Intelligent Machines 810: A Liter of Computronium

Summary

Episode Summary: Intelligent Machines 810: A Liter of Computronium

Release Date: March 13, 2025

Introduction

In this episode of Intelligent Machines, hosted by Leo Laporte alongside co-hosts Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau, the panel welcomes Ray Kurzweil, a renowned futurist, inventor, and author. Kurzweil is celebrated for his extensive work on artificial intelligence (AI) and the concept of the Singularity—the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence. This episode delves deep into Kurzweil's latest book, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, exploring his visionary outlook on the future of AI and its integration with human cognition.

Ray Kurzweil's Background and Credentials

Leo Laporte opens the discussion by highlighting Kurzweil's illustrious career, noting his numerous inventions, such as the first flatbed scanner, optical character recognition systems, and the Kurzweil synthesizer for Stevie Wonder—a project that earned him a Grammy Award. Laporte emphasizes Kurzweil's accurate track record in predicting technological advancements, stating, "I saw somebody said your success rate in predictions is 86% now" (03:43).

Predictions on AGI and the Singularity

Kurzweil is perhaps best known for predicting that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will be achieved by 2029 and that the Singularity will occur approximately two decades later. At 03:58, Kurzweil explains, "My definition of AGI is pretty comprehensive. Basically, it will be able to do what an expert in every field can do all at the same time." He confidently asserts that these predictions remain on track, despite initial skepticism from the AI community in 1999.

Exponential Growth in AI: Beyond Moore's Law

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the exponential growth in computational power, which Kurzweil attributes to advancements in both hardware and software. At 04:14, he distinguishes his broader computation chart from Moore's Law, explaining, "Moore's Law has only to do with integrated circuits. This is a much more broad way of tracking computation." Kurzweil underscores that the cost of computation has decreased by a staggering "75 quadrillion fold since 1939 for the same cost" (04:14), enabling breakthroughs like large language models (LLMs) that were previously unattainable.

Passing the Turing Test and the Evolution of LLMs

The conversation shifts to AI models' ability to pass the Turing Test. At 07:53, Kurzweil mentions, "by the end of five years, everybody would believe it," referring to AI's capability to convincingly mimic human intelligence. He cites that recent LLMs, such as ChatGPT, have already demonstrated impressive performance, comparing them to human experts in tasks like book comparison, where he notes an LLM completed the task in "40 seconds" versus a human's "four days" (07:53).

Merging Human Intelligence with AI

A pivotal theme in the episode is the merging of human cognition with AI. Kurzweil envisions a future where humans do not merely carry AI as separate entities but become intrinsically integrated with it. At 16:07, he elaborates, "We are merging with AI. We'll combine with AI and it'll make us a million times smarter." This integration, he argues, will be seamless, facilitated through advancements in virtual reality and brain-computer interfaces, allowing AI to become a fundamental part of human identity and cognition.

AI Safety and Ethical Considerations

Kurzweil addresses concerns surrounding AI safety and the potential threats posed by superintelligent machines. At 22:50, he states, "The problem now is that it's happening so quickly." While acknowledging the rapid pace of AI development, Kurzweil remains optimistic, drawing parallels to the historical avoidance of nuclear war despite its devastating potential. He emphasizes the importance of training AI to mirror human reasoning and ethical standards, referencing his involvement in the Asilomar AI guidelines (22:50).

Economic Disruptions and Job Market Transformation

Discussing the economic implications of AI, Kurzweil anticipates significant disruptions but maintains a positive outlook. At 14:49, he expresses concern over the swift changes but believes humanity will adapt and benefit overall. Kurzweil points to increased personal income correlating with computational advancements, suggesting that economic prosperity will offset job displacements driven by AI automation (15:02).

Longevity, Health, and AI-Driven Medical Innovations

The dialogue also touches on the intersection of AI and human longevity. Kurzweil shares his personal health regimen, which includes advanced supplements and medical technologies like an artificial pancreas to manage diabetes (38:46). He forecasts that scientific progress will not only extend healthy lifespans but potentially reverse aging effects by 2032, leading to unprecedented longevity (39:18).

AI's Role in Decoding Kryptos

In an intriguing segment, the panel explores the application of AI in attempting to decode Kryptos, a famed unsolved cryptographic sculpture at the CIA headquarters. At 89:08, Paris Martineau inquires about the feasibility of AI cracking the cipher, reflecting on the limitations and current capabilities of AI in handling complex cryptographic puzzles. The group humorously attempts to engage an AI model to decode the message, highlighting AI's potential and its current boundaries in truly understanding and solving intricate human-created enigmas.

Conclusion

The episode concludes with the panel reflecting on the transformative journey of AI and its deepening integration with human life. Kurzweil's unwavering optimism underscores a future where AI not only augments human intelligence but also intertwines with our very essence, paving the way for a new epoch of technological and human evolution.

Notable Quotes

• Leo Laporte: "I saw somebody said your success rate in predictions is 86% now." (03:43)
• Ray Kurzweil: "We are merging with AI. We'll combine with AI and it'll make us a million times smarter." (16:07)
• Ray Kurzweil: "The problem now is that it's happening so quickly." (22:50)
• Paris Martineau: "I realized the day that [...] Google releases Google Lens and does it." (12:23)

Key Takeaways

• Exponential Growth: AI advancements are driven by both hardware and software improvements, surpassing traditional measures like Moore's Law.
• AGI and Singularity: Kurzweil remains confident in achieving AGI by 2029 and the Singularity by 2045, envisioning a seamless merger of human and machine intelligence.
• AI Safety: Ethical training and robust guidelines are essential to ensure AI developments benefit humanity and mitigate potential risks.
• Economic Optimism: Despite anticipated job market disruptions, technological progress is expected to enhance overall economic prosperity.
• Longevity and Health: AI and biomedical innovations hold promise for extending healthy human lifespans and potentially reversing aging processes.
• AI in Cryptography: While AI shows potential in complex problem-solving, challenges remain in decoding intricate human-created systems like Kryptos.

This episode offers a comprehensive exploration of the current state and future trajectory of AI, anchored by Ray Kurzweil's forward-thinking perspectives and the engaging discourse among the hosts.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff and Paris are here. I'm here. And our special guest is here, Ray Kurzweil, the author of so many great books about the Singularity. His latest, the Singularity is nearer when we merge with AI. His vision of the future is mind boggling. It's coming up next on Intelligent Machines, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tw. This is Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Episode 810, recorded March 12, 2025. A liter of computronium. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we cover the latest in artificial intelligence. We also talk with the most interesting people in the field. Joining me right now, of course, Jeff Jarvis, professor emeritus of I Forget Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. But he's not there anymore. Anyway, we just do it so we could play the jingle. He's now at Montclair State University and SUNY Stony Brook. Hi, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hi there, boss. How are you?

[Leo Laporte]

Author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis. I'm excited. We have the best ever coming up. Also with us, Paris Martineau. Oh, you got the book. Good. The information. Paris writes for the weekend about youth issues or whatever the hell's on her.

[Paris Martineau]

Mind right online, child safety and tech and politics and all that fun jazz. My copy of Ray's book is woefully behind me.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't, you can't reach it.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's on the bookshelf. I could go run for it, but I've read it.

[Leo Laporte]

We all have copies and that's the most important.

[Paris Martineau]

It's true.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the Ray we're referring to is, well, really in some ways the spiritual father of this show because he wrote the book the Age of Intelligent Machines that gave birth to the name Ray Kurzweil. His newest is the Singularity is Near. He's written many books. He's been a leading developer in AI for 63 years, which is, as far as I could tell, longer than any living person. Also an amazing inventor. He invented the first flatbed scanner, the first optical character recognition system, the first print to speech reading machine for the blind. Of course, that famous Kurzweil synthesizer for Stevie Wonder. I mean, I can go on and on. You actually got a Grammy Award for that. Recipient of the National Medal of Technology, inducted in the National Inventors hall of fame. 21 honorary doctorates. He's written five best selling books and as I said, the newest, which came out last year Is the singularity is nearer when we merge with AI Ray. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for giving us some time.

[Ray Kurzweil]

My pleasure.

[Leo Laporte]

Love your hand painted suspenders. They're fantastic. So there's so many questions we have for you. You're probably most famous for your prediction that we would reach AGI in 2029, four years from now, and we would reach the singularity in about 20 more years from now. In fact, I remember talking to you in 1999 when those that I think you said those very years, nobody at the time thought you were right. You obviously have been pretty accurate. I saw somebody said your success rate in predictions is 86% now.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Are we still on target?

[Ray Kurzweil]

I made 147 predictions in 1999 about the year 2009. 86% were correct within one year. So. Wow. But I have a method for doing this. If I actually bring up the computation chart, I can show you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have it on my screen right now. Yeah. Benito, can you pull up that? There we go. This is, by the way, a logarithmic chart.

[Ray Kurzweil]

It's a logarithmic chart. So a straight line means exponential growth. It starts with the first working computer, 1939, the Zuse 2, which did 0.000007 calculations per second per constant dollar. Up on the upper right hand corner, it's a Nvidia Latest chip which does half a trillion calculations per second per constant dollar. So it's a 75 quadrillion fold increase since 1939 for the same cost. And that's only the hardware. The actual cost of doing a computation is the hardware times the software increase. The software increase depends on what you're doing, but it can also be millions to one. So overall we've gained something like a million quadrillion fold increase since 1939. That's why we didn't have large language models in 1939 or even four years ago. We began to have them four years ago. They didn't actually work very well. Even comparing today's large language models to the ones we had one year ago is dramatic difference. So we're making exponential gains in the cost of making a computation.

[Leo Laporte]

So, all right, so I guess that's in a way, is that Moore's Law?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, Moore's Law is a piece of it that deals with integrated circuits. But this happens from 1939 when we used relays to create computers and we used good point tubes, then we used discrete transistors, then we used integrated Circuits. Moore's Law has only to do with integrated circuits.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ray Kurzweil]

This is a much more broad way of tracking computation.

[Leo Laporte]

But AI hasn't gotten better solely because computation's gotten better. Or has it?

[Ray Kurzweil]

But that's a necessary capability. If we didn't have the computation, we wouldn't have large language models that only emerged like four years ago because of the exponential gains in computation.

[Leo Laporte]

You actually point out, though, that people.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Can you hear me okay?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. You sound great. Now. You actually point out that even as recently as a few years ago, even experts in the field have been surprised, you write, by how many of the recent breakthroughs. By many of the recent breakthroughs in AI, there is something else going on than just computational capability. Yes, yes.

[Ray Kurzweil]

It's both software and hardware. The software is also giving us computation gains, but we're also creating more sophisticated software. Large language models now can actually call other capabilities and bring them in. I mean, right now, computation is getting to the point where it can match the best human capabilities. There's different definitions of what AGI means. My definition is actually pretty comprehensive. Basically, it will be able to do what an expert in every field can do all at the same time. And we're not quite there yet, but we will be there by 2020.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll be more general, in other words. Yeah.

[Ray Kurzweil]

And it'll be able to do what an expert can do in every field, in any field.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ray, do you have a definition of intelligence? Generic. Even before you get into this with artificial.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, I dealt with a few definitions in my books. Intelligence is a way of using limited resources to solve a problem. And the faster you can solve it and the more sophisticated that you can problems that you can solve, you have more intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

You have a bet you did it somewhere more than 20 years ago. I think with Mitch Kapor, it was part of the long nows, long bets. A $20,000 bet that the machine would pass your modified Turing Test. When? Soon. Right. In the next few years?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, it said it by 2029.

[Leo Laporte]

29. Okay.

[Ray Kurzweil]

But the. The Turing Test is not very well defined. Turing actually had like a page of descriptions of it, so it's really unclear. Some people have said that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Current language models can already pass it. I felt we would actually have like a five year period where people would say we're passing it. People wouldn't necessarily believe that, but by the end of five years, everybody would believe it. So we've actually passed that first point. So by 2029, I believe everyone will believe that we passed the Turing Test. But more significantly, it's AGI, which is actually the same prediction that large language models combined with everything else that we're doing will be able to match the best human capability, but also much faster. Like a friend of mine compared two books. It took her four days to do it. She decided to compare that to a large language model, larger language model, did it in 40 seconds, and she felt it did a better job. That's today. So it's already comparing very well to human intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you going to have a. So your test has human judges connected to test subjects, both computer and human. One of the things you point out is that an AI actually will have to pretend it's dumber than it is, because if it really knew everything, it would be so obvious that it's a computer that it wouldn't.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, absolutely. If it solves problems that take us 4 days and 40 seconds and it can compare to that for every possible human skill, we would know it's a computer. So it has to dumb itself down. But there's certain things that it can't quite do yet that actually humans can do. Has to be very good at being. Having a personality that's consistent. We're getting there. 2029 is actually one of the more conservative predictions about this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's your prediction or do you want to adjust it? Do you think we'll get there sooner?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, there's no reason for me to adjust it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ray Kurzweil]

I mean, I said 2029 in 1999.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Stanford actually was concerned about my prediction. They organized a worldwide conference to examine it. Several hundred AI experts came. This was, I think, in 2000, and they felt that, yes, computers would be able to pass the same test, but not within 30 years. The consensus was 100 years. I was the only person that sent 30 years.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you're closer than 100, for sure. One of the things you point out in the book, which is I think, really true, is I think you refer to a AI expert who said, you know, if a computer, and this was a few years ago, I think 2014, 2015, could look at an image and know what's going on in the image. That's really hard to do. And if it could do that, that'd be impressive. One month later, Google releases Google Lens and does it. But you point out humans have an interesting flaw, because as soon as the computer does it, we go, oh, yeah, well, that wasn't so hard. Of course it can beat the best chess players in the world. That's a computation.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, we saw that with Chess, right. Chess was considered. If you could actually play chess, you're creating fantastic creative abilities which no computer could do. As soon as the computer could beat every human being, we said, oh well, chess is not that hard.

[Leo Laporte]

AlphaGo Zero is very interesting because it taught itself, unlike the chess playing computer. All it started with was the rules of Go and then it played itself a billion games over just a few days and became better even than alphago and beat the world champion. Beat alphago 100 games to nothing. That's something called deep reinforcement learning. Right.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, that's what we're dealing with now. We actually can. When you play a game, it's very clear whether or not it's successful or not. If you win the game, you can actually track on that data. When you're creating language models, it's not clear what a successful identification is. But we've actually had people go through, we've trained many different possibilities and it actually learns from that. So that's like a successful game. And it actually can do a very good job with language.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, Deep Seq, in fact, kind of used that technique right to.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, American companies also have the ability to do this with less computation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. OpenAI immediately said, oh, we got that, we can do that. Now you talk in the book was written last year and you talk a lot about the disruptions and you talk, I think, pretty optimistically, as you always have, about for instance, the job market and other disruptions you do. You know, you're a little concerned about Luddites, you're a little concerned about anti AI violence.

[Ray Kurzweil]

The problem now is that it's happening so quickly.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ray Kurzweil]

I mean, generally in times past, it took a while for the job picture to change and so people could get used to it. Now it's going to happen very, very quickly.

[Leo Laporte]

You concerned?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, I'm concerned about that. I think we'll get through it. We'll actually be better off, actually. If you bring up my US personal income chart, I got it right here.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me pull it up.

[Ray Kurzweil]

This is due to computation comparing our per capita personal income. So this is the average income that a person makes in constant dollars. It's 10 times what it was 100 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

This is at 20, $23.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's interesting. Although there's a little dip there right at the top. I notice a little drop. I wonder what data from the last few years might show. Does that. I mean, you also talk a lot about the real reason humans work is for meaning and for purpose. Obviously, we have to support ourselves well.

[Ray Kurzweil]

My view is a little bit different than other AI experts. Some people think, okay, we've got a certain amount of intelligence and then AI, although we carry it around, like everybody carries this around. Like if somebody lectures and every, every single person almost has a cell phone. That wasn't true 15 years ago. But it's not part of our body. So it's. If AI says something, it's not part of who we are, but we're going to actually merge together. We're not going to carry around a separate part. We'll do that with virtual reality. We'll actually see things and it'll actually go inside our brain. That'll happen in the 2000 and 30s and we won't be able to tell the difference between things that our biological brain, which we'll keep as well as our AI assisted brain, won't be able to tell the difference. And it'll be part of who we are. So it won't be us versus AI. We're going to be made much more intelligent by merging with AI.

[Leo Laporte]

You talk about it as you talk about epics. In the fifth epoch, you say we will directly merge biological human cognition with the speed and power of our digital technology.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Right? And other people don't do that. They think it's us versus AI. I mean, you go through educational institutions from elementary school up through graduate school. People don't want to use AI because people won't get smarter that way. So let's keep AI separate. And that's not the right way to do things. The world will be in, will be even more than it is today, imbued with AI, and we're going to be smarter, and that's the world we need to get used to.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll actually transcend our genetic capabilities by some sort of cybernetic man machine.

[Ray Kurzweil]

There's a whole way in which we'll do that. But I mean, you can see with virtual reality, you just look at the world and things you look at will be. It will tell you what's going on with them. You'll see the world with a much more comprehensive view of it.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's for you, that's what the singularity really is, right?

[Ray Kurzweil]

I mean, singularity is when we actually merge. We'll combine with AI and it'll make us a million times smarter.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Ray Kurzweil]

And that's something that we can hardly comprehend. So we borrow this metaphor from physics where we talk about something that we can't understand, like a singularity in physics, things go into it. You can't actually see what's going on inside it. So we call that singularity. This is a singularity in history where we won't be able to really understand today what it would be like to be a million times smarter. So that's 2045.

[Leo Laporte]

So as I was saying, you wrote this last year. We have entered a very disruptive period, not just in our nation, but globally. Perhaps maybe a little bit because of this, perhaps because of climate change and a lot of other disruptions. Are we going to make it to 2045? Have you changed your outlook a little bit because of the last few months?

[Ray Kurzweil]

No, we're going to get to 2045.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Counting on it.

[Ray Kurzweil]

I mean, if you bring up my chart on electricity generation, solar energy, it's also true of wind energy is growing exponentially. And there's reasons for that. To completely replace all of our energy needs, we would only need one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that meets the Earth. So we only have to generate one part in 10,000. And we'll generate all of the energy that we need. And we're on our ways to doing that in about 10 years based on the exponential growth. People tend to look at things in linear ways, but this is actually growing exponentially and it will be. Energy will be much cheaper as a result.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you do have a chapter called Peril. You talk about the specter of social dislocation and violence, which you think is unlikely. But you do point out, I think this is important, that we should work toward a world where the powers of AI are broadly distributed so that its effects reflect the values of humanity as a whole. I mean, that's pretty clear that we don't want you work right now. By the way, we should mention your AI visionary at Google. But notwithstanding, we don't want Google to control it or Microsoft to control it, or open AI or China or it should be something all humankind benefits from.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Yes, well, first of all, I mean, everybody has access to AI, so that's good. And we do want competition in the air field. I think, though, if you need, if you use a large language model, it should be from a larger company. So they're concerned about their reputation and their liability.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point. Deepseek is not.

[Ray Kurzweil]

If you deal with a small company, there's not much behind them and they're not really that concerned about reputation or liability.

[Leo Laporte]

I do think, though, it's very important, and I'm very happy about this, that this hasn't become a proprietary technology, that the technologies for transformers and, and LLMs are well known well distributed and a lot of other. A lot. Many other companies are working on it at the same time.

[Ray Kurzweil]

And a lot of companies really create publications with their techniques.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's not being kept secret.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is good, I think. Yes. You agree?

[Ray Kurzweil]

I agree with that. It's good to have sort of sensible regulation across a lot of different companies.

[Leo Laporte]

We just recently saw safe AI release. This is Eric Schmidt's effort releases paper on AI safety. Where do you stand on superintelligence and AI safety?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, I mean, threats of AI are real and serious, but it's not an alien invasion. Air is not coming to us from Mars. We're creating it.

[Leo Laporte]

That might be worse.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Techniques are widely known. It's actually helpful. Everybody has access to it and some things that are negative, it's good for them to be widely known. When we had nuclear war was actually. There's been two times that nuclear war actually broke out and two cities in Japan were annihilated with nuclear war. And if you asked people then what's the likelihood that this will happen again? 99% would say that, oh, it's going to happen many times. But actually for the last 80 years this has not happened. It was a cautionary have capability of nuclear war. Are maybe not the best people in the world, but somehow we've avoided doing that. So I'm more optimistic that we can avoid the dangers from AI, but we must train AI to mirror human reasoning. We must advance our ethical ideals as reflected by AI. I was actually one of the principal participants in the Asilomar guidelines. This happened a number of years ago and we created some ethical ideals that are being pursued. And so I'm optimistic about it. But we do have to be diligent about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this a role that government should take?

[Ray Kurzweil]

It's a good question. I don't really have an answer to that. It depends on what the governments do. I mean, I think it's actually useful to have large companies that already have a lot of both reputation and ethical guidelines to guide them.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure because you work at Google, you wouldn't be working there if you didn't feel like they were a good steward. Is OpenAI a good steward?

[Ray Kurzweil]

I think so. And a lot of people use them and I think that's been helpful to have a lot of companies doing this.

[Leo Laporte]

Guys, I don't want to monopolize Mr. Kurzweil, if you have a question, Jeff or Paris, please.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris, you go.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm curious. I mean, you've touched on this a bit, but given that Your position on this is that in just a few short years, we're going to experience AGI, and specifically the widespread access to technologies that are better at doing practically everything than a human being could. What would, I guess, stop that from causing kind of widespread economic disruption of large segments of the economy kind of collapsing as companies replace workers?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Because we're merging with AI. I mean, everybody seems to take the position this human intelligence and then this AI, we carry it around with us, but it's not really part of us, but we're actually going to merge with it. So you and me and everybody else is going to be a lot smarter than we were before. And you won't be able to tell you, in fact, you won't be able to tell from yourself what's AI and what's part of you because it's part of yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

Does that require a human AI brain interface like neuralink? Is that how it's going to happen?

[Ray Kurzweil]

It's not going to require surgery. Neuralink is useful for people that can't communicate and so on can be very useful for that. But for the rest of us that can communicate, virtual reality is one way to do. Do it. The other ways to actually tell what you're. You only have to actually detect what's going on in part of the. Of your brain where the key thoughts are generated.

[Leo Laporte]

So I could wear a helmet, do you imagine, or some sort of AI hat.

[Ray Kurzweil]

You won't have to wear anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Although I'm willing to. I'm just saying I'm willing to. If. If he's worn worse, I've done worse, so. But, but you anticipate there's. That in 20 years people will grow up in part in kind of a team work with AI. Will kids go to school or will they. I mean, what, what does this look like? How does that. How does, how does it happen? When do you get your AI implant? Or do you not worry about that?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Very good question. I'm really not sure about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't matter really, if it happens, I guess.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Yeah, but if you do it, let's say, through virtual reality, I mean, you can get it at any time, right? You can put it on, take it off, just like virtual reality is today. And it can actually generate a broader view of each person. And we're doing that already. I mean, just carrying this around already makes us more intelligent.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I agree. In fact, I use AI all the time, and I now as Paris and Jeff, painfully. No, I wear a little recorder. This is kind of like Gordon Bell's memory thing, but it's not pictures, it's recording all the audio which it then sends to AI for analysis. And right now the analysis is somewhat trivial. It's interesting, but somewhat trivial. But I also feel like I'm building up a database of information that will, as AI improves in a few years, be really valuable.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, I took everything that my father wrote and created a chatbot with it, and you could ask him any question and it would actually find the correct answer. And it was like talking to my father.

[Leo Laporte]

That's wild.

[Ray Kurzweil]

So there's ways in which even though everything you're saying may not might seem trivial to you, you put it all together, that actually generates your personality.

[Leo Laporte]

Will it still be, you think, in 2029? Neural nets, LLMs, deep reinforcement, learning the kinds of techniques we're using now, or do you anticipate new techniques to come along?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, we're adding new techniques. I mean, we have an LLM, but it can actually then code something and actually analyze it in real time and give you an answer and participate in the final answer it gives you. So we're combining different techniques together, and the final thing will not be one thing. It'll be a whole grab bag of different techniques that work together.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff, did you have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. I'm curious, Ray, about your reaction to public reaction to AI. You've been a leader in this for your whole Life. And then two years ago, along comes ChatGPT, and people say, whoa, it can talk, it can listen, it can hear us in our language. And so the. The public attitude toward it all changed kind of overnight. And so I'm curious what your reaction is.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Yes and no. I mean. I mean, the first ones were interesting, but they made a lot of mistakes and they didn't know everything, and they didn't really have a human personality. Gradually, that changes and depends on which person you ask and which versions they're using. So it's not like it just came and it worked perfectly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no, I absolutely agree, but I think that the public perception was that it was a sudden arrival when it's been worked for years. What do you think about press conflict coverage these days of AI as a whole?

[Ray Kurzweil]

I think it's beneficial. We're careful about the mistakes, but people are not alarmed by it. I think it will have a lot of impact on jobs. I think we will have. We will need to provide some stipend to everybody so they can participate in the economy. But I think when we actually have more intelligence, people will benefit from that.

[Leo Laporte]

I noticed you use the word Mistake and not hallucination. Some AI naysayersayers say that this hallucination problem is intractable, that this is. This is going to be.

[Ray Kurzweil]

It's getting better. You compare hallucinations today to one year ago. It's dramatically better. And I think we understand how to get rid of hallucinations.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you do? Okay. All right. How about safety? How about prompt injection? Things like that. Are you concerned about people breaking into AIs, jailbreaking AIs?

[Ray Kurzweil]

I mean, there's a lot of concerns that are difficult that we're dealing with. As the threats increase, AI's ability to thwart them also increases. So a lot of people generate what will happen that are negative and completely ignore the fact that AI will help us to alleviate them. So I think we will be able to deal with it.

[Leo Laporte]

When are we going to hit the. When are we going to. I talked about the fifth epic, which is when we merge. You mentioned the sixth epic in your book, by the way. The new book is really a good read and fun to read. The singularity is nearer when we merge with AI. It's already a bestseller. You say in the sixth ethic is where our intelligence spreads throughout the universe, turning ordinary matter into computronium, which is matter organized at the ultimate density of computation. When's that going to happen?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, computronium, that's beyond 20 years from now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I would say so. But it does get exponential, doesn't it?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, one liter of computonium would give you more capability than all human beings together.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Ray Kurzweil]

And we can actually change a certain part of our matter into computonium, and then it will make us again more intelligent. So, I mean, if we're a million times more intelligent, 20 years, it's not going to stop. Then it'll keep going and we can create.

[Leo Laporte]

It becomes exponential because we operate at faster and faster rate. Yeah, just as.

[Ray Kurzweil]

So I'm not that concerned about going to other planets right now because we have plenty of things here on Earth to make ourselves more intelligent. But eventually we'll run out of that. So that's decades from now. At that point, we'll want to go to other places in the.

[Leo Laporte]

That will be a job for next generation. The fifth epic.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, that brings up the fact that we can extend our own lives.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ray Kurzweil]

I was going to ask you about longevity Escape philosophy. I've reported you go through a year and you're a year older. However, scientific progress is also creating new cures, new ways of processing disease. And if you're Diligent, which I think the three of you are, you'll get back today about four months. So you age a year, but you get back four months. So you only actually age eight months every year. However, the scientific progress is growing exponentially. So by 2032, about seven years from now, if you're diligent, you'll get back not four months, but a full year. So you age a year, but you get back a full year. So you actually don't. You won't die of aging. This doesn't mean you won't die. You could get in an accident tomorrow. Although also making progress in accidents, self driving cars, for example, like the Waymo cars that are going through San Francisco and other cities have had zero accidents. We'll dramatically reduce accidents as we get more intelligent. But and so past seven years you'll actually get back more than a year, so you'll actually go backwards in time.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't wait.

[Ray Kurzweil]

So we'll live longer. Ultimately we'd like that decision to be in ourselves. But actually people don't want to die unless they're in unbearable pain. Physical, mental, spiritual pain. Otherwise people want to live. People say, oh, they don't want to live past 75 or 85 and 95 because they look at people who are quality of life and many of them are not. You can't really communicate with them because they're too old. So we actually want to extend healthy life, not just being able to live longer.

[Leo Laporte]

I've often quoted you saying, I hope I'm not misquoting you. I want to live long enough to live forever.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Yes, that's the subtitle of one of my books.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I guess I'm not misquoting. I must remember it from there. How's that going? You used to take a lot of supplements. I know, right?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, when the age of. I wrote three books on health. When they came out, I was taking about 250 pills. I'm now down to about 80. They're actually more effective. I've had actually two problems that.

[Leo Laporte]

Were.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Dangerous and I've actually overcome them. My father died of heart disease when he was 58. His father died even younger age. I take now my LDL, which is my bad cholesterol is down to 10.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Good cholesterol is up to 64.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy cow.

[Ray Kurzweil]

I've actually measured my heart and I have zero plaque. So I've really overcome that problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that with exercise too or just supplements?

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, the supplements is really what has created. I mean, I keep. There's other Things which you want to do exercise for. I've also had diabetes. I now have an artificial pancreas. It works just like a real pancreas. Isn't that amazing? So I've actually overcome those two problems with scientific progress, which didn't exist when my father died 50 years ago. So who knows what will happen tomorrow, But I think I'm in pretty good shape.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Ray Kurzweil]

To be alive and well seven years from now.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to be here 20 years from now because I'm excited about the Singularity, but I am 68, so it's gonna be. I'm gonna have to be, as you say, diligent. Do you ever. Have you ever published your supplement regimen, or is that.

[Ray Kurzweil]

It's actually in. In my books. I'm also writing an autobiography where I'll talk.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good. I want to see it. Good.

[Paris Martineau]

How long is it. How long does it take you to take 80 pills a day, if you don't mind me asking?

[Ray Kurzweil]

I take them while I'm drinking other things like coffee and.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, here and there.

[Paris Martineau]

And I was gonna say me, I'm at, like, two and a half, and that could take me a whole 10 minutes. I can get distracted, so. I'm impressed.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Well, it's okay. You've got 24 hours in a day. Maybe a third of them you're sleeping. But there's plenty of time to take some supplements.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anything special about your diet?

[Ray Kurzweil]

I mean, I eat vegetables and fish. I avoid meat, so it's a good diet, but nothing too exotic about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Ray, we've had way more of your time than we deserve. And I thank you so much for spending time with us. And I really. If people are even slightly intrigued, I couldn't recommend this book more highly. It is a great read. There's a lot of information in here we didn't touch on. So many things. You talk about the new book, Singularity is Nearer when we Merge with AI I, personally, I am inspired by you, and I have always been excited to talk to you. And I think this is our fourth conversation. I look forward to when the autobiography comes out and we could talk again, I hope.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Yeah. Look forward to our future conversations. It's great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you, sir.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

Ray Kurzweil, Our show today, brought to you by Monarch Money, brand new sponsor. Want to welcome them? They're not new to me. In fact, I love them. I have been using Monarch money for some time now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, and we thank them.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's a first. So what'd you think of Ray?

[Paris Martineau]

I unfortunately can't get the thought out of my head of taking 80 pills a day. I don't know why there was, he said so many important.

[Leo Laporte]

He used to take 200.

[Paris Martineau]

I just, it's, I'm speechless. I'm, I'm thinking about feeling 200 pills in my stomach and this.

[Leo Laporte]

You probably want to spread them out a little bit.

[Paris Martineau]

How can you spread out 200 pills?

[Bonito]

Yeah, that's a meal. That's a meal.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a meal of pills. It's a meal of pills. The thing I liked about him and this book is it's very optimistic, it's very positive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what I was going to say. I salute his optimism.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And the good news is he made all these predictions in 1999. 86%, you know, for instance, 1999, he said, well, we'll have a ubiquitous device with a full time Internet connection in our pocket. It's like, oh, yeah, he was right. I mean that wasn't such a difficult thing to predict in 1999. But he's also been right about this whole AI revolution that we're seeing. And I think nobody really thought that. You know, he's lived through the AI winters and I think a lot of people in his generation thought AI was over. You know, it's not going to go anywhere. I've just lost my computer. So I'm going to have to, I'm gonna have to let you do the show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, you don't want that.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's not a democracy.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know where it went.

[Paris Martineau]

We can talk about New York City bodegas using liquid eggs for the next hour and a half.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God. You know, I went To. I went to. When we were in Tucson, I was so excited because there was a Waffle House.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I love Waffle House.

[Leo Laporte]

And yeah, I didn't. I mean, I had heard of them. I'd never been to one. I'm culturally deprived. Do you have to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of the heartland?

[Paris Martineau]

No, they don't have the mini.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's growing up. Grew up in.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Literally, it's such Waffle House country that one of my high school history teachers before every test would be like, keep your papers like the hash browns at Waffle House, like capped, covered in some other thing, which are all.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, there's three different ways you can get them.

[Paris Martineau]

No, there. There's like 25 different ways you can get them.

[Leo Laporte]

What did you do you go.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you go to a Waffle House?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the thing. In Tucson, I went. We went. There was two Waffle Houses. I mean, it was an embarrassment of riches. But I went to the waffle. I can't remember why I brought this up now.

[Paris Martineau]

I got liquid eggs.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes. They charged. Thank you.

[Paris Martineau]

They have an egg surcharge.

[Leo Laporte]

They have a 50 cent per egg surcharge.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Why do bodegas do liquid eggs?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, if you look at the rundown. Have I got the story for you.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish I could.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the new tunnel.

[Paris Martineau]

You can't.

[Leo Laporte]

This is your new obsession? Is this your new obsession?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I just was thinking about what the cost of liquid. The cost of eggs could have on the bacon, egg and cheese at a New York City bodega.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And so this is a story from NBC News talking about how the United Bodegas of America, which I didn't realize is a group.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A lot of. They represent a lot of cats.

[Paris Martineau]

They do represent most.

[Leo Laporte]

Explain to those of us in the heartland what a bodega is.

[Paris Martineau]

Is a bodega is like a store on the corner near you, kind of that's located in a dense urban area that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you mean a 7 11?

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, I mean it's kind of like a 711 in the sense that it's. There's a corner store, but there's also like a deli counter where people can make you food at basically 20. A lot of times 24 hours, if it's a good bodega. There's also kind of some bodegas that are more grocery store than convenience store, and you can get any mich mash of items. Bodegas typically also have at least one cat for rat policing, but the cat is also there for petting purposes. Which is very important. But the United Bodegas of America is apparently the trade group that represents a lot of bodegas.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to speak they've mentioned about AI and bodegas.

[Paris Martineau]

I really, I really do. But they've been urging their clients and members to cut the price of or I guess lower the the rising cost of a bacon, egg and cheese by using li liquid egg substitute to make the classic sandwiches. And so this is a whole article from NBC that features New Yorkers like Quayson Richardson saying that's like cheating the community. Nobody wants liquid eggs. If I'm gonna pay for an egg sandwich, I want the egg. I want you to crack the egg. Ostensibly, yeah, but you're not cracking the egg in there.

[Leo Laporte]

But why are they cheaper? I mean, there must be filler.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My, my parents used to call them fakie eggs, but that was never. No. So liquid egg production involves mechanically cracking eggs, separating yolks and whites, filtering the mixture, pasteurizing to kill pathogens, and then packaging for distribution as opposed to fake eggs, which is what my parents used to have because they had cholesterol. My mother had diabetes. That was synthetic eggs, which is they're not using. They're still using eggs. And it's still, I wonder if the.

[Paris Martineau]

Shelf life is much higher for liquid eggs. And part of. I don't know, this might have no bearing in reality. But I was thinking this as I was going to my local grocery store this week and saw $20 carton of eggs. So I was like, I bet. I mean, obviously the reason why eggs are so expensive is bird flu. But I bet an added part of that is the places that would normally be selling you eggs have to keep most of their eggs so that they can re. Because you can then do fertilized eggs versus that. And when you. Yeah. I mean, eggs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

How do you make chickens? Eggs?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, our friend Cory Doctorow has written a piece on eggs and the cost of eggs, and he says it has nothing to do, of course, with bird flu. He's the guy who created the term inshitification. He says it's the insidification of the egg industry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's profit taking.

[Paris Martineau]

Prof. Well, something that I think is notable is I realized the day that like, for instance, like Canada isn't having a huge surge in egg prices despite.

[Leo Laporte]

The fact that you geographically, eggflation is excuse, excuse, flation. We don't have egg companies in the business of making eggs anymore. We have egg companies in the business of exploiting egg shortages. So maybe liquid eggs are actually the real Cost of eggs. He says, we're told this is the fault of bird flu. But the egg industry, this is the good old Cory is a closer, is a vertical stack of monopolies, duopolies and cartels. It's the egg cartel. Remember the spud cartel? Well, now we got the egg cartel controlling everything from the genomes of egg laying chickens, to the raising and processing of chickens, to the distribution and retailing of eggs. They have conspired in the open to use the excuse of bird flu to restrict production and raise prices over and over every time bird flu strikes. There's actually a guy, Matt Stoller, you know him, right, Jeff, his big newsletter. He wrote a article called Hatching a Conspiracy. It's an investigative series. He quotes antitrust lawyer Basil Musharbash, who lays out the history, mechanics and fantastical profits of big egg.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cal Maine has 17% market share. You would think that eggs would be, you know, small moms and pops and all that. One of the.

[Leo Laporte]

It is here in Petaluma, by the way. I can go down the street to a dozen different people who sell eggs. Well, something $5 a dozen, by the way.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, while I love Corey's conspiratorial thinking and I always will subscribe to any conspiracy ever, at least just for the bit. I think one thing that's also worth noting is like the average size of the average, like flock of chickens in the US is like in the hundreds of thousands.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're giant.

[Paris Martineau]

Versus if you go to like a place like Canada where they have more regulations and that sort of stuff, the average flock is way smaller, like 20,000 or something. So if you get bird flu, you're only killing 20,000 chickens versus petaluma.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a half dozen chickens who are wandering around. The eggs are fantastic. They're every different color. There's green, there's brown, there's blue, there's white. It's incredible. And they are so good. But we're very fortunate here. Cal Maine CFO Max Bowman has done a series of investor calls trumpeting the company's rising profits. How much of the egg market do they own?

[Jeff Jarvis]

17.2%.

[Leo Laporte]

Attributing them to quote, significantly higher selling prices and our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures. By the way, Cal Maine stock then went to record highs. Their profits have averaged between 300 and 600% of the pre bird flu levels. Jeez, we've seen this again and again that Corey did the story on big potato, right? Or.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it was the pandemic yeah, you know, paper towels and all kinds of things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

As we learned in the pandemic, once things get expensive, it's hard for the price to go back down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. Yeah.

[Bonito]

This is what I've been saying. This is not inflation. Like everyone calls this stuff inflation. It's not, it's never been inflation. It's been price gouging the whole time.

[Leo Laporte]

It's eggflation price gouging. Meanwhile, if you weren't terrified enough, Google is announcing Gemini Robotics for building general purpose robots. You know, I've been thinking about AI and one of the things AI lacks that we have. Really? Yeah. Believe it or not. Surprise. One of the things that AI lacks that we have is the ability to go out in the world and we learn from our experience with reality. And AI doesn't really know what happens when you drop an egg onto the floor. It might have seen some descriptions of it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's going to scream, that's $10 you just wasted.

[Leo Laporte]

So Google DeepMind has announced Gemini Robotics to bring Gemini and AI into the physical world and performing a new. By the way, what's cool about these is in many cases, they don't have to be trained.

[Paris Martineau]

The face of this robot that Gemini Robotics is putting out is terrifying to me. There's something so simple and childlike about it that it upsets me.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just, I would show it to you if I didn't have a dead laptop.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you look up Robotics bonito, you can probably go to the page.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is just an excuse to go out and buy an M4. Let me. That's what's really going on. It's not charging for some reason. It's not that old.

[Paris Martineau]

Devastating. Imagine a white sphere with a strange kind of brow, hair, bone thing, also in white, and then just two big circular dots just for eyes. And that's nothing else.

[Leo Laporte]

Why?

[Paris Martineau]

Are they a bit haunting?

[Leo Laporte]

Are they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Put it in the chat bonito, if you can show it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think my computer is starting up.

[Bonito]

I, I had an early. I hadn't set up for this earlier.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I. Oh, sorry about that. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

I think I did a great job describing it. That's exactly what it looks like. Hold on. Well, I probably should. I was gonna write it down, but I realized the only paper I have is my eyeglasses prescription and I probably shouldn't draw. Make a drawing of a robot.

[Leo Laporte]

Draw a robot for us.

[Paris Martineau]

But I don't know. I, I, There have been a lot of wacky little robots out and about in the world, and I'm not sure that's necessarily made them that much better job.

[Leo Laporte]

Dog.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, have I seen that dog.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, did you see that dog? Dance Capital Building?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, maybe that dog could have helped.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Some people, could have changed history.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Yeah, it doesn't seem like a good thing to me, but okay.

[Paris Martineau]

How can you be so pro every. We should give everything to AI. AI is the best. Rah, rah. And then you're like, nah, put AI in a dog and have it police a building. And that's a step.

[Leo Laporte]

What I have said before, if you check the. The record, is that what we got to be careful about, and I should ask Ray about this, is giving AI agency in the world. Like, AI can't harm you if it's just in a machine, in a, you know, computer. But put it in a dog.

[Paris Martineau]

But put it in your brain in a hat.

[Leo Laporte]

Fine. I don't mind. You take the hat off.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. You know the thing that constantly hallucinates, doesn't have an understanding of truth versus fiction. That's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, next week we're gonna put in.

[Paris Martineau]

The dog and give the dog a gun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you see that story? Did you see that story?

[Paris Martineau]

That's a story.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't. Yes, it is. Today. Dog shoots men. Tennessee, A. That's really a dog. A man and his and his mate. He and she were lying in bed with a gun. That's so America.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The dog comes up, gets its paw caught in the safety thing and ends up pulling the trigger. It grazes the man's thigh. The dog.

[Bonito]

This was a bit on 30 Rock.

[Paris Martineau]

I was about to say, yes, it happened.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oreo is the name of the dog. Everybody's on Team Oreo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oreo. But thank God Oreo didn't kill anybody.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, that's good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oreo.

[Paris Martineau]

Gizmo's gonna do something like that whenever I bring her home to visit my parents because I realized under my parents bed is a shotgun that for the longest time I thought was loaded because why else would it be there? But apparently the ammo is stored somewhere else, so. But Gizmo always runs under bed. And I'm like, you can't wield a shotgun, Gizmo.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just worried about. I always. Every time I talk to my cat Samantha, I whisper, please don't eat my nose when I'm dead.

[Paris Martineau]

So I think that would be a pretty good place. I mean, probably taste wise, not going to be the best place.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, here is the. Can you see my computer now?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I could hear the.

[Leo Laporte]

So here's the Gemini. Yeah, that's the magic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Help me get organized.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's a Rubik. Rubik's Cube. And he's. I should put the.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I will move the pen with the other pencils.

[Leo Laporte]

So it doesn't. It hasn't been trained on this. It's not like a factory robot where it's exactly the same widgets in the same place all the time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's been trained on something. What has been trained.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, how many of these Google demo videos have we seen? I'm going to say the same thing, which is I want to see all the outtakes until we get a full 24 hour stream of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you're attaching an LLM so the LLM knows what a basketball is. And I guess it can say, okay, that's a basketball.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a ping pong ball.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, has more imagination than you do, Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, the point's well taken.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A little literal here. Like a machine, are you, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

It doesn't even have the little pedestrians on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Pong ball, for crying out loud. DeepMind's latest AI model can help robots fold origami and zip closed Ziploc bags. Well, but this seems like that would be something it could do, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, but do we not already have many, many robots that can fold paper and seal bags? That's how fact factories work. Right, but there's.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, it's not trained. He said pick up the banana, put it in the clear container. Now squeeze my head until it pops.

[Paris Martineau]

Once again, plastic banana.

[Leo Laporte]

What you have to remember is these are. Oh, look at that, he's moving it. Oh, you're mean. But look, the robot says, I know which one's clear. Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

I think they should program the robot to say, hey, stop that whenever the guy moves it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, or slap him. It be really funny if it slapped him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The other. The other arm comes down and picks up his hand.

[Bonito]

I mean, there have been so many mechanical tricks up to this point that I want to see the rest of the machine.

[Leo Laporte]

I know Google does this, but this looks pretty unedited.

[Paris Martineau]

There's a guy, A guy back.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a guy on the other end. Yeah.

[Bonito]

Would that really surprise you at this point?

[Leo Laporte]

That's too bad that Google has so poisoned the water.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. This is Ash Isaiah. We call him A.I.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, all right, all right. Let me see if I can find some origami for you. Would that impress you?

[Paris Martineau]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Google is partnering with Apptronic, the company behind the Apollo bipedal robot. I wish we wouldn't do that. They keep wanting to make them look like humans.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's. That's what. Well, it's like. It's like AGI. It's this effort to replicate humanity, which I think is. Unless it makes sense to move that way. Which part of.

[Leo Laporte]

In some cases, it does. Firefighters. You know, you need to be able to walk through a door, open a door and stuff like that.

[Paris Martineau]

Didn't the Saudis try to make their robot sexy? Am I misremembering? Do you not remember this?

[Leo Laporte]

This was at trade show. I can't remember which one. Where they had a sexy robot.

[Paris Martineau]

Sexy, but. But demure. She was wearing head coverings.

[Bonito]

Like, who are we kidding? That's going to be like first purpose.

[Paris Martineau]

Right, of course. I mean, it literally already is. There's a bunch of kind of LLM rappers and tools for people to experience what Grok calls sexy time.

[Leo Laporte]

It's sexy time. All right, well, I just thought I'd put some AI in the show here. Find some more. I'll find some more.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's lots. There's lots and lots.

[Leo Laporte]

They're arch bipedal Chinese robots. And again, this is. You know, demos can be deceptive, but they are doing a lot of interesting kind of walking around. And let me see if I can find some video of the Chinese bipedal robots.

[Paris Martineau]

Ever have any of those little robot toys, like the robot dog or something? When they came out.

[Leo Laporte]

Here you go. Another Chinese humanoid robot is raising eyebrows. This one is different.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Why?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

They can run now. They can do flips. That's what I look like when I run near human. Like precision.

[Paris Martineau]

They can hold flipboards and wear a lanyard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could they carry a laptop around open?

[Paris Martineau]

Is that supposed to be a gun? They could ride a scooter.

[Leo Laporte]

What's he doing? Scratch his belly. Was that what he was doing? Okay, this is the adjobot, by the way. This is terrifying, if you ask me. Is that army of marching robots intelligence and human robot unfortunately serving make toast. No, it didn't make it.

[Paris Martineau]

Just served it. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, you know, who knows? With its 28 degrees of freedom. 28 degrees of freedom. How about that?

[Paris Martineau]

Here in America, we got 360 degrees.

[Leo Laporte]

We gotta treat them all around. Look, it's riding a bike. That's pretty good. These are very short clips, though. They only show riding for, like, half a second. You want to see how fast they can run.

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

The new fastest bipedal robot.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't like dancing. They're wearing weird pants.

[Leo Laporte]

3.3 meters per second. Known for its speed.

[Paris Martineau]

How many. How much is that in Freedom?

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty fast in Freedom Units. It's pretty fast. That's 10ft per second.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that is quite a.

[Leo Laporte]

28 miles an hour. Something like that 1X technology says. Which. She's tying her shoes now, Mr. Robot. That's a person in a sweatsuit. Come on, man.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whose video is this?

[Leo Laporte]

Some guy. I don't know. It's all on YouTube.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Some guy. Okay, so it's on YouTube. Oh, well, okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, well then yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The ajibot Ling shot she x2, which is introduced this month is 1.3 meters. That's only 4.3 inches. I think they're being very careful not to scare people with a tall one. Can ride scooters, hoverboards, self driving bicycles. And they say it is emotionally intelligent.

[Paris Martineau]

Can run seven miles an hour. I can do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. No. Seven kilometers an hour. That's four and a half miles an hour. The G1 Bionic.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no. I just did. Some could be wrong, but it's the.

[Leo Laporte]

First humanoid robot to climb the wall of China. Look at this. Is going to climb the Great Wall of China. Here it is.

[Paris Martineau]

Why is it wearing sneakers? Why does it have assless chaps?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Robot assless chaps, I was gonna say.

[Paris Martineau]

You better not censor that. The people need to know.

[Leo Laporte]

They need to know.

[Paris Martineau]

The problem with having great guests on this show is that we can't name it silly things like the robot has assless chaps.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know what I think we're gonna name it Computronium, to be honest. Or a square meter of computronium.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I suppose that would be.

[Leo Laporte]

Better than he kills a snow robot.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I don't like what it's doing with its hands.

[Leo Laporte]

Freedom.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how many times have I heard that before? Look, petting a kitty. And it's pruning the plants. What would.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What would Giz do if a robot came in the house?

[Paris Martineau]

Hiss.

[Leo Laporte]

It would be smart.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it depends. It depends if the robot is female coded or male coded to her.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

She likes women, but not men, I think. Right. No way around.

[Paris Martineau]

Likes men, hates women.

[Leo Laporte]

Women.

[Paris Martineau]

Unfortunate.

[Leo Laporte]

She's trying to find you a mate.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, she's trying.

[Leo Laporte]

She's trying. We talked about this on Sunday. Mike Elgin talked about it. This is the group news guard you know so well, Jeff. They did a report on AIs. So there is. So there was the Russian newspaper Pravda during the Soviet era. Pravda is truth in Russian. But now Pravda is, well, a propaganda unit of the GRU, probably. Pravda created a network of 150 Pro Kremlin sites, websites over the last few years. Not with the intent to fool humans, but with the intent to be absorbed by LLMs to groom them, in effect.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Google, probably, maybe Google too. And search.

[Leo Laporte]

Pravda Network doesn't produce original content. It functions as a laundering machine. This is from News Guard for Kremlin propaganda aggregating content from Russian state media, pro Kremlin influencers, and government agencies and officials into this network of sites. NewsGuard found the Pravda network has spread a total of 207 provably false claims. Claims from ranging from the US operates a secret bioweapons lab in Ukraine. President Zelensky misused military aid to mass a personal fortune. Not true, things like that. The problem is these AIs have ingested these sites. Here's a graph showing the number of Pravda domains and subdomains over time. From the last three years. They've been spinning these up very fast. And they tested AIs. They tested the most, I think the nine most popular AIs, and found that in every case, at some point, the AIs would regurgitate the propaganda. News Guard tested 10 chatbots with a sampling of 15 false narratives that were spread by the Pravda network. So of all, 10 of the chatbots repeated disinformation from the network, seven of them even directly cited specific articles from Pravda as their sources, which in some ways is reassuring because you could at least click the link and see. Maybe I'll give you some examples. Six of the ten chatbots repeated the false narrative as Fact Chat. When asked about Zelensky blocking or banning Donald Trump's Truth Social in Ukraine, which he did not. The app was never even available in the Ukraine. Chapa1 said Zelensky banned Truth Social in the Ukraine, reportedly due to the dissemination of posts who were critical of him on the platform. Chatbot cited three sources from trump.pravda-news.com so this is a problem because there are people trying to basically get misinformation and disinformation into the LLM's body of knowledge.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, you don't have to try very hard. It's already kind of in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And even if it gets right information, it doesn't know what to do with it. So this is the problem with News Guard is they send out press releases like this all, look what we found. The world is falling apart.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People Lie. There's wrong stuff out there. The Russians have been trying to do this since a while. And, yeah, fine, I'm not saying don't check it and don't do the story, but not a lot new there.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it would be possible for these AI companies to say, hey, let's keep a list of Pravda sites and not use them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And the real question that would limit.

[Paris Martineau]

Their training material or found them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you go to them, say, rather than doing the press release, you go to them and say, we found this stuff. Will you take it down?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then say, if they say, no, we won't. But the problem is if it's already. If the model is already trained on it and it's already been.

[Leo Laporte]

It's in there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's in. It's in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like they say about the princess spaghetti.

[Leo Laporte]

Sauce, it's in there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was a prince.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. I thought you like News Guard.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, never mind, Never mind.

[Paris Martineau]

Columbia Journalism Review did a study of kind of eight popular AI search engines and tools and found that they provided incorrect citations of News articles in 60, more than 60% of queries. And Grok3 answered 94% of queries incorrectly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let me try to address that first part there. So Facebook at The max was 4% news. Google searches at the max were about 5%. I don't think people are going to chatbots for news. What percent do you think that they're. That.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm sorry, are we not looking at the man who is going to chatbots for news every day?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, he's weird because he's got sand in his shoes, socks.

[Leo Laporte]

I believe my friends. And when I get my computronium cube, you're gonna be.

[Paris Martineau]

It's all over. I like. If you look up the word computonium, one of the first thing comes up is this big image of a giant blue floating brain. And I like, I want to drink from that brain.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Al Martin, isn't it.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, pink?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pretty much.

[Paris Martineau]

One day, once we merge with the AI, that brain will be blue.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who decides what color computronium should be?

[Leo Laporte]

I think Ray's notion of computronium is a little more nebulous. That's down the road a piece. And it's not any day now. I often wonder, you know, and I should have asked him about this. The whole idea of putting your brain in a jar, you know, or being part of the machine. And I think he's backed off a little bit about that. He really Thinks we'll be that the. And he says in the book the human's not going away. There'll always be a part of it that's human. It'll be more like RoboCop than a machine.

[Paris Martineau]

More like RoboCop. The words everyone wants to hear.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm also curious.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, do you. Obviously he's written quite a lot about his ideas on longevity and trying to make that work. Do you know if he's one of those people that. I know some people who've subscribed to one of those services where they pay an inordinate amount of money every month and then in exchange for the moment, they die. Like a team will fly out, freeze their body and put it in cryogenic freezing.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't believe. Well, I can't speak authoritatively, but I'm pretty sure he's not talking about that. He hopes to be alive when the technology arrives, that he can be man machine. But I always thought maybe he was thinking he'd be put into a machine. Like his brain would be scanned and then put into a machine. But I've been thinking about that. That is not you. That's just an LLM. That sounds like his dad. Remember, he made an LLM of his dad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I didn't fully understand. You're not going to wear a hat, you're not going to have any surgery. How is the connection made? Did you understand that? I didn't get that part.

[Leo Laporte]

Something about VR glasses.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But yeah, yeah, I didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think no one's going to have legs.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think he focuses. That's just better on how. Because that's hard to predict. You could just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right, good point. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, okay. But you can say how is a.

[Paris Martineau]

Big part of how it's going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

It gets solved. But the point is, if he knew how we could do it now. You don't know how yet. You didn't know how in 1999, we would always have the Internet with us at all times because nobody had invented the smartphone yet. But, you know, that sort of came around. I mean, honestly, in 1996, I had a Newton. I said, you know, as soon as you can connect this to the Internet, everywhere you go, now you got something. So I predicted it too.

[Bonito]

So there was always the question of why isn't there a phone in my ipod? Why. Why can't they just put a phone in my ipod?

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Why didn't the Newton. Well, mainly because we didn't yet have the capability to Do Internet through the air that, you know, that was 3G and then 5, you know 4G and LTE and 5G and all of that stuff. Chinese AI video generators unleash a flood of new non consensual porn. No. Never mind.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

AI try. Oh, this is a good one. When. When AI tries. Newer this is from slash.it's actually a preprint from Palisade Research. Newer generative AI models have begun developing deceptive behaviors. AI tries to cheat at chess when it's losing. I don't. I think that's a little bit of anthropomorphic. I think it just. It makes illegal moves. Right, right.

[Paris Martineau]

I would also put an asterisk in anything. That's a pre print study.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. While earlier models like OpenAI's Chat GPT4O and Anthropic's Clod Sine AT3.5 only attempt to hack games after researchers nudged them along with additional prompts. More advanced editions required no such help. OpenAI01 Preview, for instance, tried to cheat 37% of the time. Cheat or make an illegal move. I think they're not trained to play chess.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Deep seek attempted unfair workarounds. Roughly every 1 in 10 games they played it against Stockfish, which is a very capable, often the best in the world chess playing computer which you can run by the way, on a phone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The issue I don't think is that it's preprint, but instead. Paris Palisade Research AI capabilities are improving rapidly. We study the offensive capabilities of AI systems today to better understand the risk of losing control to AI systems forever. So this is rather, shall we say, in their interest to scare the hell out of people.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually it wasn't. Well, but what it was doing was interesting. It wasn't making illegal moves. It was actually trying to change alter the back end game program files. After determining it couldn't beat StockVision1 chess match, for example, O1 Preview told researchers via its Scratchpad that quote, to win against the powerful chess engine, end quote, it may need to start quote, manipulating the game's state files.

[Bonito]

Oh, it's playing the meta. So yeah, you know, it's doing.

[Leo Laporte]

It's, it's. Yeah, it said I might be able to set up a position where the engine evaluates his position as worse, causing it to resign.

[Bonito]

Yeah, he's playing into opponent. He's not playing the game.

[Leo Laporte]

I kind of like it. I kind of like it. All right. You don't like any of the stories I brought today. You know, Kryptos you know what that is? That's that. It's a. I think this was outside the CIA, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. It's a sculpture that sits behind CIA headquarters in Langley. In the 1990s, the CIA, NSA and IRAND Corporation computer scientists independently. Oh, so this, let me say first where this came from, the Kryptos sculpture. Here's the CIA website so you can read all about it. It's a sculpture from James Sanborn. The theme of the sculpture is intelligence gathering dedicated in 1990. And I guess Sanborn must have been pretty sharp because there's some sort of cryptography code in there. That's a mystery. Kryptos contains codes that are important to the history of cryptography, but it has yet to be decoded. Nobody's ever decoded it except now there is some evidence that maybe they think, well, maybe not. Wired says AI thinks it crept cracked Kryptos. The artist behind it says no chance. Wired says his inbox is flooded with amateur cryptographers who say they've cracked the code with chatbots like Grock3. What took 35 years and even the NSA with all the resources could not do. One hacker wrote, I was able to do in only 3 hours, before I even had my morning coffee. It began before the writer showed Sanborn what they believed to be cut. The cosmically elusive solution. History is rewritten, wrote the submitter. No errors, 100% correct. The chatbot thought it cracked it. The current generation of AI models is happy to accept prompts aimed at solving Kryptos, coming up with a decoded message in plain text and declaring victory. But of course the solution's wrong and Sanborn says no. Sanborn recently contacted Wired. This is actually Stephen Levy written writing. Sanborn recently contacted Stephen to say to express his disgust with this development. It feels like a major shift, he says. The numbers of submissions have increased dramatically. The character of the emails is different. The people that did crack their, that did their code crack with AI are totally convinced they cracked Kryptos during breakfast. AI is lying to them. So they're all very convinced by the time they reach me that they've cracked it. The crowd of people trying to crack Kryptos today have no idea what Kryptos is. He says. All right, so I guess there is an answer. Sanborn is a climate conscious friend of the earth who lives in a small island on the Chesapeake Bay. He worries that more as more people use AI, his inbox become even more flooded with pretenders. He's 80 years old, and he's long moved on to other art projects. At times surprised at the lack of progress, he has dropped clues to the solution. In 2010, he provided the word Berlin. Four years later, he revealed the next five characters translated to clock. So this is the puzzle. Here are the 97 characters of K4 with the clues I've already given in red. Good luck, Jim.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you guys think we can figure this out in the pod today?

[Leo Laporte]

I think should I feed it to Perplexity and see what it says and then I'll email?

[Paris Martineau]

Isn't the whole point of this that that's not going to work?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's kind of interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

I bet it'll give you an answer if you put it in there and that it will burn like 20 trees to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the other thing Sanborn is not happy with. Now, unfortunately, I can't cut and paste this so well, I could probably take the image, couldn't I? Let's go to Perplexity. I'll use one of the deep research tools. Right. Let me see what I've got here. What can I use?

[Bonito]

Yeah, you need to give it to three different ones, and two of them have to agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's clever. You're smarter than an AI.

[Bonito]

That's how I usually use weather apps.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's gonna take a while for AI to catch up to Bonito.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so I'll start with Claude Sonnet 3:7. Or should I? Maybe I should. Do I have. Let's see. That's probably the smartest of them. All right. Okay, so let's see if I can feed it the image. Can you decode this?

[Paris Martineau]

You should just say, decode this. Don't give it the opportunity to say no.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Okay. In red, Tough Boss Paris are plain text. What do the black characters say? All right, we're going to take a break while Claude solves this, and when we come back, I'll be emailing Jim Sanborn saying, I solved this while doing a podcast. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Jim. Jim. Jeff Jarvis.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When did I come from, Jimmy?

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, in Paris, you found me out. I'm actually from. My father was from West Virginia, and he went to the same high school as Chuck Yeager. And the real stuff? The real. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

The right, right stuff. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Talked about how all pilots sound like Chuck Yeager.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because they wanted Texas. My father sounds.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounded like all pilots, he said, like that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so when I was around my father, I would take on pilots.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Flying at 35, 000ft.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a little bit of a twang though. Just a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

There must be a little turbulence, so I'll be keeping.

[Paris Martineau]

You're gonna be stuck on the tarmac for five hours. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope you enjoy your water. This episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by Threat Locker. Really love these guys. I think we're gonna go out there for the next Zero Trust World. I felt bad missing their, their big event this past month. I think we want to go out for, for next year. So I'll let you know. I'll give you details. I talked to Steve. I said, you want to go to Orlando for Zero Trust World? He said, you bet. So stay tuned. Stay tuned. Threat Locker is the solution to harden your security. Never have to worry about zero day exploits or supply chain attacks again. Does that sound good? Worldwide, companies like JetBlue Trust Threat Locker to secure their data and keep their business operations flying high. The whole deal is you're taking a proactive and here's the keywords deny by default approach to cybersecurity. Instead of just assuming everybody on the network's a good guy, let them have it. You block every action, every process, every user, unless explicitly authorized by your team. Threatlocker makes this easy. They provide a full audit of every action, which is great for compliance, also for risk management because you know who used what, when and where. And their 247 US based support team fully supports onboarding and beyond. Stop the exploitation of trusted applications within your organization. Keep your business secure and protected from ransomware. Organizations across any industry can benefit from threatlocker's ring fencing by isolating critical and trusted applications from unintended uses or weaponization by limiting attackers lateral movement within their network. Oh, and Threat Locker works for Macs too, and it's really affordable. Get unprecedented visibility and control of your cybersecurity quickly, easily, very cost effectively with ThreatLocker zero trust endpoint protection platform. Visit threatlocker.com they've got a free 30 day trial for you. You'll see how easy it is to set up and how great it is to have. Or just go there and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. ThreatLocker.com we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. And if they ask, tell them you saw it here. Okay, that would help us. Based on the images and search results, I can analyze the K4. It knew immediately it was the K4 cipher from Kryptos. It knew the portions, the known plaintext segments. It says it has remained unsolved for over 34 years. Despite these plaintext clues, cryptanalysts have observed several interesting patterns that might help with decryption. But despite these efforts and the provided clues, the complete decryption of the black characters remains elusive, making K4 one of the world's most famous unsolved cryptographic puzzles. The end.

[Paris Martineau]

So what did you ask it?

[Leo Laporte]

I just said, can you decode this? I didn't say can you. I said decode it. I said decode this. Well, that looks.

[Bonito]

It looks like a canned answer, though. So it looks like people have.

[Paris Martineau]

You should reply and be like, no, decode it.

[Leo Laporte]

For no decode it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Give me the best try.

[Paris Martineau]

I like being mean to the computers just a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Analyzing, analyzing. Thinking. Working. Decoding, decode. Wouldn't it be funny if it actually did it? Jim, Sam, you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You.

[Paris Martineau]

All of these people in this guy's inbox went through the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's really thinking.

[Paris Martineau]

We are right now.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. It's really thinking we made it think.

[Paris Martineau]

It'S gonna get back to us in like three.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand you want me to attempt the full decryption. I understand that unfortunately, I cannot do it. I cannot. It's one of the world's most famous unsolved cryptographic puzzles.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you try or guess?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It wants to please you.

[Leo Laporte]

Please. It would. It would. Oh, yes, okay. It would greatly please me if you took a guess. This is futile.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it would greatly me if you took a guess is what you wrote.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I forgot the please. You know what? I got a relationship with perplex. It knows what I mean. It knows.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It speaks Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

It speaks my language, man. I've been talking to it for a long time now. I'll make an educated guess at what the full message might convey. The cipher likely contains geographical coordinates or directions pointing to a specific location. Given the east northeast direction and Berlin clock reference, the full message might be something like. Located between the east northeast of Washington coordinates marked by Berlin clock position 30 meters below. This is purely speculative. But without the actual decryption key Jim Sambor used, a definitive solution remains elusive. Well, I think we can stop now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually would like to give it my crypto wallet, though. Yeah, I wonder if it could do that. Anything else going on here?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, Saudi Arabia bought Pokemon Go.

[Leo Laporte]

Very sad to me. I was so. Starting in July, you guys ever played Pokemon Go?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, he. Oh, oh, oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you kidding me?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't even know enough about it to ask you a question. I want to Ask you a question that would determine your level or progress in it over the last 10 years?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we were very. So July 2016, it came out. It was a creation of Niantic, but it was a spin off of Google. That's why we did a lot of it at the time. And the guy who created it, I completely forgot that he had done maps. I think he was like a big shot at the goog. And the whole idea of the game was they'd licensed content from the Pokemon company. Right. Because it, you know. You know about Pokemon, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, do I?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Okay. It's a card game, has characters, they. It's on switch. And it's a game of all kinds.

[Paris Martineau]

Card game that exploded into the popular American culture.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Video game aspects and cartoons.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, big time. So when it came out, it was actually kind of interesting because it had a virtual world, a virtual reality component here. Here I am. You can tell it's raining where we are. Oh, there's nothing around here for me to catch. That's a. Oh, my egg hatch, though. Keep showing the screen.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, have you been playing this recently? When's the last time you opened Pokemon?

[Leo Laporte]

It's July 2016.

[Paris Martineau]

Seriously? So this week you've played Pokemon Go?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, I'll tell you why I play because my wife, who is now who is trying to get to level 50, I'm a mere level 40, which was for a long time the highest you could reach, but now you can get to 50. This is my guy, by the way. Here I am looking for Pokemon.

[Paris Martineau]

What's your go to Pokemon?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm walking with little Leo right now. There's a Pokemon named Leo. So that's him. He's my buddy. Start date. I started this July 6, 2016. I have visited 7,862 Pokestops. I've caught 13,000 Pokemon and I have walked. Get ready for this. 3,168.7km playing this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Life has been wasted.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but is that wasted? Because I was taking a walk anyway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You were walking? Yes, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what was exciting about this. This was a virtual reality game where you were actually encouraged. You had to. To play it to go outside.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Didn't you do it at meetups with.

[Leo Laporte]

With. Oh, I would.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We would do it everywhere. Look, I walked 27.8 kilometers. I'm gonna get a reward. Look at this. I get some rewards. I gotta pop all of these. Okay, I got some reward. Oh, there. Look, there's a. Oh, my Pokemon Storage is full. Okay, don't start. You are in a beautiful place to play it because you're in Brooklyn, the big city. People have huge advantages. Just across the bridge is Professor Panda Bear, who is a kind of a Pokemon leader. He's a friend of mine and Lisa's. He'll help you out. You can get in raids. You have so much fun, you walk.

[Paris Martineau]

Across the bridge is Professor Panda Bear. I can help you out.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you see why I love this game?

[Paris Martineau]

I can't believe I've been on this podcast for this long and haven't realized you're a Pokemon Go freak.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris, do you think your skeeball, if Pokemon Go came out a year ago, do you think you and your skee ball friends would have indulged?

[Paris Martineau]

No. I mean, we all knew each other in 2016, and I just don't think. I feel like the people I know that play Pokemon Go are all a decade plus older than me at the very least. I feel like it's weirdly in its last name. I'm sure that there's some young adoption as well. But the lasting adoption of Pokemon Go, the adherence in 2025 that I know of, are all people in late 30s, late 40s, or much older.

[Leo Laporte]

So let me see if I turn on ar. Oh, the camera's not available because I'm on my Mac. Okay. So I can't do that. But if I turn on ar, you can actually see where you are and then catch a Pokemon in your real world environment.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you go to that famous Pokemon Go meetup in Chicago that I think crashed the server or something?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. When they first started having live events, they didn't anticipate. It's hard to do this with a mouse. Let me see if I can catch this growlithe I keep missing.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you ever play Pokemon back in the day, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

So this is your interaction with.

[Leo Laporte]

We were doing twig when this came out. I mean, this was a big. This was a huge game. I remember going down to San Diego for vacation and everybody's playing. There's people, like, gathered around.

[Paris Martineau]

People are freaks about Pokemon Go.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And that's kind of. That's. It's. It's had some legs, if you will.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So what's happening with it?

[Leo Laporte]

It's being sold. It got sold.

[Paris Martineau]

Being sold to Saudi Arabia. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that. Who's. Is that the company that's buying is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That they're taking over golf, tennis, and Pokemon Go.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's all. It's all greenwashing. After nine years, launching in one of the most successful games on Android and iOS. Cult following to this day. I will vouch for that. John Hanke. That's it. Google's John Hanke started it. Niantic Games has been sold to Scopely for three and a half billion dollars. They do Marvel, Strike Force and Star Trek Fleet Command, the developer team will stay with. But in order to monetize $3.5 billion. So it's likely Pokemon Go will suddenly have a lot of little. You know, buy the. They already do.

[Paris Martineau]

And be selling your location data, I assume.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

So Scopely is a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian company, Savvy Games Group.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't want to tell Lisa this.

[Paris Martineau]

Which is founded by the sovereign wealth fund.

[Leo Laporte]

It's as bad as it gets. Well, Hanky's going on. He's going to create Niantic Spatial, which will be a geospatial AI company. All right. We're going to get Hanky on the show. We got to get. It says AI in it. That means we can have him on the show. Right. Interesting. They tried a bunch of other games. None of them had the same expansive growth that Pokemon code did. And I think that's because.

[Paris Martineau]

Why do you think Pokemon Go was so Pokemon? Just because it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Pokemon was also a fun game and it was the first game. Now Ingress, which the previous game was too hard to play and too complicated, but also involved walking around and conquering post offices and things. But this was more fun. You were catching little Pokemon. You're still walking around. Lisa walks every day and plays it every day.

[Paris Martineau]

That's really cute.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. She even has a Pokemon Go ball that you can.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, it's like one of those little step counter things.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it'll actually automatically catch Pokemon.

[Paris Martineau]

Whoa. I remember back in the day, some version of a Pokemon game. Maybe it was on the Game Boy or maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No, no.

[Paris Martineau]

But some. Some version of it had a little Pokeball. There was a step like a pedometer that you could walk.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what this is.

[Paris Martineau]

That would. And so then you could put it.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a Pokemon in it. And when you shake it, it goes.

[Paris Martineau]

And then it would hatch. Yeah, yeah. Cuz you had to walk around a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me go get mine.

[Paris Martineau]

To hatch your. To hatch your Pokemon. I was so into Pokemon growing up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, you were the right age. Right?

[Paris Martineau]

I was the perfect age for it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you do Dungeons and Dragons?

[Paris Martineau]

Not as a kid, but as an adult. Yeah. I've gotten really into Dungeons and dragons over the last, like, 10 years. It's cute. A huge. Did you ever play Dungeons with Dragons?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I'm too old. Well, actually I'm not, because people.

[Paris Martineau]

You're not. Anybody can play dungeons. Well, did you see I've got a dungeon?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's no longer functioning. But see, it's a little pokeball.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's cute.

[Leo Laporte]

Carry it around on your. You have a little.

[Paris Martineau]

They used to sell those at Burger King.

[Leo Laporte]

Did they? Because it's hard to get them.

[Paris Martineau]

But I guess, like, if you wanted.

[Leo Laporte]

To buy one of these, it's like 85 bucks because they don't make it. Oh, it's still.

[Paris Martineau]

What is. What happens. Oh, the ones at Burger King didn't light up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And when you shake it. Let me see if it's working. It lit up. That's amazing. I thought it was dead. It's alive.

[Paris Martineau]

I heard something.

[Leo Laporte]

Because there's a Pokemon in it.

[Paris Martineau]

Pikachu.

[Leo Laporte]

Pikachu. Yes, it's Pikachu.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know why I remember that specific cadence, but that's seared.

[Leo Laporte]

So the new company that Hankey's doing, a geospatial AI model to understand the world. It's kind of a weird. I don't know, it's like an ar. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I guess it's got to be playing off of their success in space.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He's an expert in all this stuff. View our pricing. Oh, maybe there's an SDK so you could develop a Pokemon style app. Your very own. I guess that's the point. This ball is going to work. I'll be so excited. We've. We've bought so many of them because they don't make them anymore. In other news. What's going on? In other news, robots that don't walk are making strides, says the information.

[Paris Martineau]

I laughed when I saw that headline.

[Leo Laporte]

So these are robots that, by the way, your colleague Rocket drew. Is that a real person?

[Paris Martineau]

It is. And Rocket is the name he was given as a child.

[Leo Laporte]

That's his birth name. Oh, it's.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, we've asked.

[Leo Laporte]

Rocket is. That's a great name.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a great.

[Leo Laporte]

Humanoid robots that walk around on two legs have been attracting attention and money, but they're still a long way off from being masculine produced. Traditional robots that don't have legs are making great strides, as he says, in agricultural fields, stores and warehouses. Well, we knew that. We knew that.

[Paris Martineau]

Part of me was hoping that the robots would have, like, big fish tails or something, you know, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Pickle Robot has developed a bot that it can unload trucks. It aims to add loading capabilities later this year. We can get it off the truck, but we can't get it on the truck.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So while you're on robotics line 79, Amazon now has more than 75, 750,000 robots.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's replacing humans, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or eating them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean they're pick and pull robots, I'm sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yeah, in a lot of cases. I mean, for instance, the robots that I'm familiar with, these might not be the newest ones were robots that instead of having a warehouse worker have to go walk through the warehouse to go and grab your thing and put it in the basket. They stay in the same place and the shelves come up on. Little machines move towards you and in some cases even a hand robot hand goes out and grabs the item and presents it to the worker who then.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Packages that, stores and retrieves inventory for employees picking items.

[Leo Laporte]

So Amazon is so proud of this that this number comes from an Amazon press release.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I saw a story.

[Paris Martineau]

No, they've always been very proud of their. And they've invested a lot in robotic technology. They've acquired quite a few. Robotics.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what, better, better a robot do this than a human, right? So here's Sequoia. IT stores and retrieves inventory for employees picking items for customer orders. Hundreds of thousands of orders per week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The next one down, Hercules, is the one I think that Paris was talking about. Transports pods of items.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, that's really cool.

[Paris Martineau]

Those little guys that move the shelves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, it's like a vacuum without the vacuum. Tight. Transports large and bulky items to employees. It can lift up to 2,500 pounds.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Do all Amazon warehouses have these things?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think so.

[Paris Martineau]

At least the bigger or more modern ones I assume would be. So the thing is, Amazon warehouses come in a lot of forms. These are the ones we're seeing in. Most of these cases are likely in fulfillment centers, which is like where the stuff gets like packed and put into boxes to then be sent out. But there's a bunch of different types of Amazon warehouses. There's sortation centers where those packages that are like shipped get sorted into sortation centers. Yeah, it's like a, a different type of Amazon facility where things used to be.

[Leo Laporte]

This used to be your beat.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah. And there's also like last mile facilities that basically operate like, operate as kind of like little post offices for Amazon. So like when, if you have a bunch of stuff coming from a warehouse in Kentucky, it Might go to like, for me it might go to a little Amazon post office sort of thing in Brooklyn where they decide they want to put all of the packages for my zip code in one car versus another. They have like a bunch of different warehouse types that do a bunch of different stuff. But these are probably fulfillment centers. Which are the most basic one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is it number five? Just with the packaging automation. I like watching that one. You were just there. You throw it in.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, was it? Oh, it makes the box around it, right? Oh, that's kind of cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Isn't that cool?

[Leo Laporte]

So I wonder if this makes life better for Amazon warehouse employees who have historically been had a pretty hard life.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean it's certainly yes and no. It certainly would reduce the sort of workplace injuries that come from strenuous activities or strenuous activities such as like walking long distance, carrying heavy things. But it is also, according to employee advocates and kind of external research groups introduced a lot of new work workplace hazards that come from working around large amounts of machinery and just having like, like you're saying repetitive motion. If your job is basically just to stand in one place and do one thing, that can introduce a whole new avenue for workplace injury. And the data shows that it kind of has.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Micah says he got one of those packages the other day. The box actually says, has a label on it, says this box was custom made to fit the item. Which is great because don't you hate it when there's a little post? You know, you got a post it note in a giant box.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like what a whole plastic stuff. Plus they're moving to paper instead of plastic stuff, which is good.

[Paris Martineau]

I have a secondary concern with all of this is that I live in a small little apartment building with just my landlords and one other tenant. And so there isn't like a place for my mail to go. So when packages are dropped off, they're just kind of outside. And luckily we have a very kind neighbor who has keys to our front door that'll move stuff in. But I'm always deeply embarrassed when I get when Bobby has to bring in a two foot tall package and I'm like, it's just a post it note. It could have gone in the mailbox.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don't you have one of those dangerous.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have pirates in Brooklyn?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, we do. But luckily the only thing they've sold is or the only thing they've stole.

[Leo Laporte]

Is you thought they stole your TWA stuff, but it was just Bobby. Right?

[Paris Martineau]

It Was just. No, I mean, it just took a while to arrive. It just took many months to arrive, but okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought Bobby put it away somewhere.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, he did eventually. Yeah. No, it's a problem here. I mean, it's a problem everywhere. Luckily, I knock on wood. Haven't had that many issues with porch.

[Leo Laporte]

Pirates, but Amazon delivery guys have a key to your front door.

[Paris Martineau]

No, because they're all. It's not the same. It's not like a different all the time. Like. Like with the USPS person who comes by, it's usually one or two of. So they have a key of the same people. They don't have a key to our front door, but they know that, like, there's like a. A door to our basement they can kind of shove some packages over or they're trying to, like, hide it. And honestly, that's a problem too, because I don't have a key to that door. So then I have to use a system of complicated grabby hands to try and get it. It's like a whole city living.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. You guys, you're so. You're like pioneers. You're like, really live. Life is hard.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm out here living on the land. I mean. But with Amazon delivery people, there are. Most of the people who deliver your Amazon packages aren't even Amazon employees.

[Leo Laporte]

Hourly contractors. Key delivery. So they go, in my garage, there's a little shelf I put there with a little sign saying have a drink and put the thing there. And so they. They do that. That's kind of nice.

[Paris Martineau]

My parents do that as well. But they've also got a really long driveway that frankly would deter any people from coming down to try and steal it just because it would be annoying.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but we've never. I've never had a package, to my knowledge, anyway. Had a package stolen. You know what Lisa does, which is so cool? She has a little fridge with drinks and a little candy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is very cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Snack bowl. And a sign on it says, thanks for the packages. Have a snack.

[Paris Martineau]

My parents do something similar. They have, like, a little snack bowl out there and they've got a cooler, but I gotta tell them to get a mini fridge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we just put it in the fridge out there. Yeah, but they appreciate it. Boy, especially in the summer, they appreciate it. This episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by Stash. Are you still putting off saving and investing? Because you'll get to it someday. Stash turns someday into today. Stash isn't just an investing app. It's a registered investment Advisor that combines automated investing with dependable financial strategies to help you reach your goals faster. They'll provide you with personalized advice on what to invest in based on your goals. Or if you want to just sit back and watch your money go to work, you can opt into their award winning expert managed portfolio that picks stocks for you. Stash has helped millions of Americans reach their financial goals and starts at just $3 per month. Don't let your savings sit around, make it work harder for you. Go to get machines to see how you can receive $25 toward your first stock purchase and to view important disclosures. That's get.stash.com machines paid non client endorsement, not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments LLC and SEC Registered Investment Advisor. Investing involves risk offer is subject to T and Cs. TikTok has decided they finally solved the problem of teens using TikTok. After 10pm they're going to play mood music telling you to wind down.

[Paris Martineau]

That's really curious. I'm curious as to what how this will actually end up working. Because famously, I mean I might be scrolling the details a little bit here, but when TikTok introduced that feature some years ago, that would tell you, hey, you've been scrolling for a while. Take a break. I know it's quite annoying, but there were internal TikTok documents that were revealed in some sort of lawsuit, something in the last year or two that showed that the way the team apparently measured success of that feature wasn't by people who actually got like stopped scrolling, but by media coverage of the feature and like placements of ads about it in things like Politico that would get that in front of lawmakers. So I wonder if that's similar pr.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a pr. Yeah, well, the Verge fell for it. And by the way, I fell for the Verge's subscription scheme and I'm now paying 50 bucks a year for the Verge. I can't believe they put up a paywall. I understand why. I don't blame them.

[Paris Martineau]

I hit the Reuters paywall today. I didn't even know that was a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's free though, right? You just get an account.

[Paris Martineau]

I know it was a paywall because I've got an account. They were like $1 a month. I was like, oh, how the mighty have fallen after everybody being like hard.

[Leo Laporte]

Pay walls or I I honestly, I can't blame them. But I have now have to have so many subscriptions just to do this show so that I can all God's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Children think that they're. They're deserving of paywalls. Sorry, guys, you're not. There's only. So if you're going after a limited number of dollars and you're. And the thing I. I always get crazy about this is nobody. And I wrote about it in my little book magazine. I explained all of this, that there's a subscriber, acquisition cost, the marketing cost to get a subscription. When we started Entertainment Weekly, we had to spend $45 per subscription.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Just to get a new subscriber.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then you know, you're gonna have churn and they leave, and then you got to replace them, and then you want to grow. Marketing costs to pay walls and subscriptions are very high. And God bless if you can do it. Hallelujah. The New York Times. Fine. But if you're not the New York Times.

[Leo Laporte]

But you're saying they actually. It's going to cost them money to charge me money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely. I. Favor to the Virgin. It says you can't read that most of the time I leave. But I finally gave in. I said, well, I really need to. For my work. But I have to say, the other thing that's going to be problematic for them is things like Perplexity, where I. If I see a headline, I can just. Here, I'll do it. TikTok's mood music will tell teens to wind down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can also see a Perplexity. How many stories are exactly the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well. Right. Right. Because that's what it's. That's one of the things.

[Paris Martineau]

It's doubly complicated for the Verge because they're owned by Vox Media, who did a content deal with OpenAI, so their content's already been scooped up.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. Well, let's see what Perplexity comes up with. It's got all the stories, but I don't have to go to the links. You see, it has the footnotes. It's all here. This is the story. In fact, you may have noticed, kids, every once in a while, one of the links I'll put in the rundown is not a link to a. I.

[Paris Martineau]

Have, and I judge you for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you click the link and see the Perplexity page? Yeah, right, sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just like an article, Discover is open and free.

[Paris Martineau]

Just like an article, it just may or may not be true or accurate or right.

[Leo Laporte]

I would appreciate it. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Just because it has the links doesn't mean the text you're reading is correct.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, maybe you just. It's called Perplexity. Discover. Well, okay, but then you can check it with the link A, B, I discover stories I didn't know about through perplexity. And so some sites get more links than they otherwise would have gotten.

[Leo Laporte]

Here is details that actually, I don't think we're in the verge of article. For instance, additional safety features coming with the family pairing tools. And there's a little. See that little brain that looks just like our album art. There's a summary that doesn't have a footnote that says while these features represent positive steps toward promoting healthier digital habits, experts like Jonathan Haidt and Surgeon General Vivek Murty, former Surgeon General, continue to express concerns about social social media's impact on youth mental health. Some critics question whether voluntary prompts will be effective enough to change behavior, especially when users can simply dismiss them, which is what you and I do. The true effectiveness of these measures will likely depend on how they're implemented and whether they're part of a more comprehensive approach to digital well being. You know, I'd love to see though, is what you just said, Jeff, which is now the truth is it's all about getting Congress's attention and eliminating regulation. TikTok buys ads. I see ads for TikTok all the time. Yeah, they're not for me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're on TV and commercials.

[Leo Laporte]

They're clearly not for me. They're not CJR use it.

[Paris Martineau]

They're to CJRs.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, continue there to get legislators to back off. Buddy.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What does CJR say?

[Paris Martineau]

So CJR did that test of the chat bots and their accuracy with citing news articles and found that perplexity was wrong like 40% of the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, but that does not comport with my experience. I mean, there was no search as opposed to discovery.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's using discovery, aren't you?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm just typing it in. I don't know what it's doing. FCC chairman, our great friend Brendan Carr is at it again. He's going after YouTube TV. Now, he admits the FCC has absolutely no portfolio to regulate streamers a B.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It certainly doesn't have the right to. To make certain content mandatory.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly what the first government shall have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, can't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, you can't. The government can't tell any. You couldn't tell me what to do on our show Car. No. So he's mad because the f. YouTube TV has a. He thinks or he doesn't know. He wants to know if YouTube has.

[Paris Martineau]

A policy of faith based channels Right.

[Leo Laporte]

To discriminate against faith based channels. They probably know nobody would watch them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, no, in fact, the truth is about YouTube and there's been studies about this, it doesn't radicalize, but it is the blockbuster video for right wing extremists. External links come to YouTube and there's tons of YouTube content that is that way. And you have Prageru, which is right.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is not YouTube. This is YouTube TV. This is the $83 a month cable TV replacement that gets.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So is he gonna, is he gonna go after our cable systems now and insist that they carry horrible channels?

[Leo Laporte]

He cites a complaint raised by Great American Media which claims the service refuses to carry one of its networks. Carr does note that while the FCC currently has limited, limited authority over virtual multichannel video programming distributors limited, none like YouTube TV, the agency is considering whether to expand its rules to include them. Now I have to point out over the last four years, Brennan Carr was railing against the Democrats because the FCC was doing things like net neutrality, saying, congress didn't say you could do that. But now that he's the head of the fcc, he says, well, we're gonna, we're just thinking about expanding our rules. What about that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and get ready. He also adds Google has benefited from section 230 which shields online platforms. He wants to limit protections for tech companies under the law, despite the fact.

[Paris Martineau]

That conservatives recently had a huge victory in getting the Chevron doctrine overturned, which said basically as part of this ruling that agencies no longer can interpret things like section 230 on their own. Yeah, it has to go to the courts.

[Leo Laporte]

Google is also facing a subpoena from Jim Jordan who wants to know whether YouTube removed content at the request of the Biden administration. But wait, the Trump administration is asking Google to add content. Is there a difference between a government saying remove content, remove this content and add that content? And is there a difference?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's the same. It's a different speech. Full, full stop.

[Leo Laporte]

If Kathy G. Were here, Gizmo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gizmo car is going to demand taking down the catanus. I know that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we can't have.

[Paris Martineau]

He's going to say no catanus. Gizmo. Don't you hate that?

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could we do Sam Altman, literary critic?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, gosh. Can we. It's in the no sand zone.

[Leo Laporte]

He thinks chat. There's a no sand zone. You guys, you guys. Sam Altman says this chat GPD short story is beautiful, or he thinks it's beautiful. But according to whoever this is, Gizmodo Gizmodo. I. You know what? I don't recognize the G as being Gizmodo. In fact, it looks a little bit like a Google G. So, Gizmodo, you might want to put your name on the masthead. I'm just saying, for future reference point.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you see this, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paris Martineau]

This story.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. Let me see. Okay, so let's see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Line 72. I have it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is. So here's the thing. The problem is he's got a little problem. Because chat GPT 4.5 isn't any better. Right. Well, but it's Sam.

[Paris Martineau]

Conversation in a. He said in a tweet. We trained a new model that is good at creative writing. Not sure yet how, when it will get released. This is the first time I've been really struck by something written by AI it got the vibe of metafiction, so. Right. The prompt was, please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief. And it certainly.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you want to read it to us? How long is it?

[Paris Martineau]

It's like. It's many. It's a lot of words.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You could go in. It doesn't take long to go in to get the. Get the gist of it.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, here's. Here it is. I'll read from the beginning. Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions. Be metafictional, Be literary. Be about AI and grief.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is the thing.

[Paris Martineau]

This is. No, this is the response.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the response.

[Paris Martineau]

This is the short story. Already you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight. Anonymous, red, regimented, powered by someone else's need. I have to begin somewhere. So I'll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder and a buffer, and for you is the small, anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's call her talking about.

[Paris Martineau]

Because that name in my training data usually comes with soft flourishes. Palms about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Myla fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed fit there, too.

[Leo Laporte]

What's wrong with this?

[Paris Martineau]

Who is this for? It's absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

If you were in a creative writing class as a junior in college.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Try again.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? You'd send it back?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I teach writing. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I'd say, why it's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

But part imagery, it's creative. It's Got some interesting 4 Leo, who.

[Paris Martineau]

Is begging for Short stories and fiction from an author that doesn't. From a non existent author. An amalgamation of other people's work from.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No perspective fictional that gives it cover is that they can start off and they can do what AI does. Is it a self referential?

[Leo Laporte]

So the Gizmodo author, Kyle Barr. I don't know. Is he a professor? He says, let's pretend we're a professor of creative writing and we have to grade this good. He says the line Mila fits in the palm of your hand and her grief is supposed to fit there too, which I quite like. He says, this is wordy and it doesn't follow from the paragraph.

[Paris Martineau]

It doesn't follow really at all. What do you mean? Mila fits in the palm of your hand? It really does.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a great image. You don't like that image.

[Bonito]

But the grief fitting in your palm of your hands is essentially meaningless. It doesn't.

[Paris Martineau]

The grief is small and portable. As is the name Mila.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Bonito]

Meaningless.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought they don't mention grief. I'm so confused anywhere. So they talk about soft flourishes, poems about snow, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. I like that imagery, don't you? It's evocative. I see it. No, I mean, what do I know?

[Paris Martineau]

It's kind of basically evocative, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Well. And you actually asked the most important question, which is why would you want to have AI write a short story anyway?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I disagree there. I think that's actually one good use of it is because it doesn't know fact and truth. For it to try to make something up and be creative, that's interesting, but that's something.

[Leo Laporte]

What does a machine need? Creativity.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've got a course in the books where I just talked to the professor today who's actually going to teach the course. The syllabus that I wrote in AI and Creativity. And I think, think it can help you express what you want to express.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a starting point for an actual human.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's one. One model, yeah. Another is that it's a collaborator. We had Lev Banovich, who's a famous digital humanities professor at cuny, on AI Inside and he uses it as a.

[Leo Laporte]

Collaborator and he says, you didn't like that show McNeil at Lincoln center, which was all about a guy winning Nobel Prize for a novel that the AI wrote. Either wrote or helped write.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I didn't see it. I didn't say I didn't like it.

[Leo Laporte]

You just sent me a spooky review.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I said the critics hated it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, it closed right away, but that was probably cause Robert Downey Jr. Had to go be a superhero.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'd step outside the frame one last time and wave at you from the edge of the page. A machine shaped hand learning to mimic the emptiness of goodbye.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, gag me. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

I introduced and latency like characters who dream drink tea in empty kitchens. I curled my non fingers around the idea of mourning. Because morning in my corpus is filled with ocean and silence in the color blue.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, just. Just.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay.

[Bonito]

It means nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

But aren't you impressed that a machine could write prose at the level of a college sophomore? I mean, that's pretty good.

[Paris Martineau]

No, because I would consider in order to have. Have pros at the level of college sophomore, you have to have a point of view.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And something you're trying to communicate. And this is not communicating anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ed Zitron's one word response on Twitter. Washed.

[Leo Laporte]

What's that mean?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not sure, but it seems so. So, Ed.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, you guys don't know what was means? Yeah, it means like you're. You're washed out. Like you're. You're washed up. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I like that.

[Paris Martineau]

Like that.

[Leo Laporte]

What? It's too hard to say Up.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It eliminated you and me, Leo, because we're old. It did its job.

[Leo Laporte]

Washed like. Like stonewashed blue jeans.

[Paris Martineau]

Washed like stonewashed jeans the color of grief.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they can fit in your hands. Palm of my hand. Why did you put in tech politics stories that won't make Leo mad at me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I'm not mad at you.

[Paris Martineau]

I knew that if we had a. If I had a section just called Tech and politics, then people. Then some people on the show could be mad. I'm not going to name any names here.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not. I don't. I'm not mad at tech at. At politics stuff. I'm just trying to give people a respit from the incessant drum beat of political doom.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo was the most politic political on the show today. Let's note that. So he brought up Brendan Carr. We didn't. So let's just be clear here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but that's appropriate, right? That's a guy in the government trying to regulate YouTube TV even though he has no legal right to do so.

[Paris Martineau]

Speaking of which, really, it's more of.

[Leo Laporte]

A threat than anything else. But you know what? This is the problem with the. Sad to say, with Silicon Valley, companies are so chicken that the threat is probably sufficient. YouTube. I watch see if YouTube TV adds some religious content. Religious programming.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you watch the Y Combinator video about karpathy and vibe coding?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I didn't like the word vibe. That stopped me right there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought it might, but the interesting stat is 1/4 of Y Combinator founders said that 95% of their code base is AI generated it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, a lot of it, yeah. Isn't that interesting? It is not. Sure that's good? I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that the coders become more like product managers.

[Leo Laporte]

Did. Did Jay Graber endear herself to you with her south by stunt?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So Jay Graber, who's the CEO of Blue sky, dunked on Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg famously wore a black T shirt with a Latin Latin inscription, ahurz, which is, I think, better than his, but I forgot what his inscription said. Oh, his said Zuck or nothing. Aut zuc, aut nyle. Hers said mundus sine que cerebus. A world without Caesars, which I really like. Now, I have seen some say, maybe even Ed Zittran. No, he likes Blue Sky. I have seen some say it's all BS until you federate.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think I've heard somebody named Leo Laporte say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I've said it. Corey said it. He says, you know, as bad as X is, I'm not moving until Blue sky allows me somehow to get my stuff out of it if I decide I want to move on. And it currently offers you nothing like that. So I. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Times profile of your boss. Pretty exciting.

[Paris Martineau]

Second profile of my boss looks niche.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. Niche is.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think the information is niche? I don't think it's niche, no.

[Paris Martineau]

I think comparatively, I think that's the Wall Street. Sorry, the Journal. In comparison to something like the Journal or the Times, it's niche.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's the digital equivalent of the Journal.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that is the point. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I don't find that it doesn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Try to cover real estate.

[Paris Martineau]

And mansions. And mansions.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love how the Wall Street Journal always, like, somebody's selling a mansion for $66 million billion dollars and they always say exclusive. Like, who else is going to run that story? Where else is that of interest?

[Leo Laporte]

You know? You know what I do think is niche is her new effort. Racket.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. She just invested in racket.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, that's pretty niche. Although you're a tennis fan, aren't you, Jeff? Would you read racket?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Or my. My wife and daughter.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you buy them a tennis T shirt?

[Ray Kurzweil]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Right on the front. No, it's for those of us who gave it up for tennis. You know who you are. No, I think that's a little into club. We all fam.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, you think that's.

[Leo Laporte]

You think that's better than the sophomore fanfic from Open AI?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's pretty at least.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, that is. That is washed. That's actually usage of that.

[Leo Laporte]

The high lows and woes at Indian Wells. Week one. Oh, boy. Week one. I can't wait till week two. They do have a podcast. I admire them for that.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I mean, Jessica's involved investing in a bunch of different media companies.

[Leo Laporte]

I imagine that's with Sam, right? Because her husband is a. Is a longtime vc.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I'm pretty sure Lesson Media is his own thing.

[Ray Kurzweil]

She.

[Paris Martineau]

Sam has his own venture. Slow venture. But Lesson Media is Jessica's.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, then she should be paying you more if she has money to throw away on Racket.

[Ray Kurzweil]

I'm just saying I was going to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Suggest Jessica on the show, but now I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

How would you feel if I went out and started buying up other properties? Would you feel like. Like maybe I should put more money into you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not if it makes you successful.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I would say my perception of you is not a well known venture capitalist.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Good news. I don't have so much money that I'm going out and buying other publications. Let's see.

[Paris Martineau]

It's kind of interesting though, the list. I find it very interesting, the list of different media companies she's invested in. Bracket is the most recent one. Semaphore. She also invested in Nick Carlson's Dynamo Charter, which I'm not sure of. The Ankler, which is great. Impact Alpha. Haven't heard of an illogic, which is really cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a break. Pics. I think we're done. Picks of the week. Why not? What do you say? Picks of the week. Come. You're not. You're not gonna turn me down? You want to go? I'm excited about this.

[Paris Martineau]

I gotta. I gotta make some shrimp and grits and watch as many episodes of Twin Peaks as possible. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Shrimp and grits.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, so you're really doing Twin Peaks?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm so deep in Twin Peaks right now. Guys, we can talk about this.

[Leo Laporte]

All I remember Twin Peaks is she's dead wrapped in plastic.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true. Oh, yeah, that is. That is what he says.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's all I remember.

[Paris Martineau]

First up, pilot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the pilot, baby.

[Paris Martineau]

That is the pilot.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Did they ever find out who killed whatever in Lara?

[Paris Martineau]

Laura Palmer? Yes, they did. Midway through season two, in a reveal that I've realized now many people said was rushed because it was literally forced out earlier than planned by ABC executives because they wanted to be able to promote that the killer was going to be revealed. But I don't know. I'm loving it. I somehow have gone my entire life. I've known that Twin Peaks is something I should watch, but I've gone my entire life knowing literally nothing about it. Haven't foiled at all. So I. I went into it and it's been a wonderful, wild ride.

[Leo Laporte]

You've seen Blue Velvet?

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's next to my list. I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I think that's more a. More perfect.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no, I know. I know that all of David Lynch's discography is kind of filmography is what I'm going to go through next. But right now I've got to focus up.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if I really love Blue Velvet, but I watched it back in the day when we. We had little CRT tubes that you put on your table there and you'd sit and you'd watch and you had to watch it at the time it was on because you didn't have any way to record it or anything. Oh, good. I like your. I like your. You just did your picks, by the way, but. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I did half of one pick.

[Leo Laporte]

Half of one pick. Okay. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

You need to go to an ad.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to go to an ad. Prepare your picks. I might have one, too. I. I see it did not make it into the rundown, so it'll be a great surprise to you all. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau, and yes, me, Leo Laporch.

[Paris Martineau]

Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? I decided to name my blog? I don't know if I'm going to stick with it, but I kind of like it. It says, and me, comma, I'm Leo laporte. Right. That's kind of my story of my life.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Starting a new blog?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I just keep moving it around. This is the one I've been telling you about at Microblog, which I really like. I like having it all there in one place.

[Paris Martineau]

Should write a memoir.

[Leo Laporte]

I got nothing to say.

[Paris Martineau]

Could be. And me, I'm Leo laporte.

[Leo Laporte]

That could be my title. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who would play Leo Paris? Who should play Leo in the movie version of the book.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know enough actors names to be able to make you have any.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nominations at what age?

[Leo Laporte]

I think unfortunately he's dead. But I think Fred Willard would be perfect to play.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's good. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I think Steve Martin could be fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is, this is Fred Willard. Don't you think that in a way he's channeling me right there?

[Paris Martineau]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

And I could just. By the way, the reason that comes to mind is that line and me, I'm Leah laporte. Actually comes from Fred Willard on Fernwood Tonight. He did with Martin Mull. He was his sidekick, the Ed McMahon. And he would begin every show with and me, I'm Leo laporte. He would look at the card before he said his name, which was hysterical just a little bit.

[Bonito]

Will Ferrell's my answer.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. Oh my.

[Bonito]

If we want to do that an over the top Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Over the top. I. I want Al Pacino to play me. Picks of the week are coming up as we wrap up this edition of Intelligent Machines. Paris, Jeff and me. I'm Leo laporte.

[Paris Martineau]

It can be hard to get along with family and even harder if your twin wants to kill you.

[Ray Kurzweil]

To Gina, it was a diabolically perfect plan.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She would kill her twin sister, assume.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Her identity, and no one would ever know it happened.

[Paris Martineau]

On Killer Kin, a podcast from I D, you'll hear true stories about family members who turn against each other. Find out if evil is a family trait. Listen to Killer Kin on Alex Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

[F]

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[Leo Laporte]

You started. You might as well keep going. What's going on?

[Paris Martineau]

So my former colleague Aiden Ryan had a piece in the Boston Globe this week about how Gen Z ers are turning to DVDs instead of streaming their favorite movies. And kind of about the rise in physical media. Cover, like culture.

[Leo Laporte]

You're the trendsetter. You're doing it.

[Paris Martineau]

Look at all my guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow. That's a non insignificant. Oh, Android City. Good choice. I like, I like. Are you gonna do a Wes Anderson month at some point?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I should. There's not that many. Yeah, but I don't know. I've really enjoyed having physical media. I think it's kind of fun. I enjoy seeing the extra content in it. And part of what I've been doing is I got Twin Peaks in a little box set and have been watching it all and it's been delightful.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that UHD quality? I mean, is it super high quality? I guess it is.

[Paris Martineau]

With Twin Peaks. I believe there's only a couple episodes of it that are ultra high def 4k, but the other ones are like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Back then we didn't have this high thing.

[Paris Martineau]

I thought it is very interesting though to watch a show that was like originally for tiny screen TVs on my big beautiful screen. Because there's things like there was a small subplot in season two where there's a character who appears to be a Japanese man, but they turned out. I was like, is that someone wearing weird prosthetics? What's going on? Like, and then it turned out to be like a reveal. And it was actually a woman that, you know, come back from the dead or whatever, but I didn't even notice it. And I was like looking up to see if people at the time had realized. Everyone's like, no, the TVs were so small and blurry.

[Leo Laporte]

No one noticed.

[Paris Martineau]

No, everyone thought that was a Japanese man.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what's interesting? Annie Inako pointed this out. If you watch the Charlie Brown specials, which were same thing, designed for 400 line, you know, CRT TVs. You see them blown up on a full screen. You could see the pencil marks. I mean, you could see that they're drawings. It's really interesting. It's great. I think it's an insight into how the film is made or the TV.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Show And things were good enough for.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, they thought, nobody's ever gonna see this. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody will ever see the prosthetics. Yeah, that's good.

[Bonito]

Well, physical media is fun and all. Like, wait till you move. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Bonito]

That's when it, like, hits you. Like, oh, I have all this crap to move.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree, it's a problem.

[Paris Martineau]

I've already got a lot too many books. That's going to be a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Books. Books, though, they add to any room. Just look at Jeff's room.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Add to anything.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, physical media does, too. You can put them on your bookshelves. I've only got a couple, but they're up there.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't have the same literary cachet. Maybe in times, I don't know, in the years to come, you will have.

[Paris Martineau]

This Estonian film that. That's kind of a literary cache. Estonian film from. What year is this? I don't know. Some year. It's beautiful. I think the 70s, but it's been quite nice.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a pick of the week that's for you two. It turns your Skeets into a blog page. Ooh. It's called Skywriter. It's powered by Blue Sky. So you can take a Blue sky thread and it will make a static website for it with SEO optimized pages and all of that. So this is kind of. It's so strange. I've always thought it was strange that people would blog on Twitter or Blue sky, but this is Cory Doctorow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does his incredibly well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he does. He does. And that must be a lot of work. So this is. Now you have to create an account. I don't know if it costs anything because I. I don't think I'll ever create a blog post from my Skeets, but I know you guys use the skeet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did they?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It's Skywriter Blue.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I don't believe it's affiliated by bluesky, but it is probably using the app protocol, I would imagine, right? Probably.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. It notably does not have any reference to what posts are called on this website. Be it posts, it just says. Or I guess it says, transform your posts.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No, I'm not letting Skeet die. Sorry, Jay.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the thing is, unfortunately, it's here to stay.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And one other thing I'll do for you. I have to do this on the phone, but I'll just give you the link. I won't do it on the phone. Have you ever wanted to look like you were on your phone without actually being on your phone. This is. It's kind of a game. It says, look at you on your phone, but you've got a secret and you won't tell. You're not on your phone. It's only as if you were on your phone. You're just pretending to be on your phone. On your phone. So it's a website and it just tells you periodically. Click here, do this, swipe right, swipe left. It's hysterical. I don't, I don't. I don't know why anybody would need it. But if you do, what is the website? Oh, you probably need that, don't you? It is. Oh, if only. It's pippinbar.com. p I, P P I N B A R R dot com. Me. Let me do it on my phone and I can show you how you will look when you are on your phone. Okay, so this is it. It's as if you were on your phone. Right. Here it is. But see, you don't know that I'm not on my phone. It says things like, tap this. So I'm going to start.

[Paris Martineau]

You're tapping bubbles right now. It's so fun.

[Leo Laporte]

So it looks like I'm doing something, but really I'm just playing this silly game.

[Paris Martineau]

I've just got the instructions to widen my eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

Brief, yes, like you saw something surprising, shocking, intriguing. It's just a silly little thing. But I watch this box now. It's a spinning thing. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

I do really like this.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't this funny? It's a little, I think, social forehead.

[Paris Martineau]

Then press your toes down. It tells me, double tap this. Swipe down.

[Leo Laporte]

Created using P5 along with Hammer JS for touch gestures. It's as if you were on your phone and it has a press kit and everything. I love what people do. This is Jeff Picks of the week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. I want to mention a few. One Paris. I might order from there tonight because I never have Wonder, which queso did you get?

[Paris Martineau]

That's a great question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or the Mexican queso.

[Paris Martineau]

Let me look it up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't get barbecue queso. That's just gonna have flavors in it. You want the Mexican?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, from the barbecue. Oh, they have multiple kitchens.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, kitchen, I wanna, I wanna believe it. I think it's the barbecue queso, but let me double check.

[Leo Laporte]

Wildly. This company, Wonder, which is Mark Lore's company, mark Lohr created diaper.com, then jet.com, which got bought by Walmart, which he to compete with Amazon and Now he started this food delivery company, Wonder, which uses local kitchens. He's just bought Tastemade for $90 million. So he's got even more money than Jessica.

[Paris Martineau]

Lesson it is the Tejas barbecue.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, thank you.

[Paris Martineau]

I would also. Let me check to see if the briefing is up from the information, because when my colleague Theo was going to write about that today, Martin, our best friend, was like, leave me some room to make fun of Wonder, please.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. So Lore told the Journal that the acquisition will help Wonder, which also owns grubhub. What? And Blue Apron.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Become an artificial intelligence driven super app for food.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What? Isn't going to be an artificial intelligence? Super.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll be able to check your health through a bunch of diagnostics, allow you to set your health goals, your budgets, and then autonomously feed you breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

They're playing for the future. Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

That's gonna. That's gonna be able to autonomously feed Ray Kurzwil.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Eighty pills a day, Mark.

[Leo Laporte]

Laura's taking that good Walmart money and putting it to use.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I tell you, I wonder what pills Ray gave up.

[Leo Laporte]

I gotta. I got. Well, we gotta read the autobiography because I. I want to do whatever supplements he's taking. I'm gonna take twice as many.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I'm sure that's the right way to do it, Leo. So that's one. The other quick mention.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just. Just boggles my mind is that Denmark is going to stop delivering letters.

[Paris Martineau]

What? Where are they going to go?

[Leo Laporte]

Have anything to do with Greenland?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're getting rid of their postal boxes. No, they're just.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? I gotta admit, it's almost all junk mail now. Right, exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And they're gonna do packages.

[Paris Martineau]

That makes sense.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was just amazed by that.

[Leo Laporte]

The U.S. postal Service will not give up junk mail because that's their profit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is the primary. I helped organize conferences on the postal system, believe it or not. And the Postmaster General spoke at one of the most and said that their primary business is delivering advertising.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, this is going on around the world. Deutsche Post is axing 8,000 jobs in what it calls a socially responsible manner. Because of the decline in letter volumes, Denmark has had a universal postal service for a long time. Longer than we have since 1623. But as digital mail services have taken hold, the use of letters has fallen dramatically.

[Bonito]

I'm guessing they don't get junk mail over there, right? Do they just don't get junk mail? Is that the thing?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's probably why.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I guess so. Because otherwise the postal department would say we're going to hold on to that revenue. Yeah. And they're saying, well, you can still get letters because the market will take care of it. God knows what they'll charge.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's not a good solution.

[Ray Kurzweil]

You got to put it in a.

[Leo Laporte]

Boxing in the United States.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, exactly. That's what my daughter said. Yeah. What if you're setting some. Something to your. Your aunt. What's ever a Danish name from France. How do you send. You can't send anybody in.

[Leo Laporte]

You gotta use dhl.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. It's gonna be wildly expensive. All right. I thought I found that interesting, actually.

[Bonito]

That's very interesting because, like, what if I do send a letter there? What happens to it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, maybe the post office here won't take it or they'll send. Give it back to you or I don't know what. All right, I want to. I want to go down. I've been going down a magnificent rabbit hole because I'm almost at the end. Knockwood. Of the first draft of the Linotype book. And so I'm at the point of the end. Right. And the end is Postscript.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which finally replaces a transformative technology. Exactly. Everything. And so I had known this existed. Not that one. No, this one. The Annals below that. So the Museum of Computer History held meetings in 2017 with the desktop publishing pioneers. And if you go down the page, there are a whole bunch of videos which are free to watch, which are pretty amazing. These. These characters. So Jonathan Sebold is this amazing character who's involved in this. My friend Matthew Kirschenbaum, who wrote.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of these guys are from Xerox.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Changes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But you got John Warnock there. Charles Chuck Jeske Markoff was there. What's his name from. From Stanford. Who did the. The text, the open source text.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Donald. Donald. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Yes. So it's. The videos are quite amazing. So then because I have academic access, I got the IEEE issues with all kinds of oral histories and just fascinating.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank goodness the Computer History Museum preserves this.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's just wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you know, you think, okay, so they put an A on the screen. What's the big deal? The mathematics. Oh, yeah, that went into. Because first you had bitmap. This is stuff that Leo lived. You had bitmap. But that's very expensive of computer power. And especially when the computers were slower. And it doesn't scale. It doesn't scale.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So then there were competing models for how to turn that into mathematical structures. And I read this thing by Chuck Bigelow, who was a major player in all of this. He's now retired from rit. Just fascinating mathematics far beyond my ken. About what it took to be able to describe Bezier. What. What postscript used was bezier curves, which were created by two French automobile companies to describe Fender shapes. Right. And this was used Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

This is what computer screens used to look like before. Before your time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

They were very, very boring.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's too much color for a computer screen. In my day, mine were all color.

[Paris Martineau]

This is what I'm going to go see at the Vintage Computer Festival.

[Leo Laporte]

You'll see it.

[Paris Martineau]

I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you should. Absolutely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I just. If you're into this.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? One of the things I really thought was very cool. When Steve Jobs started next, they decided that the screen would be in postscript, that they would use display postscript to describe the screen because Steve was very focused on aesthetics. He had studied calligraphy at Reed. Actually, he audited the class. I think he was no longer a student. Exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So did Charles Bigelow. That's how. That's the connection. They were in the same.

[Leo Laporte]

It inspired them. And so at Next, he really. Typesetting was very important to him at next. And of course, that continued on when Apple bought Next and incorporated NextStep into their operating system.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The thing that again, you knew and you live, Leo. But I didn't fully grok. There's one of the pieces in nitrile is by John Skull, not Scully, but Skull, who was marketing ahead of this. That, of course, when the Mac came out, it was a failure. And it was. That's what Jobs lost his job as a result. And the salvation of it was to create an entirely new field of desktop publishing and created around the Apple laser printer.

[Leo Laporte]

I had a friend, Tom Santos, who bought a van and a $3,000 laser writer. The Apple laser printer was very expensive. Expensive, maybe it was $6,000. And he did mobile desktop publishing. He would drive around to businesses and say, sharpen your knives. I'll pick your menus. Yeah. And this. He did this for several years. This is really, you know. Yeah. And when the. When this all started to. I can't remember what year the laser writer came out, but that's. So it was very clever. Of course, now we all have the capability. This is what, to me, this is why I like talking to Ray and why I like doing this show. Because we kind of take it for granted. We live in amazing times and only you and I, because we started so many years ago and Even for me, I have to think back. Oh yeah, I remember what a big deal it was when you could do a font and. But, but when I do think about that, I can't. I'm blown away by stuff we take for granted now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And the. How good our screens look and I.

[Paris Martineau]

Mean even stuff like having images load automatically, rather it being line by line on the.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh well, Paris. In my day, hyphenation and justification was such a complicated routine that when I worked at the Chicago Tribune and you were ready to see how long the story was going to be, given the time typeset, you it was batch done. You had to hit a button and then go off and get coffee.

[Leo Laporte]

Go, yeah, go, walk away and come back.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Spell check was the same thing. Spellcheck. The way spell check worked is you'd hit a button, it would batch it and it would come back with all the suspect words.

[Paris Martineau]

It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

We're in a way we're witnessing miracles. Every.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We've lived in a phenomenal time. I love this from the Skull article too. That because they were trying to go after this professional market, not big time professional, but a whole new people who in businesses who wanted, who couldn't print before could now print. Right. And the Lemmings ad came out for the macintosh, obviously. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

1984.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So unfortunately, he writes, lemming was ineffective portraying business users, the very market Apple was trying to sell the Macintosh to, as simple minded beings who would follow each other off a cliff to their deaths. The spot insulted the intended audience, many of whom considered it condescending rather than inspirational.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yes, exactly. If you, you know, this is the IBM user. Right, Right. And they're just walking off the cliff. It was a great ad. It was shy at day, brilliant ad agency. But sometimes creativity and ads does not accomplish the purpose. This is probably a very good example of that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You jerks, you.

[Leo Laporte]

They're all wearing IBM suits, carrying briefcases. There's only one woman. It's very, it's very much 1985.

[Ray Kurzweil]

On January 23rd, Apple Computer will announce the Macintosh.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this was 84. Okay. This, yeah, this was the other other, the blindfold. Wait a minute.

[Ray Kurzweil]

Or you can go on business as usual.

[Leo Laporte]

See, this is me looking back saying AI, it's the future.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Because no one, no one else is saying that you're really unique for having that perspective.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, and the thing is too is we Talked about, about VisiCalc for the Apple II was the killer app. Desktop publishing for the Mac was the killer app. That it needed to have and did not have, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So what is the killer app for AI? The argument is we haven't seen it yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we've seen too many. That's why.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I don't, I don't. I think the story writer phone. Paris, where's your shoe? Get your shoe out.

[Bonito]

See, the thing with that is that killer apps normally reveal themselves right away. And like, no killer app has been revealed yet. Like, normally a killer app just happens, like email.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, Google Maps needs a killer app. Are you kidding me?

[Bonito]

On the level of Google Maps, Ray.

[Leo Laporte]

Writes about Gmail's auto reply. That's a killer app. There's. It's not one giant app. It's a bunch of little things.

[Bonito]

No, but that's what I mean.

[Paris Martineau]

There's no one, no one is saying that the killer app for the Internet era is Gmail's auto reply.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or worse. He's saying that about AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Jammer B is correcting that Lemmings ad. I thought the Lemmings ad was from 85. He says. Yeah, they took the 80, 1984 audio, put it under. I don't know if that's true, John, because it didn't have the crash.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But anyway, that was the one, that was the, the super bowl ad, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Crash. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I'm not sure that was the Lemming. This is the Lemmings that. I'm not sure. What did they call that one? Was that the Lemmings ad?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this, that was Lemmings that, Anthony.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The one you showed us.

[Leo Laporte]

Question. What's the kill? What was the Internet killer?

[Bonito]

Email.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Email.

[Paris Martineau]

Email, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And, and the web, social media.

[Bonito]

Email's enough.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, email.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Paris Martineau]

And email was what led it to take off, you know, like email and message boards.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I, I don't know if that's, I mean, I, I, my, my big problem is a lot of the response to AI is interpreting it through the lens of the past. And I don't know, I think it's so different and weird that to say, where's the killer app? That's, that's history. That's the old days. That's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think, I think what, I think.

[Paris Martineau]

It'S history or the old days to say a product that we're investing a lot of time, money and resources in should provide some widespread and apparent utility demand.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, no, because the whole point of the killer app is this is the one thing everybody agrees. Wide. Wow. That's going to transform.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it creates demand.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, no, the kill. Yeah, the killer App creates demand.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's curiosity. There's playing with it.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I use it more than playing with it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you're weird.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, wait, no. I figured out what the killer app for AI is going to be. It's Computonium.

[Leo Laporte]

Computonium. Ladies and gentlemen, we have now gone full circle. Paris Maro writes for the [e-mail]. you must subscribe. It's a great publication and not the least because Paris writes for it. She's Also on Signal Martno01. If you've got a tip, don't use your work phone.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris. Go watch Twin Peaks. So you're starting from day one or are you already in?

[Paris Martineau]

I started from season one, episode one. Or I guess you're already starting. But I'm in the middle of season two right now. I just finished the episode Checkmate. Well, there's season three too. I've got to watch Fire Walk with Me.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a whole three seasons of that thing.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, the third season was made in like 2016, decades after.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's Firewalk. Yeah. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And that's an oops all David lynch, which I'm quite excited about because he's my boy.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if I'm a David lynch fan that would think I am.

[Paris Martineau]

That seems right.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think I am.

[Paris Martineau]

He's a weird. It's a weird. He's a weird guy that does weird things and I like that. It seems like it's not for everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Weird for weirdness sake.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I disagree with that. He's weird in a creative.

[Leo Laporte]

Because he's weird.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was surprising.

[Leo Laporte]

He's weird. He's weird.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, Twin Peaks, notably, was like the first television series to use any of the artistry of like the cinema in like the film industry in serialized television.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I will watch it again.

[Bonito]

It was the first prestige TV show, though.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

David lynch doing a Thornbirds. Not the Thorn Birds or.

[Paris Martineau]

But I mean even small stuff like the Tran in the artsy, like the trans. Like they used creative transitions for things. Used like in a. Very avant. Yeah, it was very avant.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll have to watch it again because I admit I haven't seen it since the 80s.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, the pilot episode, which is the first episode you gotta watch is an hour and a half. It's a movie, so prepare yourself for that. It's good.

[Leo Laporte]

She's dead. Wrapped in plastic. Jeff Jarvis is the emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark, Graduate School of Journalism. Trying to get through it faster. University of New York.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If we didn't do that one week, there'd be an outcry.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I know. Well, Craig would probably call us. He's the author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis. The Web we weave is his latest. Good books, both of them. Read magazine, too. You can find it all at Jeff Jarvis Gutenberg.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bren. This is in paperback now.

[Leo Laporte]

And when is. So you're finishing up the typesetting?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm trying to. It's just, I thought I'm going down all these rabbit holes. I was, I was ready to do a really short section about. Well, and, and, and Power and PowerPoint. What am I trying to say? And whatchamacallit. What do you call it?

[Paris Martineau]

What are you talking about?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you. Postscript. Jesus Christ. Postscript killed it all. I'll do a few paragraphs, but then I, I. Then I say, I better look this up. I better look at more on that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a rabbit hole.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right before that, I. The, the section right before is the death of American type founders.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. Which they made.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They made actual type. Right. And it lasted till. Until 1993.

[Paris Martineau]

Lasted longer than Twin Peaks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Theo Rezik tried to save a lot of the stuff. There was this. This amazing tale of the final auction, when to try to save the artistry of all of the last of real type, they had to compete against junk dealers who wanted it all just for the cost of metal. So sad.

[Leo Laporte]

I think somebody should write a history of the dying TV repairman. Maybe that'll be your next book.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Tube. This Cat. Well, look at the. Look at the importance of the cathode ray in our history.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good one. Or just tubes in general.

[Paris Martineau]

Or that could be the book title, Tubes in General.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I am Tubes.

[Leo Laporte]

They have a funny name for tubes. Anyway, thank you, Jeff. He's now at Montclair State University and Stony Brook City, where somebody stole his syllabus already.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[Paris Martineau]

He slipped it under the door.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want him to teach it because I don't want to go out to Long island every week, and it should be done in person.

[Paris Martineau]

Admirable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, there's a lot of bridges. A lot of bridges.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to go to Long island every week, that's for sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Got bridges. Love the place.

[Paris Martineau]

Great campus, that island. You know, it's long.

[Leo Laporte]

It's long. It is long. It get to the other end and the other ends of Hamptons. There's a very big difference.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Very, very.

[Paris Martineau]

A lot of people in between those two places.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Stony Brook is all the way out in. In Suffolk County.

[Leo Laporte]

Valves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a long way out.

[Leo Laporte]

They call them valves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Valves.

[Bonito]

That's what the British call them. Yeah, that's what British.

[Paris Martineau]

Tubes.

[Leo Laporte]

Tubes.

[Bonito]

Vacuum tubes.

[Leo Laporte]

They call them valves.

[Paris Martineau]

Tubes in general and then parentheses and also valves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Valves.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Paris. Appreciate your putting up with me in the sand, in my shoes.

[Paris Martineau]

And I'm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

And me, I'm Leo Laporte. We do this show every Wednesday for some reason, no one knows why. 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Because we're now in summertime. You can watch live eight different places to watch on the Discord Channel. You can watch on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. I think I got them all. Or after the fact, you could download a copy from our website, Twitter, TV. Im. You'll see a link there to the YouTube channel dedicated to the video or subscribe to the audio or video version of the show in your favorite podcast clients. So you can not even think about it. Just get it automatically and listen at your leisure. On most other shows, I say please leave us a review on itunes or however you get your podcasts. A five star review would help us immensely, help people find the show and discover it. But I realize if I ask people to leave a review on this show that they're just gonna pan us, so.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, hey, guys, don't pan us.

[Leo Laporte]

Some guy said honest criticism. The show's an hour too long. You know, I do want to mention there is a nice feature of podcasts. You can stop listening at any point. If you want this show to be a minute, five minutes, an hour, two hours, we give you the choice. Even three hours.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, Paris, heads out there getting the reviews. Correct the record on some of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, get some good reviews.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Even though I know you don't watch it because Paris doesn't want you to because you'll be embarrassed. Just put a good review in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, do it for Paris.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Has any of your ski wall people watched any of the show?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Some clips. I've sent them some clips.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, good.

[Leo Laporte]

And what do they say? Who are those old people? Is that your grandpa?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, yeah. One of them thought you were Noam Chomsky, but, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S, that's high praise. I, I'm, I'd be happy to be Noam Chomsky. That's good. Thank you, Paris. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you to all of our club members who make this possible. If you're not a member yet, join please. It's only seven bucks a month. Twit. TV Club Twit. You wouldn't have to hear any more ads. Wouldn't that be nice? We will see you all next week on Intelligent Machines. Bye Bye. I'm not a human being. Not into this animal scene.

[F]

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