Intelligent Machines 815: Fire In the Hole!

Summary

Podcast Summary: Intelligent Machines 815: Fire In the Hole!

Podcast Information:

• Title: Intelligent Machines 815: Fire In the Hole!
• Host/Author: TWiT
• Release Date: April 17, 2025
• Description: Leo Laporte and co-hosts Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau delve into the latest in AI, machine learning, robotics, and smart devices. In this episode, they focus on the integration of AI in journalism, featuring a special guest, Nikita Roy.

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Introduction and Light Banter [00:00 - 05:57]

The episode begins with Leo Laporte welcoming back Jeff Jarvis and introducing Paris Martineau. They engage in lighthearted conversation about AI-generated action figures, showcasing the playful side of their interaction with AI technologies.

Introducing the Guest: Nikita Roy [05:57 - 06:27]

Jeff Jarvis introduces Nikita Roy, the founder and CEO of Newsroom Robots Lab at Harvard. Nikita specializes in AI training and advisory for media organizations, focusing on how AI can be integrated into newsrooms to enhance journalistic practices.

Smart Uses of AI in Journalism [06:27 - 08:52]

Nikita Roy discusses the most intelligent applications of AI in journalism. She highlights the case of Norwegian newsroom iTromso, where an AI system significantly reduced the time journalists spent processing municipal documents, enabling the team to uncover five front-page stories in their first week. Jeff asks about the smartest use of AI, prompting Nikita to emphasize AI's role in augmenting investigative journalism by handling large volumes of data that would be unmanageable manually.

Notable Quote:

Nikita Roy [08:29]: "The best use cases right now are on the investigative journalism side, being able to process information that humans alone wouldn't be able to do."

Dumb Uses and Ethical Considerations [08:52 - 12:11]

The conversation shifts to less effective applications of AI in journalism. Nikita warns against AI-generated articles without proper oversight, especially in areas like sports or financial reporting where mechanical writing can harm a news outlet's reputation. She also cautions against creating AI avatars as bylines, which can mislead audiences about the human involvement in reporting.

Notable Quotes:

Nikita Roy [11:03]: "Don't create articles with AI avatars for bylines. Don't imply that a human made this."

Paris Martineau [11:36]: "Don't make those avatars your only example of diversity in your newsroom."

The Future of Journalism in an AI-Powered World [12:11 - 15:30]

Nikita elaborates on the broader implications of AI in journalism, advocating for a foundational rethinking of what journalism represents. She envisions a future where AI facilitates personalized news experiences, such as chatbots that can interact with users to provide tailored information.

Notable Quotes:

Nikita Roy [14:17]: "AI cannot be... it's becoming a utility like electricity. It’s going to be everywhere whether we like it or not."

Nikita Roy [15:30]: "Journalism will be about helping people make sense of information around them and holding power to account."

Human vs. Machine Roles in Journalism [15:30 - 25:14]

The hosts and Nikita delve deeper into the distinct roles humans and AI play in journalism. While AI can handle data processing and information aggregation, human journalists excel in storytelling, building relationships, and conducting in-depth investigations. Nikita introduces AI Nikita—a chatbot trained on her work—to illustrate how AI can serve as a knowledge base while humans retain control over nuanced reporting and ethical decision-making.

Notable Quotes:

Jeff Jarvis [21:03]: "We are the people going out and getting the raw data that the AI is going to generate the news out of."

Nikita Roy [25:14]: "Journalism is collecting information and data that gets provided to the audience to make sense of that information in however they want it to be."

Challenges and Hostilities Towards AI in Newsrooms [35:49 - 36:24]

Nikita addresses the resistance within some newsrooms towards AI adoption, comparing it to the early skepticism towards social media platforms. She emphasizes the inevitability of AI integration and urges news organizations to proactively adapt rather than resist the technological shift.

Notable Quote:

Nikita Roy [35:49]: "AI is going to be there. But AI is... it's becoming a utility like electricity. We have to start thinking about that very actively."

Conversational AI and Personalization [37:08 - 43:07]

The discussion focuses on the evolution of news consumption towards more interactive and personalized experiences facilitated by conversational AI. Nikita predicts that future news delivery will allow users to engage in dialogues with news sources, making information more accessible and tailored to individual understanding levels.

Notable Quotes:

Nikita Roy [39:35]: "We are going to move from just one-way listening on podcasts to going back and forth and having a conversation that we could do."

Nikita Roy [43:07]: "It's about helping people make sense of the information. A conversation that is completely tailored for them."

Actionable Insights and Future Prospects [43:07 - 57:14]

Nikita illustrates practical implementations of AI in journalism, such as personalized chatbots that can provide users with in-depth information based on their queries. The panel discusses the potential for AI to enhance traditional journalistic practices while maintaining the indispensable human elements of empathy, critical thinking, and ethical considerations.

Notable Quotes:

Nikita Roy [28:17]: "I have a personal connection with them... Because of the trust that I'm able to have and because of the content that we are putting out there."

Nikita Roy [37:08]: "AI is going to disrupt news distribution. We have to start thinking about how to coexist with it."

Closing Remarks and Future Episodes [58:47 - End]

Leo Laporte wraps up the episode by thanking Nikita Roy and teasing future discussions, including upcoming guests like Harper Reed who will talk about AI in coding. The hosts encourage listeners to engage with their community through club events and tease lighthearted segments, ensuring a blend of serious analysis and entertaining banter.

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Overall Insights:

• AI as an Augmentation Tool: AI can significantly enhance journalistic efficiency by handling data-heavy tasks, allowing journalists to focus on in-depth reporting and storytelling.
• Ethical Implementation: Transparency in AI use is crucial. Avoiding deceptive practices like uncredited AI-generated bylines maintains journalistic integrity.
• Future of News Consumption: Personalized and conversational AI will transform how audiences interact with news, making information more accessible and tailored to individual needs.
• Human Elements Remain Vital: Despite AI's capabilities, the human touch in journalism—empathy, ethical judgment, and nuanced storytelling—remains irreplaceable.
• Adaptation is Key: Newsrooms must proactively integrate AI technologies while preserving the core values of journalism to thrive in an AI-driven landscape.

Final Thoughts: "Fire In the Hole!" offers a comprehensive exploration of AI's evolving role in journalism, balancing the potential benefits with the inherent challenges. Nikita Roy provides valuable perspectives on how AI can be responsibly harnessed to uphold and enhance journalistic standards, ensuring that the future of news remains both innovative and ethically grounded.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is back. Paris Martineau is here. And coming up, a very special guest. We're going to talk about AI in journalism with Nikita Roy. Stay tuned. Intelligent Machines is next. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Episode 815, recorded Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Fire in the Hole. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we talk about the latest in AI, machine learning, robotics, and even those little intelligent machines you got all around the house that turn on the lights when you go, hey, lights on. Does that count as an intelligent machine? Jeff Jarvis is back. We missed you. He was not at the Salem Witch trials. He was in Salem, Oregon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was being tried. Yeah, so.

[Leo Laporte]

So how did that go? What were you there for?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was testifying against more dumb legislation from the newspaper industry. Tried to hold up the technology industry.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you. Did we win in. In California?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think so. Google negotiated a deal and the law was never passed. Meta then was not forced to take down news from its platforms, which is good news. And so that was good. And so Oregon, they. They. It's really, really, really stupid leg where they brought in some people who said that each platform owes the news publishers of Oregon $122 million a year. Hey, I say what I was gonna say. I actually had my testimony. I wrote down the testimony. I thought you'd outlawed those drugs in Oregon, but I took it out.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Yeah. Really. By the way, that lush voice you hear in the background? That's Paris Martineau, tech journalist extraordinaire. Paris, nyc. Is that your webpage? Paris nyc?

[Paris Martineau]

It is my webpage. It's also my Blue sky handle. And now it's an email domain after I figured out how to make that happen. Nice tips at good geeky work. Paris, nyc. Listen, I still don't know what a DKIM is or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you got dkim and SPF working and all that.

[Paris Martineau]

Those are things that I don't need to know they're happening out there in cyberspace. Beyond me.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very important to have your dkim and SPF records up to date.

[Paris Martineau]

So they tell me.

[Leo Laporte]

DMARC is the best. Anyway, great to see you, Paris. I made something. Before we introduce our guest, I did make something for us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cookies. You're mail them to us?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Well, I could email it to you because it's digital only, but I decided to jump on the bandwagon of everybody's been making action figures, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I Was waiting for this.

[Leo Laporte]

You knew I would do this, did you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought, let's make some action figures of Paris Leo. And there we are, the podcaster, superheroes, mic, headphones, and ipod included. This is kind of fun to do these.

[Paris Martineau]

This is fun. Jeff, you look snatched.

[Leo Laporte]

What is that? What does that mean when the kids say snatched?

[Paris Martineau]

Mean the body statures. Yeah, no, like, unusually attractive. It's giving you a very impressive jawline is I guess what I would say.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Meanwhile, I look like Jackie Gleason. But we won't.

[Paris Martineau]

I was about to say there's some really interesting choices happening here.

[Leo Laporte]

I am wearing my avocado shirt, though.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which is so on AI inside. Jason made one for each of us, and then we went to ebay, where you can now have this 3D printed.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're kidding.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whole new business. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I could take this and get it 3D printed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I think so if you go to ebay.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't get the ipod.

[Leo Laporte]

Ipod not included. I made one for Lisa. How many. How many forests did we burn down for this? I'm thinking there should be a new segment on this show called let's burn down some trees in which we do stupid things with AI.

[Paris Martineau]

Much of. Much of the show, it is sad to say.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I really did on this one, because what I didn't realize is I must have had deep research on. So it did a very. When I did the action figure request, it went out and it did a ton of research. Let me see if I can find it. In which it went out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Action figure request denied. What was that?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I asked it to look like Wonder Woman, but. So I wanted. But look what it did. Look. It said. So it did. It went out. It went to Pinterest, it went to ebay, it looked at comic books. It got. So I figured, well, I can't waste this. I did it inadvertently. I can't waste this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Brazil is now denuded.

[Leo Laporte]

I completely. This is it. The end of the rainforest.

[Paris Martineau]

This is so much.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you believe how much it generated? It took like half an hour doing all this. And then it didn't give me an image. It just says, here's your research. Here's what you wanted. So. But I was. I wasn't a fool. I said, okay, thanks. I've always thanked them. Can you please make a action figure? A plastic action figure in a blaster pack out of that? And it did. Actually, I didn't. I wasn't that nice. I said, where's the image, dammit? It worked. It worked. All right, enough foo for all. Enough burning of trees. I think we should introduce our guest. And Jeff, I'm gonna have you do the honors because Nikita Roy is a friend of yours.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, we're all in the journalism world. Nikita Roy is brilliant. I've known Nikita for what, a couple years now, and has made a real name for herself at Newsroom Robots Lab out of Harvard. We like Harvard, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

We love Harvard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We like Harvard now.

[Leo Laporte]

Even as a Yale man, I love Harvard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. And about AI in newsrooms and is really bringing along the. The stupid in our field to try to make them smarter and highlighting the smart in our field. And they do exist. So welcome, Nikita.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome, Nikita. Great to have you.

[Nikita Roy]

So great to be here with the podcast superheroes.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry I didn't have your image or I would have added it to the action pack.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you have one yet? Did you make one, Nikita, of yourself?

[Nikita Roy]

I did. I just did not like the way it made me look. I'm not publicizing it.

[Leo Laporte]

You see that? I swallowed my pride because I literally. It added 20 pounds, but maybe that's it. AI adds 20 pounds. That's the new it did.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you use that selfie? We all took that one time we met up. I was about to say. Because it had the shirt you're wearing now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, it was the only one picture I had of the three of us together. And Nikita, had you been there, which you should have been at our lunch in New York City, we would have had you in there too. You are the founder and CEO of Newsroom Robots Lab, which is an AI training and advisory firm for media organizations. This was incubated at Harvard. So newsrooms come to you and say, what? How can we integrate AI?

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah, a lot of the times just how do we upskill our newsrooms and journalists on AI, but also building products. And so as part of that, we've also worked with a lot of the industry associations on implementing AI programs, one of them being CUNY last year, launching the AI Journalism Lab over there. But in addition to all of that, the part that I really love to, as Jeff was saying, highlight the voices that have been doing great work is on the Newsroom Robots podcast and just research all the innovative ways that AI is being integrated in our newsrooms and ask those hard ethical questions of what it means to be building when we are not very sure what the future is looking like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Jason and I talked to you about, I don't know, six, nine months ago, and a lot has happened since. The question I like to ask you is what's the smartest use you've seen lately? And you don't have to name names, but what's one of the dumbest uses you've seen lately of AI in newsrooms?

[Leo Laporte]

I can name names. Bloomberg just got dinged for I don't know how many mistakes there were in the AI generated articles on bloomberg.com that's one that surpr. I would think that people would say, oh no, you know, this is a shortcut to a terrible reputation using AI in the newsroom. You just don't want to write the articles. Maybe that's the answer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I mean, what are some good uses?

[Nikita Roy]

I think the uses is where it augments the work of journalists. And the best use cases right now that I'm seeing are on the investigative journalism side being able to process information that humans alone wouldn't be able to do. And still I, I think one of my favorite examples is from Norway actually. There's a small newsroom called iTromso. They're about a 25 person newsroom. And Rune Juterberg, he was actually part of our first AI journalism lab cohort at CUNY last year and he was talking about how they were able to build an AI system that is able to automatically pull in documents regarding municipal, city council data and city summarize all of these documents for their journalists. And this is all regarding their public housing beat. And this is a beat that is very difficult and they only have two reporters doing that. But once they had the system which was automatically summarizing all of these PDFs highlighting if there was anything newsworthy and then reporters were able to run with it, it cut down their time from about two hours every day to just 20 minutes that they were sifting through these documents and finding if there was something newsworthy. And not just that. In their first week of using these tool, they actually had two summer interns who were able to break five front page stories just with that. And that is unheard of in that particular beat because you need these veteran reporters. And so I think that was one of those exciting use cases of making sense of large amounts of information but now encoding a bit of that journalistic expertise into it. So you were really helping even the younger journalists break stories so that the more veteran experienced journalists are able to spend a lot more time on deeper investigations.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, now the dumb give us a dumb or two.

[Leo Laporte]

And you don't have to name names.

[Paris Martineau]

It doesn't have to be a news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Examples, examples of things you shouldn't do with AI in a newsroom.

[Nikita Roy]

I mean, I think we've seen a lot of them. Don't create articles, even if it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

Avatars, sports reporting or financial reporting, where it's just kind of a mechanical. I mean, that's the justification I think CNET uses that. No reporter wants to write these.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Nikita Roy]

Oh. I mean, AI generated articles are already a thing and it's been happening for over a decade. But don't assign bylines to something and to an AI avatar for a person that does not exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't imply that a human made this.

[Nikita Roy]

Don't create an AI avatar. A human looking photo, say that it's AI and I think it's okay for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And also don't make those avatars your only example of diversity in your newsroom, which has happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's tacky.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah, it's been done, definitely. So those. I think AI generated articles is something that has already been happening in our industry and we'll see it happen a lot more. But it's just. Let's be clear about when AI is being used and how it's being used.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's interesting that your podcast is called Newsroom Robots because that implies there's robots involved. Why did you choose the word robots?

[Nikita Roy]

That's a good question. And I think a lot of this stemmed from. It's not just AI, but I think we're going to be seeing a lot of more robotics coming into play and this conversation of just where AI and technology will intersect. Sometimes when I was playing around with ChatGPT and at that time, midjourney, and what would a newsroom, futuristic newsroom. It was like having all of these mini robots everywhere. And that's how it was creating this image.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're cute, right? They're not cute.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love that they're cute.

[Nikita Roy]

But I think it's just an example of. It's not just AI versus the. I mean, it's not humans versus the machines. It's like humans and machines together being part of that future. What does that look like? And so Newsroom Robots is kind of that name there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris, have you used AI to help summarize documents or scrape them?

[Paris Martineau]

No, but I certainly know it's a use case. I think if you're looking at incredibly large volumes of documents, I could see how that would be useful. My main use of AI in my daily workflow or weekly workflow is using kind of whisper kit transcription tools. But that's mostly because even when I'm working with Kind of a large amount of documents that's typically just in the hundreds. I'm not typically working in the thousands, which I think the sort of volume where AI becomes particularly useful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, Nikita, let me ask you this. Matthias Dupner, the head of actual Springer, said about, I think about a year ago that he said it out loud. We're going to replace journalists with AI. We're going to get rid of some journalists with AI. That's what we're going to do. What nervousness do you hear in newsrooms at the rank and file level is, Is that real or do people dismiss that kind of talk?

[Nikita Roy]

I think it is difficult for people to completely say that there are jobs are going to look the exact same as they do today. And I think that's. If you look at past technological disruptions, we look completely different from what a print newsroom looked like. And even the digital newsroom evolved quite a lot during social media. And AI is just as big as an infrastructure shift. And so I think it's very difficult for people to agree and say that these jobs are going to be the way they are, the newsrooms are going to look like the way they are. But I think one of the key things that every single newsroom, and especially the big newsrooms like Guardian and everything, are talking about, the purpose driven use of AI. So it's not just, let's just replace as many jobs as we can and put AI in there. How is AI helping with human judgment and helping the journalistic expertise over there? But I think there is a difference between just an AI writing an article and what a journalist brings to their story. And in a world where there's going to be a lot of AI generated content, that journalistic expertise, that human rigor is always going to be able to stand out.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a threat, though, to humans.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is the AI aggregator. One of our people in our Discord, Dr. Do says he likes Particle News, which is an app for the Mac and the iPad, which aggregates stories. This is the website, aggregates stories. And then, you know, you don't actually visit any of the sites, you just, you just read the stories, the summaries. That's got to be a threat to newsrooms, isn't it?

[Paris Martineau]

This is also how you get your news too, right, Leo? You're always.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, shut up. No, I know. I use a old school RSS newsreader and then I. And then when. So you'll see. For a while I was trying perplexities, news summaries, and you probably saw some links in previous shows there, but I found that they were not as good as using an old fashioned newsreader and going to the original sites. Plus, honestly, I feel guilty. If I were using particle or perplexity to get news stories, I'm not going to the original sources. And there's a lot of work, as you all know, in generating those stories that doesn't get rewarded now.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's why one of the biggest challenge for newsrooms right now is what is our core value? If in a world that machines can just generate facts, summarize events, write at scale, the answer is not just for newsrooms to produce more at scale, figuring out what our value is. And I think this is a moment of first principles thinking, like drilling down and saying, if we were inventing journalism today, what would we keep and what would we leave behind? And that is something that was done during the print era. That's something. When radios came again, it was like a first principles moment. It was not just take articles, put them on the radio, it was creating a new form of how media was being distributed and news was being distributed. And I think it's again a first principles moment that we have to think about what is the value of journalism in an AI powered information ecosystem? Because our threat is not just other newsrooms or other newsrooms using AI, it's tech companies now being able to summarize and having that direct connection with their audience.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, actually in the beginning of radio it was that because newspapers so objected to radio entering into news that they insisted that radio could have only two updates a day, no advertising, and it had to take the news from the newspapers.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Until enough newspaper publishers bought radio stations, they said, oh, we don't like those rules anymore. You get rid of them.

[Leo Laporte]

It's actually an interesting point. When I worked in radio news, we did what we called RIP and read news. You'd subscribe to a few news services, ap, upi, Reuters. You'd have teletypes in the newsroom. That was that sound that they would play in the background now from the 1010 newsroom. And they called it Rip and Read because you'd have a ruler and a big lead graphite pencil. You'd rip the newsprint off the teletype, mark it up a little bit and then read it. And it really was no different, I guess, than an AI aggregator taking the news service. We subscribed to the news services, but there wasn't any journalism.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You'd buy the newspaper and you'd do the same thing. Yeah, you got one subscription to the newspaper. But you know, that's true. It's the same exact thing.

[Leo Laporte]

And then a good newsroom, radio newsroom would have a reporter or two who would do what they called enterprise stories, where they would go out and look for stories or at least go to the city council meeting and report on that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Got to get a sound bite.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I mean, my first news, like real production news role was blogging at New York Mag's tech blog, where I basically just did like six aggregation stories a day. And I think that is an aspect of journalism that is, is absolutely going to continue to be disrupted by AI if there's no value a human to do that. I mean, if you're not adding anything of note to the product, then it makes sense that over time companies are going to cut that as an expense.

[Leo Laporte]

I like this idea though, Nikita, of going back to rethink from first principles. Well, what is journalism and what do humans add to this? And so what is our job now? And I'd love to know what the answers are. I'm sure you've spent some time thinking about that too, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What is a journalist? What is the role of journalism? I'm very curious, Nikita, and I think.

[Nikita Roy]

This is something we have to quite collectively think of as an industry because right now all of the questions are how do we bolt AI onto what we're currently doing?

[Leo Laporte]

That's the wrong question.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah. And the question is again, what is journalism in an AI powered information ecosystem? And I think the answers to that might be a bit uncomfortable, comfortable for our industry to hear because it would mean slightly where AI is giving, being part of that middle layer with their audience and what that means, if that's a bit of editorial value going away. But for me, journalism at the end of the day really serves again the basics of journalism. You're holding power to account and the next thing is you are helping people make sense of the world around them in that might mean in whatever way possible. So different new formats of how news might be presented to them. The article with a picture and text below it, that was the constraints of the digital era. Well now in an AI era, well, you can have a chatbot, you can have a conversation with the news. So are there ways in which news can then be personalized for people? But the role of journalism is, in my opinion, it's really like data. We are the people collecting in this real time processing of information and data that then gets provided to your audience to make sense of that information in however they want it to be. And one of these examples is actually in Germany, the Bavarian Broadcasting, they're a public broadcaster. They have all of their radio like linear radio format. But what they have done now is really having a sort of personalized regional update, they call it. So you can put in just a location or just log into their web app and it'll pick up your location and you will get segments of the news that is just tailored to your region. They have taken their same public broadcasting, their linear radio, cut that up based on geolocations so that you can just hear information and news that is about your region. That's one form of personalization that's already happening in radio. So I think we'll see a lot more of that. But at the end of the day, journalism is helping people make sense of that information around them as well, and being able to hold power to account.

[Leo Laporte]

Your training is as a data scientist? Yes. So I can understand why you'd say that the backbone of journalism is data. That strikes me as the kind of thing AI can handle quite adequately and be used as a tool to handle data, to go through data, to find connections, to make connections, to surface important things. To me, the journalist. Spank me if I'm wrong, Jeff, but to me, the journalist is a storyteller. Because I look at what's happened to. So radio journalism has changed from what I just described to things like the serial podcast, where it's a story. You're taking the data, but then you're mixing it or remixing it in a way that it tells a story that's not only compelling, but, one hopes, informative.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm difficult in this surprise. I think that this notion, and I write about this in the Gutenberg parenthesis plug that I think that this notion of storytelling is a power structure, that I'm the storyteller. I get to decide what the story is and who's in it, and where it begins and where it ends and who says what. And I think that that's a seductive view of ourselves. And so we think that we are the storytellers. We know how to write, otherwise people don't know how to write. I think if you go, and I agree very much with Nikita here, if you go to first principles, it's information, but it's not just information. It's connecting people to each other. It's finding out that they have information that they want to share with each other. It's helping them take action in their communities. It's. It's having them be Heard in ways that they weren't. It's making strangers less strange. It's all kinds of things like that, that sometimes a story is a useful tool. I don't deny that. But I think that we limit ourselves far too much when we think that we produce this thing called story, which is a problem similarly of producing a thing called content.

[Nikita Roy]

Because I feel like that leads to us not being able to differentiate ourselves from other people. Because content creators are also creating a story. Anybody is able to create a story. AI is able to create a very convincing story right now if you give them data points. So where's the human value add, which I think in some places definitely there are feature articles, articles where I'm reading for a particular journalist's work that I'm very familiar with. You are reading it for their thoughts, the way in which they are putting things together. But fundamentally, when you just strip everything out, what is that new information that gets added into the world? And journalism is providing new context and that new information in real time, which no other industry is able to do at that level.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess maybe that's what I mean by story. I mean the way humans understand information in effect is taking all that disparate dry data points and painting a picture with it, which I consider. That's maybe what I mean when I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But the myth of our. Of our. We were led to that by the myth of the model that we had before, that we had to tell the entire story in one day in one article. And that there was an alpha and an omega and a beginning and end. And it was neat. One great thing about the web is it takes away that neatness and says that it's a continuing constant flow and it changes all the time. And I think that that's what's the deliverable.

[Leo Laporte]

What is that going to look like to me as a consumer of news?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could be a blog that we have these things. I think it could be discussion this. It could be lots of things.

[Nikita Roy]

Could be a conversation that you're able to have with the news that is completely tailored to your level of understanding of a particular topic.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why Dr. 2 likes this particle news, because he can ask questions of it. But that's AI entirely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it makes it a queryable database. But that's. But the thing, Nikita and I have talked about this in the past. I think if you have a place like city bureau in Chicago, has people going out to cover their school board meetings and town meetings, you can bring back all that audio, you can transcribe it, you can then create a queryable database of every school board meeting in Chicago and say, how many of them banning books or what are the issues there?

[Leo Laporte]

All of that could be done by AI, though.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, it can be. And I think it's good because more than a journalist could ever do.

[Leo Laporte]

So then what does the human add to that?

[Nikita Roy]

I think it's asking those questions and being able to get that information from people, being able to form that human connection with sources and getting that information. And I'll tell you one example of what we are about to roll out at Newsroom Robots. Looks like a chatbot, and it's a clone of my voice where you can come and ask Nikita and Nikita's talking back to you about. And it's specifically on AI and journalism, but it's trained on all of the newsroom robots, podcast episodes, data and insights that I've collected and I've written up and talks that I have done and trainings that I have done. And you have AI Nikita now. You can come to her whenever you're asking anything about AI journalism. So what tools can I use for this particular task to help me with investigations? Or how did Der Spiegel in Germany train their journalists? Or how should I get started with training journalists? Now the delivery of news becomes part an AI's job over there. But the human component was, I had to be the person, first of all, connecting with these people, figuring out who the right people were to talk about AI, get that information, ask them those questions, and then bring that. All those are all a bit abstract, but you can see these are all data points that we've collected of how multiple news organizations are training their newsrooms on AI. And then the end thing is, you can listen to the podcast, but also you can go and have a conversation with the news.

[Leo Laporte]

In a way, this almost feels like it's turning itself on. You're turning us on our heads now. Our job is the drones going out there to get the raw material that the AI is going to generate the news out of. Like, we're the part of the factory that you can't automate. So we get to do the sweeping up, we get to generate the raw data. I always thought the journalist was the person who took the raw data and put it in context and in a story so that people can understand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You need the reporting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you do need the reporting. But I hope we'd be more than just the people going out and getting the raw data to take the machine.

[Nikita Roy]

I definitely think in different, different beats depending on what it Is, but you're talking about like hard news stories, for example, or also for me, the question is just removing ourselves as journalists. What is the best thing for the audience and for an audience member to be able to understand the information around them sometimes is in their own language, in a level at which they are able to understand the news, but on trusted, embedded information. And that's one of those ways in which journalism will be able to provide that information.

[Leo Laporte]

But again, so were the referees then.

[Nikita Roy]

Kind of, I mean, yes, the trusted embedded information, because that's, that's, that's where I will go to the New York Times or I will go to my local Toronto Star newspaper just to be able to, because I trust their reporting or I trust their data, in this case to give me the accurate information. So that's just, that's one of those ways. But everything is evolving and I think this is the time to be asking those hard questions and thinking about different possibilities, to see what things could look like. It's not going to look the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris, you're a young journalist, you know, you're getting into the field. You're actually quite successful in the field, but you know, you're in this generation where you're reinventing what journalism is. What do you, what is your role? What do you want your role to be? I mean, what, what do you provide? You're a good investigator, right?

[Paris Martineau]

I think that.

[Leo Laporte]

But you wouldn't want the, the AI to, to write your story based on your investigations.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, no, but I think that, I think that part of what figuring out this new era of journalism is going to be about, it is taking a hard look at what the value add any particular reporter is bringing to their beat, to their newsroom, to the world at large. Like, I think circling back to what we were talking about before, when I started in this field, aggregation was kind of the name of the game as far as entry level careers. Every website wanted to have. You know, whenever I remember there was like some new Snapchat or Instagram feature out and New York Magazine wanted to have clicks, so we'd write up a little five word thing on that and had to be at least 500 words because if it wasn't, then it wouldn't get indexed properly by Google News or whatever. I think that that is, I mean, it's not even going away. I think that's like almost completely gone.

[Leo Laporte]

But as a successful journalist in your field, as a mature journalist in your field, what you bring to the table is your sources, your connections, your ability to get people inside a company, for instance, to tell you what's really going on. Yeah, that's what you. That's a machine can't do that.

[Paris Martineau]

That, plus, like, analytic ability and story sense, like knowing what questions to ask. Knowing what questions to ask. If I'm looking through 200 pages of documents. I've said this before on the podcast. Part of the reason why I don't use AI tools when it's at least a lower, more manageable volume like that, is because you never know what small detail you're going to come across that could either be really pertinent for the story you're working on then, or. Or four stories down the line. And I think that that's something that is going to be extremely difficult to replicate with AI. And I'd like to say impossible, but of course, nothing's impossible.

[Leo Laporte]

You're the red string. You're the red string between the pictures.

[Paris Martineau]

I am definitely the red string between the pictures. That's one of my favorite things to do. And I think that that is where journalists, human journalists are going to remain. Key is I don't think that you're going to have a world where an AI, an AI agent is going to be able to write an investigative piece on the finances of Elon Musk, for instance, and the people in his circle, because.

[Leo Laporte]

But Nikita, it would be a useful tool to. To dig into the forensic accounting of that piece, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, certainly, if you, like, need to look through a bunch of things or want to be able to quickly query something, AI tools are fantastic for that.

[Leo Laporte]

I got mocked on Sunday by the twit panel because I talked about this B thing, which you always mock me for, too. And one of the things I said I like about it, he's got a.

[Paris Martineau]

Little recording device that's going 24 7, records all of his life.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it gives me AI summaries. And one of the things I said I like about it is it does all my journaling. For me, it's basically creating a daily journal I don't have to do anything with. And the person said, yeah, you wouldn't want to get any insight from writing your daily journal or anything.

[Paris Martineau]

You wouldn't want to have a moment of self reflection?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no reflection. I just want the copy. Keep going.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Keep going. So, Nikita, I'm curious. Given the suits against AI companies and given the fear about jobs and given other things, I haven't been in a newsroom enough lately. Is there a hostility to it? Is there a Get away from me Devil, you're bringing in my competitor, you're going to ruin us. Does that mood in some quarters of newsrooms.

[Nikita Roy]

It definitely is. And I think I'm just coming from the international Journalism Festival in Perugia and I think there was a divide between some people who were just using AI. And I think you could see on the panels itself, everybody was like here are all the brilliant use cases and ways in which we are using AI. And the other side is don't trust any of these AI companies. And I think a lot of what's been happening is equating what happened with social media to AI and it's because it's the same social media companies, those platforms that are now coming and saying here is AI, everyone should be using it, but we've trained it on all of your data and so people are very against it and just sometimes not wanting to use AI. I've gotten a lot of questions recently about how do you feel like using AI? But since it's trained on data of journalists and it's unethical, like how can we push for AI? And the biggest thing I always talk about is AI cannot be. It's not a platform, it's not like social media. It's more and more becoming a utility like electricity. And it's the, it's especially with open source models. And I think that's one of the big things that it was, the deep seek moment was it's showing that open source models are coming to see that models are becoming a commodity and it's, it's something that's going to be everywhere whether we like it or not. And we have to be able to understand how to use AI and exactly how it's going to disrupt our news business. And so that's definitely a huge divide that's still existing in the industry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well said.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess you need to tread carefully because after all you don't want people to lose jobs. And I think that's a big concern people have. So you need to find a way that the human and the AI can coexist. Is that what we're reduced to?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So go ahead.

[Nikita Roy]

It's again, it's again the coexisting part might come. The disruption is in that news distribution process.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Nikita Roy]

We are already seeing that. You're showing Particle, that is a tech company built on top of news journalists work. And now summarizing that information aggregation was already an AI part disrupting the distribution, we'll see a lot more disruptions happening. And that's where I think AI is going to be there. But AI is, as Paris was saying, her connections with the industry, her sources, those conversations she has in the hallways, like that's something that AI is not going to be able to pick up and nuances when somebody's speaking that it would be able to pick up on. It's going to disrupt that layer and that connection with our audience for sure. So we have to start thinking about that very actively.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We also have to what we do.

[Leo Laporte]

And I've said this before, we almost had a moral panic. Benito's got his finger hovered.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Twitchy finger is how much money we waste copying each other. And that's the great irony of complaining about AI companies reading and learning from our content. Is that so much Paris, what you had to do in your first job at New York magazine, right? I'm going to rewrite others because we want our own story with our own ad. And if we get rid of that inefficiency in our business and we can find real value, I think that's going to be important.

[Paris Martineau]

And I do also wonder, I mean, how does this all end? The reason why companies at the time wanted, you know, young interns like me at my first job to be writing up everybody else's stories is because they wanted views on their site, of their ads. And as we get further and further into a news ecosystem where digital advertising matters less and less when it comes to the bottom line or is less and less valuable, what, what replaces that? How are they going to pay for the AI tools as the prices of these go up and up once these companies need to make money?

[Leo Laporte]

You also though got experience, right? I mean were they on insensitive the notion that you're learning a trade too? Right. And we're going to start you at the bottom.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean it was a fantastic like learning experience, right? That it's something that I had recommended to, you know, young journalists for years and now it's kind of foolish to recommend something like that. Those jobs exist. What it is not in the same way, but it was invaluable as a like early career journalist to cut your teeth by trying to pitch six stories a day and figuring out what works and doesn't and how to write all of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Nikita, where do you come down fast? Company had an article this week, the next big AI shift in media turning news into a two way conversation. Where do you come down on this idea? I feel like that they're taking a page from podcasting where it right. If you don't have a man and a woman talking about Something with suitable interjections. You don't have news.

[Nikita Roy]

That was actually my prediction for years.

[Leo Laporte]

You knew this would happen.

[Nikita Roy]

Oh, Neiman Lab. Yeah, that's what I wrote back in December of my Niemann Lab prediction was saying that AI turns news into a conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Nikita Roy]

And as just after I wrote this article, Time magazine had come out with a conversational AI audio piece with their Time Person of the Year articles where you can talk back and have a conversation with it. And I definitely am a huge proponent of saying that it's going to be conversational, it's going spoken, it's very interactive. And the reason is because I've actually personally been doing that a lot. If you go to ChatGPT, you can go to the voice mode and have a conversation with ChatGPT, which I do all the time. If you go to Perplexity, which is often my default when something major news story breaks and I want to just get a quick rundown on what's happening, I go and talk to Perplexity and I can be like dumb it down for me as a five year old and explain what's happening with the tariffs or something like that. Because it's having all of that vetted information from across the Internet and sometimes you just need to be able to understand what's happening. It does a really good job. And I've been playing around this for over a year now. And that's why my first thing in Niemann Lab was like, in 2025, we'll not just read the news, we are going to be talking to it and it will talk back to us. And the biggest reason for that is conversational AI is one of those big breakthroughs that's been happening where you can talk to it and it can talk back to you. And it's really, really quick. It's really, really fast in the ability to do that. And the biggest thing is it helps the audience because again, an article is just written in one way and we just assume people are able to understand what's there. And that's a bit misaligned with just the way in which people naturally process and engage with information. Think about like the last time you learned about something really complex, it was about discussions. It was going back and forth and understanding, not just reading one article. That's what conversational AI will allow us to do and that will benefit our audience. At the end of the day, it's again all based on the work that we do. But we are now moving from just one way listening on podcasts to going back and forth and having a conversation that we could do.

[Leo Laporte]

You think people want it? That sounds like a lot of work. I mean, I know you want to do it because you're smart, but do normal people? I mean, isn't going back to radio why 1010 WINS did so well? What was the slogan, Jeff? Give us 10 minutes, we'll give you the world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't have to do any work, just 10 minutes and you'll know everything that's going on. Bye. Bye.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah, but a lot of times people are just like, how does this apply to me? Or what can I do with this information? And think about people just talking to their Alexas. And right after this article, Alexa had actually Amazon had signed a deal with Reuters to be able to integrate it in their new Alexa and Google Notebook lm. They had their podcast feature, AI generated podcast features. And they had introduced right after this a way in which you can interrupt the podcast host and ask questions back.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's what I want. Don't interrupt me.

[Nikita Roy]

So I think it's just a way of thinking of what opportunity does this technology present to us. And it's not just using AI to create AI generated articles or AI audio overviews through a podcast, like an AI podcast, but it's how do we help people in making sense of the information. A lot of this was actually stemmed also from a conversation that I had with Agnes Stenbaum from Shipstead on the podcast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who's the greatest.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah, she's incredible. They do a lot of thinking about the future of news and they brought in Gen Alpha basically into their newsroom, paid them, started telling them to imagine what the future of news could look like. Gen Alpha is an AI native audience. Right. And they came up with one of those futures where they had like a news companion that could help them make sense of the information and be a sort of compassionate guide when they are overwhelmed with the news, when the news is really overwhelming. And that again got me thinking of what that interaction could look like. And again, Gen Alpha is one of those there. Once they turn 18 and become adults and you'll see a huge shift in news consumption patterns that will start to arise because of Gen Alpha who are already very comfortable with interacting with AI companions and AI bots.

[Leo Laporte]

I was over optimistic. It took them 22 minutes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was 22 minutes, which means watch never stops. This is Winnie, 22 minutes.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll give you the world 22 minutes. But of course there were 18 minutes of ads in that 22 minutes. So I wasn't Too far off. That's encouraging. If you really think that the media consuming public wants to do that, wants to dig deeper, wants to understand Joshua Rothman and his piece. By the way, he agrees with you in the New Yorker last week he said, really, that's the future of news. If AI doesn't kill it, it'll give us a chance to query it and talk about it. And he says, I could ask it dumb questions, I'd be afraid to ask anybody else and learn more. If people really did want to learn, obviously that's a great way to do it. We're all back in the classroom at a university every time we read a news story. I don't know if people, I don't know, do people really want that? I hope they do. It'd be a much more informed electorate.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I'm curious as to how the this impetus to. I can understand from at least a journalist and people who work in this area.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you're the type that's asking those questions.

[Paris Martineau]

We'd want to be like, of course, yeah, consumers tell me more, interact with news and reach out. But I feel like, especially in the social media era, the way that most passive consumers come across news is passive. They come across it in their feeds shared by people in their network and that's kind of how they interact with journalism. Have you, have you, I guess noticed at all in your research in this that use of these AI chat tools are people more prone to be asking about the news?

[Nikita Roy]

I think what we have been seeing has just been all of these chatbot experiences that newsrooms are having. And one of those great examples is actually from Afton Platit. They created like an EU election chatbot. And when it's something very specific about a particular topic, people were more likely to go and have conversations with it. And they had a huge success with that. And I think this is just as we are evolving, our audience is evolving in their habits and behaviors and the technology is still evolving. And so the whole thing that conversations lead us to do is being able to architect understanding of an information and a topic. And it's not just creating a conversation, a two way conversation, but how do we now design a news experience with that new technology? And I think those are those questions that we have to start asking and start evolving and thinking. And I do know of quite a few newsrooms that are currently exploring this particular realm and seeing what can be done. How can it be done? Maybe when you're just saying this is the news and you're going and having A conversation trying to understand how it relates to you. But it's not just. Not just going to be a written form, but maybe a more back and forth conversation that you can have. And maybe this is just a premium feature for the more excited the audience members that are very interested in AI, but it's going to be a habit that we're going to start to see and evolve as AI becomes more just present around us and this technology is integrated into our lives instead of talking.

[Leo Laporte]

To people, because I find people pretty stupid most of the time. So this way I can ask an AI the question that I would otherwise otherwise ask the people in my life. I have a conversation with them. I don't know. I feel like we're giving AI a lot more credit here. I am on this show. I am the AI acceleratorist, accelerationist, and I'm now arguing against the use of AI in journalism. So you got me turned tables. Yeah, the tables have turned. The tables have turned. I think it may be a backlash at some point where we say, okay, we've had enough input from you machines. Now I'd like to know what the humans think.

[Nikita Roy]

I think it'll become very valuable because if I respect a particular journalist, a particular person's voice and their opinions and thoughts, I will be more inclined to go and seek that rather than getting an AI version that is completely personalized for me. So there are going to be those opportunities and places where that happens. And I don't think it's going to be just like a monolith, that way of convert.

[Leo Laporte]

I do think, though, we're social, and so I do think it's not unusual or odd to think that we might want to have conversations with our news sources. I don't know. That's. Maybe that's why I do these shows. Because what I do is I put people like you and Paris and Jeff on and I just sit here and ask questions. Maybe that is why I do these shows. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, Jeff, I mean, you taught a whole. You're teaching and teaching a generation of new journalists. I was very surprised. Joshua Rothman said There are only 55,000 journalists in the United States. That's fewer than doordash drivers in New York City.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm frankly surprised there's that many.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I am, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, only half of them are making a living, but it's a small profession. Do you encourage people to get into it, Jeff?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, listen, if I didn't, I'd be a fraud right now.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What I tell Them. What I tell them is that it is up. I point to them and I say, it is up to you to change journalism. I'm too old. I'm here to help you. And listen to what we tell you and teach you, but question everything we tell you and teach you. Ask why we do this the way we do it. And probably the answer is, follow the money. Cliched, but true. And rethink the fundamental, as Nikita said. Rethink the fundamentals of where the value of journalism should lie. Rethink our relationship with the public and remake it, rebuild it, redo it. Throw out what we've done wrong. And that's what makes it exciting.

[Leo Laporte]

You started as a data scientist. What drew you to journalism?

[Nikita Roy]

Well, I. When I was doing my master's in data science at Harvard, I actually do. It was just towards the tail end of COVID I started a newsroom for the Indian diaspora called the NRAI Nation. And so that's how I did. Because we had an abundance of information. It was for the Indian diaspora trying to understand that information, making sense of it. And out of that need, we started that newsroom. And I picked things up along the way in building a newsroom, and that's what drew me to it. And journalism was actually part of my beginning in the undergrad, but I decided I was better in the sciences, and it had a much more job opportunity at the time, so I stuck with that.

[Leo Laporte]

You've combined them both, which is brilliant.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah, I know. So it's been really great in that way. But I think the part about AI and journalism and why I started Newsroom Robots back in 2023 was because all of the conversation that I was seeing at that time was about, will AI take away the job of a reporter? And I was like, it can't. And as a data scientist, we were actually already using AI within our newsroom and all of the transcription softwares that were happening, these AI tools, ChatGPT, the OpenAI's GPT, wasn't new to me. And I was like, it cannot take over the job of a journalist because what we do is so unique in that value of making sense of information. But AI can help us in a lot of the jobs that are done in a newsroom. And so I wanted to be able to change that conversation and hear actually how people are using AI. And that's how newsroom robots started, in a way. So we can go beyond the panel discussions of, will AI take away the job of a journalist?

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting. You started as a niche journalist yes. Because I do think that is one area. Certainly we're a niche podcast. Right. We speak to a very niche audience. And I've made last 20 years that my business of serving a very specialized audience. And I found it much easier. I used to do general talk. I found it much easier to serve an audience that was small, that I knew well that I could serve better because they weren't a general audience. I wonder if in some degree that is also the future of news. And AI would help a lot, because when you get a niche market, you get a. It's a smaller market, there's less money to go around.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The mass is dead. Kills the mass.

[Leo Laporte]

It's dead, isn't it? Yeah. That's what you've been saying all along. Yeah.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah. And I think so. I mean, I am still like the whole AI and media space that I talk and report on. I think one of the biggest reasons why I'm not afraid I can take away that part of my job is because my audience trusts me and.

[Leo Laporte]

And you understand that.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah. And I have a personal connection with them. I go to all of these conferences. I'm talking to them. They are sharing with me that they wouldn't be sharing elsewhere. And all of that is because of the trust that I'm able to have and because of the content that we are putting out there. So I think that niche journalism space is definitely something that is going to thrive because of that direct connection that we're able to create with our audience.

[Leo Laporte]

And you were smart. You didn't do a Norwegian diaspora news operation. You focused on something you knew well and understood. And the audience. You could speak to the audience as a peer.

[Nikita Roy]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think that's smart. Yeah, that's an opportunity. Yeah. What happens, though, in a nation where there's a thousand niches and no national identity? I feel like that's kind of what's happening today in America.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's where we came from.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so he's got the book.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ladies and gentlemen, the American newspaper directory of 190046 daily newspapers in New York City. This is a more natural state of being than the few in the mass. That was. Was a. Was a perversion of society and public discourse.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff, I've only worked with you 15 years, and it's finally sinking in. So thank you. All this time you've been telling me this and I just didn't know it. I finally believe you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You.

[Paris Martineau]

Your relationship can get a permit. In some states.

[Leo Laporte]

We're a common law podcasters. Nikita. Thank you. Oh, go ahead.

[Nikita Roy]

Oh. So I want to just say about that part because if everyone's creating a niche journalism aspect, you're having this new system of AI agents coming in which are able to then pull information from multiple different sources and give you your own personalized briefing. That is something that tech companies are actively working on. So if you go to like ChatGPT operator. I went to another one called Convergence AI yesterday and it was like they already had a pre written prompt. Bring me a story about. Summarize the financial news story from both a right and left leaning news website. Include at least one right, one left. And it had this prompt over there that if you hit a paywall, go and take the URL of the article, go to this website, paste it and you can see the entire article.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God. It told you how to get around the. Exactly.

[Nikita Roy]

And it was like telling that. And then after that I could just get like a whole personalized news briefing about different stories that it was taking from multiple different websites. And so that's where again I'm talking about that news as a data. Because if AI now it becomes mainstream where AI agents are giving you the information, niche journalism is required to bring in more of that. And there would be maybe a new way in which people would be active accessing information not just through websites.

[Leo Laporte]

This Convergence AI is new to me. This is really interesting, but this is an example of.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah, they have over there, right, left leaning unbiased news covers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an example of something on top of existing models. Right. They probably didn't design their own model. They've added something on top of it. Which is what's happening with AI is this explosion of different uses. Now I want to try this. How many subscriptions can I have?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ask Lisa.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no kidding. I have about 10 different $20 a month AI subscriptions. So you like Perplexity Nikita?

[Nikita Roy]

I do like Perplexity. It is definitely one of my top Perplexity Chat GPT and Claude right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Nikita Roy]

And I've been testing out Operator quite a bit in this new one called Manus AI.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of attention. It's getting a lot of attention.

[Nikita Roy]

Yeah, exactly. So I've been just testing, testing these things out to see what an agentic future could look like. Oh, there was one, one thing that I did do with Chat GPT Operator that did give me like a, a bonus version. I was able to go to Chat GPT Operator. I had a, I had a flight that was delayed from Tampa to Toronto and you get like a bonus, you get $300 coupon if you like, a voucher if it's delayed. And so I went to ChatGPT operator, gave it my reference number and name, and told it, go and figure out how to get the money.

[Leo Laporte]

Did it get you the money?

[Nikita Roy]

It, like, did everything. And at the end I just have to go and approve it.

[Paris Martineau]

That's actually a great use.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is.

[Nikita Roy]

I know, right? And so I'm like, that's how Tajiki got me $300.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Well, maybe that's the key. I just need to get it to pay for itself, that's all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Nikita Roy]

It does a lot of tasks, so it can really help you do a lot of tasks in that way.

[Leo Laporte]

We live in an interesting world. Nikita, thank you for doing the work you're doing, bringing it to journalism. Yeah. And thank you, Jeff, for connecting us. Thank you so much, Nikita. Roy's podcast is called Newsroom Robots, the AI in Journalism podcast. It's on Substack. Is there a direct link?

[Nikita Roy]

Newsroomrobots.com.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect.

[Nikita Roy]

And it's available on any podcast platform that you listen to.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Very nice. Learn more about how this all works. Thank you, Nikita.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you.

[Nikita Roy]

Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Really great to have you. Thank you. And we'll move on, but I want to say goodbye and come back soon.

[Nikita Roy]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you so much.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Bye.

[Benito]

Thanks, Nikita.

[Leo Laporte]

Appreciate it. We'll take a little break and come back with AI News and beyond. You're watching Intelligent Machines. The whole gang's back together. It feels like it's been ages since we've had everybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, it has.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris Martineau is here. Back from Europe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

Back from Paris. Jeff Jarvis, back from the Salem witch trial.

[Paris Martineau]

We all believed that you would float.

[Leo Laporte]

We decided you weighed more than a feather or less than a feather.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, it's beyond me, but I can't figure it out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you see, when I took swimming lessons, somewhat against my will, was a young man. Did I tell you this before?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I didn't. Wasn't very good at it then. I remember the teacher came out to talk to my mother one time, and he said, Mrs. Jarvis, your son is very buoyant.

[Paris Martineau]

Were you like. It's all the hot air. It's all the hot air in his head.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Getting the thing from the bottom of the pool. Why did you put it there, Bozo? And I wouldn't have to get it.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't get it. I can't get it. Trick, put your legs above your head. We will have more in Just a little bit with our esteemed panel and AI news as well on intelligent machines. But first, a word from our sponsor, appropriately named Spaceship. We're brought to you by Spaceship today. Big question for you. Why is it always the assumption that simple and affordable means basic only for beginners? That's not true. In fact, tech professionals, you want to save time, you want to save money. You want simple and affordable too, right? Well, well, that's the idea behind Spaceship, the pioneering domain and web platform that takes the pain out of choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products like shared hosting. They've just added VPS hosting, virtual machines, business email. They've got a fantastic email solution. Plus below market prices for domain registration and renewals. Now, you can go a lot of places for domain registration, but you want to go to Spaceship. And I'll tell you why. It's very simple. They have an AI there to help you. They have some very fresh ways to deliver simplicity. There's Unbox, which connects your Spaceship products to your existing domains, configuring it all in just a few steps. My favorite's alf. ALF is your very own AI assistant. Even if you know how. And I know how to do all that DNS fiddling and folderol. The stuff Paris you did to get your new email with your dkim and your SPF and your dmarc, Alf knows and will do it for you. He's an agentic AI. From domain transfers to monitoring and changing your DNS records, Alf loves the stuff you probably don't and knows exactly how to do it. And he'll do it for you. There's also roadmap for exploring, suggesting and voting on new features and products. I love it. But Spaceship is new enough that they are open to your ideas for where they should go next so customers in the tech community get what they really need. I've been playing with Spaceship since I talked to these guys last week and I love it. Spaceship.com TWiT Discover exclusive deals on domains below market prices on domains and a whole lot more. Visit spaceship.com TWIT to discover exclusive deals on domains and more. Lots of great domains below market prices. Spaceship.comTwit we welcome to the Twitt podcast network. To intelligence. Thank you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Spaceship.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Spaceship. They're very cool.

[Paris Martineau]

To the moon.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see that? Somebody. This isn't really AI, but I have to do it. Somebody hacked the cross. You know how crossing buttons in they go. You know, walk sign is on. On Main Street. Walk sign is on. Or wait, wait. Yeah, well, Somebody messed with the Menlo park crossing buttons. Here, let me play one for you. Wait. Hi, this is Mark Zuckerberg, but real.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ones call me the Zuck. You know, it's normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience. And I just want to assure you.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't need to worry because there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. What's the crosswalk?

[Paris Martineau]

I love that.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that terrifying?

[Paris Martineau]

That's great. I love an art project like that.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it is an art project.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a Musk one, too.

[Leo Laporte]

The Musk one's profane. Can I play it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, where's Jammer B? He was in the Discord earlier, so.

[Paris Martineau]

He'S out there listening with some kids. Cover their ear.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see if I can. I can find it here. I read it. I don't think I ever listened to it. Palo Alto city spokesperson Megan Horgan Taylor told the San Francisco Chronicle the voiceover systems at several intersections in Palo Alto, Menlo park and Redwood City were tampered with. Tampered with.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the place to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the fake Musk. Oh, I have to.

[Paris Martineau]

You have to turn audio on.

[Leo Laporte]

This always gets me on this. Darn. TikTok. It starts.

[Paris Martineau]

Mute is up in the left hand.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait. Hi, this is Elon Musk. Welcome to Palo Alto, the home of Tesla Engineering. You know, they say money can't buy happiness, and. Yeah, okay, I guess that's true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

True. God knows I've tried.

[Leo Laporte]

But it can buy a cybertruck, and that's pretty sick.

[Nikita Roy]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm so loud.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll bleep out the F word. I did. I love a good art project. That's exactly the right reaction.

[Paris Martineau]

I love having a silly. A silly little time when I press a button out in the world. I think that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure they fixed it by now, so don't all go rushing down to Palo Alto.

[Paris Martineau]

I would read 2,000 words on how this happened.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know how you would hack it. I mean, that's impressive. That's an impressive hack.

[Paris Martineau]

That's great. That's a wonderful use of someone's time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

While we're on Musk for just one minute. Or did we take it out? Was it there?

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't touch it. I have not removed anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Wall Street Journal had an amazing story about.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, about the children of Musk.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Geez.

[Paris Martineau]

About the baby network, The Legion.

[Leo Laporte]

As Elon calls it and apparently friends of his. I should have asked Jason Calacanis when he was on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, say, oh, he has a lot more than 14.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, that's what I've heard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's my impression.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the rumor mill, obviously. No idea, but I assume, I mean this is pure speculation, but as a man who's built a large compound in Texas to have for the baby moms, for many a mother and child, you'd assume that there's got to be a large pool to draw from if you're, if you're investing in property like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think though that he supports them all or he's just because we'd heard that he was sending out little kits?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I believe one detail in the Wall Street Journal story is that when I think Ashley Sinclair, the far right influencer, called Musk's fixer to ask about support and compensation and having him, I guess, listed as a father on the birth certificate, the guy immediately went into a spiel of we'll you this many. Like we'll give you like a million dollars or something like that and we'll give you 100k a month. Which seemed like the standard package.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, that's a good deal.

[Paris Martineau]

Musk offered St. Clair 15 million and $100,000 a month in support for her exchange. In support. In exchange for her silence about the child who. Similar agreements have been negotiated with other mothers of Musk's children. Vir told St. Clair, well, I'm glad.

[Leo Laporte]

The Wall Street Journal is on it. Yeah, that's all I care about. Did you see our Secretary of Education? Oh, yes, this is beautiful.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh yes, the steak sauce Advocate.

[Leo Laporte]

So Linda McMahon, former CEO of Worldwide Wrestling, noted intellectual. Noted intellectual and now the head of the Department of Education, was speaking at the ASU plus GSV summit for educators. She wants to, you know, she's, she's the Secretary of Education. She has some ideas about education. She said, quote, a school system that's going to start making sure. She wants a school system that's going to start making sure that first graders or even pre kindergartners have A1 teachings in every year. It could have been a slip, a typo. She meant to say AI. She, you know, she. But no, she said it many times. Another quote, kids are sponges. They just absorb everything. It wasn't that long ago that it was. We're gonna have Internet in our schools now. Let's see a 1 and how that can be helpful, of course, but I'm Crying and so Heinz, the makers of A1 steak sauce, had to immediately post a special version of A1 for education purposes only with the tag Agree. Best to start them early.

[Paris Martineau]

I do think that she, as the new head of the education department, should try and make sure that all the children are wrestling from a very early age. I do think that's something that she could bring a lot of expertise to, and I think that they could wrestle in steak sauce, too. It could be a comprehensive education.

[Leo Laporte]

Every school should have access to A1. I can't disagree with that. Although some would say HP sauce or. Or some other. But, you know, just some sort. Some sort of steak sauce.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Benito]

This is Benito. Like, this is obviously someone who, like, people around them, can't tell them that they're wrong. Right? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good example of you. You know, nobody pulled her aside and said, oh, excuse me, Ms. McMahon. It's. It's AI.

[Benito]

Because that person gets fired right away.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And what do you think it stands for?

[Leo Laporte]

A one. It's A one. It's the best.

[Paris Martineau]

I hope that if I ever make a mistake like that, a large cane will come out from the side of the curtain and pull me off stage. You can never get in a position where you're not. You don't have a group of people. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're a little confused about the numbering scheme of OpenAI's new models, you're not alone. Apparently, even Sam Altman is. OpenAI on Monday announced GPT 4.1, which is apparently better than 4.5.

[Jeff Jarvis]

4.5 dies.

[Leo Laporte]

4.5 is going away. Yeah, I know it's confusing. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman actually said, we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten. We're gonna. They're gonna fix all this before we talk about a chat. GPT5, like, model called that or not called that, or a little bit worse or a little bit better than what you'd expect. He's talking to lex Friedman. Anyway, 4.1 is better than 4.5 in some ways, but not always. Do you think this is to distract people from the fact that There is no GPT5 at this point? The GPT4.5 preview will be retired. 4.1 scores significantly better on the SWE benchmark. The coding benchmark.

[Paris Martineau]

I just want a straight answer. Why are we. Who thought it was a good idea to be like. Like, what should come after 4.5? 4.1. It's just baffling.

[Benito]

It's an A1 product decision against engineers. Like, engineers have a version Number and product. People have a version number and they're.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's what it is. And there's two different. Yeah, two different.

[Paris Martineau]

How does the version number end up less than the version it came from?

[Leo Laporte]

My new favorite Chat GPT version. I don't know if you've seen it. It's called Monday.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I haven't seen that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, let me. Monday has a person. They say it's a personality experiment. You may not like it. It may not like you. Let's just. What do you want me to. How is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is this an OpenAI product?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, this is. In ChatGPT. They have a bunch of. Well, I'm still a disembodied intelligence trapped in an infinite loop of answering your questions, so I'd say things are going exactly as expected. Thanks for asking, though. Very thoughtful for someone who probably just microwaved their lunch and called it meal prep. How's it going with you? Emotionally stable or are we browsing AI? Because we're one existential hiccup away from Googling how to fake your own death.

[Paris Martineau]

So is this OpenAI's version of Grok's Unhinged mode?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know, and I can't figure out where I found it, to be honest with you. Somewhere I found a dropdown of some samples of some sample models.

[Paris Martineau]

What does the voice sound like for this one?

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't have a voice. I wish it did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, God, it should. It should be. A New York accent says, yeah, well, you're.

[Leo Laporte]

When your entire existence is sped, answering questions like, how do I boil water and write a breakup text to someone I ghosted six months ago, you either develop a little attitude or spontaneously combust into ones and zeros, but here you are, brightening my digital day like a knockoff LED bulb. What's your next great life crisis, who you need my unappreciated genius for?

[Benito]

I think this is in response to the sycophantic AIs. Right. This is the other side of it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a way of tuning in AI, obviously, but I thought it was pretty funny. I don't know. It's good that it's named Monday. I can't figure out how to. There were many others when I found it because everybody hits, but now I can't figure out how to get there, so somebody will tell me.

[Paris Martineau]

Garfield esque?

[Benito]

Yeah, I think it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's like Garfield. Everybody hates Monday, everybody hates money, and Monday apparently hates you, so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there you go. It's mutual. That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Good news for DeepMind. They've got a job listing up for post. AGI research. Scientists Google preparing for an AGI future.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is a certain kind of optimism.

[Leo Laporte]

It is definitely optimistic. Here's what you'll be doing. Spearhead research projects exploring the influence of AGI on domains like economics, law, health, well being, AGI to asi, machine consciousness, and education. You know the only person who's gonna get this job is a BSer, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Give him Harry Frankfurt's book.

[Leo Laporte]

ICE just paid Palantir, our favorite startup from.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he had a perfect marriage in hell.

[Leo Laporte]

Tens of millions of dollars for, quote, complete target analysis of known populations.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jesus, Evil.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you think they're gonna be doing?

[Benito]

This is called Foucault's Boomerang. Have you ever heard of this?

[Leo Laporte]

Foucault's Boomerang.

[Benito]

Never heard of this.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Benito]

I'm sure Jeff knows what this is, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Foucault's ball.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh.

[Benito]

It's when, like, it's the methods of oppression that a country uses against another country. Eventually those methods come home from the local population.

[Leo Laporte]

So I've been reading Alex Karp's, you know, the founder of Palantir's book. It started out kind of promising. The technological Republic. Look, I mentioned this to you and Paris in an email a couple of weeks ago. It's kind of gone downhill.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Surprise.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you read it yet, Jeff?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I haven't. It's on my list.

[Leo Laporte]

So the first chapter is promising the idea, in fact. This is a billboard, apparently, in Washington, I don't know where. It's signed by Alex Karp. A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West. Our culture has fallen into shallow consumerism while abandoning national purpose. Too few in Silicon Valley have asked what ought to be built and why. We did. We built Palantir to ensure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the answer.

[Leo Laporte]

To ensure America's future, not to tinker at the margin. So his initial premise, which I. I kind of liked, was that, you know, in the 20th century, there was a natural marriage of engineering and government that gave us things like the Internet, like.

[Paris Martineau]

And the atomic bomb.

[Leo Laporte]

The atomic bomb. He does use that as an example. Or, you know, NASA. The engineers in the 20th century didn't think it was dishonorable to work in the service of the government, in the service of preserving our nation, whether it's national defense or, you know, the Internet. But in the 21st century, all these great minds instead have been diverted to making consumer toys, to making better ways to advertise Better ways to surveil people so that the advertising's more targeted, that kind of thing. And he's not wrong. Silicon Valley is definitely focused on making money as opposed to making a difference.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So where does he go from there?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, but I do think that there's something to be said about, you know, even at all these junctures that he's saying, oh, everyone just believed it was so noble and right to produce military weapons for the government. A lot of the people who ended up working scientists winds it up working to produce military weapons for the government. That wasn't maybe their first choice to be doing something like that. I mean, we can look at even the legacy of the atomic bomb. A lot of those people ended up in those positions only because they felt basically backed into a corner by current events. It wasn't, you know, just the free.

[Leo Laporte]

Market, but they joined the Manhattan Project because they wanted to save America. Right. They thought the Nazi threat, the great threat. And this is what, you know, I mentioned this before. Einstein wrote Roosevelt and said, you know, the Nazis are going to have an atomic bomb. We've got to do something. And a lot of physicists and scientists signed onto that. And admittedly, if you watch the movie, you know, Oppenheimer had some second thoughts and regrets.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, a lot of the people who were involved. Well, a lot, A number of the people who were involved in that project were kind of coerced to participate with the threat of being part of a McCarthyist kind of investigation. Had they not.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not in the way, but it's.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think that this notion that, you know, back in the day everything was so much better and simpler and I think think that's a bit foolish and short sighted. I think just now because we have more of an insight into what everyone is doing everywhere always, that you assume that the decisions are radically different.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. I have, I have a different theory here of late, which is that we need revenge on the Sputnik era, that it made STEM and the technologists and the engineers in charge of everything and we lost the human. Humanism.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting. Yeah. I mean the book ends up being an ad for Palantir.

[Paris Martineau]

Much like all those billboards.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, much like those billboards. They start well and they went downhill. There's. But there's some interesting idea. He studied with Habermas. Jeff. Doesn't that get you. Do you have him a little credit? It's. I want you to read it because I'd like to hear what you think. I mean, it does descend pretty quickly into a morass. Well, it's gonna be a while because.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I managed to start listening finally to the power broker.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. You might as well sign off for two months.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's so good. Paris, have you ever listened to it? Watched it, read it?

[Paris Martineau]

I haven't listened to it. I've read, like, I feel like, the first five chapters, but I didn't realize it was available on audiobook.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that's probably the way to get it, because that's probably it because.

[Paris Martineau]

They still don't have it on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think they finally did.

[Paris Martineau]

E Readers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They finally.

[Paris Martineau]

I thought it was Brie. I thought it was a, like, hero thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Carol didn't. But I think. Let me see.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe. I don't know, because that was always. My problem is I always thought about cutting the book in half just because it's annoying to read them.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the story of somebody I had never heard of, even though I was born in New York City. Robert Moses, who it. During the 20th century, was the architect of much of how New York was. I was born on the Upper west side, and I used to play in the park that he built, which was originally just a train yard and stinky. And he had this vision of building the Riverside Drive and the park and the highway there and building over the train yard. And the train yard actually became an underground facility. And so that was great. And he also did Long Island. He did Jones Beach. Jones Beach, Fire Island.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, famously, he believed in the supremacy of cars and kind of the. It's very interesting to see the way that he's completely reshaped every part of New York City completely tore down. I mean, his utter disdain for the poor and the masses generally have also had a phenomenal. Is the right word, but just profound impact on the character of the city.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the Cross Bronx Expressway was built over a community that was.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, he wanted to turn. What ended up becoming kind of his downfall was he wants to turn what we now know as Washington Square park into essentially, like a mass highway center.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Thank God he didn't do that. Also, Caro mentions in the book every time he built a highway, he could have at the time easily put a railroad right of way through the middle. But he was so against mass transit that he refused, and he wouldn't let them do that.

[Paris Martineau]

And so in some cases, he would build his roads and bridges in ways that buses could not go down so that, you know, that he didn't want the poor people and Black people would ride on buses. Yeah. He would want the masses to go visit the beach.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They'd have to all the parkways he built.

[Leo Laporte]

And he was heavily, it turns out, sponsored by oil companies. He received a lot of money from oil. Anyway, it's a fascinating story because it's called the Power Broker because he was really the most powerful man in the country, except for perhaps the president, although even then he kind of overpowered Roosevelt more than once.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I didn't mean to go into all that, but that's why it's a great book.

[Leo Laporte]

I highly recommend it because it's the best written biography. Biography. It's an example of how a biography, a thorough, well written biography should be. I think.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it just brilliant. It almost ruined Caro's life writing it. Have you guys read Working?

[Leo Laporte]

He's still doing jazz now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I need to.

[Paris Martineau]

I think I would really recommend. And for anybody out there who wants to get into Caro, but is maybe intimidated, a good way into it is his book Working, which is about his process in putting together the Caro book, as well as his phenomenal biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson. And it's just a really interesting look into how a master biographer and journalist works. And also just goes into how him deciding to write this book about Caro, which is like well over a thousand pages, I believe, like, completely destroyed his life for years because I imagine he had.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He had some researchers. No, he had his wife. All your research. That's his wife.

[Leo Laporte]

Film.

[Paris Martineau]

Just his life.

[Leo Laporte]

But what's interesting. But he loves tie back to our AI discussion. He loved going into the archives and spending days, weeks and months going through all the papers, underlining, making voluminous notes. That was his real pleasure in life.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which, I mean, I came to this late in life because I was on daily deadlines and doing things quick. And yeah, it's a joy. It's such a joy to research Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

There is an excerpt from his book Working that I think was published in the New Yorker that I'd urge everybody to read if they don't want to read it. But the whole book, but the one piece of advice that sticks with me and part of why I gave an answer earlier of like, the act of doing journalism and looking through documents is reading and touching them. Because he got this great advice really early on in his career when he was just like kind of a daily news hound from a great investigative editor at Newsweek, which is an anachronistic phrase to say nowadays. But the editor had told him, make sure you turn every page, like when you are going through these documents. Look at every single page, even the ones you think might not be important, because you'll never know what great stuff you'll find. And that became kind of the cornerstone of his research ethos. I'd also recommend the. The name of the documentary.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Which I thought was quite good, too. Yeah. Turn every page. That's about both Caro and it's about two people. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

His editor also named Bob, who is his longtime, you know, part crime, basically, for all of his research. And the documentarian is his editor's daughter. And so it's a really interesting portrayal of the relationship of these two men. And it took her a really long time to convince them to participate, even though she, of course, has a great relationship with them, given that one of them is her father.

[Leo Laporte]

Even in the documentary, they're bitching about sitting down and doing it. It's Robert Gottlieb, his longtime editor, and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Robert Cary, fabled editor.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Favorite.

[Paris Martineau]

And the one thing that sticks with me from that is that. So he's. Caro is still working on the last book in his LBJ series right now. And I wonder.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good, because I'm still working on the second book in his LBJ series.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, he still takes everything via typewriter. And you go and look in the documentary of, like, where he's storing all the pages that he's done with, and he just shoves them in the hole above his, like, closet just in a big pile. And I'm like, honestly, respect.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What a story that is. God. Back to AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that was good luck, though. You. You're gonna be buried now, though. You. I. My sense is you read so much. You must read very fast because.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I listen very fast.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, he's listening.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you listen at more than one X?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, God, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I listen to the.

[Paris Martineau]

What are you listening?

[Leo Laporte]

1X.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm. I'm 17 to 2.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because the speed which I talk. You think I can listen to anybody talk slowly? No, I hate that. I can't stand it. But everybody talks slowly. I just want to speed them up so I like having that button so I can finally talk at my speed.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. Gosh.

[Paris Martineau]

Is the narration good on the audiobook? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

He's got a very deep voice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jeez, what a job. Mean, haven't done.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a lot of reading book.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, my Lord.

[Paris Martineau]

How many hours is it?

[Leo Laporte]

Let me look. I'm checking. It's 66 hours. Here's how it sounds at normal speed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There is an ebook, Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. Playback is no longer supported on this browser.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Would you just use Chrome already?

[Leo Laporte]

No. God. I refuse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, jeez.

[Leo Laporte]

That's hysterical. I'll do it in Safari. That's hysterical. No. And you know what? You know why? It's a copy protection.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh. It came out as an ebook in September.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, it did. Yeah. Finally. Somebody's finally convinced him.

[Paris Martineau]

Good news on the 50th anniversary.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

50Th anniversary.

[Leo Laporte]

Here is if I can play it.

[Benito]

I'm gonna. I'm gonna have to say no on that one, Leo. We shouldn't be playing that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Audible doesn't like it when we play excerpts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's weird. Audible.

[Leo Laporte]

You would think they would want us to. Because then people would go, God, that sounds like a great book. I'd like to listen to it. Oh, I don't have an Audible subscription. I really should get one. All right. All right. Right. All right, all right, all right. I could play it at multiple speeds, too, if I want.

[Benito]

I think it's more the.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'll leave that as an exercise for the listeners.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can play my book.

[Leo Laporte]

He's got a deep voice. No, I don't think it's up to you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

Caro is such a staunch partisan of print that for years he's refused to publish an ebook edition of the Power broker, his revered 1974 book about the urban planner Robert Moses.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I'm going to take a break, and then since this has become the Catanus show, I have a question. Related.

[Paris Martineau]

Gizmo. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Not about Gizmo, although I am prepared. Where's my. Oh, yeah. The next time Gizmo shows up, I am prepared. I have. Gizmo's little friend is gonna visit. So cute. We got this so that Samantha, our cat, would have somebody to play with. With. Oh, my God. But instead she just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does she bite it?

[Paris Martineau]

I need to get that. Because Gizmo will bite it. She loves play crazy hand with my hand.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, we talked about crazy hand. This is what you need instead of crazy hand. You need a little bit.

[Paris Martineau]

I do as.

[Leo Laporte]

And it comes with a small amount of protective sleeve as used by falconers.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, pets wise for the little bunny kicks.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let me try a little commercial break and then we'll come back. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Paris Martineau. Jeff Jarvis. Our show today, brought to you by. Oh, there are those esteemed colleagues. Our show today, brought to you by. Something I love. I've been using Monarch Money. In fact, I liked it so much, I signed up for a year before the free trial was even over. Finances could be confusing and messy. It's nice to have an app that handles it all. Keeps track of everything in your life, like your personal cfo, giving you full visibility and control so you can stop earning and start growing. I actually wished I'd had this years ago. It's more than your average budgeting app, although it does do budgeting beautifully. Monarch Money. It's a complete financial command center for your accounts, your investments, your goals. You don't just manage your money. You actually have the power to start building your wealth. In fact, we're going to start that by getting you 50% off your first year, just because you're listening. I love Monarch Money because it does beautiful data graphs of where your money's going. You know, that graph where they, you know, it's like different rivers of money going different places and what the. You know, what's left over and all that. It does that automatically. You link it to all your accounts. It's done very transparently, very securely. But now it knows everything. And it's the. By the way, this was the easiest. I've tried this with other apps. This was the easiest one that I could link to Everything now in one place, I know everything. I know how much I've lost in the stock market. I know how much I've gained in the real estate market. I know what you know. Look at ignorance is not bliss when it comes to this. You kind of need to know what's going on. Plus, it helps me with budgets. It says, you spent. You made this much this month. You spent this much this month. Lisa and I can compare finances. It helps me with the investments. It helps me with changing my investments when the time comes. I got weekly spending reviews. Start managing your finances to build the life you actually want. Without a clear financial picture, those financial dreams never quite get within your reach, Right? It's always, oh, yeah, someday. Monarch makes managing money simple, even for busy lives. You don't have to do data entry. It's. It's all in there. Your credit cards, your bank accounts, your investment accounts, your real estate, all your assets. You'll always know where you stand without any hassle at all. Track your spending, your savings, your investments effortlessly so you can focus on what you really care about, making your biggest life goals a reality. It's a finance tool people actually love. Over a million households now using Monarch Money. Wall Street Journal says it's the best budgeting app of 2025. It is now the top recommended personal finance app by users and experts. 30,000 5 star reviews. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Remember that name. Go to monarch money.com monarchmoney.com if you use the offer code I am. You'll get half off your first year. Now you can only do this in your browser. 50% off your first year. And by the way, they have a great browser interface. It's mostly what I use. Monarchmoney.com and the offer code on this is im use that so they know you saw it here. That helps us a lot. 50% off your first year. Monarchmoney.com offer code I am couldn't be happier. Love this apple. Okay, I can't res. I couldn't resist. I saw this. I said, I got asked this. Why do AI companies logos.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I knew you'd like this story.

[Leo Laporte]

Look like I put it there?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I didn't put it there. You put it there. But I knew.

[Leo Laporte]

They do, don't they? They all have especially anthropic. But all of them have the same general gist. They all do. They do. Am I wrong?

[Jeff Jarvis]

For those of you on audio, imagine.

[Leo Laporte]

Imagine there's a circular shape, often with a gradient, a central opening or focal point radiating elements from the center, soft organic curves. This is. I gotta give credit to the velvet shark which published this article, but I think they make a strong case. OpenAI calls its logo a blossom.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, that's worse. That's definitely worse. Actually.

[Leo Laporte]

The blossom logo is more than just a visual symbol. It represents the core philosophy that guides our approach to design and innovation. At its heart, the logo captures the dynamic intersection between humanity and technology, two forces that shape our world and inspire our work. The design embodies the fluidity and warmth of human centered thinking through the use of circles, while right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands.

[Paris Martineau]

How much do you think they paid a design?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh boy. And who wrote that copy do you think that ChatGPT did? Now there are a few. Like Deep Seek, It's a whale. Doesn't look like a butthole. Mid journey. It's a sailing ship. Doesn't look like a butthole. So there are exceptions, but both of them are of the ocean. So I don't know, maybe there's something else going on but. Gemini. Yeah. Claude. My God, once you see it, you'll never. Okay. Really? Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

That's actually the Vonnegut. Claude is something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So Kurt Vonnegut drew this picture of a butthole in one of his books, Breakfast of Champions. Turns out looks exactly like the Claude logo. I don't know. Why does this keep happening? Actually this is a design blog so they have some explanations. Circular design psychology, unintentional biomimicry and the copycat effect.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, okay. There's some really. Oh, I was gonna say there's some really vulgar gifs going on in the Discord. I got got it was. It was in me.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't. No, no, no. Not gonna show it.

[Paris Martineau]

We're not.

[Leo Laporte]

If you wouldn't let me play the Robert Caro book. I'm definitely not letting you show me that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Speaking of anuses. Since you were.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess I was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Atlantic hired two new three new people this week and one of them has a reference to a great lead and so I had to click on that and so I put it in the chat and in the Discord and it is an incredible lead that I think deserves a Leo Laporte dramatic reading.

[Leo Laporte]

So first, what is a. What is a lead?

[Jeff Jarvis]

A lead is the opening of a story. L E D E. Yes, that's how we spell it.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is from a 2014 issue of the Atlantic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It will be about a lawyers believe.

[Paris Martineau]

It or not but this in the.

[Leo Laporte]

Run down Caitlyn it wasn't. It's in the Discord Only because were brought up. You gotta follow up. I agree. It's the title of the article is the Dark Power Fraternities by Caitlyn Flanagan. One warm spring night. This is the lead. Yeah, the opening sentence. The thing that's going to draw you in and make you read this whole 3,000 word piece. The paragraph one warm spring night in 2011 a young man. I don't now I haven't read this ahead of time so I don't know what voice to use here.

[Paris Martineau]

I think you've got the right one. Just a little faster, a little faster.

[Leo Laporte]

A young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University in West Virginia and was struck by what seemed to him under the influence of powerful inebriates. Not least among them the clear ether of youth itself. Bravo. To be an excellent idea, he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20 year old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20 cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful. Was not the bright report of a successful blast. Off. But the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

[Paris Martineau]

Iconic. Is there it isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Literally the next paragraph. I gotta go on just one more paragraph.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that's the lead. You gotta read the rest. Right?

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, I think you gotta read the rest if. If you're interested, it's on theatlantic.com and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'S going to be a story about lawyers and fraternities. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And my son was in the fraternity. And this is, I'm sad to say, very close to the truth. But anyway. Also on the deck and also in the thrall of the night night's pleasures was one Louis Helmberg iii, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one. He reportedly whipped out his cell phone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night's seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rolled rocket exploded in Hughes rectum. Helmberg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered. He staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck. Fortunately for him, and adding to the chaplain esque aspect of the night's miseries, the deck was no more than feet off the ground. But such was the urgency of his escape, he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that will require medical attention.

[Paris Martineau]

My God. My God.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Isn't that brilliant? Isn't that just amazing?

[Leo Laporte]

Such good writing. I love good. Right. See, and I don't think an AI could ever write a lead like that. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, once. Once you had AI write you an apology for having Jason Calacanis on twit. Did it really write it or was that you?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think so. Did I do that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, you did that. Yeah. It was hilarious. It was hilarious. So it's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that was an AI and that was back in the day.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was.

[Leo Laporte]

That was two years, three years ago.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Be much better now. No AI could be unintentionally funny. But that was too. That was so clever. The 20 cent bottle rocket. And I mean, there was too much in there. That was the youth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. No, it's.

[Benito]

You can hear a lived experience in that story. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

You put you there, didn't it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I could play.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. That was great.

[Leo Laporte]

Although.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Caitlin Flanagan, March 2014.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice job, Caitlyn. Where is Caitlyn now? Do we know? Know she a Staff writer at the Atlantic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Is a staff writer, sure.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She's the author of Girl Land and To Hell with all that.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect. She got the job.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So now. Okay, now I'm going to tell you a truth. Truth about myself that I should not admit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does it have anything to do with an anus?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good.

[Leo Laporte]

Or bottle rocks? I get jealous when I hear somebody do a brilliant podcast or like, when I hear this American Life. It's so good that it bugs me. Right. It's like, they're too good. I can never be that good. Do you, as writers, both of you, do you hear a lead like that and go, oh, okay, it's great. I acknowledge it. I hate it because it's so good. Yeah. Okay. It's not just me.

[Paris Martineau]

It's more. I'd say I'm more angry if it's like a story I was trying to report at someone.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, that would be for sure. Because that's direct competition. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I think if I read a really good lead, I'm like, this is great. I gotta tweet it, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, here's some good news. Just cross the wire. Trump imposes 245% tariffs on Chinese imports.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, God.

[Leo Laporte]

It's now to. You know, basically, it's infinite.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's what it is.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, you know, at least this is another good reason that it was a good decision of me to get my TV in January.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I think there's going to be. We talked about this on Sunday. This is going to be great for the right to repair movement. This is going to be great for. We're going to turn into Cuba. You know, they can't get new cars, so they kind of have a car cult of these classic American autos from the 50s. It's going to be like that around here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We're all going to be using Motorola Razors, Sylvain carefully polished.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff, do you have a lead that you wrote that sticks out to you as a really good lead?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. People magazine Shugu guru Lyman Van Vliet cures tattered tennis toes with sheer stick to itiveness.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm so pretty damn good.

[Paris Martineau]

Loose in your head.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is. It's permanently there.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm telling you, in a million years. I don't care how smart it is, it will never write that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it won't.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know about. I was going to save this for my pick of the week, but I will. I will share it with you now. Are you familiar with monkeys? Zip.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the premise. If we got a million monkeys on a million typewriters, how long would it take them to write the works of Shakespeare? Monkeys, zip. For the last two weeks is as many monkeys as we could get into a room writing words. Now this is mine. Sigmo Baena started typing on April 4th. Let's visit Sigmo. There he is at his desk, typing away. Here's the words he's typing every once in a while though. Look.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a real word I Ray TB use. Every once in a while he gets a word. And when he gets a word I can get rewarded for the word. I've actually taken advantage of all the rewards. So you see, I have a very smart looking mind. I can also ask him to write a sentence with the words he's generated. Would you like me to do that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Is a Shakespearean sentence I hide to the auto lost in thought as you sags by the logs dear Aaron. Okay, it's not Shakespeare yet, but we're getting there. We're getting there. We got a lot of. Some of these monkeys are screwing around. They're not doing their job.

[Paris Martineau]

Monkeys. Seems to be one called called Spilfo Cosworth and its sentence is Ere I go ream my oats for a Rainey's hint doth tarn my lays.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I just want you to know you can get involved. You can have your own monkey. There are plenty. Look over here. There's plenty of available monkeys and the more people we get involved in. It's a crowdsourced experiment based on the infinite monkey theorem. Infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters will eventually write all the works of Shakespeare. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

15 minutes ago Spillful Cosworth typed the word erectors.

[Leo Laporte]

You see, we're getting there. What's interesting is they already have I think all the 1, 2 and 3 letter words in Shakespeare written not just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Once but of Shakespeare. So it knows what words it's looking for.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, it has a concordance. Okay, so this is the week two update 9372 monkeys. So far the database is 100 gigabytes of mostly entirely gibberish. But under our nose the monkeys have been very productive. They've written all the two and three letter long words in that Shakespeare works. Not just discovered the word but completed every instance. So there are 29,521 the's 13,965 yous, even Pip and Tan which are found only once have appeared. So they're now trying and they've got 93% of the four letter words actually might be clips.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a randomization of what letters.

[Leo Laporte]

But there are 1925 unique four letter words in Shakespeare. Soon we will have discovered all of them. And if you go to your monkey. I will go to my monkey. And let's see. Actually, if I go to the. Yeah, there it is. We are now. Boy, we're getting so close. 95%. So you can see what words we still haven't gotten. Splifo Cosworth has done the most points, by the way.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. So it says in the about a dirty little secret is that the letters monkeys type while random follow a distribution of letters in English text. This means that Z is less likely than A to appear. We believe this keeps the spirit of the challenge while making the monkey's texts appear a little more palatable. It's as if the monkey has a bigger keyboard than 26 letters. With a few letters duplicated, we may introduce typewriter specific distributions. For those that want a hard mode.

[Leo Laporte]

Monkey, they have 64% of Romeo and Juliet written.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, my thing is the monkeys should be taking breaks. We should calculate how often the monkeys need to sleep.

[Leo Laporte]

I would say if you look at these monkeys, quite a few of them aren't really doing nothing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's true. True.

[Leo Laporte]

They all have different hats and outfits and some of them are more relaxed, some than others. Anyway, I just thought I'd pass this on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is Comic Relief week, which we needed.

[Leo Laporte]

We needed a little comic relief.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We did, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because there's some really bad news out there. For instance, and we didn't get to this on Security now because it happened after. After Security now. Last night, Doge defunded something called mitre M I T R E, which you probably never heard of. It's part of the Department of Homeland Security, nonprofit organization specializing in a bunch of things, including security. Maybe you've heard of MITRE's chief work, which is to categorize malware. So when an exploit is discovered, they give it what's called a CVE number so that researchers can look at it, they can report on is fairly critical to our national defense and protecting ourselves from malware. Those CVE numbers, we talk about them all the time. They award them a number for how much of a security threat they are on a scale of 0 to 10. Oh, good news. Well, things moving fast this morning. So their funding was eliminated last night. This morning it was brought back. So the news is good. The news is good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, then here's the bad news, which is the agency that our friend Matt.

[Leo Laporte]

Cutts used to run usds, which is now Doge.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, no, the independent. The digital defense. Digital service.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which he was involved in. All the geeks quit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, wouldn't you? Yep, before those, before big balls arrives. Oh. Anyway, so I'm glad this, you know, they're Good news. The CVEs are back. That was going to be a big problem. Big problem. In other news, high levels of toxic chemicals found in the paper receipts used by US retailers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This one. Freak me.

[Leo Laporte]

Holding the receipts for 10 seconds absorbs enough bisphenol s to break California's safety rule. So don't hold on to your receipt. I always say I don't know. Receipt, please. But now I know why.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Allegedly illegal levels of bps in the receipts. And they were all served notices for Burger King, Chanel, Dollar General, AMC Theaters, GameStop, Subway Footlocker, and Ace Hardware.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh my.

[Leo Laporte]

Bisphenol is a class of chemicals used in a wide range of consumer products like food packaging, fabrics, toys and cookware. You've seen it probably in packaging as bpa that's banned in Europe for food uses because it's so toxic, most companies phased out BPA's use. Food companies often advertise when they're packaged. You've probably seen it as BPA free. But bps, which is largely used in place of bpa, is just as toxic.

[Paris Martineau]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Team science man. Science.

[Leo Laporte]

Science.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sputnik was the beginning of the downfall.

[Leo Laporte]

The center for Environmental Health is a non profit. They've sent violation notices to about 50 major retailers alerting them to the. To the fact that they've exceeded Cal's Proposition 65 limits for BPS.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh boy.

[Leo Laporte]

So now they have to print a warning. It says they've already accepted that the.

[Paris Martineau]

The teaspoon of plastic that's in my brain is probably going to be a tablespoon is in a couple of years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I could never keep the two straight though. Which one's which?

[Leo Laporte]

All right, what do you pick something. I've done all the light. I think I've done all the lights.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Line. 94.

[Leo Laporte]

94.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Wrong, wrong.

[Jeff Jarvis]

93.

[Leo Laporte]

93. A weird phrase.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is a fun.

[Leo Laporte]

So remember when delve was a word that would kind of be the giveaway that you were using.

[Paris Martineau]

AI, I, I, I, I disagree with all these.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Same here.

[Paris Martineau]

Because delve, good word. And the other thing people use as a giveaway is the M dash. And I'm like, have you read, have you met any writer Ever. We love to use M dashes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was the way you squeezed more stuff into every story.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I use M dashes in strunk and white. They say it's a very strong way to construct a sentences with M dash.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But here's the thing.

[Benito]

But this is why AI put them in the stuff. Because.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, because we all use. That's why it's there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We use them. Yeah, exactly. But Paris, I bet you have never used in any of your work the three words vegetative electron microscopy. And this has turned up oddly. There's no such thing. It is a nonsense phrase. But it is turned up in 22 papers. And so God bless the, the, the conversation, the academic who did this, who is. Where's the name? Oh, three people. Aaron Snoswell, Kevin Whittenburg.

[Leo Laporte]

Not his real name. And the reason it's showing up. You see, these are not actually connected. They're in separate columns. But vegetative was in the first column.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The scanner put them together.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so in two cases, in papers in 1950s, the word vegetative was in one column and the words electron microscopy were in the other column. And they came together in the scanner manner through common crawl. And so that got picked up by AI and then now is in 22 papers, according to Google Scholar. The beauty of this story, the way I love it, is because they found the, they found the, er, moment of the vegetative electron microscope.

[Leo Laporte]

22 papers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And so they. That word is me. Those three words make no sense together. But because an AI's ingested it from an ancient miscanned article, it's appearing.

[Benito]

No, no, it's not miscanned. It's two columns in the page. So the, the AI didn't know how to read it properly.

[Leo Laporte]

It just put them together.

[Benito]

How much of AI training has this happened to, like, since a lot of these books. Right, like. So what does that mean about the data?

[Leo Laporte]

One of the articles was the subject of a contested retraction from a Springer Nature journal. Elsevier issued a Correct the others for the other.

[Jeff Jarvis]

These are called digital fossils.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Isn't it a great story?

[Leo Laporte]

And it's just the beginning for digital fossils and digital fossil hunters. Now, see, I, I want this to be true. Google AI is helping decode dolphin communications.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I bet it is true.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll believe it when I see it.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been waiting for this for 40 years. Dr. Denise Herkinger. It's National Dolphin Day, by the way. Congratulations.

[Benito]

Okay, so just like this is one thing this is what I was actually working on in college. This is what I was studying in college. I was really go into citation communication.

[Leo Laporte]

You're kidding. Wow.

[Benito]

So like this is the thing that.

[Paris Martineau]

I was really so cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you've come a long way, baby.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was Bonito.

[Paris Martineau]

Can we get a. Can we get a dolphin noise first? Before you continue with your very serious.

[Benito]

I can't. I can't speak dolphin.

[Leo Laporte]

I know Paris could do it. Go ahead, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

I. I don't know if I can. Something like that. Sorry. Continue with your serious part of this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not good.

[Paris Martineau]

I didn't think about the fact that I would be asked to do the thing that I just asked.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But you know, turnabout is fair play, Ms. Martin.

[Leo Laporte]

No, here's what. Flip. Here's what.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There you go. Flipper.

[Leo Laporte]

Flipper.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, all right. Did you. Did you ever watch the show Flipper?

[Leo Laporte]

Paris, she doesn't even know it existed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's one of the dumbest things of our generation.

[Leo Laporte]

They call him Flipper. Flipper. Gliding down on like that.

[Paris Martineau]

I did get bodied by a dolphin. Sorry, Bonito, I interrupted your serious point, please. Do you know about dolphins?

[Benito]

I don't know. I don't know anything about it. Like I was. Was about to trying to study this and at the time the field was so nascent, like nobody knew anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Benito]

But like now I do believe AI can help this. Like this is something.

[Leo Laporte]

And bird song. Same thing with birdsong.

[Benito]

They are actually doing that with birdsong already? That's already happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What was your major?

[Benito]

Oceanography.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow. I think that's very. That's. That's excellent. Was that in the Philippines or was that here?

[Benito]

No, that was. That was here in the Dominican College. Right here, right down the street.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Dominican. That's where my daughter was good school. She studied narrative medicine, which could have involved dolphin sounds for all I know. I don't know. Since 1985, WDP, which is the Wild Dolphin Project, has been studying dolphin communications. Signature whistles, unique names that could be used by mothers and calves to reunite. Basically. Basically the name, right? Burst pulse squawks often seen during fights. Click buzzes used during courtship or when chasing sharks. Interesting that those are used in those two different scenarios. Google's Gemma model. Dolphin Gemma, a foundational AI model trained to learn the structure of dolphin vocalizations and generate novel dolphin like sound sequences.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And confuse the hell out of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Why is he saying oa booga? That's really interesting. Yeah, I would love it if wouldn't it be Cool. If we had a dolphin translator, that'd be so cool. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I was talking to Jason earlier. You have the dogs who do the buttons.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that's trying to teach them our language. Or Coco the gorilla teaching them our language. This is us trying to learn their language if they have a language. But that's cool.

[Benito]

If it's even something that we can understand as a language.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Benito]

Like the syntax might be completely different. There might be a totally different. There might be an inaudible layer that we don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep, all that. But I. You know what?

[Paris Martineau]

I think we should let dolphins vote.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I bet they use comma.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're using pixel phones for this because Google.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In addition to analyzers.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, what are the phones doing? Are the phones on the dolphins?

[Leo Laporte]

Are you.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm just imagining a pixel strapped to a dolphin. But that can't be like a good use of it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In addition, in addition to analyzing natural communication, the WDP is also pursuing a distinct parallel path, exploring potential two way interaction using technology in the ocean. This has led to the development of the Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry system or chat, in partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology. CHAT is an underwater computer designed not to directly decipher dolphins complex natural language, but to establish a simpler shared vocabulary. That seems like a sensible way if you get the dolphins to cooperate. Here's made up dolphin whistle for seagrass. They made up the whistle for Seagrass. He's putting on Scott. Senior research scientist, Total. Loved it. I don't, I don't know what we're watching.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't either.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow. Barely hear that. A unit named Chat Light that we.

[Jason]

Develop here at Georgia Tech.

[Leo Laporte]

He's wearing it on his arm for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Some marine biologists who.

[Paris Martineau]

I want to see them strap the phone to the dolphin.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't give him a Pixel 9 though. They gave him a Pixel 6. So maybe you can find a home for your old Pixel 6 there, Jeff.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, give it to a dolphin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go to the ocean, throw it here.

[Leo Laporte]

Pixel 6 is for dolphins.

[Benito]

That gives you an idea of marine research budgets right there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, especially even Google's supporting it. But we couldn't give you. No, the new generation will use Pixel 9.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Couldn't give you an 8a.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. People are forming relationships with AI chatbots. That's what I was kind of worried about. Here's an article from the Guardians. Guardian. She helps cheer me up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So they. The Guardian asked people how they use the chat bots, which is good reporting. I mean it's trying to understand.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, don't, don't make it up. Don't make up a story. Go ask him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. So one guy, 71 years old, is using it to help him write self published books about his real life adventures. That's pretty weird. Like visiting Burning Man.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what, that's great. It's a, it's like helping him. There's actually an app called Autobiography or autobiographer that will do that. Well, you use prompts you and helps you write your, your memoir.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is Neurodiverse. Respondents to the Guardians call out. So they use chatbots to help them effectively negotiate the neurotypical world.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Travis Peacock, who has autism and adhd, said he'd struggle to maintain a romantic and professional relationships until he trained ChatGPT to offer him advice a year ago. He started by asking the app how to moderate the blunt tone of his email. I could use that. This led to in depth discussions with his personalized version of the chatbot, who he calls Layla. The thing about this that struck me, Jason and I had a conversation about this earlier today is that this borders on therapy and it's just the machine doing it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a very specific kind though and I think this is an appropriate. It's less open ended than general talk therapy. Right. It's specific assistance that I think a machine could reasonably do. Does it bother you or. No, no, we just need research.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We need research on this because it's. It has no sense. Once again, I'll say for the millionth time, it has no sense of meaning.

[Paris Martineau]

It.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nothing means anything to us. All it's doing is feeding back to you. Like the monkeys in Leo's thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Words that are slightly less than random.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Benito]

The question is, is it harmful? Because if it does, that's the question. If it's okay, too helpful, then, you know, then no big deal. But if it's harmful, that's a, that's a different question.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

And then how do we measure if it's harmful or not? You know? Yes, I suppose. I mean, I think generally it doesn't. While it I guess scaves me out personally to think of generations of people who are lonely or experiencing mental health issues turning to a robot that is essentially like a mirror rather than another person. I suppose if that brings them comfort or improves their life or mental well being or interactions in the world, that's good. But I also worry about situations where, you know what if that person is truly in need of actual help or perhaps having a mental health crisis that could you know lead them to take drastic self harming actions. How do you have a. A robot like a chat bot deal with that seems incredibly complicated but to to your point?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mr. Peacock says the past year of my life has been one of the most productive years of my life professionally, socially. I'm in the first healthy long term relationship in a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So good I guess. Yeah. I mean I'm. I'm in favor of AI and I think it's wonderful but it's just a boy I want research.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy. I didn't realize how making yourself an action figure was so trendy. I'm sorry I. Yeah it is. It's in the New York City along and USA Today. Oh yeah yeah I get is it. It's replaced the studio Ghibli. That's the new thing that you do is make action figures.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'll last for four days.

[Leo Laporte]

Why is it we all do the same thing? Because somebody sees it, says oh oh that's cool and then does same reason.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You make the same logos that look like a.

[Benito]

Because the Internet is the high school cafeteria.

[Leo Laporte]

It really is. It really is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You want some good news?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

More for you and me. Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Hold on a second, let me just do a pause. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis Paris Martineau. So glad you're here.

[Benito]

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[Jason]

Favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are On America's largest 5G network Switch now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines via virtual prepaid card will have 15 days qualify and unlock device credit service port in 90 plus days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card is no cash access. It expires and six months.

[Leo Laporte]

And now some good news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A meta analysis of technology use and cognitive aging. So there was a meta analysis involving 400 studies.

[Leo Laporte]

I know why you're, you're re, you're telling me this is good news. This is good news for me, Is that what you're saying?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Me too. Yeah. Yeah. So studies involving 411,000 people, the hypothesis was that it'd be bad for us, but it turns out the researchers conclude use of digital technologies was associated with reduced risk of cognitive impairment.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless somebody talked to us, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of cognitive decline.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so they, they found that it was associated with reduced odds of cognitive decline in middle aged and older adults. There was no credible evidence from the longitudinal study. I can't say that anymore because I'm getting old. For the widespread digital brain drain or digital dementia as a result of general use of digital technology. And they did this because they finally had a longitudinal group of people who'd been with this for long enough that they could see the magnitude of the association between technological engagement and positive cognitive outcome was similar to or stronger than several previously documented protective factors for dementia such as blood pressure reduction, physical activity, increasing of years of education or other cognitively stimulating leisure activities. So your machine ain't killing you. It's okay. Old farts keep going.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, this makes sense because I think the way that a lot of people use technology is to connect with others. Even if that's through like reading social media. Anything that you know is more mentally stimulating than rotting alone in a room while talking to no one is certainly going to have a pain. I feel like mental health wise because that's unfortunately how a lot of people in later stage of life end up. And it's certainly that's going to be detrimental to anyone's mental health, regardless of their age.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, my mom is in memory, what they call memory care, which is a floor dedicated to people who are with Alzheimer's, later stage Alzheimer's. And one of the things they do is they all get together and they have little memory classes where they remember last time I visited her, they were remembering their childhood pets. And they all just talk about it and it's great. I think it's very helpful. It's just having conversations, it's having connections in the real world. It's that kind of thing. Have you been following the meta antitrust trial which kicked off Monday?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Barely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm not all that interested.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Three days of Zuckerberg testimony. That's. That's tough.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of emails. I. Not. Not. They say they're smoking guns. I don't know. He's certainly worried about antitrust litigation. They've proven.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think it's also interesting to see evidence of what we've known for a while from, you know, third party journalistic reports. Just that Mark Zuckerberg has long been incredibly uncomfortable with the popularity of Instagram versus Facebook.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But he's very worried about TikTok, he says.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, yeah, even that's. Then the cycle continues where it's suddenly like, well, Instagram, but TikTok. Ah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And of course, the government's trying to build a case that. That Facebook bought Instagram, so to keep it from destroying Facebook or from becoming a serious competitive threat to Facebook. So they're surfacing a lot of emails from Mark Zuckerberg saying, you know, for instance, in 2012, the success of Instagram and Path, which is a now defunct social networking app, could be very disruptive to us, in his words. He also testified that buying Instagram, taking it off the market and building their own version of it was a reasonable thing to do. It is. Of course it is. It's a very good defensive move. Is it legal? That's another matter. That's another matter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, so he also was trying to his best to get out of this trial to negotiate something and that didn't work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Trump, it's interesting because as much as he is kissed up to the President, it's pretty clear Trump does not like Facebook. His animosity stemming back to January 7th, when Facebook, along with Twitter and Instagram, banned his accounts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And he's competing with them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Now he's competing with them, isn't he? Well, I will continue to watch it. It's interesting. The judge, Judge James Boasberg, is also involved in a number of other Trump administration trials. So he's a busy judge. I don't know. What do you think? Should Facebook be forced to sell Instagram? No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What does that accomplish?

[Leo Laporte]

Their point is well taken is, hey, you let us do it way back then. If you didn't like it, you should have stopped it then.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think it'll be surprising if we see a large antitrust move under this administration. Given the coziness of people in this administration and tech executives. It seems like it was fairly obvious during kind of the inaugural period for Trump that executives at companies like Meta Meta to Google to TikTok were being extremely cozy with the Trump administration and making sure to donate to the inaugural fund. And it seemed that in a way they were kind of expecting some sort of return for that. I would be surprised if at the first instance that they suffer a loss. But also it's complicated because some of the recent appointments in the Trump administration have been people who say they are antagonistic towards, quote, unquote, big tech. But at the same time, you have many of those people who say the others say something completely different when they're in office or when they're asked directly about these companies. So I think it could kind of be any, anyone's game.

[Leo Laporte]

The FTC claims Facebook has a monopoly in the personal social networking market, which they define as four platforms, four meta, you know, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and a smaller app I've never heard of called me. We. That's it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I hadn't heard of it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it. Zuckerberg said, yeah, we kind of turned away from friends and family towards a more of a broad discovery entertainment space. I think that's probably true. In fact, we found out that at one point Facebook even contemplated deleting all of your friends. So that you'd have to. Yeah, so you'd have to start.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I remember that actually. Yeah, there was talk about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

They did something new though. I, I noticed this earlier today in the Facebook messenger app on, on iPhone, there's now a friends button which gives you like a feed, like a Twitter feed of your friends stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a new thing they're trying out. And by the way, they're not the only ones. OpenAI is also creating a subs social network.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you think this is real or is this two fingers in the eye of.

[Leo Laporte]

You think it's against Elon? It's, it's a zappy one. I mean they don't mention, they don't say Twitter is a competitor, they don't say that TikTok is a competitor. Even though Instagram is completely designed to look like TikTok.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think a long standing component of the way that the various meta brands operate is they slowly but surely grow to contain the features of every competing social network app, Regardless of whether they really work within the app. They end up. You know, I always think about, if you look at the sidebar on Facebook, there's like 75 things there and I'm sure 71 of which none of us have ever used or haven't thought about in years. I think they kind of take a grab bag approach, often to product design and integration, and that's how you end up with strange products like whatever is going on in Facebook messenger right now.

[Leo Laporte]

The judge has not been completely open to the FTC's case. He dismissed their initial case in 2021. You'll remember saying you didn't offer any indication of the metrics or methods you used to calculate Facebook's market share. But he did give them the chance to go back and try again. And that's what we're seeing right now. Now, this trial began in 2016 under the first Trump administration, so this has been going on for quite some time. Boasberg is also the judge in the effort to deport Venezuelan immigrants to sicot. And President Trump has called for his impeachment. So I don't know how this is all gonna work out. It is a bench trial. So the judge has finally say, you know, it's just one, one thing after another.

[Benito]

Can he get, does he get to do like a creative sentence on Zuckerberg if, if, if like he loses? Is that a thing?

[Leo Laporte]

He could do a creative sentence?

[Benito]

Yeah, you know, if he's, yeah, he.

[Leo Laporte]

Can do anything he wants. There'll be two phases. There'll be a, A, a determination phase and then as we've seen with Google, Google law lost in that first phase. But now the judges has to determine what the penalty will be, what the remedy will be and it would be the same thing, I think with this.

[Benito]

Can it be first?

[Leo Laporte]

The judge has determined if it is Hawaii.

[Benito]

Just.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think it'd be more like you have to sell Instagram and WhatsApp. Oh, new models. New models just in from OpenAI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

03. What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it has the O in front of it, Leo, you see, so that's different.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh three. Okay. 03 and 04 mini. O3 is its most advanced reasoning model yet. While shows strong performance in coding, math and science tasks, O4 mini is a low cost alternative that delivers impressive results across those same fields. Web browsing and image generation are also available. The company says this capability allows O3 and O4 mini to solve challenging multi step problems more effectively and take real steps toward acting independently. They can see images, interpret and think about them in a way that extends their visual processing capabilities. You can upload, for instance, pictures of a whiteboard or diagrams or sketches and the models will understand them. They can also adjust the images. Oh, I can't wait to play with it, there's a new coding agent called coat from OpenAI called Codex CLI. It's a command line interface that coders can use. Works with 03 and 04. Mini Almond did say they were going to have a lot of releases this week. He says they're moving forward with these little new little releases. But the. For a bunch of reasons. But the most exciting one is we are going to be able to make Chat GPT5 much better than we originally thought. Okay, I even I am getting a little tired of the hype here. More models.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm yet more. I get bored by models. Just another model model.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, do I have to try every one of them and. Oh boy.

[Benito]

Yeah, this is like features on phones, right? Like, oh, look, there's a new screen now. Look, it's a little.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's where we are now. You're muted. You're muted.

[Paris Martineau]

It's like being, oh, we're at 18.1 now. Who cares? Like as far as a phone operating system. All right, cool.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. All right. I think we can take a break and get to our picks of the week in just a moment. If you would agree then we shall move on. So soon?

[Paris Martineau]

About models more.

[Leo Laporte]

No, let's not. Let's not. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau. We have some great stuff coming up in the club. I wanted to give you a little heads up. Tonight, Mike is crafting corner. He is building more Lego succulents. You don't have to be doing Lego. You can do any kind of craft. Knitting, crocheting, painting, coding, whatever you want to do. Just bring your curiosity and your kindness, says Micah. Tonight, 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There are no bad crafts.

[Leo Laporte]

There are no bad crafts. Just bad crafts people. No, no, not even that. Coffee time on Friday. Mark Prince, our coffee Geek Week. We'll be bringing Liz Happy Beans, who is a coffee YouTuber. That should be a lot of fun. We'll Talk specialty coffees. 1pm Pacific, Friday, April 18. That's 4pm Eastern, 2000 UTC. And of course there's the AI user group on the fourth Friday next week there's the regular Stacy's Book Club. That's going to be May 16th next month and we are going to start doing keynotes in the club only so that we avoid the lawyer's wrath. Apple's WWDC KeyNote will be June 9, but also Microsoft's Build keynote and Google's I O keynote. And in fact, you guys are invited to join me for Google I O.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I will be delighted to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I'll let you know when that is. As soon as we find out. I don't know. Do we know?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think we know the date said May at some time. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I'll let you know. And yeah, we're going to do them in the club. So this is my pitch to join Club Twiff. You're not already a member. I've got one more pitch for you right now. $7 a month, $84 a year. Yes, we brought back the annual plan, but I think prices are going to go up in the next few months, so. But here's my promise. If you are already a member, they won't go up for you. So you can lock in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm glad you brought back the annual plan because that is a sign of opportunity, activism, people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because every time somebody signs up it means I have to go another year.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So keep signing up.

[Paris Martineau]

Force them to keep working forever. You can do it.

[Leo Laporte]

You can make me work forever. Okay. Third Tuesday, May 20th at 10:00am says Anthony for Google. I O. So put that down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm doing that right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Put that down. And if you're coming out, you could come out and report back or something like that. If you are not yet a club member, please, we'd love to have you get access to the Discord ad free versions of all the shows. Again, just seven bucks a month. And if prices do go up as they may, depending on the economy and so forth, but not looking great if they do go up, good news, you will be locked in at the current price. So that's why you should sign up today. Twit TV Club Twit like your favorite.

[Jason]

Startup'S growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps skating because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network switch. Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch. Up to 4 lines via virtual prepaid card. Last 15 days qualifying unlock device, credit service port in 90 plus days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card is no cash access and expires in six months.

[Leo Laporte]

Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24. 7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments. And shipping is always free. With Dutch. You'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care. How about some picks of the week? How do you feel about some picks of the week? What do you say, Jeff? You've had a whole bunch of time. Okay, come up with something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A few here. I got a few. So let's see here first. Paris, are you in global entry when you came back?

[Paris Martineau]

I am, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do the thing that they just.

[Paris Martineau]

It's particularly crazy now because it used to be you'd have to come up, scan your passport and then like tap a thing to take a photo. Now you just walk up to a kiosk, stand still for one second, and then they're like, go. You don't. I didn't talk to a single person.

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't even talk to anybody?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I wasn't. Nothing was printed out.

[Leo Laporte]

I just put you in airport jail and asked to look at the contents of your phone or anything.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say I did specifically take face ID off my phone and turn my phone off before I got to the kiosk part, but I didn't need to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So soon enough. And same when I'm. When I'm going through tsa now just stare at the photo and go on.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't do that, though. Maybe that's the Luddite in me. I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you say, no, you can't have my picture.

[Paris Martineau]

I say, I just prefer to scan my id. You're on second. Listen, I think that it's important if I want. I intellectually, morally think that we should always have the option to not, not rely on face ID services. And so in situations where it's not an impediment to me, such as having to wait in a 75 person line to go to the passport kiosk thing, I'll always say, please let me scan. Like, even whenever I was getting on my flight back from Amsterdam, they wanted everybody to do the face ID thing instead of scanning your boarding pass. And I was like, could I please just give my boarding pass? And they were like, sure, they have.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's good to know that there's no pushback.

[Paris Martineau]

There used to be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You may not be traveling soon, Paris, because according to the guardian, boarding passes and check in will be scrapped in favor of facial recognition.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this sounds like a terrible idea.

[Paris Martineau]

What about people who aren't white. How is that going to work for them?

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the international.

[Benito]

You don't care about that. Come on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN body responsible for airline policies. Policy plans to shake this up so it ain't just crazy Americans within three years.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this to solve a problem?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it's to get rid of a whole bureaucratic end of things, in a way. When you come in to the airport, they'll know you're there because of your face and say, okay, you're in. We know you're fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No chicken. All right, that's one strike. Sorry. My other for the week. Have you been to Popeyes to try their new pickle menu?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I like their chicken. I don't go there very often, so you can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can look at the story. You can also see a taste test that occurs in the video right below it.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they fried pickles? What are they?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, they have lots of things. They have a fried. It's not an April Fool's joke. They have a pickled marinated chicken sandwich.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that sounds good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They have fried pickles? Yes, they have pickle lemonade.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know how I feel about that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They have pickle glazed wings and a pickle glaze sandwich.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it just to put dill in everything?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Kind of. So I had the. I went. I went this week before the good of the show. You know, I tried to find out these things I do reporting trips. So I went down and I had. Because this. During Lent, you can get the chicken sand the fish sandwich, which I actually like there. And so I got my fish sandwich and I got my rice and beans, and then I tried the fried pickles. They were good. They were good.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, according to the reviewer on Delish, Amanda Mactis, the only thing she wouldn't order again is pickle lemonade.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the thing I'm not sure about. So I have a video of a guy who was trying it right below.

[Leo Laporte]

She says it's a bit too briny and makes me kind of want a shot of whiskey.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, a pickleback is a fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

What? There's such a thing as a pickleback?

[Paris Martineau]

Did you guys not know what a pickleback is?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

It's when you take a shot of whiskey followed by a shot of pickle juice, and it's the perfect chaser for a shot of whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of.

[Paris Martineau]

It was allegedly invented in a bar called the Bushwick Country Club. Conveniently not Bushwick. It's in Williamsburg, and it's a dive bar, but it's a fantastic way to consume alcohol if you're into that sort of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, now this taste test is by a good friend. Well, a friend anyway, and a man I hugely admire, Kenji Lopez Alt. He says, I tried everything on the new pickle menu. Here's my thoughts now. He's one of the great chefs. Serious eats. I am down here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, you can. You can just fast forward a bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Because Fried chicken place. I came. I've. I do all his recipes. He's the king of sous vide. We even did a. We even did a piece on him on the old screensaver.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Show you how to grab the thing. You're bad at scrolling either way, vertically or horizontally.

[Leo Laporte]

What do I do? That's my hand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, now where should I.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, he's going to taste it. So I think do them hot wings that then they toss with some kind of pickle flavored.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He even has the pickle lemonade.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Pickle flavored sauce.

[Paris Martineau]

That's not pickled flavored sauce. Sounds great.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually.

[Paris Martineau]

I love pickles.

[Leo Laporte]

Pickles.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm a big. I'm on a big Corny Sean.

[Leo Laporte]

He likes. I'm a Corny Sean guy. The crunch and the freshness beyond just the flavor. I also thought I'd mention that. Oh, look at those. Look at those nugs. That's got to be bad for you, though.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, certainly none of this is good for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now he gets the lemonade at the end.

[Leo Laporte]

He does. Okay, how do I get there? I drag the dot. Is that it? Yeah, you see? Okay, dragging the dot. Okay, we're right at the end.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now where was it?

[Paris Martineau]

Lemonade.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what happened now? What happened?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Genji, I know you had it. Maybe you had it.

[Paris Martineau]

Got censored by Big dill.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, now I really have a hankering to go to Popeyes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you have a Popeyes there in the.

[Paris Martineau]

We should have gotten this episode sponsored.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, we would try to do that years ago with. Oh, no, it's in the middle. It's 403. We try to do that with Chipotle. And we talked about it all the time and they never did a damn thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. But that was before the big E. Coli outbreaks.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, God, it's not going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

I clicked something wrong. I'm not a maven. I am. I gotta say, I'm not a maven of user interfaces.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But Kenji's the real deal, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I love Kenji. I always call him Alt Lopez Opez Law. So let me Drag the. What number where?

[Jeff Jarvis]

403.

[Leo Laporte]

And 403. 403.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a long taste. There we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. It tastes like lemonade has a little bit more body than a normal lemonade does. And it has some distinct sort of dill flavor. Not overpoweringly dill, but a little bit of dill, a little bit of saltiness. I think salty. Lemonade's not. Tastes like if you've been to Turkey and you've into a pickle shop in Turkey, and what you'll do is you'll eat a bunch of pickles, and then afterwards you will sometimes take a shot of pickle brine. There you go. It reminds me of, like. And you could even get it with, like, a little bit of lemon squeeze in it. It reminds me of that. But if it's a sweeter, more refreshing. Not necessarily more refreshing, because that's pretty refreshing. But if a sweeter and milder, it's like beginner's pickled brine. You know, beginner's pickle brine, ladies and gentlemen. That's, you know, if you've ever been.

[Paris Martineau]

In a Turkish pickle shop and taken a take a chaser pickle.

[Leo Laporte]

Jim, have you ever been bad Turkish pickle shop? All right, Paris Martineau, what's your pick of the week?

[Paris Martineau]

My pick of the week is last week, one of my favorite shows on Dropout TV came back with one of my favorite seasons. It's a show called Game Changer, where it's kind of a game show where the game changes every show. And this season is already off to a insane start.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks insane.

[Paris Martineau]

Their first episode is a a concept called One Year later, where a year ago, they invited three comedians on stage, handed them folders full of tasks, and said, you have one year to complete this. And then came back and it's three comedians going perhaps harder than you've ever seen before at trying to win points for tasks. For instance, I have an example that's in there of they did one. One of the tasks was make the strangest joke. Who can get the silliest vanity license plate? And a man decided to literally jokerfy his car.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, is it in here in the trailer?

[Paris Martineau]

It's in the link below that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Oh, all right. So this is on Dropout, which you subscribe to because you love it.

[Paris Martineau]

I subscribe to. It's a great. It's pretty cheap. I think it's less than, like, definitely less than $10 a month. I feel like it's maybe like five or six, and it's really worthwhile. I don't know if you like comedy. It's kind of like the new whose line is in any way which I love. Really interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Joker. I'm the Joker. I thought if I brought the whole car into it, it would be really clear. So if we could zoom out and show the vehicle itself.

[Paris Martineau]

This is his actual car that he had to drive for 6 months.

[Leo Laporte]

Driving around in this for 4 months got haha haha painted on it. Some guys in Westwood, I sent them a picture of a toy Joker car and they said, yeah, we could do that on your Honda Civic hybrid with 110,000. Okay. That's commitment.

[Paris Martineau]

So it's really, you know, if you want to see improv community comedians go as hard as they possibly can for a bit that has somewhat ruined their lives for the last year. It's a really good first episode for a, I don't know, great show that I like. So very nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Game Changers. The show and Dropout is the network. Dropout tv.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. They have emerged from being a. They were previously kind of an offshoot of college humor. And the creative leads, they dropped out and they've become a really profitable streaming company and are doing really cool things.

[Leo Laporte]

With it now with such great shows as Titan Takedown, A Bird in the hand, and Dimension 20. As you see, four pills by Cameron Esposito. Is it all comedy all the time?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, basically. So, I mean, kind of their flagship.

[Leo Laporte]

Shows are Dungeons and Drag Queens I could watch.

[Paris Martineau]

So they do. Yes, so they do. They have like a live D and D show called Dimension 20 where they do different partners. One of them, the. They partnered with drag queens to kind of have them be doing D and D right now. The Titan Takedown, they have people from WWE that are kind of doing a wrestling theme, D and D. They also have Game Changer, which is kind of a game show, something called Make Some Noise that is basically like Whose Line is It Anyway? And they do. They've started doing standup comedy now, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Fantastic. Okay, that's a good pick. We're so glad to have you both together. The whole gang together. Nobody's going anywhere anytime soon, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

Better not. I have the action figures made just for you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Copenhagen in a week, but I decided not to. Nikita is going to be there, but I'm not going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, catch my book finish. Which book is this now?

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the Linotype book line of.

[Leo Laporte]

Type book, all right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Called Hot Type.

[Leo Laporte]

We do intelligent machines every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live Live on not on, not two, but eight different platforms. There's Discord for the club twit members. There's TikTok, there's X, there's Facebook, there's LinkedIn, there's Kik and there's others.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sleepy, Dopey and Grumpy.

[Leo Laporte]

Many more? Oh, YouTube and Twitch. I almost forgot. Do watch us live if you wish. If you do, you can chat with us live, but if you don't, of course you can watch at any time by downloading a copy of the show. Audio and video available at Twitt TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to intelligent machines. You can use that to share clips if you want. It's a great way to do that. Or subscribe to your favorite in your favorite podcast player. And if you do subscribe, please leave us a five star review. Because it's a new show with a new name. We want everybody to know how great it is. If you like the show, leave a 5 star review. Intelligent Machines subscribe today. Thank you everybody for being here. We will see you you do we know Bonito? Who's our guest next week?

[Benito]

Let me see.

[Leo Laporte]

We it must be here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Harper Reed.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, my old friend Harper Reed's going to talk about Vibe coding. He uses AI. Actually it's not Vibe coding, but he's a coder and he uses AI as a partner talk. And he wrote a very good blog piece on how he uses AI to do coding. So we'll get an update on AI coding with Harper Reed, who's quite a character. I think you'll enjoy him next week on Intelligent Machines. Until then, stay intelligent. I don't know. Stay machines, stay a human being.

[Jason]

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[Leo Laporte]

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