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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff and Paris are here. Great interview. To kick things off, Vlad Prelovec is here, founder of cogi, the best search site ever. It beats Google. All hollow. We'll also talk about the controversy over perplexity versus cloud flare, AI flight pricing, and why it may cost you a lot more next time you fly. Plus an amazing new video generator from Google. That and a whole lot more coming up next on Intelligent Machines. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. This is Intelligent Machines, episode 831, recorded Wednesday, August 6, 2025. Nine seconds of Google. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we talk about the latest in AI robotics and the smart doodads and doohickeys surrounding you. Careful there. There's one over there. This is always a pleasure to do this show because I get together with two of my favorite people. Paris Martineau is here. Investigative.
- [01:10]
Paris Martineau
Gosh, there was an intelligent machine right underneath me.
- [01:13]
Leo Laporte
It's everywhere. They're everywhere. She is a investigative journalist at, I'm happy to say, Consumer Reports. Paris NYC is her website. Hello, Paris. Is that a new painting over the fireplace over the manor?
- [01:25]
Paris Martineau
It's not, but my office situation is kind of in flux right now, so the camera is probably pointing.
- [01:31]
Jeff Jarvis
We're gonna need an update later.
- [01:33]
Leo Laporte
It looks good.
- [01:33]
Paris Martineau
We're going to. Whenever the new desk gets here, I'll send you guys.
- [01:36]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you. Did we shame you last week with your little red desk?
- [01:40]
Paris Martineau
Well, no, I love my little red desk. I want to continue using it. But you are correct, it needs to be larger. And the time is finally now. I've made some bold offers on an Eames desk on. Oh, it'll hopefully pay off.
- [01:56]
Leo Laporte
Well, next time you're visiting Petaluma, you know the new Eames Museum will be opening here in a few years, so if you're an Eames fan.
- [02:02]
Paris Martineau
I am.
- [02:03]
Leo Laporte
This is the place to be. Also with us, Jeff Jarvis, emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School. Damn it. Author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis magazine, now in audiobooks, and of course, the web.
- [02:22]
Jeff Jarvis
I'm going to lunch with Craig tomorrow and I would have loved to have gone to Salt Hanks, but I don't think there's any chance we'll get in.
- [02:27]
Paris Martineau
He's just too popular, folks.
- [02:29]
Leo Laporte
He really is. New York Times gave him a rave on Friday, which didn't help the lines.
- [02:35]
Jeff Jarvis
Amazing rave.
- [02:37]
Leo Laporte
I want to rave about my search.
- [02:39]
Jeff Jarvis
Engine, as you do often.
- [02:42]
Vlad Prelovac
You really do.
- [02:43]
Leo Laporte
Yes, I remember in the late 90s, maybe even earlier than that. I used to work with computer columnist John C. Dvorak, who used to have a litmus test for geeks. He'd say, what Internet browser do you use? I mean, search engine do you use? And if they said Excite, they said Yahoo. He would. Nah, he'd say it's Google. And I think when we first. Everybody has that experience when they first use Google of like, this is a revelation. This is how search should be. But in the intervening years, sad to say, inshittification has taken over Google's search results. The latest being their AI summaries, which are often wrong, often misleading, and something most people just don't want. I've gone on a search, you've heard me talk about it, for a better search engine for a long time. I've tried them all. Duckduckgo, ecosia and I even paid for Neva back in the day, until Neva threw in the towel saying you can't compet against Google in search. Then I found something called Kagi K A G I Kagi had a crazy proposition. You want good search, you want no ads, you want reliable results? Pay for it. Pay for it. But what? So I've been paying for Cocky search for a couple of years now, and I must say it's worth every penny. Joining us right now, the man who started Kagi with his own money, Vrad Prelovac, who is the CEO and founder of Kagi. Vlad. It's such a pleasure to meet you and have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.
- [04:25]
Vlad Prelovac
Thank you. Honored to be here.
- [04:26]
Leo Laporte
You self funded. You put $3 million in at the beginning to bootstrap it.
- [04:32]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, it turns out that every VC in Silicon Valley thought it was a crazy idea and nobody would give you.
- [04:42]
Leo Laporte
Money, in other words.
- [04:44]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, I did. What one's supposed to do when they live in Silicon Valley, when you have a crazy, outlandish idea, you go to VCs and see if somebody would fund it. It turns out that they really thought it was crazy. And so I ended up putting basically all of my money into the project because I so desperately needed something that I can rely on for my search and also that my kids can use without being surveilled and profiled all the time. So is how Kagi were born in.
- [05:17]
Leo Laporte
2018, no less, which I can kind of understand the VC saying, what are you talking? No one's going to ever beat Google. Partly because Google gives a lot of money to companies like Apple, Samsung, Mozilla to make sure that they're the default search. In fact, good luck trying to change your search on your iPhone to Kagi. They don't. It's not an entry.
- [05:45]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, pretty much. So the main difference is that I never had a plan to kill Google or dominate the world. The plan was always only to create a search engine that you can trust that will have your best interest in mind and that can align incentives to a paid business model. Meaning people pay for the search results. If they're not good enough, they walk away with their wallet. So that creates this positive feedback loop that created a lot of innovation, I would say in Kagi as a product in search experience and just is a wonderful thing to use. Knowing that a tool that you need and rely on so much through the day is designed with your best interest in mind. And that's some random advertisers.
- [06:35]
Leo Laporte
You're a public benefit company corporation as of last year. So that means that it's not a non profit, but it means that you have to. There are some rules regarding how much money you can make. Does it also mean you can't sell out?
- [06:51]
Vlad Prelovac
No, it means that it means that we are not only beholden to our shareholders but also to our public benefit statement. So you know, normally corporations in us are, you know, at will of the shareholders and optimized for shareholder value. A public benefit corporation also can take into account their public benefit mission. So that makes a great deal of difference in terms of how we think strategically, how we make decisions, how we, you know, create initiatives.
- [07:30]
Leo Laporte
The, the public benefit statement is, quote, Kagi is committed to creating a more human centric and sustainable web that benefits individuals, communities and society as a whole with a transparent business model that aligns the incentives of everyone involved. So now you're kind of bound to live up to that.
- [07:49]
Vlad Prelovac
Yes, it was, which was the goal from day one. So I only learned about PBC concept last year. So this is when we decided to transform to a pbc. But it is basically a structure that allows companies like ours to really emphasize their mission.
- [08:07]
Leo Laporte
Are you profitable as of this time?
- [08:10]
Vlad Prelovac
We are break even profitable.
- [08:13]
Leo Laporte
Is that enough for you? Is that sufficient? Are you happy with that?
- [08:17]
Vlad Prelovac
Sure, I'm beyond happy. So we have a decent search engine, we are providing stability for 50 or so employees and we have the world's best search engine. So that's a lot to be happy about.
- [08:36]
Leo Laporte
One of your most recent employees is a good friend of the network. Mike Elgin's son, Kevin Elgin has joined you on the team. Now COGI is not free. I mentioned that there is a free tier which gives you 100 searches. I think I started with the $5 a month, 300 searches a month, and then I just skipped right to the 25 bucks a month. Not so much because I needed the number of searches, because you can get unlimited searches for 10 bucks a month, but because I really wanted to support you, I really believed in what you were doing and I thought, if anything is going to succeed against Google, it's going to succeed because we, its users want it to and support it that way.
- [09:16]
Jeff Jarvis
Tell more about the assistant that you get at that level.
- [09:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, so that's actually, that's a little bit controversial. I'm going to mention real quickly because the timing couldn't be better. If you go to Ars Technica, the front page right now has Lee Hutchinson's article Enough Is Enough. I dumped Google's worsening search for Kagi. I like how the search engine is the product instead of me. And he if you haven't, even if you use Cocky, you should probably read it. I actually learned about some amazing things Cocky does. That's very, very cool. You can really control your search. You don't need to, but you can totally control the search results. But a little controversial because one of the things people are moving to Kagi for is the fact that this Google AI summary that they're foisting on us, a lot of people dislike. In fact, Lee refers to that. He says, you know, I'm getting incorrect information from Google at this point in this search summary and I don't like that. So he I think a lot of people say, I'd like to go somewhere without AI. What is, what are you. What is your plan with AI? What are you doing with the AI?
- [10:35]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. First of all, AI has been part of search for decades and we are talking here about generative AI, the latest breed, the LLMs, which have been controversial mostly because of their tendency to hallucinate. So using them in information consumption scenarios is not, you know, really optimal all the time. And from day one when LLMs became a thing in late 2022, we had this thing called the AI integration philosophy that basically said we're going to treat AI as a tool and it's going to be on demand only, so we're not going to push it down user throats. And if people want to use it, they certainly can. And that means that when you use cogi, the search engine, it's going to work with like any other search engine. Well, I guess not anymore, but you know you're going to get search results. But then we built some clever little things like if you add a question mark to the end of your query, you can get an AI summary of the results, which is very useful.
- [11:50]
Leo Laporte
All right.
- [11:50]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, you just get a very quick summary.
- [11:53]
Leo Laporte
You don't get unless you put the question mark.
- [11:55]
Vlad Prelovac
You have to put a question mark in and then you get this little AI summary. It's pretty useful. I use it 50% of the time. It's always providing references and sources and citations. There are also some people who want to use these LLMs and just talk directly to them. So we build a product around that called Kagi Assistant, which basically gives you access to all the top LLMs in the world grounded in Kagi Search. So you get benefit of both, you know, accessing all the models out there and the accuracy of COGI search results. And you can do a lot of cool things with it. I, my favorite one is I created a custom assistant called Athletic Coach. So you know, whenever I run, do my cycling, whatever, you know, I, I, I dump the screenshot from Strava into it and you know, I ask to scrutinize my session, things like that.
- [12:55]
Leo Laporte
So there are definitely models you can choose from by the way, including Google's own models. I mean this is y, this is a great way to access all of these incredible models. QN is in there, Deepseek, Groq, of course. And it looks like you keep up with the latest.
- [13:10]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, pretty much do update this almost daily and you get this even on the $10 plan. But on a $25 plan you get the high end models. So we are approaching AI. I like to think very mindfully, like not really rushing into it and trying to be very thoughtful about how we use it, how we integrate it in product, how to add value. For example, in Kagi Search, I don't know if you knew any search results that you see. You can for example, translate them, you can summarize them, you can ask questions about that page. So that's all sort of one click away, but still on demand.
- [14:02]
Leo Laporte
By the way. You can also exclude AI generated images from the image search. So you can have it both ways. If you don't want to see AI images. I have that still turned on. But I mean, I like seeing all the images. Yeah, this is the most customizable search engine you've ever seen with these lenses, the personalized results. I mean there is nothing you can't do in this search engine. It's pretty amazing.
- [14:27]
Vlad Prelovac
I think what we are showing here is what a search engine looks like when you optimize for the user. And Kagi is all about user agency. So putting user in control, not trying to figure out for them what they want to see, but actually giving user the tools to personalize their search speed to find the results they want and things like that. And this is what people pay to someone for.
- [14:52]
Leo Laporte
It is an issue I think for a lot of people. You can't just choose Kagi on the iPhone, but you do have instructions in your Kagi documents of how to make that happen because it is possible to make that happen. You also offer your own browser, the Orion browser, which is a WebKit based browser for Mac, iPhone and iPad. And that of course can use and does use Kagi as its default search. So if people want to switch to Kagi, there are ways to do it. It's just there's a few extra steps. This is where Google's, you know, the power of the default has made Google so dominant. I think it's interesting that people are starting to turn away though, even though it takes extra steps which where do you get your search results? That's the other thing people want to know. Is this just Bing recast? Yeah.
- [15:36]
Paris Martineau
Could you talk a little bit about your like web index and your news index?
- [15:40]
Vlad Prelovac
Sure. So we are a small company, bootstrapped and all that. So I realized from day one you cannot, you know, we will not be able to index the entire web and things like that. It's going to be billions of dollars. So we are getting search results from every other search engine that we can pay the results for. And then we also build our own index which focuses on non commercial content which is A the content I enjoy the most reading and B something that's missing in other search engines. And by this I mostly mean personal blogs and forums and things like that. So sort of unmonetized human writing, so to speak. So and then we, we, you know, mash all that together. We apply our algorithms, we do some nice things like for example, we measure how many ads and trackers are there on any and if there are too many, we downrank those kind of results because they usually correspond to low quality content. I mean little signals like that that other search engines cannot do because they're ad based and would be admitting that their model doesn't work. But we can and this helps tremendously propel high quality pages up and downrange those bad pages with lots of ads, trackers, affiliate links. You' seen them. So yeah, we do our own stuff on top of search results but then most importantly we give users the tools. So you can block a website in cog results if you don't like it. Lots of people do that for political content. For example, you don't like this website or this news source, say block it in my search results, I don't want to ever see it again. And similarly you can promote sites you like and we actually have a public list of sites that Kagi users block and promote the most. So you can quickly.
- [17:49]
Jeff Jarvis
Like the old blog role.
- [17:51]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, basically if you go to kagi.com stats there's something called domain insights and you know this gives you idea of what Kagi users at least are, you know, thinking are good or bad websites on the web.
- [18:07]
Jeff Jarvis
Vlad, I confessed to you before we got on that I'm late to cogi. I'm already loving it in no time at all. I'm curious about your views of the web as a whole. People are complaining about Google being worse and there's two theories about that. That Google's doing things wrong. But also the web is worse not just because of AI, because of all kinds of things. How do you view the state of the web itself? And, and you've already mentioned a few ways in which you try to clean some of the junk out. But, but where do you see the trend going? How do you, how do you fight? I can't help but say at the insidification that's out there.
- [18:42]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, I think it's pretty simple. Up until 2004 or 5 the web was in pretty good shape and it was driven by I would say self expression and you know, people just creating those quirky funky websites. I had one that I would probably be ashamed now but you know it.
- [19:06]
Leo Laporte
Was the, was it on geocities?
- [19:08]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, something like that. All those crazy graphics and yeah under construction. I was saying how madly in love I was with Meg Ryan and things like that.
- [19:21]
Leo Laporte
Well I certainly hope that hasn't changed.
- [19:23]
Vlad Prelovac
Stuff, stuff that that one would do so but that that sort of quickly changed as soon as then the most popular search engine. Google adopted ads as a business model. And interestingly enough Sergey and Larry in their white paper describing PageRank which basically led to Google said very clearly that ads will ruin any search because of misalignment of incentives. And they were giving examples of other search engines at a time doing that and saying how Google will not do that. That and about six years from that paper they did indeed embrace the ad based business model. And I think this is what fundamentally led to deterioration of the web over the next few decades? Because first the search got worse because the incentives were wrong and the search experience was optimized for search customers, which were not the same as search users. The customers were advertisers, obviously. And the web consequently got worse because there were whole new generation of websites built around ad monetization as their sole primary purpose, which led to a ton of low quality content. And most of the web today, I would say 99% of all pages exist for the purpose of monetization through ads, and they do not exist for the purpose of informing and educating the reader. And that unfortunately includes most of the news websites that we read. So this process has been slow and we haven't really been noticing it as it gradually happened over two decades. But it got into such a bad situation that many people today are waking up to this fact. And you cannot basically browse the web today without an ad blocker. If you're doing that and good luck. But if you think about it, if everybody had an ad blocker, 99% of the web would disappear. This broken web exists basically and fundamentally only because there are still people out there, basically the most vulnerable, least tech savvy people who are still consuming these ads and being targeted by them. So it's sort of a sa sad story, but I would say the last 20 years of the web have been built on a lie. And it's now sort of unraveling with these AI or using Google results. Those websites are suddenly realizing that there was no contract in place and that Google convinced everybody that exposure was payment enough, like sending traffic. And these publishers got addicted to that traffic. The traffic is no more. And Google sort of kept all the all for itself. So it, yeah, it's been sad to watch, but yeah, I got sort of woken up from this in 2018 and decided to do something about it.
- [22:55]
Paris Martineau
What was the tipping point for you? When did you kind of realize that this was a problem?
- [23:01]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, there were two things that happened. One was I literally remember the query. I was looking for GitLab, which is like a GitHub alternative. And Google served me an ad for GitLab and then that same result below as an organic result. And I realized that I as a user am getting two identical results. And I felt like a monkey. I felt like my intelligence was so insulted by that. And that for a trillion dollar company to do that to me as a user, I thought it was outrageous. And at the same time, my oldest kid was starting elementary school and here in Palo Alto, they all get Chromebooks with Google pre installed and all that. A fantastic distribution strategy for Google. But I also realized that my kid will exposed to this crap over the next 12 years. She will be profiled, targeted with ads and all sorts of bad things that I didn't want for my kids. And I have three kids by the way. And yeah, at the time I could pay for YouTube Premium, for example, to get rid of ads, but there was no search engine, which I thought was many times more important. And this is where the idea came from, basically.
- [24:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Did you opt your daughter out of the Chromebook? I mean, what did you do there?
- [24:30]
Vlad Prelovac
Funny thing happens. So, you know, all my kids use Kagi. They install that on their Chromebooks. They, they go to school, teacher see, sees Kagi and teacher goes like, what's this? And they turn it back to Google.
- [24:43]
Leo Laporte
Really?
- [24:44]
Vlad Prelovac
So there's a lot of wow, education to be had.
- [24:47]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [24:47]
Vlad Prelovac
I mean the teacher is acting obviously in, you know, they're thinking, they're acting best interest, thinking the kid got, you know, malware or something. Right. And you know, it will take time for, for these ideas to propagate, I feel. But yeah, more and more people are, are realizing it.
- [25:07]
Jeff Jarvis
Did you teach the teacher?
- [25:09]
Vlad Prelovac
No, not really. But we are working on it. That's, that's what we have Kevin for. Kevin. Kevin is the head of education.
- [25:15]
Leo Laporte
He's good. Yes.
- [25:16]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, yeah.
- [25:19]
Leo Laporte
She should have said my. This is my dad's company. What do you want?
- [25:22]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, hello, Alto. For God's sakes.
- [25:25]
Paris Martineau
I was gon. Those kids have all got to have like seven parental installed apps that their parents work at. Every kid in that school I'm sure has a different app.
- [25:35]
Leo Laporte
So you also, do you have your own spider now? Are you able to do your own web searching?
- [25:41]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, we crawled the web, but as I said, we focus on the non commercial web because this is what's being left out in all other search engines and just anecdotally from our users, this is I think, what many of them find very valuable to actually read human blogs and things like that. Even when you do commercial queries like best running shoes or headphones, you're gonna see a lot of writing from people who are not trying to monetize their content. And that is extremely valuable. I want to read from the guy who tried five, you know, different running shoes and you know, picked one and there are no affiliate links. So that's what I'm looking for. So, so yeah, this is, this is the, the kind of the web that we are mostly interested in and have resources to crawl.
- [26:39]
Leo Laporte
I noticed that the number one site people block because with Kagi, you can say I don't want results from this site or that site is Pinterest the.
- [26:49]
Paris Martineau
Number two site, pinterest.co.uk the number three site. Pinterest.de the number four site, Pinterest CA. It goes on. I find this fascinating.
- [27:00]
Leo Laporte
So I don't, I don't block anything.
- [27:01]
Paris Martineau
I like Pinterest. But I also do think this is definitely like a meme among techy people. They're like all of my search results have Pinterest in them. So it's very funny to see that.
- [27:12]
Leo Laporte
One of the other things you're doing is integrating with other third party applications, which I think is very cool. If you're a Mac user and use Alfred, you can have that built into your Alfred search. I imagine there'll be more of these as people become more and more aware of Kagi. You also, and this is really important for people who are very privacy focused, you have a very clever privacy protecting tool that makes it so that you can't even see what people are searching for. Tell us a little bit about that feature. Sure.
- [27:49]
Vlad Prelovac
So one of the main features of Kagi, I would say, is that privacy basically comes with a business model because we are not interested in user data. We are interested in your five or ten dollars a month and that's it. That's where the transaction stops. Which makes user data a liability for Kagi, actually. So we want the least amount of it as possible. But we also realized that saying that is not enough for some users. For hardcore privacy users, we developed this technology called Privacy Pass, which actually builds on some very interesting research that has been done recently in the field of cryptography. Basically, when you use Privacy Pass in Kagi, we cannot tell who the user searching is on a technical level. Even if we wanted to know who you are, we still cannot tell. But we can authenticate and know that somebody paid to be able to search because ultimately you need to be able to pay. This is why this was such a challenge, because you need a payment. But we wanted not to have ability to know who the user is on a technical level. So this is what Privacy Pass does.
- [29:13]
Leo Laporte
And then if you really want to add to privacy, and Lee Hutchinson talks about this, you also have a Tor address so people can go to you without even using their IP address. So you can be completely anonymous on Kaki.
- [29:24]
Vlad Prelovac
Yes, you can be completely anonymous and still have paid for your account.
- [29:30]
Leo Laporte
Really?
- [29:30]
Jeff Jarvis
Do you work with folks like Common Crawl. Are there others who want to use your crawl? How does that. Is there a crawling community?
- [29:40]
Vlad Prelovac
Yes, they are. There's Common Crawl is something we use actually one of our employees comes from Common Crawl. We are also opening our search API very soon. So it's going to be announced in about a month or so and I see a lot of demand for that, especially now in the age of AI. I would say all these models are converging to the same place. What makes the difference in accuracy is the quality of search you feed to them. Having something like Kagi search results instead of your Bing or Google results can tremendously increase the accuracy of AI answers, which is still their weakest link. Very bullish. On the search API that we are.
- [30:30]
Leo Laporte
Working on, somebody's asking in our club Discord, we should mention that you are on all platforms, Windows, Mac, Linux. It's easy to integrate it into almost any browser. You offer your own browser, Orion, which is for Mac only or iOS only. But do you plans to. You also plan to do that in Linux? I think, yes.
- [30:49]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, yeah, we'll now, you know, in Kagi there's no lack of ambition, there's only lack of resources. So it took us a while to get to the stage that we announced we are now going to do Orion on Linux. And then a lot of Windows users said, well, why not Windows? We are the biggest market, Linux is the smallest. We are not optimizing for market share or growth. We are doing things that we can do. Yeah, Linux is in the works. It's coming in about nine months. We hope so. Yeah.
- [31:24]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's based on WebKit which is based on of course K back in the day. So Linux is kind of a natural place to go next. I think from a development point of view. Doggo is your little mascot, right? Is that your dog?
- [31:39]
Vlad Prelovac
Yes, that's. That's the one on the screen is user generated one. We had a contest. Oh, I'm not sure actually my. My eyesight is pretty bad. But yeah, we had a contest with users who draw Doggo.
- [31:55]
Leo Laporte
It's very cute when you click on him, he looks down and says let's fetch. So that's.
- [32:00]
Vlad Prelovac
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [32:03]
Leo Laporte
This may remind you of the old days when a search page didn't have a lot of crap on just had. What do you want to find? You still have. You do a lot of the Boolean stuff that Google did, including the quoted searches. You have the lens, which is fantastic as a way of customizing the sources. I can go on and on, read Lee Hutchinson's very good article on Ars Technica. He talks about a lot of features, some of which I didn't know. In fact, now I'm starting to think instead of paying for perplexity and chatgpt and anthropics, Claude and I have $20 subscriptions with so many different AIs. They're all available in the Assistant. I might just move it all to the Kagi assistant. Right. It's the same. What do I need all of them for? In fact, it's better because I can customize it. And you have some really interesting ones, including this new Moonshot LLM, which is pretty interesting. I'm starting to think this is going to be. I'm going to spend more time than ever before in Cocky. I congratulate you. 53,000 members as of this recording. That's great. Try it for free, folks. Pay for it if you want it to continue. I really think this is so important, having been, you know, having seen Neva go down because they just couldn't make it it as a paid search. I really want Kagi to make it. And I think, Vlad, you got the right idea. So glad you're doing what you're doing. Thank you, Vlad Prelovac. It's really nice to talk to you. I didn't give you guys much chance to talk to Vlad because I'm kind of.
- [33:41]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, you're. You're the super fan.
- [33:42]
Leo Laporte
I'm starstruck. Yeah.
- [33:43]
Paris Martineau
He's really been talking about Kagi for a long time on this podcast.
- [33:47]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I don't know why everybody doesn't use it. This is. This is fantastic.
- [33:53]
Vlad Prelovac
It takes time. And thanks for helping spread the word, Leo.
- [33:57]
Leo Laporte
It really means a lot to us. It does take time. I learned about it first, as many did on Hacker News, and so Hacker News probably spread the word first, but man, it's just. And you keep adding features, which makes it even more interesting.
- [34:12]
Vlad Prelovac
We love what we do.
- [34:13]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Lifetime member, Orion plus member, by the way.
- [34:17]
Vlad Prelovac
Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.
- [34:20]
Leo Laporte
I want you to make it. I want you to succeed is so exciting. And you know what you're getting there? A million queries yesterday. That's good. Yeah, that's a lot of. A lot of traffic going on.
- [34:32]
Vlad Prelovac
I like to say that about nine seconds of Google searches in a day. So, you know, we are nine seconds of Google, that's not too bad.
- [34:43]
Jeff Jarvis
Are any VCs coming to you now?
- [34:44]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, yeah, we have VC interests now, but now we are not interested.
- [34:52]
Paris Martineau
It's interesting. You exclusively raise like the 2.5 million you guys have so far. Outside of your contributions from user investors, do you have any further plan to I guess raise from either user investors or go the VC route?
- [35:09]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah, we found out that the user route was really nice because it was super easy. We had a lot of interest. I think about 90 users ended up investing. And these are all our biggest fans. We get a lot of help and support from them. I brainstorm with them all the time. So it's much better I think than having investor based board that tells us what to do.
- [35:38]
Paris Martineau
You don't have the pressures to scale and.
- [35:40]
Vlad Prelovac
No pressure. Yeah, I like that. For me, we do have some pretty ambitious projects down the road that we are experimenting with now. So if that needs extra capital, we're probably going to go that route.
- [35:54]
Leo Laporte
Good.
- [35:54]
Vlad Prelovac
Yeah.
- [35:55]
Leo Laporte
I don't allow myself to invest in tech companies, but I think this would kind of, this would be okay. It's a public benefit after all.
- [36:01]
Paris Martineau
Is there a way to user? Martin Sassenberg asks if there's a way to like. Do you guys have documentation on how to SEO websites for Kagi to try and put a website into getting scraped by you guys?
- [36:15]
Vlad Prelovac
It's super simple. We have something called Kage Small Web. So if you have a personal website or a blog that's non commercial in nature, you just add it there. We automatically crawl you and not only that, we're going to push it to number two or three in results for relevant queries all automatically. So this is basically our way to surface all the high quality stuff people are writing out there. If it's a commercial website, then it's a different story. And one day we're going to launch Webmaster Tools and have more information on that.
- [36:52]
Leo Laporte
Nice.
- [36:52]
Paris Martineau
Awesome. Thank you so much.
- [36:54]
Leo Laporte
I almost thought you'd say no, we don't want any SEO. I am going to add my little blog to the Kagi small web feed. Also you're offering AI tools to small blogs, which I have also applied for because I think that would be very interesting. Yeah, really cool you're doing just. It just shows that you could do good, important, innovative work without being, you know, about monetizing your customers, you know, in any way. But give us $5 so that we can, you know, support you. I think that's fantastic. Thank you a lot. Kagi is also on Discord so you can talk back and learn more about Kagi from the people who are working on it right now. Vlad, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it.
- [37:47]
Vlad Prelovac
Thank you.
- [37:48]
Leo Laporte
Been an honor kagi.com try it for free. This episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by Monarch Money. Oh, I like Monarch Money. This is actually a good example of a company who says, look, look, we don't want to take your information and sell it. You can subscribe and we will give you objective information about your money and where it stands. In fact, I like it so much I immediately signed up for a year as soon as I found it. Monarchmoney.com Finances can be messy and confusing and especially nowadays, it's like what is going on? Monarch Money basically acts like you, your personal cfo, your chief financial officer, giving you full visibility and control so you can stop just, you know, kind of grinding away and start growing your assets. It's a lot more than your average budgeting app. Of course it does. Budgeting does that. It's great. But it's more like Monarch Money is more like a complete financial command center for your your all your accounts, credit card checking, savings, investment accounts, assets and your goals. Right? You also put in your goals. You don't just manage your money. You're going to start building your wealth. And right now we've got a great deal. You could start being managing your wealth by getting 50% off your first year. If you go to monarchmoney.com and use the code I am, it's really about building the life you actually want. And trust me, as somebody on the other side of retirement, you gotta start managing your finances now you young folks folks to build that life. Without a clear financial picture, financial dreams, that first home, the new baby, retirement can just feel impossible. But burying your head in the sand is not the way to get what you need. Monarch makes managing money simple even if you're busy. All of your accounts are in there, all your credit cards, all your investments, everything in one place so you know exactly where you stand without the hassle. You could track your spending, your savings, your investments effortlessly so you can focus on what matters most, making your biggest life goals a reality. And I've set it up to get notifications about things that are important to me but not be bugged about the stuff I don't care about. It really is the financial tool people actually love. Join over 1 million households named Wall Street Journal's Best Budgeting App of 2025 is the top recommended personal finance app by users and experts. Over 30,000 5 star reviews. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Use the code im@monimalmoney.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year. Monarch money.com the code I am highly recommend this. Ladies and gentlemen, let us continue on with the AI news. This was a week. This was a week. It almost makes me feel like I'm not accelerationist enough.
- [40:56]
Paris Martineau
I wouldn't have guessed that that was the sentence that was going to.
- [41:00]
Jeff Jarvis
No, same here.
- [41:02]
Leo Laporte
I don't. I don't even know where to begin. We're still waiting for chat GPT5 from OpenAI.
- [41:08]
Paris Martineau
But did you see someone. Was it Sam Altman or somebody from OpenAI said chat GPT4 tight. It's represented as a tiny dot. Chat GPT5amuch larger dot. Get excited. So you know there could be a. There could be a much bigger dot coming.
- [41:25]
Vlad Prelovac
Guys.
- [41:25]
Paris Martineau
Everybody get pumped.
- [41:27]
Leo Laporte
He's really a good marketer. He also tweeted something like imagine having the smartest person you ever met in your pocket. Well that's chat a little weird.
- [41:40]
Paris Martineau
I wouldn't want to.
- [41:41]
Leo Laporte
No, I'm not putting any.
- [41:43]
Jeff Jarvis
Get out of there.
- [41:44]
Leo Laporte
But I think. And also it's overselling the idea that this thing is smart. It's not smart but it is very, very useful. So what they did release just yesterday is their first open weight models in a long time. Chat GPT OSS 120B and 20B.
- [42:01]
Jeff Jarvis
Did they ever release open weights before?
- [42:03]
Leo Laporte
This says in this wired article chat GPT2 but nobody wanted that. Now the able they ability to run these models on your local system. Now the 120 gigabyte model, you probably can't run on a system unless you've got a lot of vram, a lot of gpu.
- [42:25]
Jeff Jarvis
How does that compare to the small llamas?
- [42:28]
Leo Laporte
I think llama's 70. So it's big. It's 50% bigger. More than 50% bigger. 20B you could run on almost any machine. Sam said we're excited to make this model. The result of billions of dollars of research they have billions. In fact they are now letting their employees sell their stock at a valuation of half a trillion dollars. Which is pretty good for a company that I don't think has ever made any money. But I might be wrong.
- [43:04]
Paris Martineau
You're not.
- [43:04]
Leo Laporte
Download them both for free on hugging face as usual. Okay. Yeah. The last open weight model released by OpenAI was ChatGPT2 back in 2019.
- [43:13]
Jeff Jarvis
Here anybody could drive our Edsel.
- [43:17]
Leo Laporte
But these are their state of the art models. Well they will be or they were or they will be until five comes out. Right. And for clarify, Apache 2.0 open weight.
- [43:26]
Paris Martineau
Models are just Basically, models that you're able to download locally and tweak and.
- [43:31]
Leo Laporte
Run locally without sending any information back to the home office. And I think they're being pushed into this by the active Chinese community, the Q1 from Alibaba and Deep Seat.
- [43:42]
Jeff Jarvis
And yes, it's interesting that, that Zuckerberg has been backing off Open.
- [43:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [43:50]
Jeff Jarvis
At the same time, Yann Lecun is staying, is waving the flag out loud of Open. So I think there must be something going on in Meta to decide what's going to be open and what's not.
- [43:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, they never officially said we're not. We're gonna stop, pull back on our open source.
- [44:04]
Jeff Jarvis
No, no. But it's been obviously some discussion.
- [44:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [44:08]
Paris Martineau
It was reported by the New York Times that they were considering it.
- [44:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, internally. But that was.
- [44:15]
Jeff Jarvis
It was an interpretation of what he was saying about the. About the difficulties of this. But, yeah, I think the pressure to be open is. Remains huge.
- [44:21]
Leo Laporte
There's also, I think it's fair to say, a benefit to being open. Then you get a lot more people working with your tools and. And there's some value to that.
- [44:30]
Benito
Hi, this is Benito. I also think, like, people who are really, really serious about this AI stuff, they use local.
- [44:37]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. In fact, I'm very interested in running my AI locally. Or, you know, it's interesting to do it through. For instance, Kagi in a more privacy, forward way would be very interesting. One of the things Kagi does with its assistant is you can say, preserve all my chats, which is the default in most AIs AI chatbots, or delete it every day, start fresh. I don't want you to remember anything I say to you. And now that we know that, which Sam Altman has been quick to say, everything you say to ChatGPT could be subpoenaed at some point by the New York Times. Yeah, the court is forcing them to preserve it in this New York Times lawsuit. So he wants to make sure you understand that you have no privacy when you're chatting on the server. That doesn't mean if you download the models and chat locally. It's just that it takes a lot of hardware to run.
- [45:27]
Jeff Jarvis
So I spoke to the AI librarian at Stony Brook yesterday.
- [45:31]
Paris Martineau
Is this a human librarian?
- [45:33]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes, it is a human librarian. Yes. Yes, it is the librarian for AI, not the librarian. I misspoke. And he's running a local model. They've got a few GPUs, and he's using Llama, and it allows the university to take the Collections that they don't necessarily want to make public or can't and make them open to the students. The openness enables so much university innovation.
- [46:00]
Paris Martineau
So is this you, I mean, you'd previously described as the AI librarian? Is this, this guy's full time job focusing on.
- [46:06]
Jeff Jarvis
He was just.
- [46:07]
Paris Martineau
Wow.
- [46:08]
Jeff Jarvis
From usaid, by the way. Yeah.
- [46:11]
Paris Martineau
Wow.
- [46:12]
Jeff Jarvis
We might want to have him on the show at some point.
- [46:14]
Paris Martineau
I think that would be really interesting. I mean, I'm like very interested in the niche applications of these tools and modeling, you know, that you can get. But I'd be curious, I guess also to hear how students are using it or faculty.
- [46:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. But that's just the beginning of this wild.
- [46:39]
Jeff Jarvis
It's a sandstorm coming.
- [46:41]
Leo Laporte
It is a sandstorm. I'm telling you. We're getting close. We're getting close.
- [46:47]
Jeff Jarvis
I still love it.
- [46:48]
Paris Martineau
We're not, we're not getting close until the technology to make an AI powered video graphic for this podcast that that is sand focused exists.
- [46:58]
Leo Laporte
Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because there is a new open world model that has just come out from Google. Let me show you the video that Google posted on the Keyword blog. It's called Genie 3. Now what's different about this? Now of course they have Veo, right? But Genie 3 creates open world models, models you can wander around in. They have some persistence as well.
- [47:31]
Paris Martineau
Are you saying the AI bubble has gotten so big that we've circled back around the metaverse bubble?
- [47:38]
Leo Laporte
I honestly think.
- [47:40]
Paris Martineau
Are there going to be.
- [47:41]
Leo Laporte
Think about it. If you're a, if you're a believer in the simulation hypothesis, this would be an important step into the simulation. So you type in a text prompt, it will generate a video like VEO does, but a video you can wander around in.
- [47:59]
Jeff Jarvis
And that is live.
- [48:00]
Leo Laporte
It's live. So this is the, this is the video.
- [48:05]
Jeff Jarvis
You're not walking through a pre built simulation.
- [48:08]
Vlad Prelovac
Everything you see here is being generated live as you explore it.
- [48:12]
Leo Laporte
Now it's not out yet, so. And we know Google sometimes can oversell stuff.
- [48:18]
Jeff Jarvis
Usually they do it on stage.
- [48:20]
Leo Laporte
Now watch this. So here he's painting a wall with a blue. Oh yeah, you can look at your feet by the way.
- [48:25]
Paris Martineau
You can have legs in this open.
- [48:28]
Leo Laporte
So watch now he's painted this pattern. Now watch. He's going to look away. In the past, AIs might have generated a whole new wall when you look back. But no, the pattern is persistent and that's one of the promptable events. Now watch this on the fly. Something like another Person, a man in a chicken suit appears from the left.
- [48:47]
Jeff Jarvis
This is about. From their office in London. So notice the water comes up on the. But doesn't stay there.
- [48:53]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's still not perfect. If you look closely, you probably could tell it was generated. All kinds of unique environments, but you'd have to look pretty closely.
- [49:00]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Geographies, Leo, The. The video they put up comparing version two to version three is striking.
- [49:08]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. Let's go back to the. The blog. Is it on that blog post?
- [49:11]
Jeff Jarvis
It's on that blog post, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [49:13]
Leo Laporte
So they still have veo. There are limitations to what Genie 3 could do. It's only 720p. It can only do a few minutes, which is actually more than vo can only do eight seconds. So this is. Are these the two together? Yeah, this is it.
- [49:34]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes, it is. If you got to back up, though.
- [49:36]
Leo Laporte
How do I even control this?
- [49:38]
Jeff Jarvis
Reload the page or something.
- [49:40]
Leo Laporte
Maybe that's it. Yeah, there we go. So if we go. If we look more closely, Genie 2 is on the left. This is the other thing that I think encourages me that we are getting very close to some sort of massive breakthrough is the speed with which these improvements are happening. I mean, it's happening fast. So not only does it look better, you could see. It lasts longer.
- [50:05]
Jeff Jarvis
Longer movements are smoother.
- [50:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And. And you're controlling this with. With your keyboard, with your arrow keys.
- [50:12]
Jeff Jarvis
Paris, as a gamer, are you not jazzed?
- [50:17]
Paris Martineau
I mean, what. I'm probably not the person to ask, because I like games that are, like, very human, and I enjoy, like, the actual physical. Like, one of my favorite games is that Gutenberg Press era one where everything is pentimental, where everything is drawn.
- [50:38]
Leo Laporte
As soon as I can buy a switch, a new switch, I'm gonna send Jeff my old switch so he can play.
- [50:42]
Paris Martineau
Jeff is going to literally, like, love it. It is every aspect of it is Jeff Bates. But, I mean, I'm interested in stuff like this, but it kind of reminds me of some of the criticism around. Oh, probably Bonita's gonna have to help me. What is the open world game put out by Bethesda that had all the AI generated worlds that everybody criticized for it feeling too sparse and just procedurally generated or something. That Starfield.
- [51:09]
Leo Laporte
Yes, Starfield. It was.
- [51:12]
Paris Martineau
It is Starfield. It came out, I think, around the time of, like, Baldur's Gate 3. And I remember being like, oh, I should like into this. I'm also into Baldur's Gate 3. Like, I love Bethesda games. And I mean maybe these advents in kind of the processing power that you're talking about here might change that. But I do think that, that it pointed, it pointed to kind of a problem we still have with this, which is even if you have the technical capability to generate a whole world, unless there's someone trying to design that world or think about it in a way that it's like what about this is going to be interesting to a player? It's not going to feel the same as something crafted to be fascinating and interesting.
- [51:55]
Leo Laporte
That's also not with no Man's sky was kind of similar. I played both Starfield and no Man's sky and they both got kind of tedious because procedurally generated worlds are not.
- [52:04]
Benito
Exactly like this isn't new for games. Like we've had procedurally generated worlds for a long time.
- [52:08]
Leo Laporte
Well, but what's interesting is these might be. I mean look, there's no way these aren't going to be in games over the next few years that these, the movies, games and other things aren't going to have.
- [52:18]
Benito
Yes, but not wholesale this way. It's still going to be heavily curated by somebody who's designing an experience for another person. Person. It's not going to be a tool.
- [52:25]
Jeff Jarvis
For them to do that with.
- [52:27]
Benito
Yeah, it's a tool for them to do that with. It's not going to be like me jumping into this and being like go.
- [52:32]
Leo Laporte
You know, maybe it will. That would empower you.
- [52:36]
Benito
That's the problem. It's not like I don't know what I want. I need a good game designer to give me a good game because I don't know what I want.
- [52:41]
Leo Laporte
Well then you shouldn't design games. Okay, let's just say that like you.
- [52:46]
Benito
Don'T know what you want either. Until you get what. Until you get it. You know what I mean? Like.
- [52:49]
Leo Laporte
Well, yeah.
- [52:50]
Paris Martineau
The reason why game design is a.
- [52:52]
Leo Laporte
Field that somebody knows what he's doing. Don't you think that John Carmack.
- [52:59]
Benito
Yeah, sure. So I want John Carmack to design something with this tool for me.
- [53:04]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's exactly what's going to happen. Okay, but that's exactly what's going to happen. You're going to have the John Carmack's and there's going to be some kid now who doesn't have. John Carmack was an amazing coder. Right. He's the guy wrote Doom and was able to do stuff with. With very primitive hardware nobody thought possible. But there's gonna be some kid out there who doesn't code but who has a vision for a game? Who's gonna start using tools like this? Maybe not today. They may be a few years off. Here's another example of breakthrough technology. This is called Kitten text to speech. It runs on a potato, by which they mean a really crappy computer. This is an open source voice model that can run on your computer. CPU only 25 megabyte model. It's teensy weensy and you might say well we've had text to speech before, but it never sounds very good at that. Listen to Kitten.
- [54:00]
Paris Martineau
Kitten TTS is an open source series.
- [54:03]
Leo Laporte
Of tiny and expressive text to speech models for on device applications.
- [54:08]
Paris Martineau
Our smallest model is less than 25 megabytes. The world needs frontier open source models that are tiny enough to run on edge devices.
- [54:18]
Leo Laporte
Well, they're using kind of kit.
- [54:19]
Paris Martineau
That's what Kitten ML is here.
- [54:21]
Leo Laporte
I don't think you have to use qc.
- [54:22]
Paris Martineau
Voices was started just two weeks ago and we're excited to launch a preview of our smallest model. This model has 15 million parameters. Don't like that. Releasing the Just to give early users a sense of the latency and voices that will be available in next week's child labor. We are looking for early testers that can provide feedback to shape the future of these models.
- [54:44]
Jeff Jarvis
Leo, have you taken a PDF of a book and put it in 11 labs and had it read to you model?
- [54:48]
Leo Laporte
Oh no, I haven't done that yet.
- [54:50]
Paris Martineau
How do you get it to do that? Trained on.
- [54:52]
Jeff Jarvis
I just saw that it was capable of that.
- [54:54]
Leo Laporte
You can also do video, but no, they've added video.
- [54:57]
Paris Martineau
Now someone who wanted to do this with books. With audiobooks while on my road. With books while on a road trip.
- [55:04]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, you were asking about this.
- [55:05]
Paris Martineau
We're, we're texting about this. Is that books are. It's kind of the book equivalent of copyright. Like they're locked down the epub files.
- [55:14]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I showed her how to get around that.
- [55:16]
Paris Martineau
So I need to do that.
- [55:17]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, like I sent you, I sent you a PDF of a book about the invention of the loudspeaker.
- [55:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, let me, let me, let me put that in labs. Yeah, let's try it right now. By the way, 11 labs voices are much better than almost anybody else. But the fact that Kitten can do this in 25 megabytes without a GPU.
- [55:37]
Jeff Jarvis
God bless them. No smoke on them.
- [55:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And I don't think the voices have to sound that crappy. I have created a new folder just for that book called History in My book. I have a lot of.
- [55:53]
Paris Martineau
You have a history folder in your computer?
- [55:56]
Leo Laporte
No, most of it. Well, because my collection started mostly with programming manuals, but now I have. And by the way, we should mention that this is public domain now. You write this book?
- [56:11]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, yeah. It's old. It's hell.
- [56:13]
Leo Laporte
It's old as hell.
- [56:14]
Jeff Jarvis
Doesn't mean a guy who invented the loudspeaker in Napa.
- [56:18]
Leo Laporte
It's called the great voice Magnavox.
- [56:21]
Jeff Jarvis
In other words.
- [56:21]
Leo Laporte
Now, how do I get it to. I can do the audio overview, but how do I get a book?
- [56:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Where did I read that? Damn, I thought it was on the page.
- [56:28]
Paris Martineau
Well, what I've done before in Yield chatgpt is I upload a PDF and then I say, read this to me out loud verbatim, in chunks or whatever. And usually then it will break down like a chunk. But I don't know if that would work for a book because then you have to like, every time it's done, you have to go prompt it again to do another one and download its reader.
- [56:52]
Leo Laporte
Oh, There's a notebook LM reader.
- [56:56]
Jeff Jarvis
That's right. So I'm reading now. 11 Labs IO blog readpdfloud.
- [57:02]
Leo Laporte
I will. I can do now because we always had the audio overview, which was a goofy podcast hosts, but we now know 11 reader IO. Ah. Oh, this is. Oh, you're talking 11 reader. I thought you were talking about notebook lm.
- [57:15]
Jeff Jarvis
No, I was talking.
- [57:16]
Leo Laporte
No wonder I'm trying to do this in Notebook LM. Oh, I. I have the app. 11 has a.
- [57:21]
Jeff Jarvis
That's what I'm saying. That's why I was asking you how to do this, because Paris wants to do this.
- [57:24]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you said Notebook lm. Didn't she say Notebook?
- [57:28]
Jeff Jarvis
No. Well, she then went on to that. But we're talking about.
- [57:31]
Paris Martineau
I don't even think I brought up Notebook lm, to be honest. Honest. But.
- [57:34]
Leo Laporte
Oh, no, you didn't.
- [57:36]
Paris Martineau
I said chat GPT.
- [57:37]
Leo Laporte
All right, well, I pay for 11 reader and I like 11 reader a lot. And yeah, it. It's the one where they paid for some very famous voices. I have Sir Lawrence Olivier, and I.
- [57:49]
Paris Martineau
Don'T want a famous voice for some reason I don't know that. Does that feel strange to you?
- [57:54]
Leo Laporte
His eyes sparkled and he sent up.
- [57:56]
Vlad Prelovac
A great blue triumphant cloud from his.
- [57:59]
Leo Laporte
Okay, the paper was made in. I said precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German who. You know, the peculiar construction of synthesized voice of Lawrence Olivier. Okay, it's not actually Lawrence Olivier. He's gone reading Sherlock Holmes.
- [58:17]
Jeff Jarvis
AI Is so big they've resurrected Lawrence Olivier.
- [58:20]
Vlad Prelovac
Frenchman or Russian could not have written that.
- [58:23]
Leo Laporte
It is the German. Here's the thing that I find interesting. Testing. They are so good at this that it sounds. He's pausing. He's. It sounds like he understands what he's reading, which he obviously AI does not. But it's. It's. It communicates uncourteous to his verbs. It only remains therefore to discover what is wanted by this German who writes upon bohemian paper and prefers wearing a mask to showing.
- [58:45]
Paris Martineau
It's pretty good. Yeah.
- [58:47]
Leo Laporte
Pretty good. All right. All right.
- [58:52]
Paris Martineau
I. I will say I like this more than the average audiobook narrator. I keep having this problem that I've brought up in the show probably a million times before, which is whenever I'm.
- [59:01]
Leo Laporte
Full time U. S. Employees to adopt.
- [59:04]
Vlad Prelovac
Some form of flexible scheduling.
- [59:06]
Leo Laporte
It's like we've accidentally created. That's not a famous person but I.
- [59:10]
Jeff Jarvis
Like that that's just an obnoxious person.
- [59:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [59:12]
Paris Martineau
Plush scheduling.
- [59:15]
Leo Laporte
Cinderella read by Judy Garland frock to put on and laughed at her and turned her into the kitchen. Then she was forced to do hard work. To rise early before daylight to bring the water to make the fire, to cook and to wash. She had no bed to lie down on.
- [59:30]
Benito
These people like that. Stop making them work.
- [59:32]
Leo Laporte
Freaking amazing.
- [59:33]
Jeff Jarvis
The phrase. He just.
- [59:34]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. Let her rest.
- [59:35]
Benito
Let these people rest.
- [59:37]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [59:37]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you don't want me to use dead people anymore, huh?
- [59:41]
Paris Martineau
I don't really want you to use live people anywhere. I kind of. I kind of like. I honestly enjoyed the Judy Garland one. I do like that these.
- [59:48]
Leo Laporte
I've had annoying feeling lately about AI Although the prophecies that chatbots. That's Alex Cantrow. It's. That's the real person. Just testing.
- [59:56]
Paris Martineau
I was gonna say that kind of sounded the fakest but I think that there's something that you know, like something I've realized about some of these audiobook narrators or people reading scripts for podcasts is when you're. They're focusing on reading. Sometimes they don't modulate their voice because they are focusing on reading. And that is really hard for my brain brain to grab on to. At least the machine based readers know like intrinsically in the programming you've got to kind of modulate your tone and kind of switch it up a little bit.
- [60:26]
Leo Laporte
It's hard work.
- [60:26]
Paris Martineau
Someone interesting.
- [60:27]
Leo Laporte
This is why actors are very good at this because they actually. So here's a. Here's Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. Burt Reynolds reading the Tale of Peter Rabbit. Once upon a time, there were real bird rabbits and their names were. He's dead too, Flopsy.
- [60:42]
Paris Martineau
He could have read it in the day.
- [60:44]
Leo Laporte
See, that's all AI they lived with their mother in a sand bank underneath the root of a very big fur tree. I think that's pretty freaking amazing. Do you want Maya Angelou reading it.
- [60:57]
Jeff Jarvis
Or Rich Presents magazine?
- [61:00]
Leo Laporte
Let's do read by Jeff Jarvis.
- [61:05]
Paris Martineau
Do you have yourself reading the AI thing?
- [61:08]
Jeff Jarvis
Pat Ryan, Joan Feeney one the end.
- [61:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think the AI would do a better job. I hate to tell you what sets.
- [61:17]
Jeff Jarvis
Magazines apart from their printed brethren.
- [61:19]
Paris Martineau
No, I love this.
- [61:21]
Leo Laporte
See, he. Because he is. Course, often I like the author reading their books. By the way, if you're playing this from Audible, you're going to get us taken down.
- [61:32]
Jeff Jarvis
Have you ever heard me speak so slowly?
- [61:35]
Leo Laporte
That's why they have producers.
- [61:36]
Paris Martineau
How many times do they have to tell you to slow down?
- [61:39]
Jeff Jarvis
A lot. It's more muffled.
- [61:42]
Paris Martineau
How many takes do you think you.
- [61:44]
Leo Laporte
When I. I did a. When I. When Audible was a sponsor, I went to their Newark headquarters and they said, here, you can read a story. And, man, they had to stop me every five words.
- [61:53]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it's hard. It is so hard. And you've got a producer who's reading the text, and if you leave out a The. They see it and you got to go back. Yeah, so. So Paris. Other cheaper productions, they back the tape up to where you screwed up, and then you've got to pick up more expensive productions. You just go back and repeat it and they edit it.
- [62:16]
Benito
Wait, they still use tape?
- [62:17]
Jeff Jarvis
Are they.
- [62:17]
Benito
They're using tape. What are you talking about?
- [62:19]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, they're virtually.
- [62:21]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. There's a guy.
- [62:22]
Paris Martineau
They've got a whole big.
- [62:23]
Jeff Jarvis
They got scissors and tape on the tape, and then they split, replace it.
- [62:27]
Paris Martineau
Sometimes they run out of tape.
- [62:29]
Leo Laporte
Here is the physicist Richard Feynman reading the Little Match Girl by hands Christian Anderson.
- [62:36]
Jeff Jarvis
Most terribly cold.
- [62:37]
Leo Laporte
It was.
- [62:38]
Jeff Jarvis
It snowed and was nearly quite dark in evening.
- [62:40]
Benito
That's more Christopher. Evening of the year.
- [62:42]
Jeff Jarvis
This is.
- [62:43]
Leo Laporte
No, that's. That's really what a Feynman sounds like. I have.
- [62:46]
Benito
No, no, he doesn't sound.
- [62:47]
Leo Laporte
Lectures. Yeah, well, he sounds just like that.
- [62:51]
Jeff Jarvis
So this is all 11 labs you've been playing?
- [62:52]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, it's an app. It's a great app. I pick.
- [62:55]
Jeff Jarvis
You can put in any PDF. That's.
- [62:56]
Leo Laporte
That's anything you own. Yeah. You can even train it with your voice if you really wanted to hear yourself. O. You want to hear Deepak Chopra?
- [63:07]
Vlad Prelovac
With love, compassion and gratitude, you open.
- [63:10]
Paris Martineau
Yourself to the infinite potential of the universe.
- [63:13]
Leo Laporte
See, they, they licensed all this stuff. That's what's interesting. How about John Wayne reading what, Sherlock Holmes? That'd be pretty funny, wouldn't it?
- [63:30]
Paris Martineau
I just imagine that this is what you do in your free time when you're not on the show, but just maybe to no one at all.
- [63:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, just by myself. Lonely man. I just sit here and has anything.
- [63:48]
Paris Martineau
Used AI for anything interesting this week, personally or small?
- [63:53]
Leo Laporte
I use it every day, but I.
- [63:54]
Paris Martineau
Know, but is there anything you're like, oh, doing interesting, kind of useful.
- [63:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So family member has a. Got an email from his doctor saying, well, we, we gave you guys something interesting on your CT scan. We think you should come here. It was cause for concern. They wrote and then they described it. And Lisa and I are looking at each other going, what does that mean, the cause for concern? How serious is this? We put it into perplexity and got a lot of great information out of. Actually eased our minds because of the variety of causes possible for the symptoms he was showing.
- [64:35]
Paris Martineau
Did you share those results immediately with this person?
- [64:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, we said, hey, here's some, here's the good news, because you know what, Everybody always goes to cancer. Right? Here's the good News. There are 20 other things that could cause this, not cancer. So let's.
- [64:51]
Paris Martineau
And what does the doctor say?
- [64:53]
Leo Laporte
Well, we haven't. He's going to go in for the test. But this is the problem. He got that email, didn't even talk to it. This is the modern medicine. This is a very good use for AI because modern medicine now is just terrible in the US no doctor called, which I think on something like that a person should call.
- [65:09]
Jeff Jarvis
Drives me nuts. Yes.
- [65:11]
Leo Laporte
And then said, and we'll make an appointment for you in a week. So he's got to sit for a week in mystery. So I think that's a very good use of AI. Of course you're not looking for. Well, that's cancer for sure. You're looking for options, information. And it was very good at doing that. What else have I used it for lately? I use it all the time. Did you see your noise? I use it for my diet and for exercise.
- [65:38]
Paris Martineau
I will say so the only. The reason this is prompted by is I log all my meals through like one of those, like fitness tracker, like, like calorie breakdown macro sort of thing.
- [65:51]
Leo Laporte
Which one do you use?
- [65:53]
Paris Martineau
I use Lose it.
- [65:54]
Leo Laporte
I don't have any particular chronometer.
- [65:56]
Paris Martineau
Listen. Yeah, I probably should change. It was just the first thing I decided to download. It worked.
- [66:00]
Leo Laporte
Take a look at Chronometer. They just added a new feature.
- [66:04]
Paris Martineau
I do like that.
- [66:04]
Leo Laporte
I take a picture of the meal and it tells you what you're eating and what the calories and macros are.
- [66:12]
Paris Martineau
Using what Chronometer. Using what AI tool? Because what I'm about to describe is how I use like chat chat GPT 4.5 for that and it usually ends up being fairly accurate. I don't use it. I'd use it from like eating out or something. Or if I like get a biscuit from the bakery and then I weigh it at home and I want to get a rough estimate of what the calories are.
- [66:35]
Leo Laporte
So I just took a photo of my lunch. This isn't a good test because it says what's on it. Yeah, but it's scanning it right now and it's going to tell me.
- [66:45]
Paris Martineau
Honest. I have no. I don't imagine that ChatGPT or whichever LLM is powering that is 100% accurate, but it's kind of fairly. Oh, does it go straight in there?
- [66:58]
Benito
It's also written on the side of the thing you just scanned, by the way.
- [67:00]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, yeah, he bit that.
- [67:02]
Leo Laporte
I mean, no, I know. In fact, mostly what you do is take a picture of a plate of food without a description. But you know it and it's. And it may be wrong. It says that was 2,801 calories but I'm not going to eat the whole thing.
- [67:14]
Paris Martineau
Is that correct?
- [67:15]
Leo Laporte
Cronometer is fantastic. I have used. I used. Lose it. I've used them all. This is the one I use now. It ties into Apple Health. It ties into my orbital. Ties into everything. Yeah, my scale. So it knows everything.
- [67:33]
Paris Martineau
I've just found it somewhat kind of useful. Daily thing that I like, even I. I've been using.
- [67:40]
Leo Laporte
You're not on a diet.
- [67:42]
Paris Martineau
I just track my. What I like consume.
- [67:46]
Leo Laporte
It's a great habit. You should get it every day.
- [67:48]
Paris Martineau
I think it is very good. Yeah. You know, but I, I recently like was purchasing some of those like ready meal things from one of those companies. Thistle. Honestly, it's been pretty cool.
- [67:57]
Jeff Jarvis
Good.
- [67:57]
Paris Martineau
I'm using.
- [67:57]
Leo Laporte
Oh, is this all good? You like that?
- [67:59]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I. I have. Listen, I've had. I'm getting allegedly a delivery of it during this show. So I'll go and get the.
- [68:04]
Leo Laporte
Go and show us the.
- [68:06]
Paris Martineau
I will show you their pitch.
- [68:09]
Leo Laporte
Their pitch is something, right? They do health or something.
- [68:12]
Paris Martineau
They do like a Kind of vegan plant focus. They also have meat options, but I, I really just enjoy, like, they've got like good salad options for lunch and interesting dinners. I'll show you, I guess when I get it. But. But part of it is they have the macros and the breakdown on the back of each package. But it's like in these, like little small font and I'm like, I want to get that into my app, but I don't have to sit there and.
- [68:33]
Leo Laporte
Like, oh, you could take a picture of it in Chronometer.
- [68:35]
Paris Martineau
I was going to say I just took a photo of it in ChatGPT and had it combine both the salad dressing and the other one and all of it into one thing, copied it over and it was great.
- [68:44]
Leo Laporte
Isn't that nice?
- [68:45]
Paris Martineau
I don't know. It was.
- [68:46]
Leo Laporte
So here's another thing I do. I gave. I give the AIs. In this case, I think I did all of them just to see who gave me better results. Results. A picture of all my supplements and medications. And then it gives me information about them, whether I should take it with a meal or not. And then I said, okay, is this a good mix? They gave me an overall assessment. What are the interactions which should be monitored, what my next blood work should be based on what I'm eating. This was really useful. This was fantastic.
- [69:24]
Paris Martineau
Wait, can you go back to the photo? What are all the supplements you're taking?
- [69:28]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's a little out of date now. I don't do creatine anymore. But that's a picture.
- [69:33]
Paris Martineau
It's on the Internet. No, I thought you. It looked like you were scrolling through a webpage.
- [69:40]
Leo Laporte
I was like, no, it's Obsidian.
- [69:41]
Paris Martineau
Could you blog about your supplements?
- [69:43]
Leo Laporte
I could, I could take it straight out of Obsidian. But no, this is Obsidian and it recommended a couple of additional supplements. It said, could you. You should give in. And I told, you know, the prompt was my health conditions and all my weight and all that stuff. It said, you might want to try ala. It helps with diabetic neuropathy and reduces fasting glucose. Also berberine, vitamin K2. It recommended some stuff to try to add to my. It's good. It was really good.
- [70:09]
Jeff Jarvis
So what do you think of Illinois's law? Just signed.
- [70:12]
Leo Laporte
I was. Okay, let's talk about this. Illinois has been on the forefront of anti AI legislation. They have a very good, I think, anti face recognition law. Tell us about the new one, Jeff.
- [70:26]
Jeff Jarvis
So they've outlawed the use of AI for therap for mind therapy, either marketing it as A therapist or allowing therapists themselves to use it as a part of their services.
- [70:42]
Leo Laporte
I think this is. I couldn't disagree with this more. I acknowledge, as we had an interview on this and we've talked about it, that there are problems with using it, but many therapists have said there it's a valuable tool. And my biggest problem is it's premature for a state to just outlaw it. People in Illinois will not have the option to try this.
- [71:05]
Jeff Jarvis
But I think there is a need for some mechanism for standards because I could go along tomorrow and I can just use ChatGPT and I can say this was going to save your life and I can market it and make money and be a charlatan of Charlotte.
- [71:18]
Leo Laporte
This isn't a standard. It bans it.
- [71:21]
Jeff Jarvis
I. I know, but I'm saying there's something between this and that.
- [71:23]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [71:24]
Jeff Jarvis
That. That just to allow it and to not have a caveat emptor here is. Is dangerous.
- [71:32]
Leo Laporte
I think all we should have is a caveat emptor and information for people and let them choose, because the jury's still out. There are plenty of people, including therapists, who say it's a valuable tool.
- [71:45]
Jeff Jarvis
I don't know.
- [71:46]
Paris Martineau
I think it's fairly reasonable. Hold on. My headphones just died.
- [71:50]
Leo Laporte
Gosh darn it.
- [71:51]
Paris Martineau
Okay, One of them is still in, so I'm going to keep talking. I think it's fairly reasonable that this law prohibits AI systems from delivering therapeutic treatment or making clinical decisions. Decisions. I think that's pretty straightforward and perfectly reasonable. At this stage in the game, you should not have a LLM like chapter is a bunch of lithium clinical decisions and giving therapeutic treatment.
- [72:19]
Leo Laporte
Well, I think that's not true. I don't think an AI can prescribe anything in. Absent an actual physician. Those laws already exist, so a physician would still have to write the prescription.
- [72:31]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, but I mean, I think that this is kind of common sense, like, first step.
- [72:35]
Leo Laporte
That's not what this does. This says you can't use it at all.
- [72:40]
Paris Martineau
Let's go to the text, the bill.
- [72:43]
Leo Laporte
It's an outright ban. And by the way, Florida's. Florida's Ron DeSantis says we're next. AI is very dangerous.
- [72:52]
Paris Martineau
This act provides that an individual, corporation or entity may not provide, advertise or otherwise offer therapy or psychotherapy services services to the public in Illinois unless those services are conducted by an individual who is a licensed professional. And that licensed professional can only use an AI system to the extent that that AI system meets, like the definitions of an AI system. They cannot use that AI system to make independent therapeutic decisions, directly interact with clients in any form of therapeutical communication. None of their business therapeutic.
- [73:29]
Jeff Jarvis
So, Leo, do you think I should be free?
- [73:31]
Leo Laporte
Should I be free? I don't want them telling me what can and cannot do. Well, that is BS So you're not a licensed therapist.
- [73:37]
Paris Martineau
It's not you anything?
- [73:39]
Leo Laporte
No, it's saying that I wanted to use this.
- [73:42]
Paris Martineau
Cannot offer you.
- [73:43]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so an individual in the state of Illinois can use this? Yeah, I could go to Abby, the website where they have therapy. That's legal in Illinois.
- [73:51]
Paris Martineau
Well, I don't know if it's illegal for Abby to offer that, but I think that you could use an LLM to give you.
- [74:00]
Leo Laporte
They're not.
- [74:01]
Paris Martineau
Ironically, they're going to say that's the.
- [74:03]
Leo Laporte
Most dangerous use of. Of it is some individual saying, I think I'm going to get some therapy from chat GPT. That's the most dangerous use of it.
- [74:11]
Paris Martineau
Arguing on this show a million different times that that should be totally fine.
- [74:16]
Leo Laporte
I don't want the government to tell me what I can do with my chat GPT. But if you wanted to say, well, here's the most harm. It's when individuals absent the help of a therapist use it.
- [74:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's what we're saying.
- [74:29]
Leo Laporte
No, they didn't ban that.
- [74:31]
Paris Martineau
That it bans using an AI system to make independent therapeutic decisions, directly interact with clients and generate therapeutic records under the aegis of a therapist or treatment plans without the review and approval by a licensed professional. So you could. A licensed professional could use these tools, but they have to have review and they have to be in the loop.
- [74:54]
Leo Laporte
Can I use it in my house in the privacy of my own home? Can I use it in my house?
- [74:58]
Paris Martineau
Use it doesn't say anything about that.
- [75:00]
Jeff Jarvis
Leo. Leo, put this way. Can I just go to move Illinois. I'm going to move to Illinois and I'm going to put a shingle outside my door and I'm going to declare myself a therapist. What's the difference?
- [75:08]
Leo Laporte
That's the way it is in California. You don't. Anybody can be a counselor in California.
- [75:12]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's California for counselor is different.
- [75:14]
Paris Martineau
Than a licensed therapist.
- [75:15]
Leo Laporte
Well, no, I think that's true. In most states there is a licensing program. I know my wife was a MFT and before that an MFCC and she went through a lot of stuff to become a licensed therapist. My ex.
- [75:27]
Jeff Jarvis
Wife.
- [75:28]
Leo Laporte
Wife. But that doesn't stop somebody from just putting out a shingle saying, I am a Counselor. And if you've got ptsd, I can help. That's not illegal.
- [75:40]
Jeff Jarvis
That makes me uncomfortable. I mean, what makes me.
- [75:45]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, that's another problem. It is a lot harder to become a haircutter in California than it is to become a lot of things. And I don't think it's exclusive to California. So first of all, this is an issue because each state is going to have its different laws and it's going to be a variety of laws. And this was why they wanted to. You know, Marsha Blackburn wanted to ban all state regulation. But the problem was, do you believe that they didn't propose anything any federal regulation either. So they were essentially saying we're going to ban regulation. I think if there's going to be regulation A, it should be very judicious and careful because we don't know a lot about what's going on right now. But now that I'm telling you, there's.
- [76:31]
Jeff Jarvis
A lot of people that is just killing mRNA which might cure cancer and we're not going to get there. So I don't really want federal regulation.
- [76:38]
Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, so maybe we shouldn't have any regulation. Right? Yeah. That by the way, is the most shocking thing that's happened.
- [76:45]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's as anti science as you can.
- [76:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Basically you want to talk testreal. It's clear that RFK Jr. Is a eugenicist and he thinks that if you get sick you should either get better on your own or die and make the species more strong. And this guy is insane and he should not be in charge of our vaccine program. But he is. There is a lot of information. Look, the information is unclear at this point about how useful or unuseful. And that's why I think think it's a premature for Illinois to ban. It says bans AI from providing mental health services. I don't.
- [77:27]
Paris Martineau
You're not looking at the text of the bill, you're looking at someone's write up. The. The write up says it prohibits a licensed therapist to use an AI system to make independent therapeutic decisions directly interact with clients.
- [77:42]
Leo Laporte
Why shouldn't a therapist generate trained therapist be able to do that? Can you let me finish?
- [77:47]
Jeff Jarvis
No, no, let me finish speaking.
- [77:49]
Paris Martineau
It says generate therapeutic recommendations or treatment plans without the review and approval by a licensed professional. I think that's really reasonable. I think that if you're trying to offer license services that are being described as coming from a licensed therapeutical therapy therapy professional, you can't do that just by off handing it off to a LLM and claiming that that's you.
- [78:13]
Leo Laporte
Okay, so if that's. It's a very narrow thing, which is I'm a, I'm a licensed professional. You come to me for therapy, I say, hey, here's your chatbot. Go have fun. I'm not going to pay any attention to what conversation you have. That's what it protects against.
- [78:30]
Jeff Jarvis
And it also says I can't start a company that's going to offer.
- [78:34]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's what therapy. Yeah. So those websites might.
- [78:42]
Paris Martineau
Might struggle in Illinois. And I mean, I. Yeah, I'm not.
- [78:45]
Leo Laporte
Sure that's a bad conversation.
- [78:47]
Paris Martineau
I don't think.
- [78:47]
Jeff Jarvis
Okay, all.
- [78:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but I think it's a little moral. I think it's moral panic, Jeff, because it comes from reading these stories about, oh, this guy killed himself.
- [78:56]
Jeff Jarvis
He said it. Don't we get a. Don't we get a. You know.
- [79:00]
Leo Laporte
There we go.
- [79:03]
Jeff Jarvis
It's one of my favorites.
- [79:05]
Paris Martineau
It really is great.
- [79:06]
Leo Laporte
I don't like laws that are written to respond to sensational news stories.
- [79:11]
Paris Martineau
I mean, then you don't like any laws, I guess, because most laws, that's.
- [79:15]
Jeff Jarvis
Pretty much all it is. Laws are ripped from the headlines, folks.
- [79:20]
Leo Laporte
Did you see? Wow. And I put this in the show notes. First of all, Paler has just signed a $10 billion army contract, Palantir, which is Alex Carpent, Peter Thiel's AI for military.
- [79:40]
Jeff Jarvis
And police.
- [79:40]
Leo Laporte
And police. This is a 10 year deal. They are raking it in in D.C. but I put a link in here to a video of Palantir's CEO talking about, well, kind of his, his vision of what AIs role in. In and what really, really defense's role, military defense's role is in the world we live in today. This is Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir.
- [80:15]
Jim Acosta
Americans are the most loving, God fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. They want to know that if you're waking up and thinking about harming American citizens, or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you're a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved. And you know, when Americans are spending a trillion dollars on defense, what I, what I know, what, what I want and what I think my peers want is why are these people keeping our citizens hostage, torturing our people, attacking our allies, El Salvador, what was once called the United nations, basically a discriminatory institution against anything good. We need to Stand up. And those people need to be scared. And that's why this conference is so important. Because we have the best products in the world and we cannot have parity. Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction, if it's even. They will take advantage of our niceness, kindness, our desire. Desire to be at home in Nebraska or New Hampshire or wherever we live in our peaceful environments. And they need to wake up scared and go to bed scared. And if you give that to the American people, the American people will go back and say, and honestly probably shouldn't say. This is why I thought the Democrats are going to lose the election. Why they did, because people want to live in peace. They want to go home. They do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology. They want to know they're safe. And safe means that the other person is scared. That's how you make someone safe.
- [81:53]
Leo Laporte
Safe means. Wow, the other person is scared. This is the telling part about it.
- [81:58]
Benito
That's the telling part. Yeah.
- [81:59]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [82:00]
Leo Laporte
He's a nut job.
- [82:01]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
- [82:03]
Leo Laporte
So I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. You may remember I read his book the Technological Republic. I thought it's fairly reasonable in the beginning. It goes off the rails much like this as it continues. This guy, I just got $10 billion from the United States army to put AI into our military and other governments.
- [82:22]
Jeff Jarvis
Germany is having huge discussions right now because they plan to use it in policing there. Germany plus Israel plus other nations.
- [82:30]
Leo Laporte
He's a nut.
- [82:32]
Jeff Jarvis
Uh huh.
- [82:33]
Leo Laporte
It goes on by the way. I cut it off because I couldn't take anymore. But I think you got the flavor of it.
- [82:39]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, my, my first thought is if this is the sort of thing he's saying on stage at a conference, what are the things he's saying?
- [82:48]
Leo Laporte
You know, kid in public, in front.
- [82:50]
Paris Martineau
Of cameras, behind closed doors.
- [82:52]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I met him in Vienna. We were spoken the same.
- [82:57]
Leo Laporte
He was a student of Habermas.
- [82:59]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, I don't know what that proves.
- [83:05]
Leo Laporte
He studied, he studied Goethe. I mean he's, he seems like an intellectual.
- [83:09]
Jeff Jarvis
Always is. The IQ's there. Same with Teal.
- [83:13]
Benito
But that doesn't mean you're morally. That doesn't mean anything about morally.
- [83:17]
Leo Laporte
Oh no. I feel like it should. Maybe that's my mistake. All right, let's take a break.
- [83:27]
Jeff Jarvis
But he. So just one more thing about. About. So, so his view on regulation was. Yes, regulate us. And then anything you don't regulate, regulate we are free to do.
- [83:40]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, see that's an issue. Yeah, that no we're expecting you to use your good judgment.
- [83:46]
Jeff Jarvis
No, he says that's your job as a regulator. You tell us what we can't do. If you don't tell us, everything else is fine and dandy and we have.
- [83:53]
Leo Laporte
No responsibility because you didn't tell us not to. You didn't tell me not to. That's a teenager's point of view.
- [83:58]
Jeff Jarvis
That's what he said on stage in. In Vienna.
- [84:01]
Leo Laporte
That's a teenager. Hey, you didn't tell me not to.
- [84:04]
Jeff Jarvis
Right, right.
- [84:05]
Benito
Well, the whole, the, the whole my enemies need to fear me thing is teenager thinking, too. Like, it's all teenager thinking all the way down.
- [84:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're not scared of me, I'm not safe. If you don't go to bed, if you, your children, your mistresses, your family don't go to bed, scared, afraid that I'm going to come and kill you, then I'm not safe.
- [84:24]
Paris Martineau
I don't think we should bring my mistresses into this. But other than that.
- [84:27]
Leo Laporte
Why did he bring that up? Telling. All right, we're gonna take a break. I just, When I saw that, I was like, oh, my God. What brought you to watch was on Reddit. Somebody. It's. By the way, it's fairly old. He did it. It's a few months ago from the Reagan National Defense Conference. He was talking in front of like minded individuals. That's why I think he felt free to. To be so open.
- [84:51]
Benito
About the Reagan Defense Conference.
- [84:55]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. You know, someday we're going to have a golden dome to match the golden ballroom. It's hard not to cry. All right, I want. I'm going to take a break. I don't want to get political. I know people don't like it when we get political, but I think it's important on an AI show to talk about the people who are in charge of the AI that our government is now buying. They're also being used to decide which regulations to cut. Right. They brought in Palantir to go through all the federal regulations. They want to cut half of them, and the AI will pick which half. I guess if it doesn't make people scared, we're gonna. We don't need it. Yeah, he is a very rich nut job. That's the problem with a lot of these guys. They're so rich, they're untouchable.
- [85:48]
Paris Martineau
Kind of like the old Internet adage that the age in which you first find large commercial success is the age at which you stop maturing socially, personally.
- [86:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that might be true. I Think these guys stopped maturing a little earlier than that.
- [86:06]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, they all started.
- [86:07]
Benito
They started with money. So, you know, they went to a.
- [86:10]
Jeff Jarvis
Freshman seminar and they talk at that level.
- [86:13]
Paris Martineau
Level.
- [86:13]
Benito
Did they all started with.
- [86:14]
Leo Laporte
Kind of feels that there's no doubt.
- [86:16]
Benito
That they all started with money.
- [86:18]
Leo Laporte
I don't know if Carp started with money. I don't think so.
- [86:21]
Benito
Let's look him up.
- [86:22]
Leo Laporte
I don't think he did. I don't know what his history is. Martin from Germany says, and he has some experience with this. If we don't get political, the wrong ones make the politics. Thank you, Martin.
- [86:36]
Jeff Jarvis
Shimped Martin Shte.
- [86:40]
Leo Laporte
I learned a new German phrase. I don't know how common it is. Was it Martin that taught me this? Oh, what was it? It was schnachmorer, which means snooze mouse or something like that. Something's really boring. It's a schnachmurrer. Have you ever heard that phrase before?
- [87:01]
Jeff Jarvis
I have not.
- [87:03]
Leo Laporte
Okay. Jason Calacanis weighing in in our discord, says he's glad Alex Carp is on our side. Yeah, that's probably true. That's one way to look at it. At least he's not making us scared. Or is he?
- [87:14]
Jeff Jarvis
It's not Jason Calacanis.
- [87:15]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, that is.
- [87:18]
Jeff Jarvis
It is.
- [87:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, Absolutely.
- [87:19]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, hi, Jason.
- [87:20]
Leo Laporte
Jason drops in all the time. Let's take a break.
- [87:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Have you had Karp on your show, Jason?
- [87:28]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I bet he has. You had him on All In. You know it, Martin. Right. What does that mean? Snooze, Snooze, mouse, snooze, moose.
- [87:41]
Paris Martineau
If you give a snooze, a moose give a snooze.
- [87:45]
Leo Laporte
Give a moose a snooze. Schnachmurrer. You can add that, Jeff, to your.
- [87:50]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes. Vocabulary.
- [87:52]
Leo Laporte
Snore. Oh, I'm sorry. A mourer is a carrot. It's a snore. Carrot.
- [87:57]
Jeff Jarvis
That's better.
- [87:58]
Paris Martineau
If you give a snore a carrot.
- [88:00]
Leo Laporte
Schnachmur murr. I can't pronounce it right, but now we have a second title after nine seconds of Google. I don't know. We're gonna. This is gonna be.
- [88:08]
Jeff Jarvis
So Jason just said that he hasn't had him on, but he will be at the All In Summit. He's fascinating, by the way. By the way, Jason, when you say that he's on our side.
- [88:20]
Benito
Who is our. Who's on our side?
- [88:22]
Leo Laporte
He's on their side. He's on my side. Anyway, I'm not on his side and.
- [88:29]
Jeff Jarvis
I'm scared, so it's Working.
- [88:30]
Leo Laporte
It's working. You know, I have to say, sometimes this stuff keeps me up at night. But not last night. Last night.
- [88:41]
Jeff Jarvis
The best ad segue ever and I just ruined it.
- [88:46]
Leo Laporte
Last night I slept on our sponsor Helix Sleep. And I slept the sleep of dreams. I am telling you, this is the song. I did this. Actually, Perplexity told me this. I said, I asked the AI, I said, when is it time to get rid of our mattress? And it said, well, it depends. But six to 10 years is sometime in that time frame. I said, oh my gosh, we have an eight year old mattress. So I started looking And I found helixsleep.com and I am so glad I did. Your mattress is more than just something you sleep on, by the way. I think you know this. We spend more than a third of our life on our mattresses. I mean, my favorite thing is to curl up with a good book. A nice, nice comfy mattress. We got the adjustable one so I can sit up a little bit. So nice movie nights with your partner. He's lying back watching a great TV show or morning cuddles with our kitty Rosie, or just winding down after a long day. Light a candle, put some nice music on. Your mattress is at the center of it all, really. It's underneath everything, right? But if you have a bad mattress, a saggy mattress, an old mattress, it's not helping you, it's not helping your life, it's not helping your health. Maybe you're waking up in a puddle of sweat or you've got a achy back from a sag, or you feel every toss and turn. Your partner makes a classic mattress nightmare. But that changed with my Helix Sleep. We just got it a couple of weeks ago. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. You can get the deep sleep you deserve. One buyer recently reviewed the Helix and this is, by the way, what sold me. I saw the reviews with five stars saying, I love my Helix mattress. I will never sleep on anything else. I second that emotion, by the way. I recommend it. We got the mattress and then we got this lovely topper and it cools you off. It's time and time again, Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand. Just this year alone, Wired's best mattress of 2025 best Good Housekeeping's bedding awards 2025 gave it the award for premium plus size support. That's nice because I'm not a light guy, so I need a little bit of support there. GQ Sleep Awards 2025 Best Hybrid Mattress New York Times Wire Cutter Award 2025 Featured for Plus Size Oprah's Daily Sleep Awards for 2025 Again, Best Hotel like features and actually, as silly as that sounds, I can think of there have been a few hotels like the Raffles in Singapore or the Mandarin in Dubai where I just go, this is the best bed I've ever slept in. Now I've got that in my home with my Helix sleep. Go to helixsleep.com twit 20% off site wide during the Labor Day sale early access helixsleep.com Twitter TWIT 20% off and that's site wide. The offer ends August 14, so don't wait. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout too, because that's important. That way they know we sent you. And if you're listening, after the sale ends August 14, 2025, be sure to check them out. They've always got something going@helixsleep.com Twitter do what I did, read the reviews. Then replace your old mattress with something that's guaranteed going to give you the best night's sleep you ever had. Helixsleep.com TWIT I just started shopping for.
- [92:15]
Jeff Jarvis
A mattress and it is hell to shop for a mattress.
- [92:17]
Leo Laporte
Oh, trust me, I wouldn't tell you. I wouldn't steer you wrong. Well, you know, okay, there is a bad thing about the mattress business. First of all, most of the mattress stores in your town are owned by the same company. Yeah. There's like all different names, but they're all the same company.
- [92:33]
Jeff Jarvis
And then across stores, it's the same mattress, but they change it. So you can't compete there.
- [92:38]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Even you can't go to Consumer Reports.
- [92:40]
Benito
And find out because that's a local San Francisco thing. Right?
- [92:44]
Leo Laporte
Which one?
- [92:44]
Benito
Mancini.
- [92:46]
Leo Laporte
That's all the. No.
- [92:47]
Benito
Is it all the same? That's not.
- [92:48]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [92:49]
Benito
Okay. I don't know.
- [92:50]
Leo Laporte
So it turns out the mattress business is a very well read. I read, I read a good article about this somewhere. I can't remember. This is a fascinating business. The stores, the storefronts, the brick and mortar stuff. Not where you should go to get a mattress. I know people think, well, I should lie on on it, but that isn't gonna. I. We've bought the worst mattresses ever because Lisa and I, we went to the store. I thought she wanted a really soft mattress. She thought I wanted a really firm mattress. So I got on a really soft mattress, which I'm not a fan of, to be honest. And I thought this is what she wanted. So I said, yeah, this is great. We got it home. Four years later, I'm Mr. Get Along. Four years later. She says, God, I hate this matter. Says, wait a minute. You said you wanted a soft. She said, this is a terrible mattress. Said, I'm sorry, I thought this is what you wanted. Don't go to the store with your spouse.
- [93:46]
Jeff Jarvis
You go together to ChatGPT for marital counseling about mattresses.
- [93:50]
Leo Laporte
We should fix everything. Well, what we did with Helix Sleep is they ask you, like, are you a side sleeper, front sleeper? They ask you your style and what you're looking for. And we really, we went through the whole thing and it really recommended the right one. It was really good.
- [94:01]
Jeff Jarvis
I've got it open right now.
- [94:02]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, take a look. Okay, so there is. And I think we're going to cover this Thursday on Tech News Weekly. Micah says he wants to cover it. It's a tough one. Cloudflare published a blog post about Perplexity. Now, remember when we had Cloudflare on, we had John Graham coming on. He's no longer their cto, but he was. He's on the board. He talked about this new tool they just added which allows sites to block. See, there is in theory, this norm in the web called robots Txt, where all crawlers, Google's and everybody else is supposed to look at it and see if they're allowed. And if they're not, say, okay, I won't crawl your site. And the AI bots are supposed to honor it too, but they don't. So Perplexity stepped up the war and has a multiple, much more aggressive no crawl tool. A blog post at Cloudflare saying Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade our no crawl directives. When I read this, I was very disappointed. As you know, I'm a Perplexity user and fan, and I thought, geez, that's the man. Have to give up on the Perplexity. Not so fast, not so fast. Perplexity fired back and said, what are they? This is a complete misunderstanding of how things work. But what, what Cloudflare did is they set up some dummy sites, set the strongest blocks they could, and then went to Perplexity and said, tell me about this site. Which Perplexity did, just as your browser would do if you asked to show the site. Cloudflare took this as willfully ignoring their directive not to crawl the site. Perplexity said, we aren't crawling the site. We are not taking information from the site and training on it. We went there because the user said, tell me about this site. They say, and this is their blog. This is fundamentally different from traditional web crawling. We're fetching content when a real person requests something specific and they use that content immediately to answer the user's question. Perplexities, User driven agents do not store the information or train with it. So I don't know who's right here. I don't have enough tech.
- [96:40]
Jeff Jarvis
So I have things to say.
- [96:41]
Leo Laporte
Say yes.
- [96:43]
Jeff Jarvis
One, that there's nothing to say. That Perplexity has to follow someone's robots, not text. It's a courtesy. It's a, it's a norm.
- [96:56]
Paris Martineau
There's no law, but it is a norm.
- [96:58]
Jeff Jarvis
It's a norm. But I'll get there. I'll get there. 2. My browser going to a site is my agent going to a site if you're talking about them training on it. But if I, if I ask my, if I ask Perplexity to do something, it is a newfangled browser doing that. And I think that they're trying to cut off. 3. Who died and made whatchamacallit? Who's the company again?
- [97:31]
Leo Laporte
Cloudflare.
- [97:32]
Jeff Jarvis
Cloudflare cop to the world now we trust Cloudflare to say, well we've got to get rid of spammers, we want to get a Macedonian campaigns, that kind of stuff. But Cloudflare on its own unilaterally just came along and basically declared AI companies evil.
- [97:49]
Leo Laporte
And furthermore, they said that Cloudflare was obfuscating their searches by using something called browser based Cloudflare. Say yeah, we do use Browser Base very occasionally, But Cloudflare's misattributed 3 to 6 million daily requests from Browser Base to us. That's not us. We only use it a little bit for specific reasons. They said this is really Cloudflare going for publicity. They also say, even more embarrassing, Cloudflare published a technical diagram supposedly showing, quote, Perplexity's crawling workflow that bears no resemblance to how Perplexity actually works. If Cloudflare were truly interested in understanding the data they were seeing how our systems work or these fundamental concepts outlined above, they could have done what we encourage all Perplexity users to do. Just ask. So I, I don't know. This is kind of beyond my pay grade.
- [98:45]
Jeff Jarvis
Cloudflare using a power that it has unilaterally, which is what bothered me about.
- [98:51]
Leo Laporte
It, we've all stood for the right. I think we have of a. Of the right to read right that especially if it's just Paris is making.
- [99:00]
Jeff Jarvis
Faces and Everything that I said and everything you're saying.
- [99:02]
Leo Laporte
Okay, Paris time.
- [99:03]
Vlad Prelovac
This.
- [99:03]
Leo Laporte
Tell us what you think.
- [99:05]
Paris Martineau
I mean, I. I don't disagree with what you guys are saying. I disagree that we all agree on the right to read as it relates to corporate products. But, I mean, it seems like perplexity's argument here. I think obviously the argument they're making with saying, oh, a lot of the traffic you're noticing is user agents. Yes, that's an important caveat and should be a part of the story. But perplexity still says read. Yes, we are like scraping web. Some websites that aren't supposed to be scraped using, like by ignoring kind of this robot text. But it's only in limited capacity for limited things, and that means it's fine. And I don't know. That means it's fine. I think that if people want to complain that perplexity is violating norms, and Plexity's argument is, oh, we're only violating the norms. Norms. Occasionally in limited ways. I mean, you're still violating norms.
- [100:01]
Leo Laporte
Well, yeah. I mean, so somebody made the point, and I think it's a good point. This is from a blog by Rob Knight in which he says the real issue is that perplexity should respect consent. That if a site says, I don't want you to look at my page. I guess if I had a site and I said, I don't want Google's Chrome to visit my site site, and I had some technical means to say, Chrome, you can't if you're on Chrome, if you're using the Chrome browser, you can't look at my site. Yeah, I guess I should have the right to say that. Well, it's kind of antithetical to the idea of an open web.
- [100:38]
Jeff Jarvis
Exactly. It becomes discriminatory. And what if you said, I want no Edus to read my site.
- [100:43]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [100:43]
Jeff Jarvis
I. I would. It's your. You can do that. It's your right. But I would think you're a schmuck for doing it.
- [100:48]
Paris Martineau
Yes, but I think, like, you can make a decision that makes you look like a schmuck, and that's okay.
- [100:54]
Leo Laporte
I think Jeff and I are kind of old school because we're old pitching the idea of the open web. Like when you put something on the web.
- [101:04]
Benito
Okay, wait. The truly open web, though, you're gonna.
- [101:05]
Jeff Jarvis
This Paris finish.
- [101:08]
Leo Laporte
Go ahead.
- [101:08]
Paris Martineau
I was saying, I think it's incorrect to conflate someone being like, I want you to respect the norm of. If I put a robot text thing there to respect the norm of not, not scraping my website. It's, it's wrong to conflate that sentiment with. Yeah, screw the open web. The open web shouldn't exist. I, I think, I think those are two totally different.
- [101:31]
Jeff Jarvis
Leo uses perplexity, asks the question that goes to a website, should it then come back and say Leo, I can't do that because, because this website won't let me.
- [101:38]
Paris Martineau
Yes, that's what chat GPT does all the time with me.
- [101:41]
Leo Laporte
And like so that would very much, that would very much make perplexity less useful because let's say I did that search about supplements and it that one of the best supplement sites, let's say it's WebMD said yeah, I don't, I don't want AI take them to worst crap too. Then all I'm going to get is stuff that, that isn't good. Right, right. Because the good site said well yeah, but I don't want anybody with an AI. And this is going to become more of an issue because it's not just perplexity, it's going to be agents, it's going to be mcps.
- [102:09]
Paris Martineau
Perplexity does not have a right to everyone else's websites for pre ad nauseam. I think that perplexity has never right to be as useful as does Firefox. Firefox is being operated by people in most cases and I think as that changes people are going to try and set different norms. When Leo asks for something to be.
- [102:31]
Jeff Jarvis
Asked, he's a person asking for something, he has perplexity for it and it goes and gets it. It's not the computer for it, it's a different browser.
- [102:41]
Paris Martineau
I think website operators disagree and someone who, who's decided to create a website I think can make how they want it.
- [102:51]
Jeff Jarvis
They can but I dislike them for their discriminatory nature.
- [102:56]
Paris Martineau
But I don't think that means it's like morally wrong or should be made like illegal.
- [103:02]
Jeff Jarvis
It's wrong to the, to the. Is wrong to the ethic of the web.
- [103:05]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't think it should be made illegal either. I agree with you.
- [103:07]
Jeff Jarvis
I'm not saying it's illegal but I.
- [103:09]
Leo Laporte
Don'T think there should be a law about robots Txt but, but either way either there is an unwritten norm that says the web is open and if you put something on the web people should be able to use whatever browser they want to look at it. And that's what I'm doing with Perplexity. That's the browser I choose to use.
- [103:30]
Jeff Jarvis
I don't know though I mean, we don't do that.
- [103:32]
Paris Martineau
If you put, like, just because you're putting copyrighted material on a website does not mean that. That it's suddenly the property of everyone in the world.
- [103:41]
Leo Laporte
It does not make it my property. I'm reading it as I would with Firefox or Chrome or I'm reading it does make my property. How is it my property? If Perplexity was training on it, I would agree that's a little different because.
- [103:55]
Jeff Jarvis
Actually the opposite there. I think training is what you have the most right to read and learn. Training is transformative and fair. Use Rag and a direct response is a different question.
- [104:11]
Leo Laporte
I mean, Google would also not be able to do snippets. And so every newspaper in the world would then say, use the same technology. No Googling.
- [104:22]
Paris Martineau
Having no Google snippets would probably be a positive for the world personally, but.
- [104:27]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, this is. We went through this with Google and Thumbnails, and the thumbnails were wrong. And then we had court cases that said, no, it's for the purpose of search, it's okay. And publishers tried to stop it. And it was good for the publishers realized in the end it was good for them. When the get ready was passed in Germany, the publishers all agreed and said, okay, Google, you can go ahead and scrape us. Actual Springer said no. And after 15 days, they cried uncle and said, no, we want the readers.
- [105:02]
Paris Martineau
Sorry, that one was cut off.
- [105:03]
Leo Laporte
It turned into a robot briefly. So, honestly, Paris, there's absolute merit in your thoughts. This is a complicated issue. And I. I went back and forth. I read, you know, Cloudflare's blog post. I read Perplexity's blog post. I've read a lot of responses to it back and forth. I'm not sure what the right answer is. It's a very interesting question, but it's more complicated than what Cloudflare said is, I guess, the point.
- [105:28]
Paris Martineau
Yes, I think it's more complicated than what Perplexity is saying too.
- [105:31]
Leo Laporte
And it may well be cleanse of.
- [105:34]
Paris Martineau
A DCN had kind of an interesting take on this in Blue sky, which is he works for, like, a group that represents a lot of media publishers. So of course, like, he's got his own kind of perspective on all of this that's worth considering. But I did think, like, he commented on the PR aspect of this that he was like, it's a bad PR move for Perplexity to get all bent out of shape about this. And it especially kind of reflects bad from a public relations perspective on the broader category of agentic AI. Because there are the sort of companies and that are going to be impacted by perplexity making kind of big swing moves like this to say, no, no, it's totally fine if we do this. Perplexity is going to be fine either way. It's going to be the small like agent AI startups that are just trying to figure out how to do this themselves and actually trying to pay attention to all the complicated morality around this that I think are going to be hit by kind of the downstream effects of Paris.
- [106:36]
Jeff Jarvis
I think it's. I think it's. Sorry. I think it's. I think it's a terrible PR move by Cloudflare. I think Cloudflare is coming along and saying, we're the cop of the web. We are going to decide what can go through, what can't. When people.
- [106:47]
Paris Martineau
I mean, that is business model.
- [106:49]
Jeff Jarvis
No? Well, yes, but they now, they've now moved the bar a lot. They've said. And AI are the same.
- [106:57]
Leo Laporte
In their defense, they would say we're just giving websites tools to express their consent or not. And. And we don't make the decision. And it's true. They're not making the decision.
- [107:10]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, Cloudflare is because the default is screw you AI.
- [107:15]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [107:16]
Jeff Jarvis
That's a decision.
- [107:17]
Leo Laporte
That's certainly a good conversation. We're going to take a little break. I don't know what the answer is. Michael will be delving into this and he has my sympathy. Thursday on Technicians News Weekly. This is one of the big topics of the week on our other weekly news show that we do every Thursday with Micah Sargent and a rotating panel of co hosts. You're watching Intelligent Machines with a very intelligent pair of people. Paris Martineau, now investigative reporter at Consumer Reports. I guess you're a journalist because if it were a reporter, it'd be too redundant to be.
- [107:52]
Paris Martineau
Well, I think technically my title is Investigating Investigative. Senior Investigative Reporter at Consumer Reports. But I agree repeating the word report and reporter within two words of it sounds ridiculous. I changed it to journalist for this purpose.
- [108:07]
Leo Laporte
You've joined the Department of Redundancy Department. Also Mr. Jeff Jarvis, who is out of focus.
- [108:14]
Jeff Jarvis
I could get this fixed.
- [108:15]
Leo Laporte
Out of focus? No. He is now running a program at Montclair State University.
- [108:20]
Jeff Jarvis
No, I'm actually not running anything there. I'm helping them out. But I'm consulting.
- [108:25]
Leo Laporte
Are you running a program at.
- [108:26]
Jeff Jarvis
I'm helping start programs at Stony Star.
- [108:29]
Leo Laporte
Nice. Very nice. This is Intelligent Machines. We do the show every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern 2100 UTC. You can watch the show live on eight different streams. If you're a club member in the club Twit discord. There's also YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick Wow. Every week we start the show. This was kind of part of the new format with an interview. We're not sure who we've got next week, but we're working on it. We may have actually we do have a pre recorded interview. Maybe we should use that for next week.
- [109:09]
Jeff Jarvis
I think it's time.
- [109:10]
Leo Laporte
Tulsi Doshi is in charge of Google's models and she will be our guest. Let's do it next week. Week. Unless somebody else shows up. We recorded it already so I think we need to use it because it was recorded last week. So Tulsi, let's say that, let's say that Tulsi Doshi next week from Google, talking about Google models on intelligent machines. We're really doing our best to get interesting smart people on the show to talk about AI because you know what, as you can see from this conversation, it, it's, it's not clear. It's not clear. This is a brave new world. We're part of this episode brought to you by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. For 35 years, EFF has been fighting to make sure when you go online, your rights go with you. They work to protect programmers and developers engaged in cutting edge security. Their technologists develop open source software, some of which you might have used. It's great to combat surveillance. Their activists push companies to build tools that work for you, not against you. What you might not know is they have a podcast called how to Fix the Internet hosted by Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelly. In it, they ask every guest, what does it look like? If we get this right, you'll hear about activists and experts building a better Internet. That's what EFF is all about. Listen to how to Fix the Internet. Wherever you get your podcasts and do what I do, join and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're fighting for us all to make a better Internet effort. Listen to the show, donate, support the eff.
- [110:48]
Paris Martineau
What do you think makes the perfect snack?
- [110:51]
Leo Laporte
It's got to be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient.
- [110:54]
Paris Martineau
Could you be more specific?
- [110:55]
Leo Laporte
When it's cravingient.
- [110:56]
Paris Martineau
Okay, like a freshly baked cookie made.
- [110:58]
Leo Laporte
With real butter, available right down the street at am, pm or a savory.
- [111:02]
Paris Martineau
Breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at am, pm.
- [111:05]
Leo Laporte
I'm seeing a pattern here. Well, yeah, we're talking about what I.
- [111:07]
Paris Martineau
Crave, which is anything from A and pm. What more could you want?
- [111:11]
Leo Laporte
Stop by AMPM where the snacks and drinks are perfectly craveable and convenient. That's cravenience ampm. Too much good stuff. On with the show we go.
- [111:22]
Paris Martineau
As a lava lamp owner, I will always come to Cloudflare's defense.
- [111:26]
Leo Laporte
They use lava lamps to generate random numbers. By the way, Jason Snell had a very good tip for lava lamp owners yesterday. A Mac break week.
- [111:38]
Paris Martineau
The juice.
- [111:39]
Leo Laporte
Don't drink the juice. That's tip number one.
- [111:43]
Paris Martineau
Open.
- [111:44]
Leo Laporte
Do not. Although does have a bottle cap on it. It does. Kind of tempting in case of emergency. What's in there? Is it water or oil or delicious goodness?
- [111:54]
Paris Martineau
I think it's like a wax and.
- [111:56]
Leo Laporte
Sometimes the wax balls. His wax balls got all the blobs got all messed up into little balls balls and he thought it's ruined. He found that if you put it in a sous vide at a low temperature for several hours, I don't know how it works, they coalesce, they congeal back into the large wax balls that you love so much.
- [112:19]
Paris Martineau
There is also a a lava lamp fan and appreciator web for like old school style web forum that I've previously plugged on this very podcast in my pick of the week. You can check the art archives and in that there is one dude who's like the number one guy in the US that makes new lava lamp fluid basically for anyone who wants it. And he specifically sells these little packs that if your lava lamp fluid is really messed up and the sous vide trick doesn't work, you can like essentially in the same way that if your hot tub or pool is messed up, you can kind of shock it. You can kind of shock the lava lamp fluid with whatever he's got and it sets it right.
- [113:01]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [113:02]
Jeff Jarvis
So therapy nice.
- [113:06]
Leo Laporte
Big story in the Tesla world. There was a trial, an accident in 2019, a fail crash in Florida. Guy driving Tesla under full self driving, he was using autopilot dropped his cell phone, assuming, I guess that the autopilot would continue to navigate safely. He reached down to get the cell phone, but unfortunately the car continued through an intersection, plowed into a parked vehicle and sadly spun the parked vehicle and killed a pedestrian, seriously injured the pedestrian's companion. The dead pedestrian's family sued Tesla and a jury verdict last week awarded them. I've seen different figures, at least $200 million. What's important about this verdict? First of all, almost always in cases like this, the lawsuit comes from the driver or the driver's family. And Tesla usually is able to settle before it goes to court. In this case, it wasn't the driver that sued, it was the dead pedestrian's family that sued. So that was a big difference. Tesla was unable to settle out of court.
- [114:22]
Jeff Jarvis
They settled with the driver, but not with the pedestrian family.
- [114:25]
Leo Laporte
And the jury's verdict was interesting because it did a assign 2/3 of the fault to the driver, a third of the fault to Tesla because Tesla encouraged the driver to trust full self driving and made no effort to make sure the driver was in fact paying attention, keeping the hands on the wheel, which.
- [114:46]
Jeff Jarvis
Would tell me that the driver should be able to sue Tesla as well.
- [114:48]
Leo Laporte
But, well, I don't know what will happen. There may well be an appeal, so it may not be over. However, you know, the driver said, I trusted the technology. I believed that if the car saw something in front of it, it would provide a warning and apply the brakes. This didn't happen. He hit the parked car at more than 60 miles an hour. It's a terrible, terrible accident. And you know, Elon will probably say, yeah, but look, the driver's fine, it's a very safe car. The bad news for Tesla, besides the lawsuit is it did assign. It's the first time, by the way, as far as I know in a court case that the responsibility was assigned to Tesla, Tesla for this accident. Furthermore, and maybe more shamefully, Tesla, now that we've seen the transcript, did a lot to deny, obfuscate and even cover up what really happened. For instance, all Teslas are recording at all times. They have an effective black box. Tesla immediately downloaded the recorded information from that car. However, when asked by the plaintiff's attorneys for that information, said no, it's gone, we erased it, we don't have it. They did have it. Wow. So they really did everything they could to cover up what really happened. The plaintiff's attorney did learn in fact that that information still existed. Tesla said that today's verdict is wrong and it only works to set back automotive safety, jeopardize Tesla's and the entire industry's efforts to develop and implement life saving technology. The plaintiffs concocted a story blaming the car when the driver from day one admitted and accepted responsibility. $243 million Tesla owes this family, it will appear appeal.
- [116:44]
Jeff Jarvis
Tesla gave Elon big bucks to stick around.
- [116:49]
Leo Laporte
Well, they have the money. They just gave him, what was it, 29 million billion. I'm sorry, yeah, billion dollars.
- [116:55]
Paris Martineau
Billion dollars.
- [116:56]
Benito
Still every day I See Elon on Twitter being like hey, it works. Full self driving's here.
- [117:00]
Leo Laporte
Hey, just today. Why is it driving?
- [117:04]
Benito
How is that okay?
- [117:06]
Jeff Jarvis
It should be. If anything should be regulated in this world, for God's sakes, it should be the that.
- [117:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So you know, I think really more.
- [117:18]
Jeff Jarvis
What did you say Paris? Your mic was low.
- [117:21]
Paris Martineau
Oh, I was just saying it's a very sad story.
- [117:23]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes.
- [117:24]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's very sad for the family. Obviously it's I think not acceptable that Tesla actively obstructed. Yes, the the case. There are now at least 15 other active cases focused on similar claims involving Tesla accidents with autopilot. Three of those have been moved to federal court. I think this judgment perhaps and I asked our car guy Sam Abulsamed on Friday about this or Saturday we went to dinner and he said yeah, this is a break in the dyke. This is just get ready. There will be a lot more because of this. But I have to say there is a. Tesla makes a point. We do think, don't we, that it is safer to have these cars drive than humans.
- [118:18]
Jeff Jarvis
Humans cause human technology. Not with just not with only what Tesla has.
- [118:24]
Leo Laporte
No, humans cause massive deaths and accidents every day. Americans die every year.
- [118:32]
Paris Martineau
This is my same argument that I make with the right to read. Yes, humans cause a lot of accidents and that's terrible, but humans have rights and just because something's terrible, we can't be like all humans cannot drive. I mean, perhaps that would be an interesting policy solution to address the problem of fatal accidents on the road, but it's completely non tenable given the way our society is organized. What we what does not have those rights are Tesla vehicles and cars generally. And so it's going to be a bit more of a complicated discussion to get those vehicles to a place where they have rights on the same level as human as it should be. And I think the same goes for these AI systems.
- [119:16]
Leo Laporte
Well, here's one area that we can agree, okay. Airlines, including Delta, are testing AI press pricing in a way that no human can understand. This is a Bloomberg story that says get ready for what one startup cause calls the exploitation phase.
- [119:38]
Paris Martineau
I'm shocked that this is a story because I feel like they've already been doing this for a while and it's only going to be getting worse.
- [119:44]
Leo Laporte
They've been using very sophisticated pricing algorithms, for instance, frequent flyer. This is from the Bloomberg story. Frequent fliers and consumer rights advocates often complain about the convoluted nature of airline ticket prices. Discount tickets can quickly become expensive through the use of drip pricing, extra fees for once free amenities, and a dizzying array of fare classes with dynamic prices that shift over time. Or even to know whether the price you're offered today and everybody who's booked a plane knows this is better or worse than the one you'll be offered tomorrow. Who knows?
- [120:21]
Jeff Jarvis
It's a prison business model. It's the same as your phone, same as your cable company and the airline.
- [120:25]
Leo Laporte
You got no choice.
- [120:26]
Jeff Jarvis
So many ways to get there. And this should be regulated.
- [120:31]
Leo Laporte
So it's. This is a paper authored by the co founder and chief AI officer of a company called Fletcher with two Rs. It's an Israeli based software startup that works with Delta and several other carriers. In the paper, the founder describes a pilot artificial intelligence program that Fletcher created for an unspecified partner airline. He describes taking a relatively simple pricing structure and replacing it with a head spinningly complex one featuring many more fare classes with prices that swing wildly from one moment to the next.
- [121:05]
Jeff Jarvis
So he's bragging about this?
- [121:06]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Such pricing structures, he says, are so complex they go beyond human cognitive limits. Limits. Great. You might say though, this is how bitcoin is priced, right? I mean, it's not with AI, but.
- [121:21]
Paris Martineau
We'Re all talking about how bitcoin should be the model for everything.
- [121:26]
Leo Laporte
The stock market kind of works like this, right? It's up and down and up and down.
- [121:29]
Benito
Yeah, Amazon is like this already.
- [121:32]
Leo Laporte
Amazon does all kinds of interesting pricing. I remember years ago, a friend of mine who sold, I think it was an air purifier on Amazon that he branded, he was a radio talk show host and he would put it on Amazon and then the bots would come, see what his price was. Buy it. I guess he might have been white labeling something from China. So get something to get something.
- [121:57]
Jeff Jarvis
Wait, wait, wait. So a DJ had a branded air purifier?
- [122:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a long story.
- [122:04]
Jeff Jarvis
Leo, you're missing things here. You should be selling.
- [122:06]
Leo Laporte
Oh man, I am missing out on all this stuff.
- [122:09]
Paris Martineau
Oh God, you gotta put your face on like a dishwasher.
- [122:12]
Leo Laporte
I should be making sandwiches in New York City for crying out. Yeah, by the way, that's a terrible business. Poor Hank.
- [122:22]
Paris Martineau
I will say I. I took a brief dive into the Reddit forum, searching salt Hank's name and deep, deep in ne. Don't never tell Hank this. Deep, deep in the comments, a couple people are being like, well, you know, his dad is famous tech podcaster Leo Lynn Port. So he's basically like a sandwich nepo baby.
- [122:39]
Leo Laporte
And I'm like, oh, no, no, it's not true.
- [122:42]
Paris Martineau
How do you think that your father being a tech podcaster, helps you in any way sell sandwiches in New York City?
- [122:50]
Leo Laporte
In fact, he never even used my name. He never called himself.
- [122:54]
Paris Martineau
I only bring this up because it was like two downvoted comments in the tits of Reddit. I just thought it was so silly.
- [123:00]
Leo Laporte
You also saw us wonderful. A young woman in the teenager subreddit saying, is he married?
- [123:08]
Paris Martineau
Does he have a girlfriend? Is he single?
- [123:11]
Leo Laporte
He's single, ladies.
- [123:12]
Jeff Jarvis
You also found one. Tell about the other one you found.
- [123:14]
Paris Martineau
Oh, I mean, so this all came up because I texted the boys group chat being like, hey, like this came across the I'm in the food NYC subreddit and they're all kind of persnickety about stuff. And one thing they've been a little persnickety about since launching lunches Salt Hank sandwich thing initially, because there was like, oh, 28 sandwich. No way it could be good. But little by little, slowly surely, I keep seeing posts crop up that are like, I went to Salt Hanks expecting to hate it because the sandwich is so expensive and it's the best thing I've ever eaten and I think it's actually really worth the money. And I take back all of my rights.
- [123:48]
Jeff Jarvis
They filled me up for the day.
- [123:50]
Paris Martineau
They filled me up for the day I had half the sandwich and it was so filling. And then I'm gonna have have the rest tomorrow. And it's the best. I drank the juice.
- [123:58]
Leo Laporte
Hank said, he. He says he really bugs him because every review says the same thing. God, this is the best sandwich I ever had. It seems to be universal. Best sandwich I ever had. It's so expensive. He says, they're always cast in shade. He said, let's look at if I could make it cheaper, I would. If we made it $1 cheaper, we'd lose money.
- [124:16]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, he.
- [124:17]
Leo Laporte
It is as inexpensive as it can be. He was so happy when day he made $300. He sold. I told you, he sold a couple of days ago. $11,000 worth of sandwiches in five hours. But they're practically a cost.
- [124:35]
Jeff Jarvis
I mean, roast beef is expensive. The roast beef is special bread.
- [124:40]
Leo Laporte
He's using the best roast beef from.
- [124:42]
Benito
He's learning firsthand, like, why insertification happens.
- [124:45]
Leo Laporte
Well, he told me this. He said, he said, no restaurant makes money on the food. They make money on the bar. I said, yeah, but you're just selling soda and limeade. He said, we're going for a beer and wine license as soon as we get that, we'll be fine. That's where the profit is. So he's never gonna make it on the sandwich. Cause he knows he can't make it a $30 sandwich. I mean, he's as inexpensive as he can make.
- [125:11]
Paris Martineau
And also, it's very common in New York for sandwiches to be $20.
- [125:15]
Leo Laporte
I know that.
- [125:16]
Paris Martineau
Different.
- [125:17]
Leo Laporte
He's part of big sandwich. That's.
- [125:19]
Paris Martineau
It's also a giant. Like, it's a big sandwich.
- [125:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [125:23]
Jeff Jarvis
I'm dying to have one. I'm dying to have one.
- [125:26]
Leo Laporte
You could feed a family of four on that sandwich.
- [125:28]
Paris Martineau
We've got to go at some point. Jeff, you've got to wait.
- [125:31]
Jeff Jarvis
I told you, I'm taking. I'm going out to lunch with Craig tomorrow. Craig. Craig. Craig. New Mark and I would take him to Salt Hank, but there's no way we're going to get in.
- [125:41]
Leo Laporte
Can't get in.
- [125:41]
Jeff Jarvis
No, no, no.
- [125:44]
Leo Laporte
So you're going to go to Hamburger America, which, frankly, I need to go.
- [125:47]
Paris Martineau
To Hamburger America, too.
- [125:49]
Leo Laporte
If I come visit you guys, I'm going to have to. We're doing both for two days, so I can have twice.
- [125:54]
Jeff Jarvis
I don't think you can have lunch and dinner.
- [125:56]
Leo Laporte
I don't think I can do both.
- [125:58]
Jeff Jarvis
Beef sweats like you've never had. Yeah.
- [126:01]
Paris Martineau
In fact, we should add a third day and then go to Coat the Korean Steakhouse just so we have three days of meat sweats.
- [126:07]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, I want to go to what's his name? The Famous guys. Who is it famous? The. The Cheesesteak. I'm a major cheesesteak fan.
- [126:13]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, that was in the New York rundown.
- [126:16]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [126:17]
Paris Martineau
All right, do a week and we'll do Meet Week Leo, where we have meat and meat week. All right.
- [126:24]
Leo Laporte
I just want everybody to know we're pivoting this show. No more AI no more intelligent machines.
- [126:29]
Jeff Jarvis
It's me.
- [126:30]
Leo Laporte
It's just meat. All meat, all the time. We're going to call it this weekend meat, and it's going to be amazing.
- [126:37]
Jeff Jarvis
There was until recently a German magazine that was just called Beef.
- [126:42]
Leo Laporte
I thought you were going to say schwein.
- [126:45]
Paris Martineau
Sausage.
- [126:46]
Leo Laporte
Sausage Diversed. Okay, I would hate to change the subject, but this is an appalling story. CNN interviewed an AI Version.
- [127:01]
Jeff Jarvis
No, he's not on CNN anymore.
- [127:03]
Leo Laporte
Oh, no. Where is Jim Acosta?
- [127:05]
Paris Martineau
Lone Wolf Jim Acosta. Acosta. Oh, publishing to substack.com, i believe.
- [127:10]
Leo Laporte
Oh.
- [127:13]
Jeff Jarvis
He was. They forced him out because guess who doesn't like him.
- [127:17]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, that's right. I forgot that's right. So on the Jim Acosta show, Jim interviewed an AI that was created by the parents of.
- [127:27]
Jeff Jarvis
By the parents, though. That's an important factor.
- [127:29]
Paris Martineau
I know, but that doesn't.
- [127:31]
Leo Laporte
I know, but it's kind of creepy. Did you watch it? I haven't seen it. Seen it.
- [127:36]
Paris Martineau
So we need to tell them what we're talking about. It is a AI Version of a kid that was killed in an act of gun violence.
- [127:47]
Leo Laporte
And I'm sorry, this is just a Texas representative. It looks like he's AI, but it's not him.
- [127:51]
Jeff Jarvis
No, that's.
- [127:52]
Paris Martineau
Oh, I was talking about a different thing.
- [127:54]
Leo Laporte
No, no, no, no. I know. This is it. It was the same story. Yeah, I mean, the same show. So the parents create an AI of their son who was killed in parkland.
- [128:07]
Paris Martineau
Yes. So it was a AI Generated avatar of their son of their deceased son that was made clearly from kind of like one static image. It wasn't.
- [128:18]
Leo Laporte
You know, this is father talking right now. Did he actually interview the son?
- [128:25]
Paris Martineau
He did interview the AI Copy of the Sun.
- [128:29]
Leo Laporte
It's kind of creepy. What do you think? I mean, I understand why the parents might do it.
- [128:36]
Jeff Jarvis
If it had been done without the parents, I would hate it. But the fact that the parents did it makes me say they're trying to keep this story alive.
- [128:47]
Leo Laporte
The. The comments in on his substack are pretty positive. You know, like.
- [128:53]
Paris Martineau
I'm posting the. The link to part.
- [128:55]
Leo Laporte
He said this was a hard watch. And I admit to being skeptical about using AI in this way. This is Jenny E. Commenting, but this is clearly expression of love from the father towards his beautiful son. As the first time I heard Joaquin and I could feel the vibrancy and kindness in his voice. Ah, such a tragedy.
- [129:13]
Jeff Jarvis
It's heartbreaking. No matter what, it's heartbreaking. But I think the response here was reflexive. It was the same one I think we all have had. But upon reflection, yeah, maybe it's not so bad.
- [129:24]
Leo Laporte
I see often in on this, on the AI subreddits people talking about. I saw one guy said, you know, I lost my dad a few years ago. I took all of the emails that he sent to me and had AI Generate a new email to me. And it. And it reconnected me, and it was very moving. There are interesting uses of this. I know it sounds like black mirror.
- [129:46]
Paris Martineau
I don't want to.
- [129:47]
Benito
Part of the human experience. Right, we got it.
- [129:49]
Jeff Jarvis
What? Paris. Paris. Fish.
- [129:51]
Paris Martineau
I don't want to knock parents who are going to be in the process of grieving for the rest of their lives for doing anything. I think that obviously you can use an AI tool like this in any way you want. Personally, I do think from a news judgment perspective, I'll criticize a bit of Jim Acosta in this case because I think that seems like the most reasonable way. It's a little sensationalist. And if you as a journalist, journalist and news gather or blogger, whatever you want to call him, want to draw. The purpose of this interview was to draw attention to the problem of gun like school shootings and the issue of gun control. And I think if you want to do that, there are a lot of living survivors of school shootings or living people who are experts on this topic, either through personal experience, academic experience or otherwise. That could have been a better subject for an interview. But they obviously, I guess, wouldn't have been as sensational as look at the AI deceased teenager.
- [130:53]
Jeff Jarvis
You know, you were going to say a bit.
- [130:56]
Benito
I was just saying, like, this is a fundamental part of the human experience, is it not? I mean, come on, like grieving for a loved one is grieving for a one who's died. Like, this is just like a fundamental thing that every human just.
- [131:09]
Leo Laporte
I always hate it when they put these on the news channels though. I just. CNN is really does this an awful lot where they, you know, really kind of tear jerker show pictures and they talk to the parents.
- [131:22]
Jeff Jarvis
Mass media man.
- [131:23]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I understand the need for ratings, but it feels a little bit.
- [131:27]
Jeff Jarvis
So line 113.
- [131:29]
Leo Laporte
I was going to end the show, but if you want to keep going.
- [131:31]
Jeff Jarvis
What do you think about. Let's end it on a morbid topic. Yeah, well, let's keep going. Death.
- [131:36]
Leo Laporte
Okay. The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die. Well, you know, is this any worse than the reverend who talks to the family 10 minutes before he has to eulogize somebody that he never met, gets a couple of notes and does a eulogy. Is this any worse than that that happens all the time?
- [131:57]
Paris Martineau
No, because we're talking about obituary, like written, published obituaries that at least in the case of someone like perhaps a reverend, someone involved the funeral poem, perhaps someone who knew the person who died. If those people are the one writing the obituary, they're probably at least going to be accurate. Or if not, they'll have some sort of kind of human reason as to why. Or a person that you can come back to be like, hey, actually my dead wife didn't like dogs and spend her time volunteering at the like, animal shelter. But in this case you're having basically AI tools that are generating thousands of obituaries every single year, and they're obviously going to get stuff wrong.
- [132:45]
Leo Laporte
The example, though, that they start with, which is, I think a telling example, is somebody who lost somebody and who wrote a prompt, just kind of emptied their heart into the prompt, just kept writing, writing, writing. It's not a coherent obituary, but it's all our feelings and all that. And then the AI generated a coherent obituary out of that. That. That's a good. I think that's a good use. We're seeing this, incidentally, more and more. I see it on Reddit all the time where somebody posts. My mom sent me this message about my divorce. Did an AI write this? And almost always you can say, yeah, I think that's. Your mom used an AI. Is that a. Is that a bad thing for the obituaries?
- [133:29]
Benito
The obituaries thing, I don't think isn't that bad because there are a lot of people out there who do die who no one will write an obituary for.
- [133:34]
Jeff Jarvis
Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
- [133:36]
Leo Laporte
And not everybody's a writer like you are, Paris, or like you are, Jeff. And so maybe they have a hard time expressing themselves.
- [133:43]
Jeff Jarvis
Would you want to write. If you knew the date, would you want to write your own obit?
- [133:48]
Leo Laporte
No.
- [133:49]
Paris Martineau
No.
- [133:50]
Leo Laporte
It's not for me to say. Yeah, yeah. This is also for others to say how wonderful I was, what a great listener, what a charming and intelligent soul. It's for everybody else to say. They're not for me.
- [134:02]
Paris Martineau
This is also. I feel about. I have no preference as to what happens to me after I die, because that's not for me, that's for other people.
- [134:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I agree. I'm very wise. You're wise for your years.
- [134:11]
Jeff Jarvis
She is.
- [134:12]
Leo Laporte
She is indeed.
- [134:12]
Paris Martineau
That's true.
- [134:13]
Leo Laporte
She just wants to get out of, you know, putting together the funeral program that's on you. I don't care. I'll be dead. We have a relative who is on death's door and has been for years. And she. I have. She has very elaborate. Very elaborate plans and even gave me pictures so I could make a. And a song so I could make a moving video tribute to her for her funeral, which I did. It was. It was nice. It was very sweet. I think it's, you know, for some people, it's kind of a comfort to know that, you know. Know.
- [134:53]
Benito
Well, some people think they're going to be able to watch their own funeral.
- [134:55]
Leo Laporte
They ain't going to be able to watch it.
- [134:57]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [134:57]
Benito
But that's what some people think.
- [134:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't think she thinks that. Maybe she does. I don't know. There is a. A new Catholic AI app that promises answers for the faithful. It's actually an LLM based on 27,000 church documents. I wonder if Father Robert had anything to do with this.
- [135:21]
Paris Martineau
I was just thinking that. Yeah.
- [135:23]
Leo Laporte
Magisterium AI, chatgpt for Catholicism. The company behind it, Longbeard, claims up to 100,000 monthly users and proclaims its mission on its homepage in a huge font. We're building Catholic AI. I gotta ask Robert about this.
- [135:48]
Benito
I think the Pope would have something to say about that.
- [135:50]
Leo Laporte
Right, but what.
- [135:52]
Jeff Jarvis
Is it official?
- [135:53]
Leo Laporte
But what.
- [135:54]
Jeff Jarvis
Is it official?
- [135:56]
Leo Laporte
Today is. No, I'm sure it's not. It looks, by the way, just like ChatGPT. Here it is. I'm showing it on the screen. You wouldn't know. So today is the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. How can I help you today? Let me a reading for today's Mass. So this is obviously for priests who don't want to have to come up with their homily. Here you go. Here you go. Here's a reading. Here's a responsorial psalm. Here's the second reading. Look at this. Look at that. I could be a minister.
- [136:28]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, the readings are scheduled, aren't they?
- [136:32]
Leo Laporte
I think so. Oh, your sister's a minister. She would know.
- [136:36]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. So there's. There's. I forget what you call it, but yeah, there's.
- [136:38]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's a.
- [136:39]
Jeff Jarvis
The lender, the lectionary, the. Yeah, somebody in the chat room is holier than I am. They'll know.
- [136:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That makes it easy, isn't it? The world's number one answer engine for the Catholic Church. That's how they.
- [136:53]
Paris Martineau
I'd assume the world's number one answer engine for the Catholic Church is God. But maybe this is number two.
- [137:00]
Leo Laporte
Well, you can ask in prayer, but if you didn't have that option, you could go to Magisterium, the AI Voice Building, God, Paris. Here's a holy widget, one of the holy widgets.
- [137:13]
Paris Martineau
We've got a lot of really good contenders for show titles.
- [137:17]
Leo Laporte
This holy widget is a confession guide. So here's what you should think about. Try to recall all your sins. You can use the below examination of conscience to help with this. Did you give God a time every day to pray? Did you seek to love him with your whole heart? Here's the prayer. Then inside the confessional. Here's what you should say, here's what you should do. Here's the act of contrition. Nice.
- [137:44]
Jeff Jarvis
Who needs to go to the confessional stuff.
- [137:45]
Leo Laporte
You got a holy widget does the whole thing for you. Can I send some other widgets?
- [137:49]
Benito
Can I send my agent to confession for me?
- [137:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [137:54]
Jeff Jarvis
My agent's been very bad. Actually, you know what my agent is? Perplexity. It has sins to confess.
- [138:00]
Leo Laporte
This is actually pretty good because there is a lot of ritual. There's a lot of text. There's of a lot, lot of information, and you might have forgotten, you know, the Apostles Creed, but if you needed it, you could go here. And it's.
- [138:11]
Jeff Jarvis
It's the apostle liturgical faith.
- [138:14]
Benito
But this is an oral rel. This is an oral tradition, though. You should be getting that information from your priest or from another person.
- [138:19]
Leo Laporte
Oh, but who can remember? You know, do you. Do you remember who the saints for today are?
- [138:24]
Benito
Well, if you're a real Catholic Magisterium on Sunday.
- [138:27]
Leo Laporte
So if you're a real Catholic Saint Sixtus Saints justice and Pastor Saint Saints Ormistas. Blessed Octavian. Blessed Shekhelin was a hermit.
- [138:40]
Jeff Jarvis
Sounds like Shecky Green.
- [138:42]
Leo Laporte
Feast of the Transfiguration.
- [138:43]
Benito
You could ask my mom.
- [138:44]
Leo Laporte
I don't want to be sacrilegious, but this is, I think, in its nature, sacrilegious. So there you go. AI is. Is there anything it can't do?
- [138:56]
Benito
Taste.
- [138:58]
Leo Laporte
Taste food?
- [138:59]
Benito
Taste anything.
- [139:00]
Leo Laporte
Taste anything.
- [139:01]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, taste. It can't taste good either.
- [139:04]
Leo Laporte
But you could build an AI that could be attached to a chemical and a very highly sensitive chemical analysis tool.
- [139:12]
Benito
This goes back to the perception question. Does green. Does green to me the same as green to you is the same as green to an AI?
- [139:18]
Leo Laporte
I can only tell you, you know, what photons are hitting my retinas.
- [139:23]
Paris Martineau
Can AI taste this spin drift? And if it does, will it taste the same to the AI as it does to me?
- [139:30]
Leo Laporte
But I can tell you something AI can do.
- [139:33]
Jeff Jarvis
It will say, that's pretty bland. Can't you just get something with a little more flavor?
- [139:37]
Paris Martineau
They'd say, this is the perfect seltzer.
- [139:41]
Leo Laporte
It can create bunnies on a trampoline.
- [139:46]
Paris Martineau
Oh, did you guys get got with this?
- [139:48]
Leo Laporte
You thought this was real?
- [139:50]
Paris Martineau
Okay, there was a brief moment where I did think there were bunnies on trampoline. Yes. And then I looked at the comments.
- [139:57]
Jeff Jarvis
And I was, if you can't trust this, what can you trust? It's a whole genre of animals bouncing on trampolines. And it's great.
- [140:07]
Leo Laporte
I think this is so good.
- [140:08]
Paris Martineau
Like, they were having a fun time.
- [140:09]
Leo Laporte
I'm just sad that it's so short. It should go on.
- [140:13]
Benito
There's also.
- [140:16]
Jeff Jarvis
No. Really? Yep.
- [140:18]
Leo Laporte
I. I can imagine. So the person who posted this, Who's Rachel? The cat lover. Which is a little weird, because it should be the cat lover. The rabbits are real.
- [140:36]
Paris Martineau
We're gonna get taken down.
- [140:37]
Leo Laporte
They are not real. Rachel. She says, just check the home security cam. You won't believe what I saw. It is kind of believable, isn't it? It is the only thing that's crazy. They're around the rim of the trampoline. They get on it, and they start to. To bounce. But you know something's weird when they stay there and you keep bouncing, like, oh, hey, this is fun. She was smart to cut it off because that makes you feel like it's more real.
- [141:01]
Jeff Jarvis
I just put up deer on the. On the trampoline.
- [141:04]
Leo Laporte
Is it real in the.
- [141:06]
Jeff Jarvis
I don't know. It's in. I can't. What. Who's to know what's real now?
- [141:10]
Paris Martineau
It has to be fake.
- [141:11]
Jeff Jarvis
In the. In the chat, I put it.
- [141:12]
Leo Laporte
We don't know anymore, do we? We no longer know what a world we live in. Aren't we excited? Aren't we happy? Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to take a break right now to think about our blessings.
- [141:30]
Paris Martineau
Thistle delivery. And then I'm going to do an unboxing.
- [141:34]
Jeff Jarvis
Okay, folks, I got the elephant here. Wait, wait, wait. We have elephant on trampoline.
- [141:42]
Paris Martineau
That's a deer, but. Oh, that's a really good one.
- [141:47]
Leo Laporte
The deer starts bouncing and then wipes out.
- [141:51]
Jeff Jarvis
So. So go to the. Go to the one I just brought.
- [141:53]
Leo Laporte
All right, this is from the real. The AI Mystery elephant on a trampoline.
- [142:03]
Jeff Jarvis
Collapses.
- [142:06]
Paris Martineau
I do really like that.
- [142:07]
Leo Laporte
I'm just saying, I don't care if it's AI or not. It gave me joy.
- [142:11]
Jeff Jarvis
It gave me joy.
- [142:13]
Leo Laporte
Joy. And incidentally, that is a perfect example of a human being who could never create that video. Writing a text prompt and using AI to create a hysterical video. He had the creative idea, the impulse, and made it happen. With AI it's just a tool. That's a great use of it. Sure.
- [142:31]
Benito
It made you chuckle for two seconds, and you'll forget about it for the.
- [142:34]
Jeff Jarvis
Rest of your life, which is okay. What's wrong with that?
- [142:37]
Leo Laporte
You think Henny Youngman may be left for.
- [142:39]
Benito
I'm not saying that anything's wrong. Wrong with that. I'm just not gonna aggrandize it as much as you are.
- [142:44]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it made a funny video.
- [142:45]
Leo Laporte
It's a creative.
- [142:46]
Benito
It's cool, but it's not the greatest thing ever.
- [142:49]
Leo Laporte
No, I'm just saying it's a creative tool.
- [142:52]
Jeff Jarvis
Neither is Saturday Night Live, but all.
- [142:55]
Paris Martineau
The rights that people have and you're.
- [142:57]
Leo Laporte
Sounding grumpier than ever.
- [142:59]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, he is.
- [143:00]
Leo Laporte
You're turning into a curmudgeon way before you.
- [143:02]
Paris Martineau
He's got a balance.
- [143:03]
Jeff Jarvis
He's been one.
- [143:04]
Paris Martineau
He's gotta balance out this podcast.
- [143:07]
Benito
Hey, I actually used AI this week, so you know.
- [143:09]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, drew tell.
- [143:11]
Benito
I just used Notebook LM to learn a new language, a new, like, audio. There's like this deep audio program that's like all. It's called Pure Data and it's really hard to learn. And I'm using Notebook Al to learn it.
- [143:25]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. To teach you.
- [143:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [143:27]
Leo Laporte
Are you not impressed and blown away with what a great tool? We didn't have that.
- [143:33]
Jeff Jarvis
It's cool.
- [143:33]
Benito
Yeah, it's cool, but it's not like tools. Mind blowing. It's like, yeah, that's cool.
- [143:38]
Leo Laporte
Well, we can also make you pay a lot more for that trip to the Philippines you're going on. Just go to Delta Airlines and see what price you're going to get.
- [143:46]
Benito
Delta, Yikes.
- [143:48]
Leo Laporte
I don't think Delta goes to the Philippines. All right, we are going to now take a break and thank you all for being here and invite you to join Club Twit for ad free versions of everything we do. Special events coming up this week, Stacy's book club, Friday, 1pm Pacific. Right after that, Chris Marquardt's monthly photo show. It's going to be a lot of fun. We answer your questions, we take a look at your photos and we give you a new assignment as we do every month. We've got other things coming up, including the Google Pixel 10 announcement. We're going to do that in the club. All the keynotes now are club only to avoid being taken down. I think for 10 bucks a month you're getting some real value. Value. But the most important thing is you're supporting what we do. If you enjoy the content we create. Content can't be isn't free. We've been ad supported for a long time and that was fine. But ads no longer cover the entire cost and we have cut way back. We shut down the studio, we canceled shows, we had to lay people off and still we operate at a deficit. Fortunately, the Club covers that 25% that the advertising doesn't cover. Cover 25% of our operating costs. Thank you, club members. And if you're not a member and you'd like to join or at least take the two week trial and see if you like it. Twit. TV Club Twit. We really appreciate our club members. Thank you. You make a huge, huge difference.
- [145:08]
Paris Martineau
If you love chilling mysteries, unsolved cases and a touch of mom style humor, Moms and Mysteries is the podcast you've been searching for. Hey guys, I'm Mandy. And I'm Melissa. Twitter this every Tuesday for Moms and Mysteries. Your gateway to gripping, well researched true crime stories. Each week we deep dive into a variety of mind boggling cases as we shed light on everything from heists to whodunits. We're your go to podcast for mysteries with a motherly touch. Subscribe now to Moms and Mysteries wherever you get your podcast.
- [145:39]
Leo Laporte
Now it's time for the picks of the week and we always start with Paris Martineau.
- [145:43]
Jeff Jarvis
Paris, she is always.
- [145:45]
Leo Laporte
Oh, maybe Jeff Jarvis.
- [145:49]
Jeff Jarvis
While we're waiting, I, I, I made a pick for you. Leo line 129. Leo bait. I love it when you drive crazy.
- [145:56]
Leo Laporte
I love it when you do that.
- [146:01]
Jeff Jarvis
Did you find it?
- [146:02]
Leo Laporte
My problem is the numbers are so tight. 129 AI vegans.
- [146:06]
Jeff Jarvis
AI vegans. This will drive you nuts.
- [146:08]
Leo Laporte
Oh, these are people that, and we know some of them, them who abstain from AI for environmental, ethical and personal reasons.
- [146:15]
Paris Martineau
I think completely fine.
- [146:17]
Leo Laporte
She doesn't look happy. Yeah. If you don't want to use it, please.
- [146:20]
Jeff Jarvis
Shouldn't she be happy now because she's off of A.I.
- [146:22]
Leo Laporte
She'S her, her brow is furrowed.
- [146:24]
Jeff Jarvis
She's very t. Yeah, she looks like she was made by AI by the way.
- [146:28]
Leo Laporte
It does, but it says it's a photograph. So. It's from Getty. So it's a stock photo.
- [146:32]
Jeff Jarvis
If you can't trust the rabbits on the trampoline, what can you trust?
- [146:36]
Leo Laporte
AI Vegans. See, this is the thing, this is.
- [146:39]
Benito
The thing that I'm actually against is being extreme on either side of this thing.
- [146:42]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes.
- [146:43]
Benito
Being like AI is the best thing in the world or AI is so useless you should never use it. Both of those positions are completely wrong.
- [146:48]
Leo Laporte
It's fair. You know what I could see? Look, there's people who say you shouldn't use a computer, you shouldn't use the Internet, you shouldn't use smartphones. That's fine. If that's what your choice is. You probably have a happier life, to be honest.
- [147:00]
Jeff Jarvis
No.
- [147:01]
Leo Laporte
1920 Einstein Time is relevant. Relative. 2025. Delta Airlines prices are relative. Thank you. Martin Sassenberg. In our YouTube chat, Paris, your pick of the week. And it better not be that soda you're popping.
- [147:16]
Paris Martineau
My pick of the week, I just got from outside. I've got a couple things.
- [147:20]
Leo Laporte
You came. The Thistle's here.
- [147:23]
Paris Martineau
This is in. I'm just a lowly Thistle user who has used this product exactly for one week.
- [147:29]
Leo Laporte
Maybe this is not a Thistle ad.
- [147:30]
Paris Martineau
It's not a Thistle ad. No way. It's sponsored. I literally just.
- [147:34]
Leo Laporte
We have had food, a number of food bucks.
- [147:37]
Paris Martineau
So it's like a. A prepared meal service that.
- [147:42]
Leo Laporte
So you don't prepare it?
- [147:44]
Paris Martineau
No, you don't prepare it. It's.
- [147:45]
Leo Laporte
So these look good.
- [147:46]
Paris Martineau
It's. It's. They're really good so far. This one's a thistle pad Thai with sesame ground chicken. You prepare it by heating it in a skillet with the sauce for three to five minutes. There are also. Their main thing is they do like little dinners and they do like kind of fun salads for lunch. And they all come like peanut butter bar.
- [148:08]
Jeff Jarvis
That looked really good today.
- [148:11]
Paris Martineau
I did not. But I got a affogato smoothie with biscotti crumble.
- [148:17]
Leo Laporte
Now, do you have to go every once in a while and say, this is what I want next week? Like, do you have to.
- [148:24]
Paris Martineau
You can just have it set, set up, Put like what you want, that you want, like one or two breakfasts, two lunches, dinner, a snack or whatever, and set it and forget it. And they'll pick stuff automatically from their menu. But I am kind of a picky person. You can have plant based only. You can do meat. So I meat only twice.
- [148:46]
Leo Laporte
A mix of plant.
- [148:47]
Paris Martineau
As far as the protein goes, you can do plant based protein or meat.
- [148:51]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I see.
- [148:52]
Paris Martineau
Um, and so I just go through, like, I just did it before the show for my Sunday.
- [148:57]
Leo Laporte
I want to do this and.
- [148:59]
Paris Martineau
Well, if you're going to do it, use my referral code. Oh, yeah, not an ad. But as a lowly user, I do get a referral code and you get $120 off your first week or something with my discount code, which is at line 163 in the chat. And, you know, I used a friend of mine like a skeeball friend for the. For mine. And so far it's been pretty good. I mean, I was literally talking to some friends today. I was like, this is really delicious. I enjoy it. Maybe the unit economics won't work out for me in the long term.
- [149:30]
Leo Laporte
How much is it?
- [149:32]
Paris Martineau
They. It depends. Like, if you get more. It's stuff, it's Less. But it's like $15 thing or like it could be like 13 or 10 or 18.
- [149:44]
Leo Laporte
So I just picked the default and it was $257 for six, six days. So 18 meals total, including snacks. That's. I mean it's. I think I could get by with less if I shopped and cooked.
- [149:58]
Paris Martineau
But yeah, I mean, and I think you also don't want me like I'm not getting it for every single meal. I'm getting like a couple a week. But I. I'm kind of busy right now. I just started a job, new job that I'm really enjoying. But it's just nice to not have to have to deal with cooking. And I find these.
- [150:15]
Leo Laporte
It's good. Does it taste good? It does taste good.
- [150:17]
Paris Martineau
It tastes really good. Like I've done cook unity. I thought about trying factor and things like that and I just felt like some of the frozen ones just feel too much like I'm eating a Lean Cuisine and I just really like that.
- [150:29]
Jeff Jarvis
This is Consumer Reports rate these various services.
- [150:33]
Paris Martineau
I have no idea. And this is in no way related to my job or is it a reflection of anything relating to.
- [150:39]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes, to be clear.
- [150:40]
Paris Martineau
Be very specific.
- [150:42]
Leo Laporte
Well, I have to ask the boss.
- [150:46]
Jeff Jarvis
I want to be part of the team that would rate these things.
- [150:48]
Paris Martineau
I think that, gosh, the testing team has got to have the best like most interesting life ever. Like we will sometimes do. I've learned the company sometimes does like auctions within the company itself of like this tested products.
- [151:01]
Leo Laporte
We don't need this Chevy Malibu anymore.
- [151:03]
Paris Martineau
They actually apparently do auction cars, but quite a few. I mean, yeah, because Consumer Reports is really ethical about everything. They buy everything full price.
- [151:14]
Leo Laporte
I did the same thing. We called it Leo's Garage Sale. I take all the crap that I bought and put it in the conference room and people would fight over it and actually.
- [151:27]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I don't know, but I've really.
- [151:29]
Leo Laporte
I might do this.
- [151:30]
Jeff Jarvis
It like looks.
- [151:30]
Leo Laporte
Looks good. Yeah.
- [151:31]
Paris Martineau
If do it. I think they're available west coast, east coast, Atlanta, Chicago, maybe one other area.
- [151:38]
Leo Laporte
I'm forgetting Thistle Co. They do do it in my town, apparently. Oh, I gave my zip and they said sure.
- [151:45]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I feel like they probably do it over there. It's so far been really good. I would recommend though, if you're kind of picky about food to like actually go through the menu and you can select what you like and what you don't like. I've realized I don't really, really like the smoothies that much or nor do I need the breakfast. But yeah, it's been good. My non spawn con seeming though it isn't actually Spawn con pick is two things related to Blue sky though. One is I've. I've been kind of annoyed that Blue sky doesn't have Bookmarks and the. Some of the folks from Blue sky posted that there's like a featured feed where you can comment a pin emoji on some someone's post and then it puts it in the thing. I hate that because I don't want anybody to know what I'm bookmarking. But I found in the replies for Blue Skies post about this that there is now a labeler run by some Blue sky user called bookmark. Like it's bookmarks.blue canary.dev. it uses the moderate like the custom moderation feature of Blue Sky. And so I set up and it's perfect. I mean it would be better if bookmarks actually worked on the site, but it's a perfect kind of band aid. So all you do is if there's a post you want to bookmark you, you subscribe to this labeler and then you just like highlight a post you go and you click like you're going to report it like to Blue sky moderation services. But Blue Sky Moderation Services is just one of many moderation services you can use. And so one of them is this Bookmarks app. So you just report it for other whatever whatever. And two bookmarks and it goes near Bookmarks feed.
- [153:17]
Jeff Jarvis
I hope the Blue sky doesn't. Doesn't judge that as if you are reporting reported.
- [153:20]
Paris Martineau
No, no. I mean because moderation feeds in Blue sky and like labelers can exist for a bunch of different reasons.
- [153:27]
Jeff Jarvis
Okay, good.
- [153:28]
Leo Laporte
So let me. Let me bookmark your post about your.
- [153:31]
Paris Martineau
Did you subscribe?
- [153:32]
Leo Laporte
So I'm gonna go here. Oh, I have to subscribe. I'm gonna report the post.
- [153:36]
Paris Martineau
No, no, no. So you need to go back to the original link I sent and you have to subscribe reporter go to that.
- [153:43]
Leo Laporte
Post and I gotta go to go to this bookmarks.
- [153:47]
Paris Martineau
So click up the top subscribe.
- [153:48]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I see. Subscribe to link.
- [153:50]
Paris Martineau
You just. It's like you're just following something. Yeah, you just.
- [153:52]
Leo Laporte
That was easy.
- [153:53]
Paris Martineau
So then go to my post again like before.
- [153:56]
Leo Laporte
Okay, how do I do that? Let's see Paris again. And then I'm going to go here now. I'm going to report you now, lady, report me.
- [154:07]
Paris Martineau
I just click other. Usually click other other. Oh, marks. So not Moderation services.
- [154:14]
Leo Laporte
That's the one you don't want.
- [154:15]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah. Bookmarks. And so you can just click Submit report. That's all. You don't have to do any detail.
- [154:20]
Leo Laporte
Never surrender.
- [154:25]
Paris Martineau
Always fight.
- [154:25]
Leo Laporte
Never forget.
- [154:28]
Paris Martineau
That's great.
- [154:30]
Leo Laporte
Submit report.
- [154:31]
Paris Martineau
And so then if you go to your feeds on Blue sky, there'll be a.
- [154:37]
Leo Laporte
There's a new one called bookmarks.
- [154:39]
Paris Martineau
Yes.
- [154:40]
Leo Laporte
All right, where is it?
- [154:41]
Paris Martineau
Where's your. Where are your. Do you have to.
- [154:44]
Leo Laporte
These are my feeds.
- [154:46]
Paris Martineau
So go to. Go to Discover. Scroll down.
- [154:50]
Leo Laporte
Discover new feeds.
- [154:51]
Paris Martineau
Type in bookmarks. Maybe that's what you have to do. Maybe there's two steps.
- [154:56]
Jeff Jarvis
They cash a lot at Blue sky, so you might have to.
- [154:58]
Leo Laporte
This one.
- [154:59]
Paris Martineau
Which one is the one that you just.
- [155:01]
Leo Laporte
There's a lot.
- [155:02]
Paris Martineau
Bookmarks.bluecanary.dev I don't think I had to do this. So maybe.
- [155:09]
Leo Laporte
So this one you could DM to somebody. Somebody.
- [155:11]
Jeff Jarvis
This one, I would just refresh the page because.
- [155:14]
Paris Martineau
Refresh the page. It might be that I have to.
- [155:16]
Jeff Jarvis
Do that fairly often.
- [155:20]
Leo Laporte
Now you're seeing all my bookmarks, I guess.
- [155:23]
Paris Martineau
Just type bookmarks. Blue Canary. This is odd. Well, hopefully this doesn't happen to you, dear listener, because this didn't happen to me. Honestly. Honestly.
- [155:39]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's probably just thinking it might.
- [155:42]
Benito
Be different on phone, on the app, than on the web. It might take a while for the web to populate.
- [155:47]
Leo Laporte
It's just thinking. I'm sure it's just thinking. That's a good tip.
- [155:52]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I really like it.
- [155:55]
Leo Laporte
So now you have a new feed that is just stuff you've bookmarked.
- [155:58]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's great, because that's a good idea. Otherwise, I've just been sending DMS to my. My other Blue sky account, which is just Paris Martino, Blue Sky, Dot whatever, so that no one else can squat in my name, since I have a custom.
- [156:15]
Benito
Wait, is it one of the tabs at the top? Is there a new one up there? I mean, those don't scroll. Those don't scroll. Okay.
- [156:24]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well, it hasn't showed up yet. It will. It will.
- [156:29]
Paris Martineau
You'll get there.
- [156:30]
Leo Laporte
It'll get there. Jeff Jarvis, your pick of the week.
- [156:35]
Jeff Jarvis
All right, since we can't trust bouncing bunnies, I'm going to do another animal story. Good Guy Humpback whales. This comes from science.
- [156:45]
Leo Laporte
Okay. Good Guy humps back whales.
- [156:48]
Jeff Jarvis
So, humpback whales. So humpback whales crash Orca hunts as an instinct. Instinct. To rescue other animals.
- [157:00]
Leo Laporte
Oh, my God.
- [157:01]
Jeff Jarvis
They don't eat the animals. They don't do it. They just. When they come in, they Say, what did. What did Lone Ranger say? My work here is done. And then they leave.
- [157:12]
Leo Laporte
Do you think it's true?
- [157:13]
Jeff Jarvis
I think so. With scientists saying so, of course, it's, you know, who knows? A study of 115 documented cases. Of course. I'm reading this from social media. Media says that in nearly 90% of cases, the humpbacks had disrupted the attack. So it. The question here is whether animals have altruistic actions, Whether these animals have it. Yes. These animals. Dogs.
- [157:41]
Leo Laporte
You don't think this is AI generated of the humpback?
- [157:45]
Jeff Jarvis
I don't know.
- [157:46]
Leo Laporte
Feing the seal to safety.
- [157:48]
Jeff Jarvis
The more I look at it, actually, the more I think it's.
- [157:51]
Leo Laporte
It really happened.
- [157:52]
Jeff Jarvis
That is. Yeah.
- [157:54]
Leo Laporte
If it did. That photographer really was.
- [157:57]
Benito
I think the scaling is all around. That humpback is too small.
- [158:00]
Jeff Jarvis
All right. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna cry. I'm gonna. Sorry about that.
- [158:03]
Paris Martineau
This is your bunnies.
- [158:05]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's the bunnies. Could be bunnies.
- [158:07]
Leo Laporte
It could be bunnies. Well, the story may well be true. I don't know that there are now. Yeah. Paper mills. Creating fake scientific studies. This is. We're living in a world. World where. I don't know if you could trust anything you read anymore.
- [158:23]
Jeff Jarvis
Just like the first days of print.
- [158:27]
Benito
And see, this is the problem with having all of our AI sound like humans and making videos and stuff like that. Like, this is the world we're making.
- [158:39]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I don't know. I'm just glad I have a good mattress because I'm gonna go lie down.
- [158:43]
Jeff Jarvis
Thank you.
- [158:43]
Leo Laporte
Jeff Jarvis, professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, now in paperback, the Web We Weave and magazine now an audiobook. Great to have you as always, Jeff. Have a wonderful. Give Craig Newmark, our regards. Tomorrow, have a wonderful hamburger at Hamburger America. Paris Martineau is a investigative reporter at Consumer Reports, where she reports on investigative reporting for Consumer Reports. So it's nice to know that you're a reporter.
- [159:17]
Paris Martineau
Are you a consumer? I want to report you.
- [159:20]
Leo Laporte
I'm a consumer. I'd like to report. She's at Paris nyc. She is awesome. You're both awesome. I love doing this show. I hate ending this show, which is why it goes on and on and on. Sometimes we do the show every. As I mentioned, every Wednesday. I hope you will watch live. I hope you will download it. I hope you will tell your friends, and I hope you will join Club TWIT But I have many hopes, and they are often dashed. So it's okay. It's. It's. It's okay. I'll. I'll be fine. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Bye. Bye. I'm not a human being. Not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent machine.
- [160:04]
Paris Martineau
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.