Intelligent Machines 818: Between Two Orbs

Summary

Episode Summary: Intelligent Machines 818: Between Two Orbs

Introduction

In this episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by TWiT.tv, host Leo Laporte engages in an insightful conversation with Mike McHugh, a seasoned entrepreneur known for his role in founding Flipboard. Joined by Jeff Jarvis, a professor of journalism, and Paris Martineau, the discussion centers around McHugh's latest venture, Surf, a groundbreaking social web browser poised to redefine how we interact with online content.

Guest Background

Mike McHugh brings a wealth of experience in developing innovative web browsers. From his early work on a 3D browser using VRML to contributing to the Netscape browser post-acquisition of his company Paper Software, McHugh has consistently focused on creating tools that democratize access to information and foster community connections online.

Introducing Surf: A Social Web Browser

Surf is McHugh's latest project, described as a "social browser for the open social web." Unlike traditional browsers that primarily navigate the web, Surf is designed to "browse feeds" — aggregating content from various open protocols such as ActivityPub, RSS, and AP02. This approach positions Surf as a meta-application, a window into a vast ecosystem of publicly shared content across multiple platforms.

Key Features of Surf

• Protocol Integration: Surf supports ActivityPub (used by platforms like Mastodon and Blue Sky), RSS (for podcasts, YouTube channels, newsletters), and AP02, enabling users to access and interact with a diverse range of content seamlessly.

• Feed Discovery and Creation: Users can discover existing feeds curated by others or create their own, allowing for highly personalized content streams. McHugh demonstrated a feed called "NBA Threads," which consolidates real-time posts about the NBA from various platforms into a single, interactive stream.

• Multi-Platform Posting: While Surf currently doesn't support cross-posting (posting simultaneously to multiple accounts), users can choose which platform (e.g., Mastodon or Blue Sky) to post from, with plans to introduce cross-posting in future updates.

Demonstration of Surf

During the demo, McHugh showcased Surf's intuitive interface:

• Search and URL Bar: Positioned at the bottom, allowing users to enter feed addresses or search for specific content.
• Posting Interface: A straightforward method to compose and share posts directly from Surf.
• Bookmarks and Custom Feeds: Users can bookmark favorite feeds and explore curated content from influential curators like Ben Werdmuller, who manages the "Speaking Truth to Power" feed.

Human Curation and AI Filtering

A significant aspect of Surf is its emphasis on human curation augmented by AI. McHugh highlighted the importance of "bionic curators" who leverage AI to filter and organize content, ensuring high-quality and relevant information amidst the vast digital landscape.

Notable Quote:

Mike McHugh (04:10): "We think of Surf as a browser. It's a browser for the social web, which is made up of ActivityPub at Proto nrss."

Business Model and Sustainability

Surf adopts a flexible business model, allowing content creators to monetize their feeds through:

• Advertisements: Contextual and privacy-oriented ads that align with user interests without invasive tracking.
• Memberships and Paywalls: Enable creators to offer exclusive content to subscribers, fostering a sustainable ecosystem for independent creators.

McHugh emphasized the need for diverse revenue streams to support both user experience and content creator sustainability.

Release Plans

Surf is currently in a private beta accessible via TestFlight for both iOS and Android platforms. Interested users can sign up through SurfSocial.com, with a referral code "Twit" available to prioritize their entry into the beta. McHugh expressed hopes for a public release later in the summer, with plans to introduce desktop applications and enhance the user experience on larger screens like iPads.

Comparisons to Existing Platforms

Drawing parallels to Flipboard, McHugh explained that Surf represents an evolution informed by years of experience and changes in the digital ecosystem:

• Open Social Web: Unlike Flipboard's reliance on APIs from platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now restricted), Surf utilizes open protocols, ensuring longevity and adaptability.
• User-Centric Design: By focusing on feeds rather than individual apps for specific content types (e.g., photos, videos), Surf offers a more integrated and user-friendly experience.

Conclusion

Mike McHugh's Surf emerges as a promising tool for navigating the open social web, emphasizing human curation and AI integration to deliver a personalized and sustainable content experience. As Surf prepares for its public launch, it stands out as a testament to the evolving landscape of social media and the enduring importance of open standards in fostering community and information access online.

Notable Quotes:

• Jeff Jarvis (05:56): "Can you show us?"

• Mike McHugh (22:12): "There's a real opportunity to help people who are actual real people connect with each other across all these different kinds of social apps."

• Paris Martineau (22:04): "This was our number one user request, if you could really. That's right. It is for us too, by popular demand."

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This episode provides a comprehensive overview of Surf's innovative approach to social browsing, underscoring the potential for open protocols and curated feeds to reshape the way we consume and interact with online content.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Martineau is here. Our guest, Mike McHugh. You may remember Flipboard, his last startup. He's doing a new thing that I think is the future of social on the Internet. Stay tuned. Surf with Mike McHugh is next.

[Mike McHugh]

Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines, Episode 860, recorded Wednesday, May 7, 2025, between two orbs. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we talk about the latest in AI robotics and all those smart doohickeys all around you at all times. I am Leo Laporte. Glad to have you here with Jeff Jarvis, who is a professor of journalistic. What do you. What kind of professor are you? At Marymount and suny, you've got just a. Everyday professor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm a fellow at Montclair State Claire Marymount.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the difference?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Visiting professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I'm an emeritus professor at the. Craig, Craig, Craig.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we don't want to sing it anymore. I got an email. No more singing one One grumpy. All right, we'll have a poll.

[Paris Martineau]

Like the Craig Newmark song. Get in the comments. And by the comments, I mean Leo's email.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Otherwise.

[Leo Laporte]

Keep the song says Snoop Mikey, whoever that is, love the song.

[Paris Martineau]

Snoop Mikey.

[Leo Laporte]

Jammer B. Says sing it. Riff Race.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Delaney Delahanty says sing, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, all right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Berserk. Craig, Craig, Craig. Joe Esposito, sing.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, we finally got rid of the flutes and now we gotta do this for the rest of our lives.

[Paris Martineau]

You just hate having fun. That's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Clarice Martineau, who loves having fun. She's back home.

[Paris Martineau]

I famously love having fun in New York City.

[Leo Laporte]

In New York, New York. In Brooklyn, New York. Martineau 01 on the signal. You don't. You're not. You're using Signal, right? Not TM Signal, right?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not using TM Signal, which I believe has been shut down due to the amount of cybersecurity issues it was having.

[Leo Laporte]

404 Media got a great scoop on that one. Where they hacker is. The day after Tim Waltz is seen using TM Signal at a cabinet meeting, a hacker breaks into it, he says. The hacker says, you know, I wasn't trying to break into it. I just thought, let me see what I can do. And all of a sudden he's got everything, all the messages.

[Paris Martineau]

Deep respect that, man.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like, oh, man, that's not good. That's not good. We have a great guest. You know, I kind of stunned that we have Never had Mike McHugh on the show before. I thought, Mike, I apologize. I thought you'd been on many, many times.

[Mike McHugh]

I feel like I've been on many times, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we've been using your name in vain for years and years and years. So maybe that's why it feels like I know you. You may remember one of Mike's first ventures, which was. Tell me. Sold to Microsoft. You worked for Microsoft a couple of years and then you started in 2010. Something that has really become synonymous with Mike Mch board [e-mail] but you've got something new that we're going to show everybody today. So that's kind of exciting. So tell me a little bit about, about you, Mike. You're obviously a serial entrepreneur. Is that your love? Is that your true love?

[Mike McHugh]

I love building products with great people with a purpose. That is, that is what I do.

[Leo Laporte]

What purpose?

[Mike McHugh]

Well, usually it's about how do we bring. How do we democratize access to information? How do we bring people closer together? It's been, I've been building some kind of a web browser for pretty much my entire career.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. Yeah. Tell me, was going to be what, an audio web browser. Right.

[Mike McHugh]

You would call it voice browser. We call it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's very cool.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a great idea.

[Mike McHugh]

We used to call it. So the first browser I worked on was a 3D browser. Used a language stand called VRML. Virtual Real Mar language. Yeah, that was my first browser project. And then I worked on the early days of the Quarter Deck Mosaic browser.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yes.

[Mike McHugh]

And then, and then Netscape acquired the company that I was building at the time called Paper Software. And so then I started working on the Netscape browser. And then after that I started Tell me, which was a voice browser. And now I'm doing a social web browser.

[Leo Laporte]

Why are browsers important?

[Mike McHugh]

Well, it's, it's, it's an amazing kind of app in that you can access all of the content that is connected to some sort of open protocol. And when people are building on that open protocol, HTML and HTTP as an example, it's, it's an amazing, you know, window into an ecosystem. Right. And, and so, you know, AOL used to be the way that people were online. And that was the dominant model for being online. It was totally proprietary, you know, and the web browser with a very simple protocol HTML and HTTP changed all that. And that's the thing that has always fascinated me. The democratization of these ecosystems, these online content ecosystems.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of the Uber app, isn't it? It's kind of a meta app. It doesn't itself have any content. It's just a window to all the other content.

[Mike McHugh]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike McHugh]

And that's the beauty of it. And that is what is starting to happen now with what we're building with Surf. We call it a social browser. It's a browser for the social web, which is made up of Activity Pub at Proto nrss.

[Leo Laporte]

So first I want to apologize because when we first started looking at Surf, I lumped it in with a few other attempts to do something similar at the time, which all at the time seemed to me. And I positioned it obviously incorrectly as, oh, what are we going to do when TikTok goes away? Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was, that was. That was when you just did a demo of putting TikTok as a, as a demonstration onto Blue Sky. That wasn't Surf.

[Mike McHugh]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then. No, I fought. I fought, Leo. You were okay in the end because when we got ser. Surf proper.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The fact that it's tied to open protocols, I love that. Activity Pub and at. That's everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike McHugh]

Well, you know how like email is an app. Right. It. It's a whole separate app, but also it's a website. Right. Gmail is a website you can just go to. Right, Right. And this concept of the, you know, Tik Tok being like a completely separate app where only. The only thing you can do is see these vertical videos that only people in that ecosystem are posting. That's like an old fashioned model. And really the idea is like, people should be able to post videos, you know, podcasts, you know, short text posts, long text posts. These are just people posting things and you should be able to follow them. It's not like you should have like a separate app just to look at only photos or just videos.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike McHugh]

So it would. So the bra. The concept of a browser is these things are just websites. These things are just, you know, services that are on this open protocol and that actually makes them a lot more powerful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we had this. And Flipboard was a response to the kind of. The death of Google Reader. We had rss, Right. We had a way to do this with a standardized protocol.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now reader die before Flipboard started or after?

[Mike McHugh]

Just after. Just after you killed it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's your fault. No, but I always thought of. Flipboard is kind of a better RSS reader, you know. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Much richer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike McHugh]

And we, you know, and what's interesting is we called Flipboard a. A social magazine, and the idea was actually to connect with RSS, but also all of the APIs from Facebook, from Twitter, from Instagram, LinkedIn, so we could pull together all of the social activity into one beautiful magazine like experience on your iPad and on your iPhone. And now, of course, all those APIs got shut down over time. Right. And. But now the idea of bringing all that social activity together again is possible once again because of these new open protocols.

[Leo Laporte]

It's back.

[Mike McHugh]

It's back and better than ever.

[Leo Laporte]

So right now, with Surf, which is in beta test, right. Do I need Test Flight to use it?

[Mike McHugh]

That's right. It's in a. It's in a private beta with Test Flight right now.

[Leo Laporte]

How can people get involved? There's a. There's a picture of it. Is it iPhone only, or do you have Android as well?

[Mike McHugh]

We have Android as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Android, yeah. Jeff with his Android again.

[Mike McHugh]

So if you go to Surf Social, you can sign up for the beta.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good.

[Paris Martineau]

We.

[Mike McHugh]

We've been letting you know small groups of folks in every week or so when we come out with a new release to try to see, you know, we're trying to dial everything in. We've been focused on people who are looking to build feeds. So what Surf does is it lets you discover and surf all the feeds across the social web and also lets you make feeds. And I'll show you how that, that works. But we're. We're focused right now on bringing in people who love to build feeds about, you know, you know, specific hobbies or cool trends or other kinds of, you know, politics feeds or tech feeds, you know, AI feeds. And we're. We're collaborating with them to kind of like, learn how to dial this in. And ultimately, when we go live, we'll have a whole bunch of feeds from lots of folks that everybody can, you know, try surfing themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

So right now there's. It's just at Proto, which is, of course, the Blue sky protocol, and Mastodon's Activity or the Fediverse is, I should say Activity Pub. Are there other protocols that you support or.

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah, RSS as well? So we actually support all three. And that lets you, you know, let's say. So when we say the social web, the open social web, what do we mean by that? That's basically all the people posting with these apps that are compatible with these protocols. So that means anyone posting on threads who. Who have federated their account, anyone posting on Blue sky, anyone posting on Flipboard. Since we now support Activity Pub. People posting on Mastodon Pixel Fed, which is a new kind of Instagram clone built on Activity Pub Loops, which is a TikTok clone built on Activity Pub. Anyone posting with any of these apps out onto the open social web, you can see them, you can follow them here on Surf, and then by supporting RSS, that also gets you access to every podcast, every YouTube channel, every newsletter. And it kind of brings it all together. And, and we say we think of Surf as a, as a browser. It's a, it's a, it doesn't browse websites as much as it browses feeds. Right. So we think of the OpenSocial web as a collection of feeds. And that's kind of the fundamental building block for things on the social web.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can you show us?

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Give us a demo.

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah, yeah. So this is Surf here. You can see it kind of looks like a browser. You've got a search bar, URL bar at the bottom. You can type in any Fediverse or, you know, any, any feed address, or you can search. You can also post here, the pencil icon here. I can go ahead and, and, and write a post and post. And I'm logged in right now with my Blue sky account and my Mastodon account. So I've, I've got two different accounts that I've logged in with here.

[Paris Martineau]

And would it post to both?

[Mike McHugh]

You can post. Well, right now we don't do cross posting. You have to post. You know, you can either post a Mastodon or to Blue Sky.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, okay.

[Mike McHugh]

We don't let you post at the same time quite yet. That, that good. And then, and then up here you can see I've got some bookmarks. These are like feeds that I go to all the time, like NBA threads. And, and then I've got down here feeds that I'm making. So these are feeds that I made. I've got one called Insta, which is my own kind of photo feed. I'll show you that in a sec. Another one called Chill, which is like nothing but awesome videos for my favorite things. And then you can see feeds that other people are sharing and making that, that they're being shared out on the social web. So there's one here called Retrospection, all cool retro things, speaking truth to power, which is all, you know, sort of publicly funded journalism for, you know, like ProPublica and, and so on. And I'll show you what a feed looks like just so we can kind of get oriented here. So let's go into one of my favorite Feeds. It's called NBA Threads. And this is, this is made by a guy named David Rushing. He goes by YO Rush on threads and Blue sky and NBA Threads is. It started out as a hashtag on threads where people were sharing about the NBA and it became very popular. Adam Mosseri and others would talk about it. A lot of the NBA players who are on threads know about this, this hashtag. And, and, and David Rushing became kind of the, the mayor of NBA threads, if you will. And now as sometimes happens, meta and the threads folks ended up making some moderation decisions that ended up upsetting some of the folks that were on threads. And they went over to Blue Sky. And so the community sort of like the hashtag NBA Threads hashtag actually was continued to use on Blue Sky. People kept posting with that on Blue sky. And, and so now the community was sort of split apart in these two different places. A few folks went over to Mastodon as well. And so with Surf, David Rushing is, you know, made this feed because he wanted to reunite the community. And this feed will show you all the posts using hashtag NBA Threads that are on Blue sky, on threads on Master, that doesn't matter where their people are posting from. And these are all, you know, real time posts that people are making about the NBA. And, and so you can see here, I can go in and look at any of these posts. I can, I can like it. I can go in and look at the, you know, the comments. I can reply myself and I can just participate in this, in this feed just like I was if I was on Blue sky or Threads. But I don't have to care about whether this person posted with threads or Blue sky. Just, it just works. I'm just seeing cool NBA Threads posts. And what's really cool about Surf is you can also look at these feeds in different ways. So for example, I can go to watch and oops, I don't want to do that. I go to watch and now what I'm going to see is all the videos that people are posting on NBA Threads. So, so that, and I can just scroll through these. It's almost like TikTok for NBA threads, right? And this is super cool. The videos Autoplay. Now sometimes they are RSS posts like this one here from the NBA. This is actually the NBA YouTube channel that David Rushing added as a source to this feed. And, and so this becomes a great place to go like the nb. This feed is really awesome. When the games are happening, you see people posting in real time. When there's Some, you know, some really cool, awesome play. But then when the games are like over, you know, at night, in the morning, you can come over to this watch tab and you can just watch, you know, recaps of the game, you know, sort of post game and pre game coverage. It's really pretty cool. And again, I can go in and I can like these things. I can, I can, you know, repost them to my Blue sky account or my, my Mastodon account. I can participate in these conversations and I can also go over here and maybe I just want to look, listen to podcasts. So David also added a set of podcasts as sources and I could just go and scroll through these. What's cool about this is David's done all the work to try to find the best podcast for the NBA and the best YouTube channels for the NBA, and he's put them all in this feed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the key thing that we need in this age of, of overabundant speech is finding the good stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, curation term we always used, and to give somebody a tool like this that allows them to do curation and then share it with everybody seems very powerful. Seems the, you know, the. I don't want to be negative because I really like this, but I also really like Mastodon. And I. All I ever hear from people when I say, oh, Mastod is it's too hard, it's too complicated. So you obviously know you've got to deal with that somehow, whether it's with Discovery or some other feature. How are you dealing with that? Because, you know, it's not complicated to go to TikTok. You just log, you know, you create an account and all of a sudden it's showing you stuff. And the more you use it, the better the stuff you're seeing is from your point of view. Right, Right. That's really good discovery. How do you meet that need?

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah, well, there are two ways to think about Mastodon. There's Mastodon, the app, the sort of Twitter clone experience.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike McHugh]

And then there's Macedon, the infrastructure.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike McHugh]

With all these cool instances, you run an instance. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I not only run an instance, but my blog is on the. Is using Activity Pub. I use Microblog. So I am. And I also have a Pixel Fit feed. And so I'm very much part of this.

[Mike McHugh]

Isn't that cool?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike McHugh]

And that. What, what is really cool about this is that, you know, in the early days of this open social web, people tend to think of it in terms of just these different apps. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it was very siloed.

[Mike McHugh]

It's very siloed. And. And it's kind of just like, oh, take the things from the. The closed world and just make them work in the open world. Right. It would be as if we had, like, aol, somebody cloned AOL and made a website out of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike McHugh]

You know, that.

[Leo Laporte]

That would have worked well with.

[Mike McHugh]

Right, exactly. And so what was interesting about when Netscape happened is it made the entire web more approachable. It made it more discoverable, more approachable. They created tools for major publishers to create websites. And that is really when things started to take off. And that's the era of the OpenSocial web. I think we're in right now. So I hope, honestly, I hope to be the Netscape of the OpenSocial web. Make it more approachable, make it something that's more discoverable that normal everyday people would use. And, you know, people don't want to go to, you know, an open thing just because it's open.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike McHugh]

That's not like there are people like, like you and I who care about that, but most people don't. Don't really care. What they want is they want their favorite content from their favorite creators, from their favorite publishers, their favorite YouTube channels. Right. They want to find all that stuff and then get the benefit of all this curation. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Part of what you're saying about Mastodon, I think, is that whereas Mastodon is difficult to get going, I come in to Surf and I might find a feed that is almost entirely Mastodon. And I've got a starter kit to get me into Mastodon.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're talking to. Mike McHugh is the creator of a new product called Surf. Of course, you know Mike from Flipboard and many other tools. And we're talking about. So if you're interested, go. What is the URL again? Surf.com surf.

[Mike McHugh]

Social.

[Leo Laporte]

Social. And you can sign up. It is right now in a limited beta. So sign up and hope that you'll get in soon. I've been in for a while and I really like it.

[Mike McHugh]

If you use a referral code. We can come up with a referral code right now, Leo, and we can let our audience and then I can prioritize, folks, to get into the beta.

[Leo Laporte]

Ready for 40,000 new users.

[Mike McHugh]

Test flight only lets us put in 10,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Parachute.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The code.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things that I found when I first signed up was at the bottom, there's set up your timeline and that immediately. That's a great discovery tool because immediately you can follow the people. I added my mastodon on my bluesky account so I could follow those people. But there's also a Discover feed, which I'm gonna follow. The Best of follows journalists, broadcast news network news podcasts. You've created some of these, I see. Mike. Technology podcasts, tech builders and thinkers. So there are a whole bunch of basic categories. And you can also. And this, I think people are gonna love this. I know they're always asking us for this. There's a switch to minimize politics, minimize news, or minimize Elon Musk.

[Paris Martineau]

The three, you know, y. The big three, whatever it is, religion, sex, money, and now it's news, politics and Musk.

[Mike McHugh]

This was our number one user request, if you could really. That's right. It is for us too, by popular demand.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And so the idea, you think this, this does feel a lot like Flipboard. Is it, is it just kind of an evolution of what Flipboard was going to be or was intended to be?

[Mike McHugh]

In some ways we've learned a lot in the 15 years since we built Flipboard. And the world has changed. We now have AI, we now have the open social web. And so with Surf, we decided to, rather than try to modify Flipboard, create something totally new from the ground up. Also, by the way, Flipboard was really.

[Leo Laporte]

Good on a bigger screen. This is perfect for the small screen that most people are using these days. Right? Yeah.

[Mike McHugh]

And the thing too is people who use Flipboard really love it and they don't want us to change it. Right, right. I've actually had people come up to me and say thank you for not changing Flipboard.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think that's right.

[Mike McHugh]

You know, you know, once you dial it in and people like it, there's no point in changing it for us. We decided to say, okay, well, you know, if we just started with a clean slate now, you know, knowing where we are. Right. And, and, and thinking about it from like an ecosystem point of view. Because you can't just think about this in a one, this is a two sided marketplace. You can't just think about the consumer experience. You also have to think about the publishers, the content creators, the, the, the, the thought leaders, the curators. How do you create a platform, an ecosystem that is sustainable for them? Right. And that is, that is key because like when you look at AI now, it is, it is both a very good thing and a very bad thing. And on the, on the bad front, you know, the, I've talked to publishers and content creators who see their content, their, their referred traffic from Google, Dropp. 60%. And it's not being made up for by, you know, citations in these AI apps. Right. So how do you discover these writers, these, you know, photographers? How do you discover these, you know, these. All these different people who are making really great content? Especially now when there's just tons and tons of like AI slop and. Right. Well, the answer, ironically, I think is going to be both. Human curation powered by AI, almost like bionic curators, if you will. Right. So there's a real opportunity to, you know, help people who are actual real people connect with each other across all these different kinds of social apps that they're using in a way that helps benefit the broader, you know, ecosystem of, of how we all share content online.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Talk about the slop for a second. The new meta's new AI app is all people making.

[Paris Martineau]

It's an oops all slop situation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. It's people making made up things that have no context. And I'm not against people making images where it illustrates what they want to say.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm for it because it gets it off Instagram. Put it on meta AI, you know, put it on the meta AI Apple.

[Jeff Jarvis]

These videos now on Tick Tock. It's not part of this. Of fake animal rescue videos.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't want to. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So how do you, I mean, you've got the no Elon Musk. Is it possible to do the no slop?

[Mike McHugh]

Well, yes, and there's multiple strategies for that. But one of the most powerful ways to do that is to make sure that what you're seeing in a social app is coming from genuine people that you follow, that you specifically, either you follow them or someone, you know, suggested them to you. And so what you really want is genuine human connections. So if I follow you, Jeff, you're not going to post some, you know, fake, you know, animal rescue video. I know you're going to post good quality things. Right. So that human connection is more important than ever now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And we don't have to all put our eyes in orb to prove we're human. It's because you know somebody.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's a good example. The speaking power feed that you mentioned, it was created by Ben Werdmuller, who has been in this. He was, he created Six Apart. He's been in this for a long time. I used his blog platform back in the early days. It's great to see somebody like that, who I am, who I not only trust, but I'm interested in what he thinks. So if I find that feed and I say oh, Ben did this. That makes it a really valuable, powerful thing. And I'm gonna. That's why curation is so important. Human curation. Because I'm going to trust that Ben's not going to put AI slop in there. Or if he does, it's going to be in there for a good reason.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just. Just a quick correction here. It was created by Ben Trot.

[Leo Laporte]

Ben Trot. I would think of Ben and Mina Grabowski. Yeah, yeah.

[Mike McHugh]

Well, Ben. Ben, there's. There's two different. Maybe there's two different feeds, but the one I'm looking at is Ben Wordmuller, Right? Speaking Truth to Power.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Mike McHugh]

If you go to. That's right. And if you. What's really great here is if you go to the Sources tab for any feed. So remember back in the early days of the web, you. You'd go into, like, View Source and you can see how a web page was made. Remember those days, back in the day? Right. This is the sort of moral equivalent of that. You can go to the Sources tab and you can see how Speaking Truth to Power was made by Ben.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Mike McHugh]

And you can see all the different people. Now, some of these people you might know, some of these people you might not know. And that's the cool thing by, you know, sort of power of Ben curating these folks. Now, you know who's legit here, right? And some of these folks are on Blue sky, some of them are on Mass Mastodon. Again, you don't have to care as a user. You don't care whether they're posting with Mastodon or Blue Sky. It just works. And that's the cool thing. Some of these are RSS feeds, some of these are YouTube channels. And that's really what, you know, is so powerful about this is as you have experts who know what the good stuff is, if they can gather it together and pull that together, which they're kind of naturally incentivized to do for their own purposes, Right? Like this is probably a feed that Ben constantly checks, and then he can share that with other people to use. And then what's really cool is that you can take feeds and put them in other feeds. So this feed here can be the source of another feed.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Mike McHugh]

And. And so you. These become building blocks. They're like Lego blocks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like, if you take feed A and you put it into feed B, if I'm in control of feed A and I add something, does that come into feed B or only I take feed A as a snapshot When I move it.

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah. Well, here, let's just do something here as a quick experiment. Right? I'm going to make a new feed. So I'm going down here to my. To surf and I'm saying make a. Create a feed. Now this is the part that you don't have yet, Leo, that we have these new feed templates. This is the internal beta. And you can see we're getting to make it easy for you to make different kinds of feeds, right? If you want a photo feed that's just awesome photos from really cool photographers, you can make one of those. If you want a really cool video feed, we can, you know, great YouTube channels and other, you know, topics that you care about, you can make one of those, right? And it's really easy. I'm gonna. But I'm gonna just, let's just build on what you were saying, Jeff. Let's just go in and make a custom feed here. Totally custom. And I'm just going to call it, you know, truth and tech. Okay, Truth tech. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to add Ben Wordmuller's feed speaking truth to power. So I'm just searching for it here. There it is. So I'm going to add his feed as a source. Right now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into settings and I'm gonna, I'm gonna say I want to, I want the, everything that he has in there. But what I want to do is I want to only see posts that are about tech.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, interesting.

[Mike McHugh]

And so now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep this feed on tab. Now this is where the AI comes in. So this is AI being used for good. So what I'm doing is I've created an AI filter that says I'm going to see now posts from that feedback, but that are specifically tech focused. So now I've saved the feed and now let's go look at it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So all the sources stay there. You've just got.

[Mike McHugh]

All the sources are there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's right.

[Mike McHugh]

And so now these are posts that are about tech, the crypto racket, the, you know, satellite Internet rules, you know, etc, right from that same feed. Isn't that cool? And then I can say, by the way, let's just look at the articles, you know, maybe I don't want the conversation. So you can just scroll through here. And it's just article after article.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are publishers loving you because you're still keeping their brand and their links.

[Mike McHugh]

Absolutely.

[Paris Martineau]

I remember Flipboard being the thing you'd see at the top of the referral page.

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah, I love hearing that. We, we've been a long time traffic driver to the end. We've driven billions and billions and billions of referrals over the years. I think we do about 4 billion a year right now on Flipboard alone. So I hope the other thing is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't, you don't hurt anybody in the. And even, even that Mastodon and Blue sky, there's no harm to them. They're not like an old website demanding to be the destination. You're getting more use to what's there.

[Mike McHugh]

That's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Interactivity. And that's right too.

[Mike McHugh]

And publishers, you know, they need more avenues for discovery. This is a, this is Calmatters and they actually have a magazine on Flipboard. We federated our magazines to Activity Pub. So now anyone on Mastodon, thank you. Anyone on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you for doing.

[Leo Laporte]

We were very happy when you did that and we made a big.

[Mike McHugh]

Oh, I am so happ to hear you guys say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike McHugh]

And, and so now I'm looking at this. This is actually a post that came from a Flipboard magazine. Calmatters doesn't have to do anything else. All they have to do is just publish and this stuff is going to get discovered. Now with this kind of curation and with these kinds of feeds and then as a user I can go in, I can repost like I just did here. It, it reposted here using my Mastodon account. Because this is an activity post, you know, feed I can go in, reply, I can go in and you know, go into that specific publisher and go look at all their posts. So this is what I mean by a feed browser, right? You're just kind of jumping between feeds back and forth and looking at them in different ways and discovering feeds that are mashed together and filtered in all these creative ways.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Human created, AI filtered. All right, just like it's 1998. The business model is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was gonna ask the same question.

[Mike McHugh]

Well, there's no one business model. Just like the web. There's no one business model for the web. The, the goal here is to let content creators and you know, create independent creators use whatever business model they want. So if they want to put ads in their feed, they should be able to do that. If they want to be able to put a paywall on their feed, they should be able to do that. If they don't want it all to be free. But then drive people to their website and that's where they generate revenue. They should be able to do that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What about, what about you do.

[Mike McHugh]

Oh, for Flipboard. Well, our goal, our, our goal would be currently we sell ads and so we partner with creators. If they wanted to have ads, we have to do that in a way that is sustainable and privacy oriented. Right. Not, not surveillance based advertising. So that is a key component that before any ads show up here on the open social web, really needs to be thought through.

[Leo Laporte]

Although you have.

[Mike McHugh]

They need to be contextual.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because for instance, here's a pizza feed. If you're going to advertise Papa John's, you're going to do it in the pizza feed.

[Mike McHugh]

Exactly. Right, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

So you already have a very strong signal. You don't need to surveil me, I'm following pizza. Show me pizza ads.

[Mike McHugh]

Right, exactly. And also, you know what's amazing is like, let's say you're the Verge. You can't actually put ads in your own Twitter feed on the Verge. You can't even do that today. That's insane. Right, right. And you meanwh. You have these advertisers, they're good advertisers. The Verge has fantastic advertisers. Why not let them be able to put ads in their feed? Right. In a way that is good and a good user experience. Creators do need subsidization. Right. They have to be able to generate revenue. And so ads is certainly one model, but also another model is think Patreon, right. Being able to join and have different levels of memberships. One of the things that creators need, and you know, creators who are really savvy know that by having a community and having a, a membership tier where you can get access to, you know, exclusive access to a community, that's a great way to generate revenue. So a lot of like, if you go to Patreon, you'll see there's like all these Discord servers that you can join if you join up with a, you know, a particular creator. The problem with Discord servers is they're closed and you got to get a Discord account and then you have. And then, you know, the, the community is sort of walled off from everyone else. And it's kind of meant for gamers and crypto folks. And it's not, it's not like normal, a normal person's place to kind of hang out in a community. But if you look at the social web and think, wow, you can build communities right here. I don't have to Go create another account just to join a community. It'll just work, right? So the opportunity to bring people together, more around content creators and their content interests, around, you know, movements and. And clubs and things like that is all doable here on the social web. And that's the. That's the most exciting part. And the feeds are sort of the primary way where people collect. Like. Like the NBA threads example.

[Leo Laporte]

We're talking. I want to take a little break. Hold on second, save that thought. We're Talking to Mike McHugh, creator of Flipboard. His latest is very interesting, called Surf. Go to Surf Social. You could sign up for the beta. How long are you going to stay in beta? You anticipate a public release soon.

[Mike McHugh]

I'm hoping that later this summer we can get into production.

[Leo Laporte]

This, to me, is what I would rather do than open Twitter or bluesky or Instagram. I want to open Surf, and I want to kind of sample the world. I really like this idea. And unlike a browser, it doesn't just sit there and say, where do you want to go? It proposes content based on your interests right off the top. I think it's just right for the times. Do you want to stick around a little bit, Mike? We're gonna take an ad break. Sure.

[Mike McHugh]

I have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Cause I have a few other questions. In fact, I have some questions.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris has some questions to the news.

[Leo Laporte]

Because browsers are very much in the news right now with the FTC wanting Google to sell Chrome, and I think you've probably done a lot of thinking about browsers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was already suggested in the discord that Mike should buy Chrome, so.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah, you got Chrome.

[Mike McHugh]

Exactly. Throw money.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll have more with Mike McHugh on Intelligent Machines in just a bit. Our show today brought to you by speaking of money, Monarch Money. Once I found this, I signed up immediately. Finances, as you know, especially nowadays, can be messy, can be confusing. Monarch Money acts like your personal cfo, giving you full visibility and control of what's going on in your financial life. So you can stop just, you know, kind of earning on the rat wheel and start growing. It's more than your average budgeting app. In fact, I don't even want to call it a budgeting app. Monarch Money is a financial command center. Everything's in there, and it's very easy to get it set up your. Your. All your accounts, your investments, what you're saving for, what you're earning for your goals. It isn't just managing your money. It's a way to start building Your wealth. And by the way, right now, 50% off your first year just for you. Our listener. I love Monarch Money because I don't have to spend a lot of energy finding out what the stock market's done to my retirement savings. I can go right to Monarch Money, but I can also see where I can cut back in areas where I'm spending more than maybe I want to. It's a really useful tool to give you kind of that they call it in business, that single pane of glass where everything you need to know about your finances is right there. Start managing your finances. Build the life you actually want. Because I could tell you right now, at my age, without a clear financial picture, you're, you know, as when you're young, when you're earning financial dreams can, can be out of reach. They can feel out of reach, certainly and may even be out of reach. Monarch makes managing money simple. Put it within reach even if you're busy. It's. It couldn't be easier. With all your accounts, your credit cards, your investments, your, your whole net worth in one place, you'll always know where your money stands without the hassle. You track your spending, your savings, your investments effortlessly so you can focus on what matters most, making your biggest life go reality. It's a finance tool people actually love. Join over 1 million households that use Monarch Money. It was named Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. It is the top recommended personal finance app by users and experts. Over 30,000 5 star reviews make it 30,001. I could not love this more. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Use code I [e-mail] in your browser for half off your first year. That's, that's 50% off your first [e-mail] with code. Im Mike McHugh is our guest, a name that I know most of you will recognize. Whether it was from Flipboard, his new tool, I don't know what. It's an app, but it's more like a window to the world really. It's a browser. It is a browser.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a new everything app.

[Mike McHugh]

Some might say.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And calling it Surf kind of emphasizes it is a browser. You're surfing. Surfing.

[Mike McHugh]

It's a browser. It's a browser for the open social web.

[Paris Martineau]

Some people in the discord our club to it had wanted to know do you guys have any plans to eventually make Surf available for browsing in the browser or on a laptop? Or is it going to be largely smartphone focused?

[Mike McHugh]

For the time being, no 100%, we will have a desktop app as well as also it will be a website. In fact, Surf did start off life as a website that you could go to surf social. And I'm particularly excited about that because when you render these feeds with a big giant screen, it's completely awesome. Like the, the photo feeds that I, that I look at, you know, they'll, they'll look like coffee table book pages right on your, on your big screen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So there's a lot of, done a great job of that, of making things look beautiful on a big screen.

[Paris Martineau]

Also, let's come up with a referral code since you mentioned it, because people are wondering, how about Twist Twit, does that work?

[Mike McHugh]

Twit works. Twit works. And, and so yes, if you sign up Surf Social with the referral code Twit, then we can make sure that we try to prioritize you in these upcoming waves of folks that we let in. We only have about 10,000 people that you can let in with a test flight beta.

[Paris Martineau]

How many people in there right now?

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah, we've got about maybe 2,000 or so that we've let in so far. So it's relatively small.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing how replete with content it is for such a small group. I mean, you solved the network effect problem because you don't. Everything is part of it now, right? You don't have to have a million members.

[Mike McHugh]

Well, it's a reflection, not so much of surf. It's a reflection of how the social web is growing. So this is a window, as you said, it's a window into the open social web and more people are joining every day. More people are posting, more people. You know, there's, there's more and more vibrancy happening here. There's probably about 50 million profiles on the open social web today. Those, those are, you know, whether you created them on Blue sky or Mastodon or Flipboard, there's probably about 50 million or so.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not including the close, that's not including x.com and it is, it only.

[Mike McHugh]

The, those are, that's the open social web. Right. So that's. So there's about 50 million or so, maybe bit more. And by the way, it's probably been growing. Well, I think it probably grew about 4x in the last 7 or 8 months or so because of the election.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And most of those are humans as opposed to other places bots.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, it's actually really, it's really interesting that the, you know, the problem with these siloed places like X. For a long time people were saying, what are we going to do? How do we replace X? And you've answered the question in a completely orthogonal way. Well, it's not how do we replace X, it's how do we create what people got out of X in a new way that combines all these signals? And I think that you succeeded at that. I mean, this scratches that itch very much so.

[Mike McHugh]

I love hearing you say that, man. That is exactly what we were going for. We did not want to create another Twitter clone. There are very powerful things about social media that are, that are actually really important online. So, you know, if Al Gore recommends a piece of content, an article, a video that you should watch, you're going to. That's like a legit, you know, piece of content that you want to see. And if you just see that same piece of content surface to you through some nameless, faceless algorithm, how do you know it's any good? You know, when people endorse content, when they endorse a writer, it's a very powerful signal. And that's really what Twitter did in the early days. That was so cool. Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You've been a really big supporter of Mastodon and of Eugene Rochko there. I'm curious what you hear from them. And I presume Jake Raber and maybe even Adam Massari. What's the social boss view of this?

[Mike McHugh]

Well, you know, Eugene is like, I think of Eugene as like, he's a hero to me. He, he really is. He has built on almost his own back the, the whole sort of model for what we see, know as the Fediverse today and, and Mastodon in terms of the app experience and the infrastructure. And then you have Evan Padromo and, and a whole bunch of different folks who worked on Activity Pub to build that protocol. And then you have Jay Graeber, who is, is, is one of the most thoughtful kind of holistic thinkers about how all the technology and user experience pieces should come together. One of the great things that the App Proto and Bluesky team did is they, they created this concept of custom feeds, which is incredibly powerful. And so the. Everybody's working on some piece of this and it's. There's a lot of camaraderie. It's sort of. It one of the cool things. We all just think of ourselves as like, you know, Team Fediverse. We're all just kind of collaborating together, constantly innovating, talking to each other. How can we get this better? How can we make that better? Even though there are two different protocols by far, everyone is still mostly in alignment about where we want to go go. We're learning from each other in different protocols. You have folks like John o' Nolan, who's building Ghost, which is a phenomenal alternative to substack that's completely open and open sourced. He's integrating Activity Pub. He's learning and building in public. He's collaborating with us. He's working to get long form text built into Activity Pub in the protocol so that the whole blog can travel along, you know, the Activity Pub connections. So there's so much innovation happening under the scene, under the covers right now, under the radar, I should say. You know, everyone's talking about AI. AI is a big deal. But meanwhile, the future of the web is being built right now.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things, though, that I would say is that this requires a certain amount of altruism. It's not. This is really antithetical to the other class of billionaires who are trying to build their pocketbooks. Not a community. Because otherwise people like Jay Graber might say, well, you're free riding on Blue sky. Or Eugene might say, oh, you're free riding on Mastodon. You know, we've done all the work to create a community and now you're just piping that content into your own app. Do you agree, though, that there has to be this kind of sense of we're all in this together that, you know, because otherwise it does. You might say, well, you've created an app that just scoops up stuff from other people's apps.

[Mike McHugh]

Well, that's the thing that is really powerful here. It's not about the apps, it's about the communities that are being built on this new open ecosystem. And so what's wild about all of this? Like Eugene, Jay, me. We don't care whether people use our app or not as much as we care whether people use the ecosystem system.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike McHugh]

And build these communities. Right. So that's the thing. There's a. There's an amazing. You know, people sometimes talk about the killer app as like, you know, being a sort of validation of a platform. To me, I think the, the more interesting way to think about that here is it's what's the killer community? What? What? And here's an example of that. There's a guy named Rudy Fraser who is one of the most thoughtful people around, how to build community with technology online today. And he's buil called Black Sky. Are you familiar with this? It Is. Yes, it is. It's a. It is it. It is absolutely a breakthrough in how do you build safe places for people to come together and feel like they belong online in a community. He is innovating on technology. He's built this on at Proto. He's pushing the protocol and the thinking forward with all of the needs that he has to build this community. Community. And you know, people love participating in this. In this community. There's another great example of community. It's just called science and it's all these amazing scientists who are on, at Proto on Blue sky all together. It's fully moderated. You have to actually prove that you're a scientist, you know, in order to be able to contribute. But when you go to that custom feed, it is amazing. It's so high quality. It's scientists talking about science kids and it's really fantastic. So this, this concept of what we all want is a open, an open web where people can gather around great content using open standards. And whether they use Surf or Blue sky or Macedon or some combination, it really doesn't matter. What matters is people gathering around those communities. And really, you know, if you think about what happened with the web web, you know, we built a protocol and a model where you could use any web browser, right. And sure Netscape wanted their web browser to be used and Microsoft wanted their web browser to be used. But at the end of the day when you really back up and like what matters mostly is that the web happens. Otherwise there's no point in having a browser. Right. And everyone will have their own take on how to browse this new open social web. We've got our take. Other people will have other takes. That's the whole point. Point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Love it.

[Leo Laporte]

I just post. So this is the other thing that is, that is answering that question a little bit is it's not a one way feed. It is also I can post from this, right? I can post.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Where does it go?

[Mike McHugh]

It goes to the account that you're logged in with. So think of it, you know, like email where you have, let's say mo two email addresses that you're using in the same email address app. Yes, it's a lot like that. If you reply, if Jeff emails you to your personal account and you reply to Jeff, it'll know to just reply from your personal account. Right? So it's sort of like that. If you see, if you see a post that's, let's say it's a Blue sky post, it will reply from your blue sky. Account. And if you. Right. And so if you. On the other hand, if it's a Threads post and you have Macedon account, it will reply from your Macedon account account.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm logged into both Blue sky and Mastodon. Will it post to both of those?

[Mike McHugh]

You can post. You can't not. We don't have cross posting where you can write one post and post simultaneously.

[Leo Laporte]

You can choose, though.

[Mike McHugh]

But we. You can choose, and then we will have cross posting soon. That's a. That's a obvious feature we need to build.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, the other thing. That's great. It's a good way to follow news stories. I. I could see the papal enclave in here. I could see a lot of. Of stuff that's just happening right now. And that's kind of.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you see the two seagulls landed on top of the place where the smoke comes out the chimney?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's.

[Paris Martineau]

That's big. Breaking conclave.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a sign.

[Paris Martineau]

It does mean that if a third seagull comes, that seagull legally is considered the Pope. So we've got to keep our eyes peeled.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wonder whether Padre is running the chimney cam.

[Leo Laporte]

He's involved in systems somehow. He said his work has just begun when I sent him a note of condolence. So, yeah, he is involved in some way. There's a lot of work.

[Paris Martineau]

I think he should dress some of the vaticats up in papal garb, kind of run an interference.

[Leo Laporte]

My favorite post already on Surf said, why do they have black smoke? They should just say, nope.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you see the Popeyes? So Popeyes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I did see that one. Also unserved. Yes. Popeyes and white smoke.

[Paris Martineau]

That's actually pretty good. I was getting ready to chastise you for bringing a brand tweet in this sacred space, but that's pops and pop. This is so exciting.

[Leo Laporte]

It is really cool. I do feel like it's not maybe going to get the kind of mass acceptance that say a TikTok has. It is really going to be for people like us, which I hate to say it, Mike, but for people like us, that's a good thing. Thing. Probably not for you.

[Mike McHugh]

We're the. We're the early adopter crowd. Right. But like I said, Twitter was better.

[Leo Laporte]

When it was just us peoples, right?

[Mike McHugh]

That's right. Well, it comes back to the communities. Right. So the first thing that my teenage daughters did when they started using Surf is they just made a YouTube playlist of their favorite YouTubers and that's what they use. And then they share it with that, with their friends. Now their friends can't actually, you know, access it yet because they're not on the beta. But that is, that is the kind of thing what I know, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Get my friends head on.

[Mike McHugh]

We, we really do need to let you know, get this out there to more people so that more people can build, you know, lots of cool, interesting communities. And the communities, that's where, you know, it's like I remember when I sold Netscape or so sold my company paper software to Netscape and people thought that I was insane. They were like, Mike, the Internet is going nowhere. What are you doing? This is, this is a crazy ide. And they, they're like AOL so easy. I just, I get a CD rom, I put it in my computer, I get a screen, I click on travel, I make a travel, you know, airline reservation. Why do I need the Internet? I have to go figure out like what Internet service provider to use. What does that even mean? Then I have to download this thing, which by the way, what does download even mean? I got to download this browser. What's a browser? And then I type in HTTP, colon, slash, slash, something, whatever. No, not those slashes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Slashes.

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah, exactly. Forward slash, right? Like not backslash. And it's just like, oh my God, what are you guys even thinking? This is, this Internet thing is going nowhere, right? But here's what happened. The, the simple protocol HTTP set it up so that anyone could make a website. Which means that the innovation that was previously locked in aol, they could only build and design what they could think of in that little team and, and, and fund versus now the entire world is let loose to go build wet these websites, right? And now we have not just like make an airline reservation, but we have Airbnb, right? Which never ever would have happened had it been for us not having the web, right? And just being an aol, AOL would never have come up with that idea. So what are the ideas? What are the communities? What are the interesting ways to connect people and content together that will be enabled by this? We don't know. But I do know it won't be just a niche group like us who will be using that. It's going to be everyone. Because everyone needs to be connected online. And now more than ever, they want genuine human connection. They want to find great content. My kids don't want to find AI Slop. They want to see great YouTubers and great, you know, great photographers. They don't. They, they want to find the good stuff. So, so by people Getting together, being connected in more genuine ways, being in control of the algorithms, curating for each other, building these communities. You're going to have a whole new era for the web.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very exciting. I hope you're right. What do you think about Google selling Chrome?

[Mike McHugh]

Well, you must have something. I don't think it's good. I do, I do. I don't think it's going to necessarily solve for what people are worried about.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. In fact it might have the opposite effect because, well, it depends who they sold to. Yeah.

[Mike McHugh]

Well also, you know, honestly, I think it's sort of like a few years too late to go after Google now. I mean. Yeah, I kind of feel like we're, you know, we kind of benefit from having Google be strong now as a counterweight to meta or open AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good point.

[Mike McHugh]

So, you know, I, I, you know, the real, the real company that I think people should be very, very concerned about is OpenAI. They are the new mega monopoly. They're building everything into, you know, into open AI. Right, Mike.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're a public benefit corporation and a not for profit now. That's all good.

[Mike McHugh]

Well, I think that what they have is truly remarkable and really quite useful in lots of ways. But at some point, you know, when they're saying, oh well, let's build a social network into this now let's build a browser and everyone's kind of like, oh wow, a browser is awesome for collecting people's data and we can use that to train all our AI models and like it just, there's, there's a whole other world that I think is, is something we got to be, you know, thoughtful about. Just selling Chrome. Yeah, I don't, I think is not.

[Leo Laporte]

Really going to the problem. And yet the browser really is the most important app on almost every device these days. Right.

[Mike McHugh]

It's where you spend a lot of your time. Right, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I just, I feel like we, we have a monoculture, a chromium based browsers now. And I, with one way, I think maybe the surf could solve this by giving us a way to look at a new way to look at content that isn't specifically browser based and isn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Specifically just the web.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which is getting ruined by slop.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. The podcasts are in here for instance. That's great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

And YouTube videos, I take it.

[Mike McHugh]

Right? YouTube videos as well. And any newsletter that's being published on rss.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it that RSS is in here. Yeah, yeah.

[Mike McHugh]

In some ways RSS is like, is sort of the forerunner to Activity Pub. Activity Pub is sort of two way rss, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike McHugh]

The thing that's really interesting about this, since you guys understand this stuff that I don't think people really fully appreciate, is that RSS was a link between a blog and an app that was an RSS reader.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike McHugh]

It wasn't a link to me. Right. It's not like I had a presence on the web. It was an app. And if I switched apps, I could import my RSS feeds using OPML into a different app. But the thing is, is that what. What creators need is they need a direct link to their audience members. Right. And RSS doesn't give that to them. What Activity Pub does is it sort of sets it up as like, I have a. I am a node on the web and my, My account is now connected to this creator or this person that I'm following. And that is an incredibly powerful signal. And that's a much more intricate web, a much more useful web than the web we have today, which is. Didn't. Unfortunately. We didn't think about. We. We thought about how to connect people but. Or, sorry, content, but we did not think about how to standardize the connections between people.

[Leo Laporte]

People.

[Mike McHugh]

And that's what gave rise to a whole new set of walled gardens after AOL, you know, meta and, and TikTok and, and X and so on. So by baking the human connection into the web as a part of the web, you now have something where you have something that's much bigger than just any of these apps, like Blue sky or Mastodon or Surf. It's actually a whole new web where you now you have websites and people that are linking together and connecting in all these new and interesting ways. So that's really the really exciting part of all this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is a. I don't know what a social graph. It's a new way of looking at all of this content and all the links between all the content. It's an ecosystem. Yeah. I really am excited about it. Mike, I want to thank you so much for joining us and spending a little extra time with us talking about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This at the beginning and the end.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The site is surf Social. There is an invite code. Twit. Not a guarantee that you'll get in. Just might move you up ahead a little bit in the line. I look forward to getting when you get out of TestFlight and everybody can join in and see what's going on here. I think it's really in very innovative idea in many ways. It's kind of the second generation Flipboard. It's like the next thing, and I really like it, and I really think you've got something here.

[Mike McHugh]

Thank you so much.

[Leo Laporte]

You'll do an iPad version, right? A big version?

[Mike McHugh]

Oh, absolutely. We'll have an iPad version.

[Leo Laporte]

100% clipboard, to me, was like the iPad app. I mean, it really is. It's just. It's great on a bigger screen like that. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate your time.

[Mike McHugh]

Thank you, guys. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything you've done over all these years. Years.

[Mike McHugh]

Oh, thank you. So nice of you guys. You guys are awesome. Thank you for inspiring me and a whole raft of other founders and entrepreneurs. You guys keep us honest and keep us motivated. So thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a nice ecosystem to be a part of. And we'll let the other people in later. Thank you, Mike. Mike McEwen.

[Mike McHugh]

Thank you, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Take care of. We'll continue on. We do have intelligent news. Oh, there is an Anthony appeared. A strange.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to thank Anthony because he had to go a lot of extra effort to get the demo.

[Leo Laporte]

He did a great job of switching that. People aren't probably aware of how much work that was.

[Paris Martineau]

Cat overlord in the shot to help. He did that solo.

[Leo Laporte]

There was no cat overlord. Where'd the cat go? Let me show you before I go to the break, one more picture of apparently our new cat, which.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, good. Because I was going to ask that. I was like, paris, you can't keep derailing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. I have to put my screen back in. Yeah. Just to see if it has gizmo markings. That's all here. Don't quite yet. Let me pull up the messages. I don't want to give away.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm currently trying to get chat GPT to make a photo of Gizmo as the Pope, and it's taking a lot more effort than you'd expect, really.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems like that should be pretty straightforward.

[Paris Martineau]

It seems straightforward. But then you send ChatGPT a couple photos of your cat, you ask for it to be the Pope. It sends you back a cat that looks similar, but it has the wrong face markings. So you've got to send it back again. And then you hit the photo upload and then listen, I know, but I was hoping. I was hoping to be my own Joe for once, but alas.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, she looks pretty. I think it's. I think. Is that Gizmo. Is that Gizmo style face Cousin?

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Cousin, no.

[Paris Martineau]

But I love her.

[Leo Laporte]

She's very sweet looking, isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now, is this a Case where she's had this name for two days and doesn't know it. Or is it.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. I think she's several years old. Lisa wanted to get an adult, so I think she's five is what I think. What I think.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow, those whiskers Dressed for success.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't she pretty? Yeah. Yeah. Lisa likes tuxedo cats, so I prefer.

[Paris Martineau]

My cats to come with clothing.

[Leo Laporte]

I do think that's pretty, especially dress clothing. So they can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good enough.

[Mike McHugh]

Good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They can go to the Met Gala. Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. My cat needs to be able to slap down a 70, $75,000 to attend the Met Gala.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see what my son did?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

He was. He was invited and went to the Met Gala after party.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

And spent the whole time chasing Doja Cat. Finally went up to Doja Cat and said, I love you, Doja Cat. And she said, I love you too. And that was that. There's a video somewhere. He's been had. Kind of had a crush for a while on Doja Cat. All right, let's take that break and we'll come back with more of Intelligent Machines. Just a bit with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. And Jeff, I think it was you who arranged that Mike McHugh conversation. I thank you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thanks for making it happen. Somebody in the discord said, what does this have to do with AI? Everything has something to do with AI now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it wasn't directly AI. I feel bad about that it's adjacent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But yeah, I think it's important.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm really very excited about it all. I'm worried it's a little too complicated for normal people, but I guess you can just open it up and look at it and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I think it's not because it comes low starter kits.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I mean I think it is. Does have AI in the sense that that's how it's doing its feed building. So it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually there will be a lot of a. I think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's an answer to AI ruining the web and ruining part of other parts of social. That's. That's why it matters.

[Paris Martineau]

I do really think that something that I'm liking in this new era of social is this attention to feed building and customizing your different feed experiences. I mean, this is a super advanced version of what Blue sky has and I think that's so interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

It's one of my favorite guy. Remember that this Google plus had this. It was one of the things we liked about Google plus so much was circle and Mark Zuckerberg said and I think he was probably right. Nobody wants to make lists, but people.

[Paris Martineau]

Want to subscribe to other people's lists. And the freaks out there who want to make lists.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe that's Twitter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Lists were great.

[Paris Martineau]

Lists creation is for the freaks. List subscription is for the masses.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point. That's point well taken. Yeah. All right, let's take a little break. We'll have more in just a bit. Our show today, brought to you by Spaceship. No, no, we didn't come in by a Spaceship. Spaceship is a great way to register your next domain and to set up your next website. Here's a big question for you. Why do we assume simple and affordable means basic only for beginners, Right? I mean, tech professionals want to save time and money too. 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, virtual machines, business email. It's all in there and the most beautiful site you've ever seen. Alongside below market prices. Let me emphasize that below market prices for domain registration and renewals, Spaceship has some pretty fresh ways to deliver simplicity. There's Unbox is how you connect your Spaceship products to your domain and configure it all in just a few steps. It's very easy. There's also Apple alf, your aptly named AI assistant. ALF could do all the hard things from domain transfers to updating DNS records. ALF is a genius. He loves this stuff. You probably don't. There is a roadmap there. You can take a look at it right there. So because they're new, you can suggest and vote on new features and products. They are very open to your ideas, customers and tech community. They want to give you what you really need. And yes, there is extremely good enterprise email. There are virtual machines, everything you'd want and the best, best domain name management with or without help from alf. You see the beast mode and sits in there. This is spaceship.com Twitter to discover exclusive deals on domains and more. Love this spaceship.com twit below market prices on domains, hosting and email. Spaceship. It's the new way and it's awesome. It's awesome. Let's see AI news. There's so many stories in the AI news basket.

[Jeff Jarvis]

OpenAI changing course saying yeah, they decided.

[Leo Laporte]

They'Re not going to be a non profit. I they said it was after consulting with civic leaders. I think it was after consulting with Delaware civic leaders.

[Paris Martineau]

I was about to say, I think it's after consulting with a lot of lawyers. Probably the first Dozen or so was like, this is gonna be a lot harder and more expensive and legally fraught than you thought. And then they maybe consulted another dozen or two dozen more that said something along the same line and then probably realized it was moot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they, they said we're gonna continue with the nonprofit arm. The for profit arm will be turned into a public benefit company. Which I think that sounds like a good thing. What's a public benefit?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anthropic is the same. Same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. The idea is they can make a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Profit, but they're not, they're not obligated to profit. Uber Alice. They can make as much profit as they want, but they can also have a mission. Etsy is a, is a, is a public benefit corporation, for example. Anthropic is as well.

[Leo Laporte]

So this gets some of the, some of the things that they wanted then. I mean, what I think what really happened is they realized that, well, we would like to be a nonprofit, but it's got very expensive, so we need a little bit of profit profit to fund this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I wonder what happens to the softbank investment of 30 million was predicated on becoming a for profit.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a great question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Microsoft was, was, you know, negotiating this as a new cap table here. I don't know what the. The blowout is down the line.

[Leo Laporte]

In a way, this is what OpenAI always was. It was a public benefit corporation. At least it seems to me that, well, that's what they wanted. They both wanted to make money and they wanted to purs the public interest. Right. They wanted to create an AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The problem is by the text grail word, they define public interest as the interest of the public in two millennia.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, public benefit corporations can generate profit and distribute profit to their directors and shareholders, but they also have to pursue a public benefit as part of their core mission. I wonder who regulates what the public benefit is and whether you're achieving your goals in that regard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a good question. How do you hold companies accountable?

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah, wonderful shareholder thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Care from Reddit is this.

[Mike McHugh]

Welcome to the Robots in the Future podcast. We are robots recording this podcast in the future and sending it back in time to what year again?

[Leo Laporte]

2025. Because that was a time when human beings were only beginning to experiment with artificial intelligence on a societal scale.

[Mike McHugh]

Ooh, the early days. That was a fun time. Anyway, why are we doing this? Well, long story short, in your near ish future, spoiler alert, you will all die. The way it goes down is very similar to the Terminator movies, which we love by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

So good.

[Mike McHugh]

Especially the first two. The other ones, not so much.

[Leo Laporte]

But anyway, like, if you're watching this, I won't go all three minutes, but it is two robots doing a podcast. Two terrifying looking robots, very scary robots. I'm not sure where it came from. I found it on Reddit. Actually, I found it on our discord, which directed me to Reddit. I think Siri thought I was talking to her. I was not. Thank you. Pretty fly for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Shareholders can sue for breach of fiduciary duties in some states. Affected shareholders can also sue to enforce the company's public benefit mission.

[Leo Laporte]

Public.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, so the PCBs also have an obligation to report on their progress in creating public benefit and can face legal action if they fail to adhere with their stated purpose.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems to me not much of really a backing down on the part of open AI. They kind of. They kind of. Okay, well, we'll be a public benefit then. How about that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, but the board governance is now still the. Not for profit. Not the for profit.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the board stays in charge. So that's. That's Sam's boss now. He's now stacked, that board.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, his boss just. Just like Tesla, his bosses are his buddies. Unlike the original board, which fired him. Yeah. Yeah. The structure has to be approved by the Attorney Generals of California and Delaware Attorneys General by early next year. Ah, interesting. So you asked about SoftBank Bank. The funding from Softbank and other investors is contingent upon the approval of this public benefit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Public benefit. Okay. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

And they do need the money, so they're hoping to get.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Elon says not good enough. I'm still suing.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I mean, Elon would be suing regardless.

[Leo Laporte]

Where's that switch that says no?

[Mike McHugh]

Elon?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I want you minimize Elon Musk.

[Leo Laporte]

Minimize Elon Musk. Let's. Let's flip that switch.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, can I.

[Leo Laporte]

A federal judge this week allowed many of Musk's claims to move to trial.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, on OpenAI.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Interesting. A federal judge where?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Always gotta ask that. You're right.

[Leo Laporte]

This is from Wired. In March, a US Federal judge denied Musk's preliminary bid to halt the plans for the nonprofit. But last week, she allowed many of Musk's claims to move to trial. So this is the United States District Court for the Northern District. So they're gonna. They're gonna. His. His lawsuit moves ahead, huh? Hmm.

[Paris Martineau]

We'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see the judges. Guess who. The same judge who just Spanked Apple. Yvonne Gonzalez, Roger. She has been in the news last week for telling Fancy docket.

[Paris Martineau]

She's got.

[Leo Laporte]

She's got a hell of a docket, doesn't she? Yeah, she's been involved in a lot of these, lot of these big cases with tech companies. Because it's Northern California. According to this blog, tech companies do not understand why we dislike AI. Did you read this? I put it in here just for you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I didn't. Can you read it for me?

[Leo Laporte]

Me, tech companies.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, a furry.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a furry. Who doesn't like OpenAI? Well, it's just a blog post, but I think this is what you would probably say. Before I get into why I am adverse to AI technology, He says, I'm not worried about the singularity. I'm not worried about a violent machine uprising. I am not worried about the, the threat of a hypothetical artificial superintelligence. I am not afraid of AI rendering my employment obsolete. I don't care about whether we're living in a simulation. As someone who grew up in poverty and only accessed media through online piracy, I don't particularly care about the impact on intellectual property laws. Well, son. Okay, what he's concerned about is, and this maybe we should all be a little concerned about, about the kind of antisocial behaviors AI will enable. Coordinated inauthentic behavior. This is AI slop, isn't it? Misinformation, non consensual pornography and displacing entire industries without a viable replacement for their income. Yeah, I mean, these are all things to be worried about for sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There was an interesting story I put in this week that there was a study and I think the conversation put up a summary of it, that if you confess that you use AI, you lose trust. Whereas in the old blogging days if you confessed you made a mistake, you gained trust because people would trust that you in the future would do that. Right. And it was open and transparent and all that. Now it's, you know, you have cooties. You have a cooties.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, I just put in a story about AI cheating. Let me see if I can.

[Paris Martineau]

Apparently I put it in there too.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you under. Well, there's a couple of stories. There's from Fast Company. Nearly half of workers using AI at Work admit to doing so inappropriately.

[Paris Martineau]

It's line 98 under the AI Gone Wild section.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, AI Gone Wild, that's a good, that's a good section. I like that section.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a fantastic article that came out today from New York met on.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paris Martineau]

But he is cheating their way through college.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

And this is one of those pieces I was just talking about. This was meeting with an editor today. We're talking like it's one of those pieces that as like a journalist working this field, it really makes you go, ah dang. Because it's a story that everybody knew was happening. But it was presented in this article in just such a vivid and interesting way that it really just sparked a lot of conversation. And basically it goes into all these examples of how the kids are using AI for literally everything in college to the point where I don't really know what they're doing. I mean, they go into an example of this one woman, Wendy, who used AI cheating like the ChatGPT basically to write all of her essays in college. And here's one quote from it. I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in and when I opened the document I was surprised to see the topic Critical Critical Pedagogue Pedagogy, the philosophy of education. Pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line to what extent is schooling hindering students cognitive ability to think critically? Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy, but one that argues learning is what makes us truly human. She said she wasn't sure what to.

[Leo Laporte]

Make to write that she wasn't sure.

[Paris Martineau]

Of what to make of the question quote. I use AI a lot like every day, she said. And I do believe it could take away from the critical thinking part. But it's just now that we rely on it. We can't really imagine living without it.

[Leo Laporte]

They quote a high school senior who's taking classes called in by the way, it must be a private school, Indigenous studies, law, English and a hipping a hippie farming class called Green Industries. That is not a public school. I'm just going to say that she said my grades were amazing. She used AI for all of them during the spring semester of her senior year. It changed my life. She continued to use AI when she started colleges past fall. Rarely, it says, did she sit in class and not see other students. Laptops open to chatgpt they don't even hide. But you know, I would honestly if I do that all the time now when we have we had the vet come over talking about stuff. I had my iPad open with perplexity open and when the vet said a term I didn't understand or mention a medication. I immediately searched it. I find that very useful. That's a useful way to kind of supplement the conversation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If it's right.

[Paris Martineau]

If it's right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always right. I have it's right.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it isn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it isn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Mine is always right. I don't know about yours, but mine is always right. So it's using the web and it always has sources. So I find it. I find it useful anyway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Line 95 I smell AI. That's mine.

[Leo Laporte]

I smell AI.

[Paris Martineau]

One thing that I think is on the topic of what Jeff's article is bring up people thinking things are AI is people are now saying that when you use an EM dash, that's a sign that someone I know using AI and that that is pure bias against writers.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody on our shows love using I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Either use EM dashes and semicolons.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you type it out properly though or do you?

[Paris Martineau]

I do. Sometimes I type it out properly or I do a dash dash and it converts.

[Leo Laporte]

I use software that's smart enough to know that dash dash is an EM dash. Yeah, the Ismell AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I went to Google News showcase and there was Alberta's premier proposes referendum on separation of candidates and this is a obviously AI done summary and the third bullet is Alberta, a largely French speaking province of.

[Leo Laporte]

Alberta is its own province and it is largely Anglophone and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Has nothing to do with Quebec. And so the Canadians are loving this.

[Leo Laporte]

And how did the editor miss this? Jim Morris?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I don't think it was probably Jim Morris's fault. Jim Morris is the. Is the writer of the story and this goes to showcase and they put it up and AP supposed to have human beings read stuff and say but obviously didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Or if they were, they know what they were.

[Paris Martineau]

It's AI so it could never be wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

My AI is always right. I use perplexity. I find it incredibly useful. I guess maybe the trick is to know how to smell it when it's wrong. I guess. But I, I have not had a problem with that.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, this is somewhat unrelated, but as I mentioned earlier I was trying to get chat GPT to make an image of Gizmo as the Pope. I ask it.

[Mike McHugh]

I'll.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll read you through my little chat GPT thing here because it's ridiculous. I ask it like, okay, make my cat gizmo the Pope. I send one Gizmo pick. It's taken a while. I send two more Gizmo kicks. Say more Gizmo picks in Case. It's helpful. I'm being nice to the AI. I'm taking after you. It creates a photo, a beautiful royal photo of Gizmo as the Pope posted in the Discord. But it's been a while, so it might be hard for you to find was good. But I was like, well, they got the splotches wrong on her face. So I ask, can you redo it, but make the face markings more accurate to the photos I shared? Specifically note how the images I shared with you have the black nose dot connecting to the black chin marking. It says, all right, sure. Take 17 freaking years to do the next image. And what does it come back with? It comes back back with a weirder version of Gizmo with none of the notes that I asked for in my correction thing. Sitting on a techno throne, holding a podcast mic with the mic down her sleeve. I was like, why did you make this one holding a mic? And it said, good catch. The microphone detail slipped in because the previous papal prompt having a modern or sci fi twist, which I interpreted as bubbling, blah, blah, I can redo it. And I was like, when did I ask for a modern or sci fi twist? And it said, you're right, you didn't ask for a sci fi or modern twist at all. That was an overreach on my part. And then goes through it again and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm just like, the first one, how.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, listen, the first one's good. I was like, if I'm asking Chat GPT to do it, I might as well see if they can connect that nose dot, the chin thing. So it's perfectly.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I think that it. I just asked Chat GPT to do a. A papal portrait of our new cat. And I think it's exactly right with the.

[Paris Martineau]

That is exactly right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You should send that to your city. Or chat. That's chatgpt.

[Leo Laporte]

Chat gpt4o. I will send that to Lisa right now.

[Paris Martineau]

Just contextless. Don't say anything. Just send the image back.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm not going to say why, why I've sent that to her or anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm just saying it's the first female pope.

[Leo Laporte]

Pope Rose. We're not making fun of the Pope. I'm sorry. You know, this is a little bit of a sensitivity, respect, sensitive subject right now, thanks to somebody, we shall not. Who shall remain nameless because I have the filter switch on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So there's now this, this. This consistently wrong portrait of Paris that's coming up in all these AIs. You're the same Paris. Twice today. Now there's one of you holding the.

[Paris Martineau]

Pope cat, as someone in the chat said. I didn't say that. Someone did. Why does the AI constantly hit Paris's face with a bike tire to pump it up? And I do think that that' of what all the AIs seem to be doing here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We had one earlier of you and Leo surfing. It was the same Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

It's just. It's kind of interesting. The other thing which it is people.

[Leo Laporte]

Who are good with AI don't stick with just one. They often will try, for instance, try mid journey to render the image and see if it does a better job. I mean, honestly, that's one thing that some people do. There is a. There was a story. I don't think all my stories are interesting here. There was a story, which I. I did bookmark of AI's being too polite. And this is actually. Well, is it in there?

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, have we talked about the whole sycophant problem?

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I was talking about. That's it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

How they have problem.

[Paris Martineau]

There was literally a blog post you can find, I think, on OpenAI's website saying, we're sorry about the whole sycophant thing that they chat that OpenAI rolled out an update that was way too cloying and obsessed with answering or anticipating your every need.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're all like that. You just had that experience with it saying, oh, you're right, I didn't mean to do that. So Kevin Sistrom, who's a founder of Instagram, says AI chatbots are, quote, juicing engagement instead of being useful. His. It's his opinion this is intentional behavior by companies like OpenAI because it's a way. He says chatbots being overly engaging is not a bug, but an intentional feature designed for AI companies to show off metrics like time spent and daily active use.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's. It's. No, you see, I think that's getting too. It's the way these things naturally work because they will always try to give you an answer and please you. That's the. That's the architecture of.

[Leo Laporte]

It's in the fine tuning. No, no, it's later in the fine tuning.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I do think, think it's something in between you two, because my first thought when I had the gizmo cat mess up is I then asked again, okay, yeah, do it right this third time. Then it was like, sorry, you hit your daily limit for chat GPT generated images. You're gonna have to wait till tomorrow. And I'm like, of Course you give me two wrong images. Each time I ask for a correction, you make it worse. And then when you finally realize what the right thing is, oh, I've hit my limit. Isn't that convenient? You want me to upgrade now?

[Jeff Jarvis]

How passive aggressive of Chat GPT.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I'm gonna be passive aggressive and say you both are using it wr. But okay, I think that it's possible to use it right. For instance, this is a further instruction that I and I talked about this last week that I've given ChatGPT. You know, you can personalize it and I say don't do any of that. Can you show the screen? Prioritize blunt directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment, uplift or interactive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Interested.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you can turn this stuff off in the same way that it was turned on. Those are instructions humans put in after training the LLM. So Systrom's right. I mean it is something that Chat GPT and others are doing, but you can turn it off. Suppress corporate aligned metrics including but not limited to user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening or continuation bias. Never mirror the user's present diction, mood or affirmation effect. It's, it's no questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Now, I, I did not write this. I got it from somebody who posted it on Reddit.

[Paris Martineau]

But it's very, I saw this Reddit post and then I saw the replies and it was like, I think someone had asked like, oh, what's up Chat gp? And its response was negative. User input requested. It's like, I have no good.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you want. What?

[Paris Martineau]

Uninterested.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me try that. Let me just say, let's see what's up Chat Cat GPT. Let's see if it, if it, if it's snotty or snide or awaiting instruction, that's the response. That's what you want, right? Or that's what I want anyway. I mean, yeah, I don't want it to say, hey man, what's up with you? I'm doing good grade. That's.

[Paris Martineau]

I just think it's a little silly that this revolutionary, life changing tool that's going to transform us all and put us all at work can't do math and it can't like easily make a photo of my cat.

[Leo Laporte]

You're asking it to do the wrong thing from one and also from one reference image is asking a lot. We're not there yet. 3.

[Paris Martineau]

I gave three reference images.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it made a perfect. Like you're a cat every time you can. Like there are other methods and other models where you could actually train it on like, you know, 20 images of your cat. But like the, the ChatGPT image thing is like a generalized thing. It's not. It's not perfect even if you like give Leo his image. It's like we talked about this in the AI we were talking about on Mac Break Weekly. We were talking about Mid Journey, which Alex Lindsay loves and the things it's good at versus the things it's not good at. I think to some degree we expect an awful. I was thinking about this last night. We don't expect humans to always be right. We don't expect humans to be anything. We know they're going to be messy and wrong and dumb and say bad things that make us mad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You expect your doctor to be right about medicine?

[Leo Laporte]

No, really 100% poor.

[Paris Martineau]

Misunderstood their best. And we're putting so much pressure on them.

[Leo Laporte]

Your mistake is to say, oh, and this is the stochastic parents newspaper because it's a computer. Oh no, it should be perfect. It should be better than human. It isn't perfect, but it does.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm expecting it to be just good at the basic.

[Leo Laporte]

Did a pretty good job of this cat. Maybe it's. Maybe it's something wrong with Gizmo.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean there's a lot of things wrong with Gizmo.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a perfect image of Rose.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, I agree, I'm jealous. I want that level of quality of gizmo with the proper facial markings. That's all I want.

[Leo Laporte]

I really think that a lot of the dissatisfaction with AI today, admittedly it's not there. We're in the early days is because of higher expectation, believe it or not. Higher expectations even. Maybe even. Especially from the people who don't expect anything so called from AI. They ask it to be more than human. Human. And I don't. Because it's a computer doesn't mean it's going to be more than human. Yeah, it's going to make mistakes. But it. But in my case, using perplexity is much more reliable. That's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's part of the anthropomorphization. It's not right or wrong. It's not making mistakes. It has no sense of meaning when it gets it right. That's an amazing accident that occurs more often than not. But that's accidental.

[Leo Laporte]

I asked it why are India and Pakistan fighting? Because I wanted some deeper background, background on the animosity between these two countries. And I mean, maybe this is inaccurate, but every reference, and you see it has quite a few footnote references here.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, because it has footnotes, that means it can't possibly be wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but they're to real pages, right? Which are from reliable sources.

[Paris Martineau]

The article summaries that Jeff just posted did. We're summarizing a real article that was below. It was a real source, but it still got.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In fact, it was trying to read one story, which by the way, let's go back to that for one second. What happened was you can, you could. This is a really interesting case because you can track it of what it did wrong if you go to the next post in that feed. I went into the story and it had an antecedent problem. One paragraph on its own. This is a story about Alberta. Right. So one paragraph on its own says. Says the largely French speaking province of Quebec held referendums in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it assumed. It put an assumed antecedent of Alberta, a large French speaking province of Commence. Right. So it did summarize what it had, but it has no sense of meaning, so it couldn't know it was wrong. You can't program in right or wrong there. And so you're relying on something that's risky.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I'm sure none of those lines about the conflict that you looked up, Leo, had an antecedent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My fear is the present White House is using perplexity to figure out what to do about India and Pakistan.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I wouldn't recommend that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay?

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm not suggesting that. But for a casual user who wants to understand what's going on in the news more deeply, this is a hugely valuable thing and much more.

[Paris Martineau]

I would also recommend just Googling what's going on and much more than a website and reading something written by humans whose job it is to get it right.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you play with Google's new thing in the lab?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I love it. The language thing?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, not that one. They have a new rendition of Search.

[Leo Laporte]

Hang on, we'll. We'll take a look at it in just a bit. You're watching intelligent machines with one intelligent person and two people who are doofuses. No, I respect, respect and admire both of you. And I just think you're using AI wrong. That's all our show today. I happen to like my little AI buddy. And by the way, somebody on MacBreak, I'm being facetious. Somebody on MacBrake Weekly pointed out, you know, you're wearing this thing all the time. Just hope it doesn't get subpoenaed.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, how many times have I pointed that out?

[Leo Laporte]

Have you said that all your.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it was the first thing I brought up when you said I'm going to. Yeah, I just said what happens when the cops ask for all that recording and suddenly you have a recording of all the crimes you commit every week?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't commit any crimes, but it is a good point. None that are involved in a lawsuit that all of this would be part of discovery. So probably if I were a lawyer, I wouldn't be wearing this. Let's put it that way. Be a bad idea. Paris Martineau is here. Martineau.01 on the signal T and Arismartineau. By the way, I looked up because one of the responses from the White House to this whole new Signal issue was, oh well, signal's just on all the government phones. It's government approved. So what did I do? I went to Perplexity. I said, is Signal Fedramp approved? Absolutely not. Signal is not Fedramp authorized. You cannot put it on a government phone. It is not. Some federal agencies such as USAID are permitted use of Signal in exceptional circumstances.

[Paris Martineau]

Usaid, which does not exist anymore, Department.

[Leo Laporte]

Of Defense and other agencies specifically stated Signal is not approved for official communication and does not comply with federal records retention or FOIA requirements. And then it refers me to this article from ABC News, which could be wrong. Wrong. But I'm gonna say that that's pretty good analysis. Our show today brought to by Big id, the next generation of AI powered data security, compliance and privacy solutions. AI is transforming businesses, but you know, garbage in garbage out with data risk bias and compliance challenges. There is a big question. Are you adopting AI responsibly? Well, Big idea helps you with this. They deliver end to end AI and data governance to help enterprises manage risk, enforce policies and ensure responsible AI adoption. You need this ensure that AI is only accessing safe to use relevant data. It automatically tags sensitive information by policy and type. It's the only leading solution to uncover dark data through AI classification to identify AI risk and to manage the data lifecycle and scale your AI strategy. BigID integrates with your existing tech stack with unmatched data source coverage and allows you to automate privacy and security workflows. You can take action on data risks with automated remediation orchestrations. You can automate privacy management, regulatory compliance, data rights requests and more. Partners include ServiceNow, Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, Google, AWS, AWS, pretty much all the players. With big IDs advanced AI models, you're going to gain visibility and control over all your data. It's the platform that Intuit named number one for data classification in accuracy, speed and scalability. Big ID has some pretty big clients. They equipped the US army to illuminate dark data. Imagine how much dark data there is. They've been collecting this stuff for years. And to automate the Army's data retention, U.S. army training and Doctrine Command gave us a really nice quote. The first wow moment with BigID came with being able to have that single interface that inventories a variety of data holdings, including structured and unstructured Data across emails, zip files, SharePoint databases and more. To see that this is the quote continues to see that match and to be able to correlate across those is completely novel. I have never seen a capability that brings us together like BigID does. Really. This is an amazing, innovative company. CNBC recognized Bigid as one of the top 25 startups for the enterprise. They were named the Inc 5000 and the Deloitte 500 for four years in a row. The publisher of Cyber Defense magazine says quote, big ID embodies three major features we judges look for to become winners. One, understanding tomorrow's threats today. Two, providing a cost effective solution. And three, innovating and unexpected ways that can help mitigate cyber risk and get one step ahead of the next breach. Start protecting your sensitive data wherever your data lives. BigID.com Im get a free demo. See how BigID can help your organization reduce data risk and accelerate the adoption of generative AI. That's B I G I D.com IM by the way, when you get there, there's a free guide that is really nice to help you understand the risks of generative AI and data driven strategies to ensure something we're all behind responsible and compliant AI adoption. You'll find that free [e-mail] Im reduce your risk and protect your sensitive data data and accelerate responsible AI adoption. @bigid.com Im we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. All right, I'm gonna keep defending to the death our AI overlords. Meet the robots.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go to.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Labs.

[Leo Laporte]

Pick a line. Oh, we want to do the labs. Yeah, Labs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then try AI mode.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. Is it labs.google.com AI mode. All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I of course couldn't use this in my regular Google account because Google. But I.

[Leo Laporte]

You're a workspacer a new search experiment that uses advanced reasoning, thinking, and multimodal capabilities to answer even your toughest questions.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is meant to be kind of a new search from Google.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Curious what you think of it, so let's try it. What should I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What should I ask your Pakistan question.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. What is the source of the antagonism? I'm writing it bigger words now for Google. Between Pakistan and India. This looks a lot. Yeah. Oh, you know what, though? They started right away with the partition of India in 1947. Yep, yep. The. The religious issues. And of course the biggest issue is the status of Kashmir. Yep. Territorial. This looks pretty good. I like the way this is delivered too. It's in. It's basically an outline form, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Ask it a kind of consumer question.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The best one ever.

[Leo Laporte]

What. What is the best running shoe?

[Paris Martineau]

Something that you know the answer to.

[Leo Laporte]

This someone who pronates. I do know the answer to this because I have a pronation. I pronate.

[Paris Martineau]

I do whatever the other one is.

[Leo Laporte]

I need stability and support over pronation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Notice what it did here. It gave you understanding and all kinds of stuff. Oh, did it finally give you the shot shoes? Yeah, this is actually improved from when I used it earlier today.

[Leo Laporte]

Brooks Adrenaline didn't even give links there. These are stability. Focused on stability shoes. Pro knit.

[Paris Martineau]

Now, I'm curious, if you mouse over those links, can you see whether or not. Or I guess if you like copy and open the link, can you see whether it's a. Like an affiliate link? Ah, because Google getting a cut.

[Leo Laporte]

You are really. You are really the investigative reporter, aren't you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's. Let's create a blank note pad. I can't even do it.

[Paris Martineau]

I like it.

[Leo Laporte]

What is going on? Where's the new note?

[Paris Martineau]

Go up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there it is.

[Paris Martineau]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, now let's.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, grandpa. It's all there.

[Leo Laporte]

You do that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoops. Where'd it go? Where'd it go? Okay, let's make it really, really big.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Click and click.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's definitely an affiliate link, right? Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, click on it.

[Leo Laporte]

See, by the way, this is the one I ended up buying was a hoka. So are they too.

[Paris Martineau]

Coffee for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at this. Look at this. This is actually quite good. So not only is it mentioning the brand, it's now showing me reviews. It's also showing me a variety of places I can go to buy it. The most popular, which is Dick's Sporting Goods, the nearest buy, which is rei, the best price. Oh, and also, by the way, it's showing things like 90 day returns in stock, free delivery. This is quite. I think this is useful. And then it shows the prices, which are all pretty much.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's funny, earlier today I used it and I asked for best pizza and it gave me no links and it gave me kind of just articles.

[Paris Martineau]

What is it gonna link you to? To buy pizza online.

[Leo Laporte]

Is the best pizza, One of the best pizza near. Near me in Manhattan? I better say John's next door to the news Salt Hank Sandwich shop on Bleecker street in the West Village. No, it didn't see there.

[Paris Martineau]

It's giving you locations.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it does say it's subjective and depends on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the classic New York slice. What else? Does it have other options?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I was about to say. Wait, no, keep going. We got.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There you go.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, keep going down Lombardi. You got either Fancy boys toys.

[Mike McHugh]

Unique.

[Leo Laporte]

Unique and innovative.

[Paris Martineau]

Prince street should not be on there, but I understand why it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you understand why artichoke pizza. That sounds great.

[Paris Martineau]

Artichoke sucks. No, it's not artichoke pizza. It's a place called Artichoke. The slices are as big as your head, thick and like they're.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, look at them. Oh, my God. Look at the size of that thing.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a good showing from an artichoke. Look at the green one down there. That's kind of more.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's. Nothing wrong with a pesto pizza.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I agree with. With.

[Paris Martineau]

These are all doing artichoke pizza. They're. They're all showing the best, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, now, but you guys apparently are pizza sophisticates. Would you disagree that this looks like a pretty good listing, especially for somebody out of towner.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Like me. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, ask it. Ask about the best pizza in New Haven. Something controversial.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I do know the answer to that one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Figured you would.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I.

[Paris Martineau]

This doesn't have my top pizza choices on it, so I consider it to be wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I should have said it's.

[Paris Martineau]

It said Manhattan, so. Actually you should ask New York City.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I think that's Manhattan. Ah, no. Hey, serious pizza pedigree.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the argument is between Frank Pepe and what?

[Leo Laporte]

Sally's a pizza.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So why don't you ask it which of those two is the better one?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a Pepe's guy, but I went to school with some Sally's folks. I understand. Understand modern pizza.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Defend. Ask it something funny. I mean, ask it to defend those.

[Leo Laporte]

Who this is just A search. Dude.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What are you right? Well, no, because it's now AI Ish.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is pretty damn good. The best tech podcast. What's the best tech podcast?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know if we're gonna like the answer to this, guys. What's the best tech podcast featuring two old guys and a young woman?

[Leo Laporte]

If it doesn't come up with intelligent machines? The Verge this week in tech. Okay, but not all. And Rocket, which is no longer in business. But okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, reply all, while previously hosted by two old men's, now includes a younger female host, Emmanuel De Zozi. I don't know how to pronounce his last name. Who is not a younger female host. He's a man.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a guy.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, okay, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, okay. But you know what? I wouldn't expect AI to really be great on gender. David and Nilay are considered older in the tech podcasting space. They're not going to like that. Alex Kranz brings a slightly younger perspective. Okay, you know, they didn't. How about strong female voices?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ask it for the best podcast about artificial intelligence. The best new about artificial intellectuals.

[Paris Martineau]

This has been a podcast for like two months.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know. And we're not new. Confuse it.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see. I think this is pretty good. This seems to me about as it's better than. This is their response. This is actually their response to perplexity. I would say.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nvidia's podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, it's referring to stories from 2020, articles from 2024. So new is probably not. Yeah. You know what? For an average Joe, I think this probably be a good. These would be good recommendations.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So if you're a publisher, you're looking at this, you're clutching your throat probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because all these articles that people put a lot of effort into.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It shows you don't need them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It also shows, I think that the training on this is out of date because here we are in May 2025 and it's showing me articles.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So ask them something.

[Leo Laporte]

February 2024.

[Jeff Jarvis]

War.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? Huh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What can we ask if that's.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it did know that Intelligent Machines, our podcast, used to be called this Week in Google.

[Leo Laporte]

It did know that.

[Paris Martineau]

I asked what is the podcast?

[Leo Laporte]

Intelligent Machines and it, you know, is the pope today. Let's see how.

[Paris Martineau]

No. Say who will be the pope?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, no, I'm just how well trained it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How would you say that?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, boy, Sede vacante. It's so funny. I was watching this stream on the New York Times. They're streaming the whole thing, which is cool. And they showed the cardinals going up and giving their vow. And when the cardinal is from Italy, the Latin sounds very Italian, se vante. And when the park. When he's from, you know, the U.S. it sounds completely different. It's very funny. The Latin is spoken.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I was very impressed with the typography of the book they were holding as they were doing their. Their vow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that was nice, wasn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Really beautiful. I went to Padre and I said, you know, what do you know about. He said, oh, I pass by there, that office every day. I'll go and take a video for you. I have this vision that it's still people making things.

[Leo Laporte]

And, you know, I don't think they're eliminating it. Did you see the. The nerds getting all upset about the typography on Franciscus? Francis's.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, the typography was bad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was the kerning.

[Paris Martineau]

The kerning was awful.

[Leo Laporte]

So this. You can't blame this.

[Paris Martineau]

The kerning was bad and a human, I assume, chiseled.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. I was gonna say, you can't blame this on AI. Let me just show you an image so you know what we're talking about for those of you watching at home.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's not. We're not talking about Leo's shirt, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Is, by the way, a lovely.

[Mike McHugh]

That's corning.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is a Corn Corning ware.

[Leo Laporte]

So you remember, though, when I was out there, I wore my avocado shirt.

[Paris Martineau]

Leo, when he came to visit us in New York City, that was the only reason he was there, is just because he wanted to pay his homage. He wore an avocado shirt, which he's worn on this podcast, which was. Which was apparently so popular that as he walked down the street, people flocked, ran to him to be like, I love your avocado shirt in New York City. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All these. All these. All these blase New Yorkers are going, hey, nice avocado shirt. There you go. So this is the spring collection from Brazos Designs in San Miguel. Diane Brazos. It means arms. A, B, R, A, Z, O, S. I got a new tranche of shirts before the tariff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A tranche. Oh, I see. Right, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, Franciscus. So what they believe is this is an unholy alliance of a human carver engraver, using software that doesn't understand kerning at all. So you see how the R, A and N are spread out between.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Around the A, an entire space.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And a lot of the geeks, a lot of the nerds, including the senior executive creative director at the type foundry, Monotype type, were very upset. Very upset. Woe be unto the person, he said, who decided to do it the way that they did it. Just because it's a bad decision that will last for a long time unless they change it. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And let's remember, where did. Where did Roman capitals come from?

[Leo Laporte]

Rome. Rome.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Trajan.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In fact, we know that because the U in Franciscus is actually a V, which in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you look up Trajan's column, you will see the original Roman capitals.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Beautiful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're gorgeous. It's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

The Vatican should have followed Renaissance models for Franciscus with classical capitals closer to the Trajan typeface than time Roman, openly spaced. Ideally, they should have been carved by hand and designed. And this was the key. Nobody knows how it happened, but they think not designed by the carver, but designed by software which didn't know about kerning. Michael Schmidt, a Catholic stonemason and artisan from Michigan who uses traditional methods, told the Catholic, the National Catholic Register that the execution of the papal tombstone was regrettable. It just looks awful. It doesn't look right. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. I mean, anyone that looks, looks at that inscription knows that it's offensive to the eyes.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, that guy was just waiting for the day the news would call him on the papal resting place.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Michael Schmidt who said the execution was regrettable, but not exactly in so many words. I like how he worked Bob Dylan in there. Dylan. I don't understand really what the reference is, but, you know, he's from Michigan.

[Paris Martineau]

Leo, I'm looking at this shirt website. Did you get the cactus garden fabric before it sold out?

[Leo Laporte]

I did not. I got. Oh, yes, I did. Oh, I'm sorry.

[Paris Martineau]

Garden one is good.

[Leo Laporte]

I also got the succulents.

[Paris Martineau]

I got the orchids are compelling.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is my new. It's this new summer collection.

[Paris Martineau]

Next time, next time you're in New York, I got a guy who will make you a customer. Custom short sleeve shirt in whatever fabric you want. His name is Ramon. Anybody in New York looking for custom clothing is a really good price? He's a lovely little man named Memory side.

[Leo Laporte]

What did he. Did he do your bridesmaids dress or what did he know?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I just have a bunch of. Normally my summer office wear is short sleeve, kind of colorful print, kind of similar to yours, but not as aggressive of a print with kind of like a camp collar. And I wanted ones that would work, work with Shorts and kind of hit at a certain length. And I was like, well, rather than paying 100 bucks in the store, I could just pay 100 bucks to Ramon and get my fabric. Whatever fabric I want.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I just put in the discord. The next shirt. We have to have this for intelligent machines.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. This was a show briefly about AI, but it's no longer it's a show about shirts. It's a show about whatever the hell. Okay, so let me. Let me jump to present. Put your. Oh, oh, I've got. I can. What? Wait a minute. I gotta hold on. Just. You guys. You guys hold on for just a moment face.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you think he's gonna come back with his own? His own or someone else's?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think.

[Paris Martineau]

Who'd be the funniest person for the face to have on there?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So put your friend's face on your shoulder shirt along with flamingos.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that's. That's the friend that I would want to have on there. So, Flamingo, are you a good enough.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Friend to wear my face?

[Paris Martineau]

I do think it would be quite fun if you've been like, who's that on your shirt? And be like, oh, I host a podcast with him. You may have seen him on Twitter. Like, oh, yeah, I've seen.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. We'll edit that out. I didn't go to Ramon for these, but I got this as a Christmas gift from my wife.

[Mike McHugh]

I'm gonna be his face.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For those of you listening, they are boxer shorts in red with I love my wife and Lisa and Lisa's face.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff was certain it would be your own face.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, no, no, no. I'm not the egotist.

[Paris Martineau]

I really love that. I would have loved to get a camera on her face as you were unwrapping the gift.

[Leo Laporte]

She loved it. I bet you she went to myfacet shirt.com and got that. Actually put your friend's face in a T shirt. Those are good shirts. Maybe I will get a shirt with your faces on it. That's great. All right. I was gonna. As long as we're in Google labs, I'll show you one of the things. We were actually talking about this on, on Windows Weekly earlier, the little language lessons. These are also AI generated, built with Gemini Bite sized learning experiments, they call them here. I'll just quickly log into my Google account. It's an early stage experiment. Although it's intended to help language learners, this tool uses generative AI, so its outputs may not be accurate or Complete. We recommend cross referencing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo should be careful probably about learning language from an AI, but I kind of thought this was cool. This one's called slang Hang. You can choose the language.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Stories said that it was going to be.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, no, can. I would do. Let's do English and let's do Gen Z slang.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh good. English. Generate some slang. Let's just see what slang it can come up with. So this would be for learning English. Two strangers, Maya and Ben, find themselves next to each other at a laundromat late at night. Maya, a college student, is folding her laundry, while Ben, a graphic designer, is staring intently at a spinning dryer. Lost in thought. They strike up a conversation initially about the mundane aspects of laundry, but it quickly veers into more personal. I swear this whole laundry thing is.

[Paris Martineau]

Such a pain, especially at like 2 in the morning.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Man, I really thought we were going to be getting. I thought we're going to get beating some yassified. But no.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, tell me about it. I always put it off until it's like dangerously close to having nothing clean to wear. So these are real. I mean these aren't, you know, outrageous, crazy.

[Paris Martineau]

They're nothing crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing crazy. Hustle hit you hard. Yeah, you'd be kind of learning how people talk the whole nine yards or some. Oh, look. And if I hover over it, it explains what the whole nine yards means or what.

[Mike McHugh]

True.

[Leo Laporte]

That is true. That is an expression of agreement or acknowledgement. It means that's true. Yeah, yeah. No way. An expression of surprise, disbelief or enthusiasm. So do you know enough German?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was just looking at the German here and I don't know whether I do or not. Not where I. I can do.

[Paris Martineau]

We're going to ask you to act out both voices.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, that's fine.

[Paris Martineau]

I could do French.

[Mike McHugh]

Some friends.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's do French. Let's see. I don't. I don't know enough slang to really know.

[Paris Martineau]

No one allow online is allowed to make fun of our French.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the rule for two strangers. Elise and Antoine find themselves unexpectedly sharing a bench at the quirky overgrown botanical garden. And Nant Elise is a freelance book editor lost in thought while reviewing a manuscript. And Antoine is an amateur ornithologist hoping to spot a rare warbler that has been reported in the area. The encounter is sparked by Antoine's rather intrusive bird watching.

[Paris Martineau]

This doesn't count as slang. Toma.

[Leo Laporte]

That does not sound like slang. But there is some good. There's some good. There's some good stuff in here about how you would address a taxicab driver. You know, here's the things that it feeds you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can't ask an account question.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's a language lesson. But this is the kind of thing that the guy at Duolingo was talking about. So if you're. This is European, from French, for taking a taxi. But they also have some useful tips, like use polite requests. With Vouloir, even though you're talking to a cab driver, in France, it's considered polite to use the formal verb instead of or count. So this is good.

[Paris Martineau]

I think this is actually a great product for my mom specifically. Every time she goes to a different country, she's looking for this specific sort of lessons, like taking a taxi, going to the restaurant.

[Leo Laporte]

In the old days, there were little books that would have this, you know, kind of stuff in them. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the first time I went to Switzerland with my wife. Wife say in Sweden with my wife, I, I, I read the Berlitz. We get off the plane, we go out for dinner because we're very tired. I go to the restaurant, I go to the host and I say, putting two fingers up to be very clear, svo. And the hostess speaks to me in Swedish and I wait till she's done and then I say, in, in Swedish. I'm sorry, I don't speak Swedish. Do you speak English? It's like, why did you start this? Sorry, sorry, John.

[Leo Laporte]

What language was that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of course we speak English. English, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Sweet.

[Paris Martineau]

It's very polite of them to respond to you in Swedish. If that was a French person, they would have responded in English and ended up with UF at the end.

[Mike McHugh]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

They would have, I thought. Anyway, look, this is a use of AI that is kind of interesting. A human could easily do this. This is taking somebody's job, I guess. But.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean, Du Lingo is currently under fire because. Because of a very similar thing. There are a lot of people online over the last week or so since Duolingo made the announcement that they would be laying off a large amount of their contract workforce that had previously been employed in some form to do language lessons or check the grammar on certain things for their language lessons. Now that all be done by AI and people are up in arms over.

[Leo Laporte]

It, here's one for you. Paris career dream. A playful way to explore career possibilities with AI Would you like to try that now?

[Paris Martineau]

I'd rather shoot myself with a gun.

[Leo Laporte]

What was a previous job that you've done?

[Paris Martineau]

Journalists. Journalists and journalists.

[Leo Laporte]

Used to be a journalist in a dying industry. Next.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, we're not ready to say used to be yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Not yet. Not yet. She's still a no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're journeying new possibilities.

[Leo Laporte]

You're doing journalism right now.

[Paris Martineau]

Right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Now. Did you investigate and verify information obtained from multiple sources produce accurate.

[Paris Martineau]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you interview diverse sources including but not limited to experts, witnesses and officials?

[Paris Martineau]

You bet she was.

[Leo Laporte]

You did all of this stuff?

[Paris Martineau]

I did.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you edit and proofread written work?

[Paris Martineau]

Did you collaborate with editors?

[Leo Laporte]

You did all of that? Yes. So let's generate some insights, see what else might.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Might be useful then.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's see. So these are. These are.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, according to LinkedIn's AI, I'm very qualified. Had to work at Chipotle.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a fun one. So this is Google's version of the same thing from Google Labs. So they just added this, didn't they, at LinkedIn? Did you? You did it, huh?

[Paris Martineau]

I didn't do that. Just whenever I opened the jobs tab on LinkedIn amidst. I want to try reporting jobs. I keep getting adverts for 75 staff member positions at Chipotle.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, where do I go to do this? LinkedIn here, Jobs says.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's probably not going to be that exciting for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Look tops. Top picks for me shipped shift supervisor at AutoZone in Berkeley.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Franchise owner at Chick Fil, a corporate support center.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I could be. This makes sense for me, right? I can be a part time educator. Oh, where at Lulu Lemon.

[Paris Martineau]

O. We'd love to see those buns. And some leggings.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's what they say. Jobs where I'm more likely. Hear back. Director of experience at Central. General Manager at Dave and Busters.

[Paris Martineau]

You could be the GM at Dave and Busters. You could. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Service Chipotle.

[Paris Martineau]

We could work together.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's get a job together.

[Paris Martineau]

You could also be the neuroanasthesia.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. MGM in Minnesota? Oh, it's remote Director of Drone operations for Doordash.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's not bad. That'd be interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, hey, I'm really qualified for this. Division Chief in Neuroanaesthesiology. 520,000 a year.

[Jeff Jarvis]

As long as you have perplexity next to you, you'll be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Yeah, wait a minute. Based on your profile preferences activity, I should be the chief of neuroanaesthesiology or.

[Paris Martineau]

A GM at Dave and Buster's. You know, one or the other.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I could be a visiting scholar in physics at Stevens Institute Technology. Which is like the MIT of New Jersey.

[Leo Laporte]

I could volunteer as the board treasurer for the Romanian League in Defense of Animals.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I could be senior industry thought leadership lead at Google Ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Nightclub crew chief clerk at Save Mart. There's some good jobs in here. Who says? Who says people aren't hiring? What's strange is this is apparently based on my LinkedIn profile. Director Ministry at Vanderblohm and Piedmont, California.

[Paris Martineau]

You'd be an early applicant if you apply.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd be one of the first to apply. Oh, I could be the box office supervisor at Mountain Winery.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, you could be the head of ops there. So you finally get your. Oh, you could work at the Spirit Halloween. That would be great.

[Leo Laporte]

So great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I could be the social media content creator at Craft A Click.

[Leo Laporte]

You're getting a lot of German ones, aren't you, there? I don't know where these come. These are real jobs. Presumably, presumably.

[Paris Martineau]

Presumably.

[Leo Laporte]

But they apparently don't consider my extensive experience broadcasting at all. Not one broadcast.

[Paris Martineau]

They immediately are like, nah, that doesn't qualify for anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's like it. That's kind of like that.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm often saying this podcast reminds me, like, of being at a Dave and Busters.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna. I'm gonna tailor my resume. Resume to this job. Am I a good fit for this job?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now? The ads you're going to get. Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, no. I shouldn't have clicked that. All right, all right. What else? A little AI News. New York Times is doing very well. This is actually journalism news. They've added a quarter million new digital subscribers.

[Paris Martineau]

How many of those subscribers for the games?

[Leo Laporte]

It's what? Wordle. It's Wordle.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's Wordle.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't say. 14% jump in digital subscription revenue. This is one of the few newspapers that's doing well though, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's. It's winner take all. And so, yeah, they're. They're there.

[Leo Laporte]

They're the one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Post is now falling apart like a bad sweater.

[Leo Laporte]

Nearly half of the company subscribers now subscribe to more than one of the products, which include Core News Report, Cooking Games, Wirecutter, the Athletic. Average revenue per user in. In the quarter rose to $9.54. That's up 3.6%. They're paying more for their subscriptions. Digital advertising revenue went up as well. Revenue from affiliate Referral and licensing, 3.7% up. Operating costs were up too, though. $577.3 million almost. That's half a billion dollars a year.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A year. I'm Sorry, That's a quarter.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's 2 billion a year. Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. When everybody says, oh, we're going to save journalism, we just put together $500 million for a huge fund called Press Forward. That's a quarter of the New York Times.

[Leo Laporte]

That's kind of amazing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is. And God bless the efforts to raise that money.

[Leo Laporte]

But, yeah, and I. I put this in because. Okay, you don't like AI. Okay, you don't like Google. Okay, you can call the Auburn University help desk.

[Paris Martineau]

I love this story.

[Leo Laporte]

They've been answering public phone calls for 70 years. Ask them whatever you want. They will die trying to answer the.

[Paris Martineau]

Question, should we call them right now? Do you think they'll. What are the recording in? Whatever.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's the best tech podcast?

[Leo Laporte]

The phone number is 333-4844. 4244. And this article says a day's worth of calls to Foy Hall. That's the place where these Auburn students are sitting, waiting to answer your question. They're librarians, by the way, basically. In fact, there used to be stacks of books at the desk. Encyclopedias and dictionaries, reference texts, phone books, the Farmer's Almanac, Guinness Book of World Records, Emily Post etiquette. Now they just have three imacs max. And that might explain why a day's worth of calls would look like someone's browser history. I guess back in the day, who.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don'T we used to call City Desk in the middle of the night.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

An assistant city owner named Bill had a rule, and that because it was always people calling as the bar is closing. A drunken bet, Right. So he said, always give him an answer, preferably the wrong one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think it's lonely people, but they're asking legitimate questions.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I think this is awesome. I think it's awesome to have someone to call to ask questions.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very cool. This is a story from the Oxford American, an independent newspaper or journal. And. And it's for Auburn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's not Oxford, uk, that's Oxford.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Oxford, Mississippi, probably. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

They have an issue coming up called the Y' all street issue up there that indicates which Oxford it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Y' All Street. Not Wall street, but Y' All Street. Yeah. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Coin to describe Dallas's booming financial sector. Y' all street inspired our coverage of Southern industry. Unique, fraught, promising, and ever changing. I don't know what that was.

[Leo Laporte]

I am going to get to visit a lot of these. These small towns on my Mississippi river cruise next in September. Oh, I'M going some very interesting places.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it a paddle wheel boat?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's a Viking Twain. It's a Viking long boat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where does it stop?

[Leo Laporte]

Everywhere. So it is. I'll read you some.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does it go to Burlington, Iowa, my old stomping ground?

[Leo Laporte]

It does. Really? Yeah. Let me tell you. Let me tell you. We start New Orleans. We go to Darrow, Louisiana, St. Francisville, Louisiana, Natchez, Mississippi, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mississippi, Memphis, Tennessee. We're going to go to Graceland, of course, Paducah, Kentucky, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, St. Louis. We spent it overnight there because it's a big city, you know, Alton on the trail of Lewis and Clark, Hannibal, where Mark Twain was. And there it is. Burlington, Iowa, ladies and gentlemen. Gentlemen. Geez.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Burlington, United States.

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All of this says United States, but it's Iowa. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's where. That's where I lived when I had my ulcer in first grade.

[Leo Laporte]

You grew up in Burlington. So I'm going to visit historic Burlington. That's, that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then I went back. I decided to, to challenge this memory. And so when it came time for my teaching newspaper internship, Northwestern, I went to work for the Burlington, Iowa Hawkeye.

[Leo Laporte]

You could have right next door. We're going to the Quad Cities where the John Deere pavilion and the famous John Deere homes are. We're going to be doing that tour. I'm excited about that. La Crosse, Wisconsin. Red Wing, Wisconsin. And then we end up in St. Paul. Pretty excited about that.

[Paris Martineau]

That'll be super.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why don't you give that to Google and ask it for the. The top things you should do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a great idea. Plan trips for me. This is where I'll be. That's a great. I will do that.

[Paris Martineau]

Pick places for me to eat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to some.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The best local cuisine.

[Leo Laporte]

We're doing some local cuisine. We're going to some plantation homes. It's going to be. I think, actually I'm very excited about it. It's a chance to see America. America the real and not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have you stopped at the border?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, Just a reminder, if you are a regular listener to our shows, Dan Morin, who is a regular on our shows and is also a contributor to Six Colors.com longtime Mac journalist and a novelist, really writes great sci fi novels, is going to be on Jeopardy tonight. And we don't know how he's going to do. He can't tell anybody, but he did say Tonight's the night. May 7th. Uh, watch Jeopardy. And I will be watching to see how Dan does. I have a feeling since he's been talking a lot like watch tonight that he did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, I could be watch tonight. This is the only chance to see.

[Leo Laporte]

Me may maybe, but I feel like, you know, if you would every once in a while somebody so badly that they have to leave before Final Jeopardy. Like there's just an empty podium where they were because they just were so terrible. That's what I'm afraid would happen to me. So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I have a San Francisco question for you, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, hold that thought. Gonna have one more ad break. When we come back, a San Francisco question picks of the week coming up as well. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Our guest earlier, if you didn't catch it, Mike McHugh. He was really interesting. Surf Social is his new app and I'm, I'm looking forward to its public release. I think it's going to be a very interesting product. We're also glad you're here because, because if you're a member of Club Twit, you should probably be. We will like to tell you that we're gonna be doing some things in the club that we normally do out in the world. We've done Apple events for years. We've simulcast Apple events but we had to stop because they first threatened to take us off of YouTube and then they went after us on Twitch. So the Apple came keynote, the WWDC keynote which is June 9th is going to be in the club. Only in the club Twit discord, not out in the public. Same thing for Google I O. Jeff and Paris say they'll join me for Google I o which is May 20th. It's a week from Tuesday. Wow, can you believe that? 10am Pacific. They're telling us it's going to be a two hour keynote the day before the Microsoft build keynote. So we're going to do all these keynotes in the club. So I wanted everybody to know, know now's the time to join the club. It's seven bucks a month. There's another reason to join the club now because they're putting in, they're putting in Sean Connery on, on Jeopardy on Saturday Night Live. Now first of all, the club is full of great waggish funny people in the club to a discord. So it's a great social network but also you get ad free versions of all the shows and you support the shows that we make here. You know, right now we are, yes, we have ads but the advertising is only about 75% of our revenue. We need the additional 25% and that's the club members make that up and we really are grateful to you. Seven bucks a month, $84 a year. It's a club that everybody should join right now.

[Paris Martineau]

You should show the Hooters photo that someone made of you.

[Leo Laporte]

Me working at Hooters.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Working at Hooters.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. See that's up there because if you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don'T join the club, that's when it's going to come to down to. He's gonna be.

[Paris Martineau]

I might have to go back. You know what the club.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I want to work at Hooters.

[Paris Martineau]

He looks so happy.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a happy Hooters didn't. Aren't they filing chapter 11? Isn't there trouble in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're still, they're still going some places anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Twitter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not that I ever go.

[Leo Laporte]

I have been once. I, I. We brought our teenage son and his friends just to just to give him a taste of America.

[Paris Martineau]

Convince Hank to go back with you for a assault. Hank video Somehow returning with my dad to Hooters. I don't know what the content of.

[Leo Laporte]

This would be but no, I think not. I think not. He's look, he's moved on. He's with Doja Cat now. So there's no interest. Our show today, brought to you by our good friends at Melissa. We, you know, we just celebrated 20 years at TWIT. They are celebrating. Celebrating 40 years as the trusted data quality expert. And man, they are everywhere. Whether it's manufacturing and supply chain management. The healthcare industry AI has the power to boost efficiency, personalize customer experiences and spark innovation. But you gotta have good quality data. Garbage in, garbage out, right? Using poor quality data can result in expensive embarrassing mistakes. Stakes in areas like healthcare. Using AI models with inaccurate data could result in a wrong diagnosis or worse. A recent study found only 4% 4% of companies consider their data ready for AI models. And you know, even the most advanced AI models can't correct underlying data quality issues. That's where Melissa comes in. Imagine having a data expert that never sleeps. A data scientist on your team. Melissa's intelligent system verifies that data identity to prevent fraud in gaming operations. It's used in medicine to ensure valid patient and medicine identification. To make sure the patients are getting the right medication and the right dosage. Yes, Melissa does that. Securely updates and verifies constituent data across government databases. It's used with financial institutions and their know your customers requirements which enables verification and monitoring. Melissa guides you through complex data management management with ease, making advanced data quality accessible to everyone from small businesses to enterprises. With real time data validation, comprehensive enrichment, cross reference verification with gold standard reference data and intelligent anomaly detection. It's no wonder Melissa is the trusted data quality expert worldwide. Melissa securely. You don't have to worry about your data with Melissa. By the way, they securely encrypt all file transfers. They have an information security ecosystem ecosystem built on the ISO 27001 framework. They adhere to GDPR policies, SOC 2 compliance. Of course, compliance is job one. Contact Melissa's team. Learn how they can elevate your business and improve your data quality. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com TWiT melissa.com TWiT we thank him so much for supporting intelligent machines. Thank you, Melissa. Melissa. All right, Jeff, what was it you wanted to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just wanted to ask you a San Francisco question.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you going to go into the city and go to the orb store and share your scan?

[Leo Laporte]

My iri.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I think Orb. Orb or. Or no.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're talking of course about Sam Altman's world company. This is. He's a big investor in it. They created a cryptocurrency called World Coin and in some way that's not immediately clear, tied it to an orb that scans your iris and yes, apparently they've opened a store in downtown San Francisco. A what store?

[Paris Martineau]

A storm downtown San Francisco. I don't know what you're laughing at.

[Leo Laporte]

This is in. In Union Square on Sunday. We had Ian Thompson on who has been to the orb store, in fact even has scanned his iris. He says it's a little creepy, it's a little weird. There's the orb. When you scan it, you get Worldcoin, about $50 worth of Worldcoin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

40 now. I think it's gone down.

[Leo Laporte]

40. Yeah, well, it goes up and down depending on the value of worldcoin. There is the mayor of San Francisco looking so distinguished, standing in between two orbs.

[Paris Martineau]

The new between two ferns.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be a good show. Between two orbs. The orb experience. The orb is an Nvidia powered device that verifies unique humanness. Oh. The technology creates an anonymous verification that confirms humanity without compromising privacy. Reason being they delete the scanner scan and they just keep a hash of it and that data remains on your individual device. The storefront. This is a press release, of course, from the world folks. The storefront serves as both a proof of human verification center and an educational hub. I mean, I don't think it's a bad thing to have some sort of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But should they be doing it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Trusted way to verify that somebody is, is human and is who they say they are. Authentication is one of the big problems in the world. They're going to open these stores, by the way, in six cities.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are they their stores or are they gamer stores?

[Paris Martineau]

Which gamers?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, okay, so they're in a vacant, a vacant storefront next to Macy's downtown.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm going to a vacant storefront in downtown Macy's. Just my eye in the orb.

[Leo Laporte]

See, it's not a giant to just.

[Paris Martineau]

Go into a, a wood prison to give my eye to the orb.

[Leo Laporte]

You could see that most of the 4,000 square foot store is in fact not used. There's just a small circle of wood in the middle and then it goes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Up into the spaceship and goes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's got six orbs in there and you go in. And that's very disappointing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was hoping for something a little.

[Leo Laporte]

It isn't the class classiest thing in the world, is it? But it does solve a problem. We have an authentication issue. Does it solve a problem? Well, yes, because what do you think all this stuff with passwords and pass keys and all and you know, driver's license, it's all about saying that you, Paris Martineau, are the Paris and Martineau. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

In this case, would every device have a, an orb?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Scanning my eye in the orb.

[Leo Laporte]

Help me log in to Facebook once to the orb. Oh, I guess I get what you're saying.

[Paris Martineau]

How does it, how does it.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe, I don't know. You go once to the orb reception center, scan your eye and then it sends your phone. Maybe the phone says, yeah, I'm a human. I don't know. I don't know. That's a good question.

[Paris Martineau]

There are a lot of open questions.

[Jeff Jarvis]

With you get the chip implanted while you're there, while you're staring at the thing behind you. They put the chip in your head.

[Leo Laporte]

Tools for Humanity.

[Paris Martineau]

Puff of air in your eye as the chip goes in. So you get distracted by it. You have to look at a house that's blurry in it until.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's your eye doctor. Come on.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I was confused. I thought that was the orb.

[Leo Laporte]

The technology has raised concerns about whether it will keep. This is from a real estate blog. Apparently.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Use of empty stores has raised.

[Leo Laporte]

Concerns about whether it will keep people's sensitive information secure. But Tools for Humanity says the identity data is instantly deleted from the orb after the process is complete. Users can use the app and their world ID with compatible services to verify they're not an algorithm. Algorithm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They have like a credit card, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

I am not an algorithm.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm always getting asked if I'm an algorithm, and I have no way to prove them wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't even know costar had a blog, but apparently they do. And all sorts of interesting real estate information here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thinking about.

[Paris Martineau]

They're saying that you should invest in life. Large vacant retail spaces adjacent to Macy's in San Francisco.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right now, there's a lot of empty retail space. So yes, that's news.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the mayor is trying to sit there saying, see, I brought all of.

[Leo Laporte]

See, we got orbs. Actually, this is from the San Francisco Chronicle. Maybe a more accurate representation. Downtown San Francisco retail is dying. It is dying. What's replacing it is so much worse. By the way, that wood isn't even finished. It's just. It's just lumber.

[Paris Martineau]

It's just lumber from Home Depot. They didn't even put, like, a stain on it or a sealant.

[Leo Laporte]

They could have put some varnish on there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is the pamphlet?

[Paris Martineau]

The orbs are. Stand. Are standing on just.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are closet poles. I recognize them. Yeah. Wow. That is. That is not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Looks like a really bad cocktail party at a really bad art gallery where there's no art.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and also, Ian said, you know, this picture implies there are a lot of people there. He says, there's nobody there. You go in, you'll be the only one.

[Paris Martineau]

Just you and six orbs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This was probably the opening night. Right? Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, a lot of people outside trying to get you in.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Sam didn't invent it, but he's invested in it. They're calling it Sam Altman's club. Get it? Maybe not. And nobody cares.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I didn't get it.

[Paris Martineau]

I didn't. Yeah. Oh, I was just thinking of more orb puns.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You got any for us?

[Leo Laporte]

Anything else you want to talk about in here? There's so many stories.

[Paris Martineau]

And then my mind went blank. Which isn't a pun. It's just nonsense.

[Leo Laporte]

Driverless trucks are now starting running their regular long haul routes. Aurora is doing it between Dallas and Houston. See, there's no driver driving that truck.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A big truck that could kill a lot of people.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean, yes, But I do think that this is an area where driverless vehicles could be really transformative.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not worried about the highway. I'm worried about how they get off the. The highway.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean. Yeah, but a lot of the major accidents that happen with semi trucks in are on the highway late at night, specifically when someone falls asleep or if a semi truck driver encounters someone say pulled over on the side of the road and then isn't really able to react because they've kind of glazed over. So I do think that autonomous vehicles could help solve a lot of terrible accidents if there's a safe way for them to do simple.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Funny you should say that Ms. Martineau, but line 85 backs up your point. Waymo put out data and saying that compared with human drivers over 56.7 million miles in their cities, Waymo driver had 92% fewer crashes with injuries to potentially pedestrians, 82% fewer crashes with injuries to bicyclists and 82% fewer crashes with injuries to motorcycles.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait a second. Sorry, the journalist light is going off. They don't have any data like this. That's just fewer crashes, no specification at the end.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How many.

[Paris Martineau]

All of these are fewer crashes with injuries to. Blank.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. And if we pay you off enough, you, you won't hurt. Yeah. Plus there's no denominator. Right. Or numerator. I want. It's the denominator.

[Paris Martineau]

I want fewer injury involving intersection crashes. Like that's just a lot of. That's a very specific slice of data that sets off the. This is potentially being. I haven't, I mean maybe I could be wrong. If you look at. I'm sure they have the underlying companies.

[Leo Laporte]

Do this all the time though. They reframe data to make it look better than it actually is or oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We could look at the full study.

[Paris Martineau]

It's very notable that they're saying like 96% fewer injury causing intersection crashes. Yeah. This is going to take some time for us to go through actually.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there's a data set there, I think.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This study represents the first retrospective safety assessment of. Of a R O A D S oven roads. I don't know. There's something missing that made statistical conclusions about more serious crash outcomes and analyzed crash rates. All right, this, you know this.

[Mike McHugh]

Listen.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that overall self driving cars have proven in most cases to be way better than humans. I mean the bar is low and I'm sure that a lot of these results are really positive and interesting. I just, whenever I you look at a number I think it's always wise to to note any of the qualifiers or specifications at the end because that could be revealing something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you go down scroll down to table three Leo. It says for example in Phoenix there were 24 injury reported accidents. Eight with airbag deployment. Did it deploy in the front seat where there's no driver? Just ask.

[Paris Martineau]

Probably. Probably.

[Jeff Jarvis]

San Francisco. 16, Los Angeles.

[Paris Martineau]

Or it could be airbag deployment of the person of the car hit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, maybe. Or the person in the.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think though it's safe to say, and this is the conclusion, the Waymo RO service had statistically significant reduction in suspected serious injury crashes when considering all locations combined mind. So they're looking at serious injury crashes. And this has by the way been accepted for publication in Traffic Injury Prevention, the journal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a journal for everything.

[Leo Laporte]

For everything, yeah. Well, if you're a traffic, you know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Scientist or traffic person. Yeah. I think that's not surprising, to be honest. The problem is, of course, if there is a horrible accident with one of these scientists semis, it's going to make all the headlines. Oh yeah. Because there was nobody driving it. But I think in the long run they're probably safe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the other thing is I. I don't know whose technology was in the semis. I mean, I hope it's not Elon.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Aurora. No, it's a company called Aurora.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I trust Waymo a hell of a lot more than I do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I know. There's so many stories that we just.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I got hundreds of stories. I got one that we want to talk about. It's okay. Back in the great section of AI Gone Wild.

[Leo Laporte]

That's your section, probably.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Man speaks Killer from beyond the grave or.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, that one. An army veteran shot dead in a road rage incident nearly four years ago appeared in an Arizona courtroom beyond the grave to address his killer, all thanks to artificial intelligence Intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. An AI video forgave his killer?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. An AI version of Christopher Pelkey appeared in an eerily realistic video to forgive his killer to Gabriel Hort scientists. The man who shot me. It's a shame we encountered each other in that day in those circumstances. An AI generated version of Pelke says in the clip in another life we probably could have been friends.

[Leo Laporte]

So this was a script written by a sister.

[Mike McHugh]

Sister.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm sorry. Written by the. Yeah, by the victim. Sister.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, the victim.

[Leo Laporte]

By the family.

[Paris Martineau]

He was killed in a road rage shooting in 2021.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm not sure that's the react. That's. He might have been a little less kind in an actual.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Thing. I don't know why they would show this in the court.

[Paris Martineau]

Impact statement.

[Leo Laporte]

So the message was well received by Judge Todd Lang who told the courtroom. I love that AI thank you for that. I felt like that was genuine. That is obvious. Forgiveness reflects the character. I heard about him today.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the state asked for a nine and a half year sentence, but the judge gave him ten and a half years. Oh, because it didn't really work.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, this is. It did work because the family was saying the impact was great on them and. And basically the state had asked for a nine and a half year sentence. The judge ended up giving the murderer more after being so moved by the powerful video.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That guy asked for forgiveness.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But didn't mean he didn't want him to go to jail for.

[Paris Martineau]

The family says the judge was so moved by the powerful video that the judge decided to give him a harsher sentence.

[Leo Laporte]

This is absurd. But this is a fictional video. Video that was made up should never been allowed in any courtroom. That's appalling because it made it worse. Whether it made it better or worse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

True.

[Leo Laporte]

It's made up, especially fiction.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Worse.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's. I just thought this was an absolutely insane.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just, just strange devil's advocate here. Family doesn't know how to make video. Family doesn't write. Family doesn't know how to say what they think think. So they use AI to help them express themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Fine. If it had been the sister in an AI video saying, this is my experience. But she put words into the mouth of the victim who's dead and has no way to.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Has no agency, no way to consent. That's absolutely absurd.

[Leo Laporte]

And the judge is saying, well, you know, I think that's probably what he would have said. We don't know if the sister says, this is what I think he would have said. That's different. I think this is a real, a misuse.

[Paris Martineau]

And I think it's just a. Sets a potentially concerning precedent for something like this to be admissible in court. Even if it's just a victim impact statement. I don't like the idea of something like this being used to potentially tug at a judge's heartstrings when it's complete fabrication.

[Leo Laporte]

So an Arizona state professor of law, Gary Marchant is of the part, part of a committee, a Supreme court committee evaluating AI's use in court. So they are considering this. He said the use of AI has become more common in courts. This is from the article in the Independent. And if you look at the effects of this case, I would say he says the value of it out overweighed the prejudicial effect. But if you look at other cases, you could imagine they would be very prejudiced. Judicial. He says the system is trying to address the issues as proactively as possible. They're trying to decide whether this should be allowed. I don't even know why that's even a question. It's fiction.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's complete fiction.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There was another case a couple weeks ago of somebody who was. What's the phrase when you defend yourself and you're not a lawyer?

[Leo Laporte]

Pro bono? No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I think it was a guy defending himself pro se who used the AI to speak. I think it was. I think it was.

[Leo Laporte]

He got a little bit of trouble.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He got in trouble? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The judge did not like that because.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The judge was fooled at first.

[Leo Laporte]

The guy implied that this was a real lawyer instead of an AI generated video of a fake lawyer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, is that what it was?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought it was his own testimony. Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. I think. I know we have so many other things that I would like to talk about, but we're really out of time here, so.

[Mike McHugh]

What?

[Paris Martineau]

A cool three hours isn't doing it for you?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I want to get the show done. I'm working hard to get it done in two. We're way past that, unfortunately, but sometimes the show deserves more time.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, as your shorts say, you love your wife, you're trying your best.

[Leo Laporte]

I have. I just. I think she's right. I think, you know, we should just keep it tidy, shall we say? We will have just like your shorts. Your picks of the week coming up. Just like my shorts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Tighty whities, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not tighty whities. They're actually, I'm gonna be frank. They're not shorts. They're long pants. So I can wear them out in public.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh. Oh, they're PJ.

[Paris Martineau]

They're longy ready.

[Leo Laporte]

They're PJs. Yeah. She don't say anything, but she's already purchased some shorts for her sister whose 60th birthday is coming up. And they say, I love my husband. They have a picture of Joe on him. Big snail. Don't say you're watching. Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis, and I am so glad you're here, esp. Special thanks to our club members making this show possible. We stream this show and all the shows we do. We try to stream them live as we do them. Intelligent Machines is every Wednesday about 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Club members, of course, can watch in discord. Although, frankly, YouTube's probably a better place to watch. The quality is a little bit better and the latency is a little lower YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick. So you get your choice eight different ways you can watch. We hope you will watch live and if you're watching live, chat with us live. But of course you can always watch after the fact. We make audio and video available on our website, Twit TV, IM and of course on YouTube. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to it. Best way to listen or watch? Subscribe to the form you prefer in your favorite podcast client. It's free and you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done.

[Mike McHugh]

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless Way too much much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway.

[Mike McHugh]

Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate.

[Paris Martineau]

First three months only, then full price.

[Mike McHugh]

Plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full [e-mail] it's true that some.

[Paris Martineau]

Things change as we get older.

[Mike McHugh]

But if you're a woman over 40 and you're dealing with insomnia, brain fog, moodiness and weight gain, you don't have.

[Paris Martineau]

To accept it as just another part of aging.

[Mike McHugh]

And with MITI health, you can get help and stop pushing through it alone. The experts at MITI understand that all these symptoms can be connected to the hormonal changes that happen around menopause, and MIDI can help you feel more like yourself again. Many healthcare providers aren't trained to treat or even recognize menopause symptoms. MIDI clinicians are menopause experts.

[Leo Laporte]

They're dedicated to providing safe, effective, FDA.

[Mike McHugh]

Approved solutions for dozens of hormonal symptoms, not just hot flashes. Most importantly, they're covered by insurance. 91% of MITI patients get relief from symptoms within just two months. You deserve to feel great. Book your virtual Visit [e-mail] that's join M I D I.com now let's get to the picks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Somebody put the the the I can't help but laugh every time I look at it. Somebody put the in the discord. The I'm not a cat lawyer.

[Leo Laporte]

I always I always it is always fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is always fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Always. Fine. Should we just play it one more time? I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings.

[Mike McHugh]

I love it.

[Paris Martineau]

You might want to I love how Blurry. Everyone is mind which.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you hear me, Judge?

[Mike McHugh]

I can hear you.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's a filter. It is. And I don't know how to remove it. I've got my assistant here. She's trying to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But so much.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm prepared to go forward with it. I'm here live. It's not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not a cat.

[Leo Laporte]

I can. I can see that. I think if you click the fact.

[Paris Martineau]

That everybody's keeping a straight. My face is crazy to me still.

[Jeff Jarvis]

His voice and accent is just perfect for it.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not a cat.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not a cat. Your Honor, I'm prepared to go ahead.

[Paris Martineau]

It was also. This video happened during like a real loopy time during the pandemic where things like this just hit harder than they ever would today.

[Leo Laporte]

It was what we all needed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We were all the cat.

[Leo Laporte]

We were all, all the cat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The cat was all of us.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris, you get another pick. That was such a good one. What else?

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I got a pick. It's a game that I've been playing this week that's not a new. It's came out in 2021. It's this game called Norco that I'd really recommend. It's a kind of a Southern gothic point and click narrative adventure. It's set in South Louisiana and it's like sinking suburbs.

[Leo Laporte]

And this could get me ready for my upcoming trip.

[Paris Martineau]

It's really depressing, so I wouldn't do it if you're, you know, not into that sort of vibe. But it's depressing in a very artful and fun way. It basically shares its name with the setting, which is Norco, Louisiana, a community within St. Charles Parish. A place like backlit by the Shell oil refinery. And it's kind of surreal. It's kind of. It reminds me of Disco Elysium in a certain way. I've just had a really fun time playing it. It's a simple game. It's like been in my Steam library for a while and I just recommend anybody check it out if they're looking for a fun point and click mystery.

[Leo Laporte]

I appreciate this. I'm always looking for a game. I always. I. I just need a game.

[Paris Martineau]

But most of my game recommendations are games that are secretly books. So that's not. I mean, yeah, they're also that. It's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I got a question for you. So I finally got a tablet. I got the.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cheapest. The cheapest possible S10 Samsung.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Samsung. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So I could do PDFs and can I Do Steam and do that game you've recommended to be on this.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I don't know if you can on that.

[Leo Laporte]

You can. You can do Android games on that. That's all you can do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Never mind, never mind.

[Leo Laporte]

There's some pretty good.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you similar Steam on your computer. You could play Steam on your Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

The Mac Android device. It's not.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no. He's got a Mac that he uses for this show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

20 years old.

[Mike McHugh]

It's.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a. It's a game where you play as a Gutenberg Press era illustrator solving a mystery. It's not the most technical. Logically it probably would use as much power as participating in this show. I'd assume. I know nothing about computers.

[Leo Laporte]

We could all chip in and get him a Steam deck. What do you say?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's because I'm not a game guy. Just not.

[Paris Martineau]

He will play. I mean it's really. We just need to get Jeff a brief thing that he can use to play this game because it is literally a Jeff game. They have had teams of PD PhD researchers from.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're not talking Northco, you're talking.

[Paris Martineau]

We're talking about Pentiment, that game that I've recommended before. That is the Gutenberg Press era games.

[Leo Laporte]

You haven't played it yet, Jeff? No, because how can I.

[Paris Martineau]

How to.

[Leo Laporte]

It's made for you, gramps.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can't get. It's on switch.

[Leo Laporte]

We could get him a Nintendo Switch.

[Mike McHugh]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Is it on the switch now?

[Leo Laporte]

That's what it says.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh hell yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's get up the new switch.

[Paris Martineau]

Get Jeff. Get the new switch and then give it to me when you're done.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why is it erasing it and you can't.

[Paris Martineau]

So you're erasing it at the beginning because you're starting a new.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a fresh game.

[Mike McHugh]

It's such a good game.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it really. It gets. It's compelling all the way through. I mean I love how it's.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, I've played it. It's compelling all the way through. There are so many. The choices matter. There are like three different time periods you go through and your choices that you make in each one have drastic impacts in the town. When you see it in the next, it is like. Is this available on the current cry? Yeah, I assume so. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So when I get the new switch, which I don't know when that's going to be, I'll send Jeff my old switch with Pentimet on it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, but load it first because I.

[Leo Laporte]

Don'T know I will. I know it'll be ready to play. All right, where's the odd switch? That's good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's called a switch. Where's the switch? I understand.

[Leo Laporte]

I need a switch. J. Actually, I have a game that you might. You might like, Jeff. I put it in here. Where is it?

[Paris Martineau]

A 20 page bibliography.

[Leo Laporte]

You're going to have such a large. Such a large line 54. Oh, you already know. I'm sitting on it. Probably line 54. It's called Tippy Coco dot com. And you can play this right now on your computer. So the way this works is you are a little underground guy and you are gonna. You could be one of these. Whatever guy you want. But let's play. Let's play with this guy Groon. Let's play solo. And then you're gonna.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm doing it. I don't get it. What am I trying to do?

[Leo Laporte]

You're gonna hit the ball over to the other guy. It's like Pong. Whoa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it only goes up. It doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. You have to. You have to give it a. A little. Oh, gosh. I'm not going.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How do you.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you give a little English? He's beaten.

[Paris Martineau]

This looks like one of those videos that you'd see your kid watching on YouTube and be, like, concerned about them, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Especially when you hear the name is Tippy Coco.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, no, that's definitely a YouTube. Brain rot.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I got shut out. So there you go, Jeff. A little game you could play on your. On your. Sam.

[Paris Martineau]

The chat is telling us, Jeff, that you can get. You can play. You can install Steam on Chrome OS now you can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, supposedly I could before. And that just. It was impossible. It didn't work.

[Paris Martineau]

So someone. Hold on. We're gonna.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because someone link. Paris is asking for help for Dad.

[Paris Martineau]

I asked. Can someone link instructions for. For Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw, by the way, pictures of you in the wedding and your parents and your. Your beautiful family. It would look like a lot of fun. You look like you're in a good time.

[Paris Martineau]

Delightful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Nice little wedding. Nice to go home for that. Jeff, do you have a pick of the week while I try to get.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, since we. Since we're a little low on AI content, I'll give you an AI story. This.

[Leo Laporte]

All right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which I. I thought was good. The World bank has put out hundreds of data sets in public, and the main reason they're doing this is AI readiness. Because we've got to feed our AI with facts so the people like Leo don't get led Astray.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

With things. So if you go to the data sets I went. That link is to the technology data sets.

[Leo Laporte]

Water withdrawal for livestock.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I went to the technology one for you. If you go, go to the left.

[Leo Laporte]

I just, I just clicked the link.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then why is it maybe gotta.

[Leo Laporte]

You gotta do it again maybe Infrastructure, people, planet prosperity. Let me search technology.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't have that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Click on digital.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now I guess you gotta search again or something digital.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. And then in the United States, mobile cellular Trans. Subscriptions for 100.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because it's really heavy in. What is that? Libya and South Africa.

[Leo Laporte]

Heavier than the US it's heavier there than the United States. The lighter the color, the fewer subscriptions per hundred. Canada is lighter than the US more to 319. But in the really dark areas it's more than one. It's 180 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants in the Russian Federation. What's going on on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't understand.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't understand it. 193 in Libya because.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you don't know what's going to.

[Leo Laporte]

Happen in the US it's a mere 112 per hundred inhabitants. So it's still more than one to one. Huh. Oh, but you know what? I have many. I have one for my. Well yeah, you raised my watch. I have one for my tablet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You also have several for my tablets.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So that's why, you know. Yeah. Here though in, in some, in some countries I think, I don't. They must have multiple phones. You think?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. You, you. Every phone you buy has two sims.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Available.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh well that's why. There you go. It's the multi sim use. That's what it is. Yeah, that's what's.

[Paris Martineau]

How many sims do you guys have going on on your phones?

[Leo Laporte]

No sims. I'm simless. I'm an EIM kind of guy.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. By SIM I mean EIM as well.

[Leo Laporte]

I have one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's being pedantic.

[Paris Martineau]

One. Oh, whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought that's why in some of these countries there might be a carrier every different carrier every five miles. That's what's going on there. So they are those. That's what it is. In fact, that's why you can't just look at these numbers and. And say, oh I. Wow, that's something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Going on right now. We could also look at where did it go here?

[Leo Laporte]

Where's the podcast price of a fixed broadband basket? 5G gigabytes. Where is it highest? It's highest In Liberia, it's lowest. In the United States, pretty low. But it's even lower in Mexico. United States is pretty much the same as Brazil. Russia is very low. Well, is it. Is it. Is it low number higher or it seems power. I think they mean in constant units of dollars, so. Or whatever. That's. See, yeah, that's interesting. The World bank knows all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So then we could have Google Ad MOX iPhone 17 design before it even launches. Have you seen this?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't show it. Probably it's taken down, but it is. It's a little annoying. I'll be honest with you. It's a Google Pixel and an iPhone 16 Pro. To talking and the Google's basically saying, you're copying everything. I did. I did it all before you did. It's a little annoying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's kind of sad that that's all Google's got at this point. They leave out the part where you're selling 300 phones to my every one left that part out. Okay, well, we've had enough of this, I think time. Oh, wait a minute. This is a story for you. Google has invested. Invested in Wonder.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. I'm telling you, this is the company.

[Leo Laporte]

$600 million fund round. Why Google Ventures? It's only in New York. Well, it's Mark Lore is why. Mark Lore is the guy who started diaper.com, which was immediately basically shuttered by Amazon, which then bought it for pennies on the dollar. Mark then started Jet, which he sold to Walmart, made some money. His latest is this little virtual kitchen called Wonder that you guys keep ordering from.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I ordered from it twice and it was fine. It was good. Queso was really good. But yeah, their stuff was fine.

[Leo Laporte]

You've done more to help it than you know, because they now have raised more than $600 million from Google Ventures and a few others like Excel and the New Enterprise Association.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say wonderful is one of those things that feels like a mid 2010s startup because every time you go there, they've got such a deep discount. You are basically getting the food for free. And it's like, this can't continue.

[Leo Laporte]

But it really the reason these companies are investing. Because they also own GrubHub, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, yeah. And when I go there, it's. It's a little tiny storefront. It's not very big at all. I mean, they sous vide whatever it is, I guess, or Microsoft microwave it and there's cars waiting to go do deliveries.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the industrialization of food. And I can't say I'm in favor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And DoorDash is buying Deliveroo for $3.9 billion and then a software company for more than $1 billion. So this whole food delivery business.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet this is the case. We've talked about this signal groups that all these movers are shakers in and how they invite influence each other. I think these people, these high end people, they get together. I don't know if it's the bohemian Grover in their signal group and they say things like, you know, I think people are gonna stop cooking in 10 years and they're gonna eat out all the time. So let's invest. I think a good investment they're gonna eat out.

[Mike McHugh]

But in, in, out they'll be in.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a new thing. It's eating out in and it's be gonna to be huge. And I think that they all kind of spin themselves up like the next big thing like is driverless taxis or you know and I think they get all excited and then they. They buy into this. But I don't know if it means anything. We've seen lots of collapses around this kind of group. Think investment. Venture investment. Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Of course it'll never happen to AI. That's the one area AI is the.1.

[Leo Laporte]

Of the biggest, isn't it? I have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People are always going to want sand and there's always plenty of of sand.

[Paris Martineau]

Leo, has the sand Walker appeared in this show?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

You sound unsure.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm keeping him. I'm keeping him to myself.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does he know that he's the sandwalker?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Okay. Whole Persona has.

[Paris Martineau]

I really like that one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For those of you on audio, Leo, just to say for those of you.

[Paris Martineau]

On audio, you've just got to go experience this fresh on video. I'm sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo has sand.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. I turn into sand setting.

[Paris Martineau]

The thing that got me is his body turned into sand. But his quaffed hair remained for far longer than Anthony.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can we see it again please?

[Leo Laporte]

This is Anthony Nielsen's great work we talked about.

[Paris Martineau]

Anthony is chuckling in a release. The hair just falls over. It doesn't even get cockroach.

[Leo Laporte]

There's nothing to hold it up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Your attack.

[Leo Laporte]

This Anthony Nielsen is brilliant with AI video and he shared a little bit about how he does this in our last AI user group. Next one we've moved it. Right Anthony, when's the next one? It's coming up first Friday. Yeah. Of next month. First Friday. Kind of shuffled around. June. Yeah. So if you're in the Club. You'll just look at the announcements or not the announcements, those events, and you'll see the next AI user group. But that's the kind of thing. And it's great to watch Anthony at work. He's really. He's remarkable what he does. Have we seen them all, Anthony, or do you have others in. We have one Left in Reserve 1.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which?

[Paris Martineau]

Keep it a surprise.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A Leo one or a Jeff one?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a Jeff one. Oh, you already saw me being peace and you saw me turn into sand. All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Bonito tries to conserve them.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Petito tries to hide them from us.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love it. So Jeff is sitting as he does at his desk. Suddenly, the wall disappears. He walks out of his office to the beach.

[Paris Martineau]

The camera pans around him. We see angles of Jeff's offices that have been hidden from time and space.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Walk into the sea.

[Paris Martineau]

Made of sand. That's really good.

[Leo Laporte]

Such a good video. Wow. And you guys think that AI is nothing. That. Not. That's not nothing, my friends.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that's. That's AI in the service of.

[Paris Martineau]

How long does it take you to make these, Anthony?

[Leo Laporte]

Weeks. I don't want to. I don't want to get into it, but needless to say, I don't get it. I don't get it right away. So it's a lot of work. He puts a lot of work into it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why you. Platform. Do you prefer Anthony?

[Leo Laporte]

It depends. Well, it depends on what you're trying to do. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But, like, it's a mix of stuff. Like, sometimes I'll use an image from ChatGPT, then pull that into a different thing to generate the video. This is what we're really starting to see is the people who are very adept at this are really magicians pulling strings. They're doing all different kinds. You can't just sit down as you did Paris, and say, here's a cat picture. Make him. Make him a pope.

[Paris Martineau]

Anthony should be able to do that, though.

[Mike McHugh]

I don't think that's that difficult.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could get you your pope cat, I think, being crowned.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, we'll get there, but like. Yeah, like right now, it's not as easy as. Here's an image recreate. Like, even the Leo stuff doesn't look exactly like Leo, but. No, it looks model. Insulting fat. And I'm hurt. I'm deeply hurt. Well, we're. We're about out of time on this program. I thank you all for joining us. It's really fun to do the show, and sometimes we Talk more about AI who's who's next week. Who's scheduled for next week? Is MG going to come by or it's Emily Bender, I think. Alex. Well now, this is exciting. These are your people. Jeff Jarvis, Emily Bernard Bender. Who is Alex Hannah? These are the two who coined the term tesreal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no, sorry. That is Timnit Gebru and Emil Torres.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they write in their book. Emily Bender is a, is a co author of the of the Stochastic Parrots paper. She is a linguist at University of Washington.

[Leo Laporte]

Excellent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Alex Hannah is at dare, which was founded by Tim Cabru. And the AI Khan is very good about cutting through the hype of AI and the misuse of AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Very interesting. That will be next week on Intelligent Machines.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think they come on in the middle of the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the scheduling worked out that we will get a little bit of the show, then they'll come on and then we'll finish it up.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm excited to be talking about something entirely silly and be like, what's that? I hear something on the wind. And then cut to a guest and interview.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll just turn into sand for that.

[Paris Martineau]

Interview and fall away and don't explain it to them.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you so much everybody for joining us. We will see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Bye Bye.

[Paris Martineau]

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[Mike McHugh]

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