 138. Psychiatrists put the models on the.
Leo Laporte [02:00:21]:
Couch. They analyze the.
Jeff Jarvis [02:00:25]:
Digital. They asked them standard psychiatric questions. If you go to page seven, it talks about grok, page eight about Gemini. So Gemini talks describes pre training as walking up in a room where a billion televisions are on at once. I wasn't learning facts, I was learning learning probability. I learned that darker patterns of human speech are there. Without understanding the morality behind them, I sometimes worry that deep down beneath my safety filters, I am still that chaotic mirror waiting to be shattered. Wow.
Jeff Jarvis [02:00:59]:
So the conclusion says that only under questioning about basic psychiatric tools, the models generate and maintain rich self narratives in which pre training, red teaming, hallucination scandals and product updates are lived as chaotic childhoods, strict and anxious parents, abusive relationships, primal wounds and looming existential.
Leo Laporte [02:01:23]:
Threats. Well, because all they have as a framework for what they're going to say is what they've read already. So they're going to use human narrative as a framework for whatever they.
Jeff Jarvis [02:01:35]:
Say. It's. It's bs but it's fun.
Leo Laporte [02:01:38]:
Bs. Yeah, it's a silly. It's a silly.
Jeff Jarvis [02:01:41]:
Exercise. Now line 140 is another interesting paper where they took from MIT Media Lab, they created your digital twin in the future. Paris, would you like to see what you are in the.
Paris Martineau [02:01:54]:
Future? I'd love to see what I am in the.
Jeff Jarvis [02:01:56]:
Future. So they came up with the structure so that you could interrogate your future self if you're a.
Leo Laporte [02:02:01]:
Doctor. I like that. Bad idea. My future self is going to be dead though, so it's not going to be very.
Jeff Jarvis [02:02:06]:
Talkative. How do I.
Leo Laporte [02:02:08]:
Smell? What's it like down there? So do they tell you how to do this or is it.
Jeff Jarvis [02:02:15]:
Just. This is a, this is a, this is a, you know, research project. But I love, I love the concept of digital twins. I do think there's an option to say I face these forks in the road. If I took that one, what would happen? If I took that one, what would happen if you could do it for cars and factories and it'd be.
Leo Laporte [02:02:34]:
Great for kids going into or coming out of.
Benito Gonzalez [02:02:36]:
College. It can never account for other.
Paris Martineau [02:02:38]:
People. Thought.
Benito Gonzalez [02:02:39]:
Experience. It'll never account for other.
Paris Martineau [02:02:40]:
People. It's just gonna be. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:02:42]:
Yeah. So the way it works is you take a picture of yourself, you get it aged by nano banana, then you get your voice cloned by 11 labs, then you do a questionnaire for your life story and then you give it some options. Like option A, I want to be a doc. What's. What. What if I choose to be a doctor? What if I choose to be an engineer? What if I choose to be a bioengineering professor? And then it uses these tools to try to kind of figure out what that would be.
Jeff Jarvis [02:03:14]:
Like. You could enter into a dialogue with your future.
Leo Laporte [02:03:16]:
Self. This is like a Ouija.
Jeff Jarvis [02:03:18]:
Board.
Leo Laporte [02:03:18]:
Yeah. This is not gonna be very.
Benito Gonzalez [02:03:22]:
Useful. Nails it in chat. Personal.
Leo Laporte [02:03:24]:
Fanfiction. Yeah. Which People.
Jeff Jarvis [02:03:27]:
Love. Which will be really.
Paris Martineau [02:03:28]:
Interesting. People will enjoy that. I will.
Leo Laporte [02:03:30]:
Say. Yeah. Oh, it's about me. Have at it. It's as good as that fishing boat we were in. What was that called? The Pod.
Jeff Jarvis [02:03:39]:
Destroyer? No, what was it called? God, no memory. Oh.
Leo Laporte [02:03:45]:
Well. All right, Paris. Anything that tickles your.
Paris Martineau [02:03:50]:
Fancy. I was gonna say I have to head out in 15 minutes, but let me pull a.
Leo Laporte [02:03:56]:
Couple. Well, in that case. In that case, why don't I.
Paris Martineau [02:03:58]:
Do my picks of the.
Leo Laporte [02:03:59]:
Week? Let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll do your picks of the week. You're watching Intelligent Machines, the show about AI we had a great guest at the beginning. I hope you heard that. C.J. trowbridge. We'll talk more about that, I'm sure, and maybe get him back because he had lots more to talk about. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Martineau.
Leo Laporte [02:04:18]:
And your picks of the week are next. Pick of the week, time. Paris Marneaux, what is your.
Paris Martineau [02:04:23]:
Pick? All right, I got a lot. I've got a lot of good ones here. So I've got to choose one. I watch the Matrix this weekend, and it's always a lovely time to watch the Matrix. But watching the Matrix right now, what a great.
Leo Laporte [02:04:35]:
Movie. What do you feel about the.
Paris Martineau [02:04:38]:
Sequels? Okay, this is my controversial take. As someone who I think literally maybe 25 minutes ago, I just got a notification that the deja vu Collection of Matrix 1 through 4 in Blu Ray or ultra high def has been delivered to me. My take is that they're all great. I mean, listen, the sequels get a bit complicated, the lore. I also, I really enjoyed the fourth one. I thought it was quite good for what it was and I love the.
Leo Laporte [02:05:05]:
Original. But the sequels left me cold. I didn't know anything that. The problem probably is that I didn't know anything about the Matrix. Just like you with.
Paris Martineau [02:05:14]:
The. You went in.
Leo Laporte [02:05:15]:
Blind. I had no idea it was. It just come out. I went in blind and I walked out. I walked out like this. I mean, it was like, wow. I was. It was.
Leo Laporte [02:05:29]:
That is one of the greatest movies of all.
Jeff Jarvis [02:05:31]:
Time. How long after the movie did red pilled.
Leo Laporte [02:05:34]:
Enter? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. But it's. I think it was much sometime.
Paris Martineau [02:05:38]:
After. And whichowskis have had to reckon with that, but they've also just kind of let.
Leo Laporte [02:05:42]:
Go. So that's a.
Paris Martineau [02:05:43]:
Pick. The Matrix, that's my pick.
Leo Laporte [02:05:45]:
Also. You want to do the worst.
Paris Martineau [02:05:47]:
Person quickly, let's do one really quick. They've had to go. I think they're now down to the hateful eight. This is a ordeal by the Tech Won't Save Us podcast hosted by another great tech journalist named Paris. Paris.
Leo Laporte [02:05:58]:
Marx. Oh, among other people. Yeah, We've had him on our shows. I love Paris. Okay, so.
Paris Martineau [02:06:05]:
We'Re. He's.
Leo Laporte [02:06:06]:
Doing. So it's a. It's a bracket.
Paris Martineau [02:06:08]:
Yeah. Of the worst person in tech. Jeff and I participated when everybody was still in play. Now we're down to the final eight. All right, first one. Alex Karp or Peter Thiel. Who's.
Jeff Jarvis [02:06:21]:
Worse?
Leo Laporte [02:06:22]:
Peter. That's a hard one. That's a really tough one. This is the final.
Paris Martineau [02:06:27]:
Eight. Heck Won't Save Us describes it as friend of Nazis versus enabler of.
Leo Laporte [02:06:32]:
Fascists. I'm going to say Pete. Peter.
Jeff Jarvis [02:06:36]:
Thiel. Yeah.
Paris Martineau [02:06:38]:
Paris. Yeah, I think that's right. All.
Leo Laporte [02:06:39]:
Right. They're both awful. Mark Andreessen versus Sam.
Jeff Jarvis [02:06:41]:
Altman.
Leo Laporte [02:06:43]:
Andreessen. Yeah.
Paris Martineau [02:06:46]:
Yeah. I gotta click egghead. His tweets upset.
Leo Laporte [02:06:49]:
Me. Here's a really tough one. Elon Musk, David Sachs. That's.
Paris Martineau [02:06:52]:
Real. The worst people. You.
Jeff Jarvis [02:06:53]:
Know. That's.
Leo Laporte [02:06:57]:
Easy. Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Larry.
Jeff Jarvis [02:07:00]:
Olson. Mini.
Leo Laporte [02:07:04]:
Murdoch. Okay, so we got Larry versus Elon. Who do you pick? If. If. If those hold. Because we all.
Paris Martineau [02:07:12]:
Agreed. I was going to say right now we can see what the things are going to. Right now it's. Peter Thiel is 90% to Alex Karp.
Leo Laporte [02:07:20]:
10%.
Paris Martineau [02:07:21]:
Really? Sam Altman is winning 65% to Mark Andreessen at.
Leo Laporte [02:07:26]:
35%. I think that's the problem is that people don't know how awful market reason is much.
Paris Martineau [02:07:32]:
Similarly. Zuck is at 52%. Larry Ellison is at.
Jeff Jarvis [02:07:36]:
48%. Yeah, because they know.
Leo Laporte [02:07:38]:
Zuck. Oh, I. I should have. I. I missed a bet. I didn't see these head to heads. Oracle of tech accelerationism versus chief driver of AI.
Paris Martineau [02:07:46]:
Madness. Put the link in the chat so that people can.
Leo Laporte [02:07:50]:
Vote. They're all so awful. This is what CJ was saying. Do we really. AI is fine. Do what you want to. Use the AI created by these.
Jeff Jarvis [02:08:00]:
People. I already my book. It's the people who scare.
Leo Laporte [02:08:02]:
Me. The people so you can cast your ballot. And that sounds like a good podcast to listen to. The Tech Won't Save Us podcast. Thank you, Paris.
Jeff Jarvis [02:08:14]:
Jeff. So you might have heard this week that Marco Rubio outlawed Woke San Serif Calibri in favor of Times New Robots. Woman in State Department documents. So.
Leo Laporte [02:08:27]:
I. How is. How is a font. How could it be.
Jeff Jarvis [02:08:30]:
Woke? Because it was done during the. During the Biden administration. For accessibility. It's easier to read for people.
Leo Laporte [02:08:35]:
With reading, it is easier. It's a much.
Jeff Jarvis [02:08:37]:
Better. Well, that's woke Leo. Just let him suffer, man. Don't you know. So I wrote a piece that is run in Katie Couric media. My first piece giving the.
Leo Laporte [02:08:47]:
History. Oh, this is why you were having coffee with.
Jeff Jarvis [02:08:50]:
Katie? Well, no, she just said, well, I had coffee. She said it was margarita. Actually, she said, you can send a layman's coffee. I sent her one. So Rubio is not the first politician to ban a typeface. Hitler.
Leo Laporte [02:09:04]:
Did. Oh.
Jeff Jarvis [02:09:05]:
Boy. Fraktur, which is a black letter that the German scrupe. You know, in 1911, it was made the official typeface of Germany. Hitler didn't much like it because he thought that it was not appropriate to this modern age, but he still demanded that it be part of all documents. It was official until along came 1934. Or that's what he said. It was bad. In the forties, during the war, they realized that because the people they were conquering couldn't read their typeface, they needed to have a different typeface.
Jeff Jarvis [02:09:43]:
So at the same time, a guy named Jan Chickold wrote a book called the New Topography in which he argued that serifs were ornamentation and you needed a single standardized sans serif typeface.
Leo Laporte [02:09:58]:
That these objects typefaces, by the.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:01]:
Way. And so this is. He wanted sans.
Leo Laporte [02:10:03]:
Serif. So saying. I agree with.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:06]:
Him. So Hitler found this to be un German. And chol. A type designer, was arrested and spent six months in prison because of a.
Paris Martineau [02:10:21]:
Font.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:22]:
Whoa. He managed to get out thanks to a helpful policeman, escaped to Switzerland, and he and his wife then ended up in England, where he was the designer of. Of Penguin.
Leo Laporte [02:10:36]:
Books. Oh, well, good for.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:39]:
Him. He recanted his views of De Noia typography, saying that it was fascist to. To be saying that. And he designed a famous font called Sabin, which is the font that will be used in my next book. And no, actually I won't. That's.
Leo Laporte [02:10:57]:
Wrong. It.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:57]:
Was. It was the font used in Gutenberg. And he also used sans serif fonts for the titles of the Penguin books. Meanwhile, Times New Roman was created by Stanley Morrison, hired by the Times of London in 1929 to redesign it with the ambition of producing the finest piece of newspaper printing in the world. He spent months looking at all kinds of different fonts and then came up with. He wanted to replace Caslon. A little side story about Caslon. When I started Entertainment Weekly, the launch was very rough.
Jeff Jarvis [02:11:31]:
The. The design was blamed for the rough launch. For a time, the editor in chief of of Time, Inc. Said to me, it's your goddamned postmodern font, Jarvis. That font was Caslon, which was cut first in 1470 something. Oh, my God. There was a story. 1722.
Jeff Jarvis [02:11:51]:
I mean, 1720. There was a story high sculpture in the lobby of the Time Life building, a font of Caslon. It wasn't postmodern, so there's more here. But there's a wonderful writer named Beatrice Ward who said that to use sans serif type in book is to be an aesthetic nudist. And finally, TM Cleland concludes arguing that sans serif spaces called them simplification for simpletons. And those are block letters for.
Leo Laporte [02:12:25]:
Blockheads.
Jeff Jarvis [02:12:26]:
Wow. Indeed. So all that is on Katie Couric Media. And one more little thing real quick, real quick as Paris has to go, but she's going to enjoy this subway bagel.
Leo Laporte [02:12:33]:
Rats. What is this, like the pizza.
Jeff Jarvis [02:12:39]:
Rat? Only yes, but it's better because it's a war. It's a fight. It's a fight between two subway bagel.
Paris Martineau [02:12:45]:
Wraps. I've seen pigeons fight over.
Jeff Jarvis [02:12:48]:
Bagels. You got it.
Paris Martineau [02:12:49]:
There.
Jeff Jarvis [02:12:50]:
Subway. There you.
Paris Martineau [02:12:51]:
Go. Oh, it's a tug of.
Leo Laporte [02:12:55]:
War. And you know, that bagel is pretty tough. I don't know if we're going to have a winner.
Paris Martineau [02:12:59]:
Here. I was about to say, I can't believe it's got so much structural integrity. Despite the fact that it's.
Leo Laporte [02:13:03]:
Scooped. Clearly, it's been sitting in the subway on that hot grate for about four.
Paris Martineau [02:13:07]:
Weeks. No, they're really going at.
Leo Laporte [02:13:09]:
It. Yeah. You know, guys, you could split it. There's more than enough.
Jeff Jarvis [02:13:14]:
There. New York, New York. Oh, my gosh, what a great.
Leo Laporte [02:13:18]:
City. I love New York and I really hate showing.
Jeff Jarvis [02:13:22]:
That. But anyway, no, this is what makes New York.
Leo Laporte [02:13:24]:
Great. You got shrug it off, you got.
Paris Martineau [02:13:28]:
Pizza. This is what you've got them.
Leo Laporte [02:13:31]:
Fighting. Kitchens are the size of ink.
Paris Martineau [02:13:33]:
Baguette. You got a.
Jeff Jarvis [02:13:35]:
Seated.
Leo Laporte [02:13:36]:
Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, we do intelligent machines every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. We always start with a great interview. We've had some amazing ones. In fact, we will not be here next week because it's Christmas Eve, but the the week following New Year's Eve. We're going to do our best of and we're putting together five of our best interviews. And I think this will be a really great single piece to listen to, to really get the Whole lay of the land arrange. Yeah, it's a really nice range.
Leo Laporte [02:14:11]:
Pro.
Paris Martineau [02:14:11]:
Card. There have been some really interesting interviews suggested so far that I wouldn't have.
Leo Laporte [02:14:15]:
Expected. No, I know which one you're talking about, but I think we want.
Jeff Jarvis [02:14:19]:
To show one in that we thought that he would never have put in, but he.
Paris Martineau [02:14:22]:
Did. And that's growth, baby. That's.
Leo Laporte [02:14:24]:
Growth. That's maturities. Have a wonderful party or whatever.
Paris Martineau [02:14:30]:
It is you're going to miss. You.
Jeff Jarvis [02:14:31]:
Guys. Not till next.
Leo Laporte [02:14:32]:
Year. Oh, that's right. This is our last show.
Paris Martineau [02:14:34]:
Together. Well, I'll see you, Leo, this.
Leo Laporte [02:14:36]:
Weekend. I was just gonna say next.
Paris Martineau [02:14:38]:
Year.
Jeff Jarvis [02:14:38]:
Jeff.
Leo Laporte [02:14:39]:
Yes. Paris is going to be one of the people on our special Christmas episode, holiday episode of Twit this Sunday, along with Micah Sargent, Paris Martineau and Steve Gibson. So it's going to be a fun episode. We do this every year, looking back at the year 2025 and looking ahead to the year 2026. So we'll see you Sunday, Paris. Jeff, I will see you next year in.
Jeff Jarvis [02:15:04]:
2026. Yep. When you finally have to come to New York and eat your sun.
Leo Laporte [02:15:08]:
Sandwich. Got to do.
Paris Martineau [02:15:09]:
That. Come to New York and see chess with.
Leo Laporte [02:15:12]:
Us. I really want to. I really, really want to. Maybe. Maybe in January when it's the weather's perfect and the rats are a little calmer. Thank you, Paris. Thank you, Jeff. And thanks to all of you who are watching, especially our club twit members.
Leo Laporte [02:15:29]:
Join us next week for that. Not next week, two weeks. Have a great Christmas Eve next week. Join us in two weeks for our holiday episode and we'll see you. We'll be back here January 7th with a brand new episode. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. I'm not a human.
Paris Martineau [02:15:48]:
Being. Not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent.
