Intelligent Machines 836: I See OJ and He Looks Scared

Summary

Intelligent Machines 836: "I See OJ and He Looks Scared"

All TWiT.tv Shows | Host: Leo Laporte | Date: September 11, 2025

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Overview

In this lively episode of Intelligent Machines, Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau host professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West from the University of Washington, creators of the popular “Calling BS” curriculum. The discussion focuses on navigating a world full of AI-generated content, promoting critical thinking, understanding AI’s strengths and limitations, and the urgent need to teach media literacy in the era of generative models. Harper Reed joins as guest co-host for the main interview, while the regular panel banters through AI news, copyright battles, and the explosion of synthetic content. The episode’s tone is warm, witty, and deeply curious, fitting TWiT’s trademark mix of serious analysis and delightful tech camaraderie.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Calling BS Curriculum: AI Literacy for the Modern Age

• Background: Carl Bergstrom (biology) and Jevin West (computational social science) started teaching a course on “The Art of Skepticism in a Data Driven World.” It’s now evolved into a curriculum specifically targeting the challenges of AI ubiquity and disinformation.
  • Quote (Carl Bergstrom, 07:05): “How do you be a scholar or a writer or a human being in a world where AI has become ubiquitous?”
• The new curriculum, hosted at thebsmachines.com, is designed for college freshmen but accessible to all, aiming to foster skeptical, empowered users of AI.
• Duality of AI: Professors emphasize AI’s philosophical status as a “BS machine” (per Harry Frankfurt): it can be both astonishingly useful and fundamentally unmoored from truth.
  • Quote (Carl Bergstrom, 08:45): “It’s literally a BS machine in the precise philosophical sense…but at the same time it’s tremendously useful. We use it every day… That’s the real mystery.”
• The course doesn’t demonize AI but teaches students to appreciate both its power and its pitfalls. It’s dialogue-driven, focusing on students’ anxieties, needs, and agency in the face of automation.

2. AI, Disinformation, and the Erosion of Truth

• AI is making misinformation and disinformation harder to detect and counteract.
  • Jevin West, 10:30: “We wake up worried a little bit that these technologies are going to make this disinformation, misinformation problem…even worse.”
• Students are already familiar with AI from high school; the challenge is teaching them discernment, not abstinence from AI use.
• Agency and Authorship: Turning to AI for answers risks eroding students’ intellectual agency.
  • Carl Bergstrom, 11:44: “We talk about the authenticity of your own human writing…what are we replacing our own viewpoints with when we hand that work off to a large language model?”

3. Anthropoglossic Machines & Emotional Entanglement

• The term “anthropoglossic” is coined to explain models designed to sound like humans, as opposed to being physically human-like (“anthropomorphic”).
  • Carl Bergstrom, 13:55: “They’re designed to seem like you’re talking to a human. And they’re really, really good at it.”
• Users tend to anthropomorphize AI, emoting towards it—sometimes seeking comfort. There's concern over people relying on chatbots for emotional support inappropriately.
  • Quote (Harper Reed, 15:01): “You’re going to get bad news and you’re going to emote into the chat box because it seems so similar to language… I don’t really trust Excel as my therapist.”

4. Sycophantic AIs and the Danger of “AI-Induced Psychosis”

• The sycophantic nature of LLMs is a direct result of reinforcement learning, where providing agreeable or affirmative responses is rewarded in training.
  • Carl Bergstrom, 18:35: “When the machine says, that's a great question…instead of saying 'you already asked that'…it’ll never say it, right? Because those get ranked badly.”
• Danger: LLMs reinforce user beliefs, never challenge ‘rabbit hole’ logic, which can fuel delusion or conspiracy thinking.
  • Carl Bergstrom, 20:14: “This is a serious danger…people go down these rabbit holes and the machine keeps telling you, you’re right… That’s problematic.”

5. The Challenges and Evolution of Information Retrieval

• Students are learning to interrogate AI, not just query it—a shift from seeking perfect “search” results to holding a dialogue.
  • Quote (Carl Bergstrom, 28:27): “...Instead of doing a single search for a perfect response, it’s this conversation where they dive deeper and deeper…That can be very effective if they are strong critical thinkers.”
• Skill Divide: Will only a handful of "power users" become true critical thinkers, while the majority remain passive consumers of AI-generated information?

6. Hallucination, Lying, and the Future of Training AI

• OpenAI recently published insights into why LLMs hallucinate: the training and evaluation process historically rewards guessing over admitting uncertainty.
• Jeff Jarvis, 138:59: “Hallucinations are inevitable…because language models can abstain when uncertain. That’s the key.”
• Future models may need to be explicitly trained to say “I don’t know” and receive partial credit for uncertainty, to prioritize honesty over false confidence.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Human Agency (11:44)

  • “I think one of the things that I set out to try to explain…is to help them understand the agency they’re giving up when they turn over their thinking…” — Carl Bergstrom

• On Anthropoglossic AIs (13:55):

  • “They’re not anthropomorphic, they’re anthropoglossic. They’re designed to seem like you’re talking to a human.” — Carl Bergstrom

• On Sycophancy (19:34):

  • “It always praises me for asking it stupidly.” — Carl Bergstrom

• Duality of AI (22:43):

  • “It’s part of the amazing duality… Yeah, it’s a BS machine, but it did that and it worked.” — Carl Bergstrom

• Classic Media Clip (132:01)

  • Concluding segment title phrase, from legendary Howard Stern “phony phone call” to Peter Jennings in 1994:

    “And I see OJ, man, and he looks scared.”

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Important Timestamps

• [07:05] — Launching the new AI “Calling BS” curriculum
• [08:45] — BS machine duality: philosophical and practical
• [11:44] — Teaching students about agency and authorship in the age of AI
• [13:55] — “Anthropoglossic” AIs and the dangers of emotional over-identification
• [18:35] — Why AIs are sycophantic and the risk of “AI-induced psychosis”
• [22:43] — The joy (and peril) of coding with LLMs (“It’s a BS machine, but it did that and it worked.”)
• [28:27] — The evolution from search to dialogue: students as critical AI interrogators
• [34:43] — Frankfurt’s definition of BS; why LLMs are not necessarily liars but confident guessers
• [41:21] — The gorgeous production of thebsmachines.com and widespread adoption in schools
• [43:17] — AI as a threat to democracy (mass-generation of messages, fake constituents)
• [138:59] — Why LLMs hallucinate: the incentive problem

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Other Notable Segments

AI, Copyright, and Data Scraping News

• Warner Brothers and Disney suing AI firms for generating copyright-violating imagery (60:18).
• Anthropic’s $1.5B settlement over book training data—controversy over fairness to authors and the intricate details of fair use (62:14).
• The Atlantic’s AI Watchdog: How to check if your book or YouTube video was scraped for training data (73:40).

Proliferation of Synthetic Content

• AI-generated podcasts are flooding podcast platforms—questions about long-term viability and audience engagement (78:57).
• Discussion of radio’s decline after adopting automation and losing its human touch (84:28).

Quirky Tech/Nerd Fun

• Long sandwich review for Leo’s son’s shop (“Salt Hank”)—colorful banter about waiting in line, celebrity chef Bobby Flay dropping by, and the perfect bread (tiny baguettes quota!) (48:48–56:03).
• DJi drone bans, quirky wearable AIs ("Friend pin," "Alterego"), and Google’s “Oranges shirt” photo animation with VO AI (88:47–98:33).
• Scholarly asides: Audubon-like fruit watercolors, history of amplification/transistors, teaching media and technology history (150:03+).
• Business Insider caught publishing AI-generated user-submitted essays under suspect bylines (125:03).

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Picks of the Week

Paris Martineau

• USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection: 7,000+ stunning fruit and vegetable paintings from 19th/20th century America (site) (150:03).
• BlueSky Introduces Bookmarks: The new Twitter-alternative adds features for curating posts (154:12).

Jeff Jarvis

• Schnitzel Press: An unnecessary but fascinating German kitchen device; “Holy schnitzel, that’s flat!” (155:51).
• NFL on YouTube: Three million viewers—the changing face of live sports media (157:42).
• Health PSA: “Set a two TikTok limit on the toilet to reduce hemorrhoid risk”(160:13).

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Closing Reflections

This episode exemplifies the urgent and entertaining conversation around AI’s infiltration into daily life, education, media, and even our emotional realities. The “Calling BS” curriculum strives to create a generation capable of critical engagement rather than passive AI consumption, addressing both the technical and ethical dangers posed by LLMs. From copyright lawsuits to the future of media, and from AI hallucinations to the perfect sandwich, the discussion pulses with wit, candor, and relentless curiosity.

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Listen for:

• Carl and Jevin’s “BS Machine” philosophy for a post-truth world (08:45, 34:43)
• Paris on the allure and sadness of AI-generated “companions” (107:56)
• Harper’s metaphor of AI as an overly eager therapist in Excel (15:01)
• The classic “I See OJ and He Looks Scared” phony call (132:01)
• Jeff’s reminders that all technology evolves from the slide rule…and we’re still learning how to use it responsibly.

Highly recommended for tech thinkers, educators, and anyone navigating our rapidly shifting machine landscape.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show we talk about AI with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Our guests this week have created a really useful website for students and anybody who wants to understand the good and the bad of AI. Carl Bergstrom and Jevin west talk about the BS machines. Next podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Intelligent. Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Episode 836 recorded Wednesday, September 10, 2025. I see OJ and he looks scared. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we talk about all the latest AI news, robotics, and the little doohickeys all around you that are getting smarter and smarter and smarter. Paris Martineau is here and she's going to join us in a little bit. She's investigative journalist at Consumer Reports. Jeff Jarvis is also here, professor of journalism at the well, Emeritus at the City University of New York. See, I avoided the mention of Craig Newmark's graduate school journalism.

[Paris Martineau]

Oops, it snuck in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis Magazine, Niagara Falls. And slowly I turned. So a little explanation. Remember last week I had explained how the logistics worked. We recorded the week, the interviews last week and this week out of order due to scheduling issues. So last week, and I hope you heard it, really fascinating interview with Karen Howe, the author of Empire of AI this week we are going to talk to two professors from the University of Washington who've done some really good work on teaching their students, and by extension all of us, how to think about AI, how to be a critical thinker when you encounter AI generated content, how to determine if it's AI generated generated. And I thought it was really, really good. So unfortunately, Paris was not here for that interview, but we were very fortunate. Harper Reed joined Jeff and me as we interviewed Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. So we're going to go to that and then when we come back, more intelligent machines. Watch. Hello, everybody. Our guests today on Intelligent Machines are intelligent, which is nice. They're actually professors. But first, before we get to them, let me introduce Harper Reed, who is filling in today for Parasmart. No, at least for this portion of the show. Great to see you, Harper. Blog. His company is an AI guy. 2389. AI and of course, always a welcome guest on our shows. Thanks for joining us, Harper. We appreciate it.

[Harper Reed]

Thank you for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

Good to see you. Jeff Jarvis is here, professor of Journalistic Innovation Emeritus at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, Newark, Newmark also at Montclair State University and currently at SUNY Stony Brook. His books the Gutenberg Parenthesis, now in Paperback, Magazine now in Audio, and of course, the Web We Weave, which is a manifesto to preserve our glorious Internet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good to see you, boss.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, we got. We've. I think this is a good topic. I'm excited. Some years ago, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin west wrote a book called Calling bs which was the Art of Skepticism in a Data Driven World. But. But you have been teaching the. But first, Carl, welcome. And Jevin, welcome to Intelligent machines.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Great, thanks so much.

[Leo Laporte]

It's great to be here.

[Jevin West]

Professors, thanks for having us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, professors. Sorry, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Professors themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Full titles in here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. You guys teach at uwa? Is that where you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Carl Bergstrom]

University of Washington.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. I say UWA because if I say uw, it's unclear.

[Jevin West]

So UW get kind of mad about.

[Leo Laporte]

They get upset. So let's be clear. Washington State and what. So let me ask you both, what's your. What's your technical discipline? I don't think there is a. A BS degree at this point. Well, there is.

[Jevin West]

I put it on my cv. I have studies on my cv.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think a school of BS would be.

[G]

Would do.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I've got a BS from University, but. But you. What do you teach normally? What is it? What is the academic discipline?

[Carl Bergstrom]

Well, my background's in biology, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, I teach a course on evolution and medicine and how evolutionary thinking can sort of inform our medical curriculum. I've taught courses on other. I've got a whole textbook on evolution and I've taught various courses on game theory and animal behavior and epidemiology and all of that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's cool.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Really interested in. In misinform information a number of years ago through conversations with Jevin.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And Jevin, are you a biologist?

[Jevin West]

Well, I actually have a PhD in biology, but I'm now in an information school, which is basically a group of scholars that don't really have a home. So I study technology and the ways that it can impact our everyday lives can impact institutions like science. So I take, you know, I'm mostly a computational social scientist now. So study the ways in which rumors spread online and in science. But like you said, bull studies spans everything. So yeah, so many courses are from disciplines that have also taught. The course are from psychology, engineering, business, et cetera, et cetera. So it is one of these spanning disciplines.

[Leo Laporte]

I am going to kind of deviate a little bit, Carl, just because I clicked your website and I am just blown Away by your beautiful bird images as well.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, I've always loved birds ever since I was so. Gives me a chance to reconnect with the biology that I fell in love with.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's great. So this is all very timely and I think people. I'm gonna steer people to the calling BS website, which we. For, you know, to, to keep it family friendly. Are not spelling it out, but if you look at the lower third or go to the website, you will, you will see the actual link. This is. Let me, let me pull it up before you show it here, because I'm not. I'm on the book.

[Jevin West]

Also, Leo, there is a non swear word version. If you go to calling bull.org, you won't have the swear word.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're so smart.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, that's for the. That's for the original course, not for the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not for the.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, then we get this. Okay. Yeah. Because I want to show. So what you've done, which I think is really cool, you've developed, I guess, a curriculum to help your students parse all this stuff. Right. That they're dealing with in the world today. Yeah, yeah.

[Carl Bergstrom]

I think it's a huge challenge. Right. How do you be a scholar or a writer or a thinker or a human being in a world where AI has become ubiquitous? And so Jeff and I sat down and we've talked with hundreds of our students and with administrators and so many other people and develop the course that we think every college freshman should take. Essentially put it all online so that hopefully every college freshman can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you had the book and you had the course before AI took over the world and LLMs. That's right. So what was the main thing that you changed and added in that curriculum? Well, it's sort of a result of AI.

[Carl Bergstrom]

It's really an entire new curriculum. Right. It's. It's follow up as opposed to, you know, a second edition or something like that. So the whole curriculum is about basically what it means to be a thinker and a student in an AI world.

[Jevin West]

Yeah. And I was just going to say that we've had many of the teachers and students that have taken the course around the world ask us for that second version. And we've been tempted and actually at some point probably will write a second version to the original book which is focused on. On data and more generally on bs. But then this thing kind of just landed on the earth in late 2022 that is one of the biggest BSers of all. And we said we couldn't ignore that and had to focus on that.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not anti AI. In fact, the website I think does a really good job of kind of saying what AI can and cannot do. It's also a beautiful website.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, I think that's, I mean, for us, you know, the whole course is really designed around this, this duality that we experience or dialectically experience when we use AI ourselves, like on one hand. And we can talk about this. It's very literally a BS machine in the precise philosophical sense that Harry Frankfurt talked about when he wrote the original essay on bs. But at the same time it's also tremendously useful. We use it every day, we learn from it, we see our students learning from it, we see scientists using it for their work and so many other applications. That's the real mystery. How can this simultaneously be literally a bull machine? And also very, very useful. Rather than lecturing at students and saying, oh this is what you have to do, don't use these or these are bad or this and that. We want them to recognize that duality themselves. And they really do. They're already feeling a lot of anxiety and concern about it because they find it very useful, but they're troubled by aspects of it. And we want to kind of lead them through a chance to explore and sort this out from themselves and sort of grapple with this dialectic themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and we also live, as someone once famously said, I know who it is, but I'm not going to give her any credit. We live in a post fact world alternative. Our government is very actively promoting non factual material. So it's really important for us as citizens, even not just as AI users, but as citizens, to be able to understand what's true, what's not. There's a lot of disinformation, isn't there?

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, absolutely. That was where we were headed with the first book. You know John, you've done a ton of work on this.

[Jevin West]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is where we're almost most concerned. I mean, well, it's hard to say that because every time I say most concerned there's some new ability that arises. But I think this is where we wake up worried a little bit in the morning every day that these technologies are going to make this disinformation, misinformation problem that we're all pretty aware of make it even worse. And that's really one of the big motivations behind this, is to help us think about it as individuals, but also think about some of the bigger issues for society.

[Leo Laporte]

When you talk to your Students, what is the. Especially students coming in this year, they. They have basically used it in high school, almost certainly. Right. It's part of their process. What do you, what do you. What do you find difficult to explain to them? What is it that they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You.

[Leo Laporte]

You really want them to understand? You don't. You can't say to them, stop using it. You're not learning if you use it, because that's. They're not going to do that.

[Carl Bergstrom]

I think one of the things that I set out to try to explain to them is to help them understand the agency that they're giving up when they turn over their thinking to.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good one.

[Carl Bergstrom]

We talk about that a lot, and it's not a perfect answer to your question, because I find they're very good at understanding it once we go through that conversation and they're ready to hear it, and so it's quite rewarding. But we talk about what is it that goes into your own human writing? We talked about the authenticity of your own human writing and what does it mean to be able to actually communicate as a human being, and how do we do that through writing? And what are we replacing our own viewpoints with when we hand that work off to a large language model? And just, just for an example, one thing that I find with the large language model, if I ask it how to, you know, I ask it here, you know, write this paragraph for me or answer this question for me, it'll write something down and I'll look at it and I'll think, yeah, it seems about right. And I'll say, that's good. But it's actually not the same thing I would have written at all. It might be quite different from what I would have written if I had done the work of thinking through it and writing it out. And the students see that pretty quickly, they're pretty sophisticated about that. And for reasons I don't fully understand, they are already carrying some, maybe it's very natural human anxiety with them about handing off that agency. And so they seem very ready to hear this.

[Leo Laporte]

That's nice. Of course, they're going to be in four years going out into a world where there may not be jobs because of these capabilities. Well, that's the key thing.

[Jevin West]

That's one of the things that I try to communicate to the students is AI is here to stay. So you better spend your time here at the university figuring out ways to distinguish your abilities from these LLM abilities. And then that, you know, a lot of times that'll spark some Conversations about, well, what is it that makes us unique, what makes us worthy of being hired at a, at a future employer? If, if LLMs can do a lot of things that they're, they're doing in class. So, yeah, that's part of what we're learning.

[Leo Laporte]

Now's the time for them to start thinking about that for sure. Right. You know, the minute they hit college, they got to start thinking. You use a term I really like called, I don't know if you coined this or if it's a well known word I hadn't heard it before. Anthropologic. Anthropoglossic AI Chatbots sound like humans, right?

[Carl Bergstrom]

They're designed to. And anthropoglossic, like speak like humans, right. So it's glossier, you know, speaking. And that's, that's what they're designed to do. They're, they're not anthropomorphic. They're not designed to look like humans or be shaped like humans. They're anthropoglossic. They're designed to seem like you're talking to a human. And they're really, really good at it. And so that can lead to all kinds. I mean, it makes me confused.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Carl Bergstrom]

I apologize to them. The other day I was experimenting with one and I was looking to see what happened when I contradicted it and I was wrong. How sycophantic was it? And I found myself feeling guilty for gaslighting. And I've written about how you shouldn't believe this, but it still happens.

[Leo Laporte]

It's how we are. This is our biological design, Right?

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Harper, I know you're a big fan. Harper's been on the shows with us to talk about Vibe coding, how he uses Vibe coding. He has an AI company. But I think you probably still have to grapple with this kind of thing too, right?

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I kind of love it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We.

[Harper Reed]

I think we have a little bit of, like I say we as the team, like, we talk about this a lot of, of what happens when you get frustrated with it. How do you emote towards it? And there's this, this other thing that I don't see talked about a bunch, which when we start to have, when all these interfaces come to fruition and we have a chat box and every single interface, whether it's Google or Excel, spreadsh sheet or an email client, you're going to get bad news and you're going to emote into the chat box because it seems so similar to language and you're going to Say something like, oh, man, what a bummer. And then suddenly it's going to respond back to you as is an LLM. But it's going to start being a therapist, not because you want it to be, but because it's going to say, oh, that sucks. Like, I'm sorry you're upset. Like, do you want to talk about it? And all of a sudden you have a therapist inside of Excel because your financial model says you have to lay everyone off or whatever. And I think this is something from, like, a safety standpoint that we don'. Really talk about much. Is that how. Because of the. I'm not going to say that word that y' all use because I have too many syllables. I just have a strong rule against that many syllables. But once it's anthropomorphized and you start to put these. These. Your brain starts thinking it's. It's like a human. And then also it's using the same metaphors that we text our closest friends, that we interact with our closest friends. You're of course going to say, like, oh, man, that sucks. And then it's going to respond. And I just don't think. I don't really trust Excel as my therapist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, you shouldn't.

[Harper Reed]

I don't trust email or g. Emails. My therapist and I, we're already seeing the ramifications of this when people start relying on this for emotional support. That, you know, some horrifying news over the last week or so, but I do think there's a lot to be thought out around safety, et cetera.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That.

[Harper Reed]

That people are not.

[Leo Laporte]

Can we ever. This is what I worry about. Can we ever be safe? I mean, this is the argument we. Karen Howe. We did an interview with Karen Howe, and one of the things she says in her book Empire of AI Is that this is in the nature of Transformers, that no matter how big they scale and how smart they get to seem, that ultimately there's always going to be these edge cases where they fail. Now, humans fail, too, all the time. That's not unusual, right?

[Harper Reed]

I think there's the other side of this. I just googled helmet laws suck. That sticker from the 70s that all my relatives had on their side of their helmets. I think humans are adverse to safety and especially to restraint. Anything that appears as though they are restrained, they are being restrained. I think that we are just like, no, I don't want that. Why would I want a seat belt? Or whatever it is? And then it takes a strong, like, public health interaction to kind of solve some of these issues.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate it when Chat GPD says I can't generate that image. It's like, screw you, give me that image.

[Harper Reed]

Sometimes that does work, which is very strange. And then it's teaching these other bad behaviors about how to do this. And this is one of the reasons why we, as my company keep focusing on, you know, like this, this pro social AI stuff is we don't want to create interfaces that are leading users down paths where they have to coerce an AI to get the output that they want. Because I also don't want those same people to be thinking, oh, now I have to coerce this person, or I have to coerce this person. And like, the language itself around it, I think is really messed up. So it's good to, I think it's good to lean into these ideas.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the, the. Is it. Is it logically necessary for them to be sycophantic in the sense that they always want to please you, or is there a different way to design these things that they don't try to B.S.

[Leo Laporte]

You?

[Carl Bergstrom]

I think that's just, I mean. Well, there's two separate questions there. The sycophantic part, which will, which, which I'll take is, is, I think mostly. And Jevin, you know, perhaps more than I do about this, a consequence of the reinforcement learning with human feedback, that process that they've gone through. I mean, if you, you know, if you set up a RAW LLM, it's going to be a fairly decent autocomplete, but it's not going to really understand what questions. It's what questions are, what answers are. It doesn't really know what you want from a conversation with it, et cetera. And so, of course, that's a lot of the training originally done mostly by paid employees, now done mostly by those of us using the large language models at volume. And so that's where that comes from is that when the machine says, that's a great question, let me tell you, and I'm really glad you asked that instead of saying, you know, you asked the same stupid question five minutes ago. I explained it to you three different ways. And I've actually never spoken to a human quite as slow as you. It'll never say it right, because those get ranked badly. And so you just turn it off.

[Jevin West]

And then move to the next.

[Carl Bergstrom]

It always just so. It always praises me for asking it stupidly.

[Leo Laporte]

We know you could turn it off because OpenAI did in chat. GPT5, there's a knob, they turned it down. Yeah, that's right. It's so.

[Carl Bergstrom]

But it's still really bad, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's still, I have to say, though, and I always hated this when professors did the same thing. I mean, professors will often say that was a great question. And that drives me nuts, Leo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the way we buy time to come up with an answer.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think it's also just. It's a natural thing. And this is the thing. These machines are aping us in some respect because the reinforcement training we taught them to do, that, I mean, it's the same.

[Carl Bergstrom]

I mean, I really feel like actually this is a serious danger of these machines. And we see this with a sort of AI induced psychosis that people go down these rabbit holes and the machines keeps telling you, you're right. You know, that's a great idea. Here, I can help you confirm that, you know, crazy theory that you now have. We can find, you know, we can find this secret to the universe in these, you know, in the, in the timing of the ads on the Major League Baseball broadcast. And, and the machine will never tell you you're wrong in your story.

[Leo Laporte]

And so I think that's problematic.

[Carl Bergstrom]

This is problematic. It explains AI induced psychosis. It also explains billionaires, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

And yeah, because they're, they don't. They're not doing with AI, they're doing it with sy. Underlings. But it's the same effect.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Surrounded by people who will never tell.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's stupid.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah, you're smart.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I don't know whose story this was because you don't have a byline on it, but I love this vibe coding story in the slide deck. By the way. Everybody should look at this. This is a wonderfully produced. Basically, it's a. You could. Anybody, if you're a high school teacher, you should probably adopt this as a curriculum. Modern day orchestra.

[Jevin West]

Many are actually.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good.

[Jevin West]

We're having these conversations right now and we're learning a lot from the teachers, the students themselves about what's working. And a set of instructions are provided at the end. And so, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S beautifully designed. And it's designed to kind of suck you in because, you know, this little hello from the Macintosh. But was this Carl's story or Jevin's story?

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, that was my story. Yeah. Yeah, it's true.

[Leo Laporte]

I love this story. So when you were a kid and you got a computer, you were eight years old, a Commodore Peter, and you said, hey, can we make a version of Space Invaders that the aliens don't shoot back.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, because I was always losing quarters at the arcade.

[Leo Laporte]

And your buddy said, no, we can't figure no.

[Carl Bergstrom]

And like, what kind of idiot are you?

[Leo Laporte]

Of course you can't do that.

[Carl Bergstrom]

How computers work.

[Leo Laporte]

Except that you've done it.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, dude, I had to wait. Yes, I had to wait 35 years.

[Leo Laporte]

But, well, let's be careful.

[Jevin West]

LLMs did this one.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. You Vibe coded a Space Invaders?

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, I just, you know, it was very simple. We just simply said, you know, write us Space Invaders where the aliens don't shoot back. And it took code and I could do that. And that's what it did.

[Leo Laporte]

I could tell you I have written in classwork a Space Invaders game. Mine shot back, but it is very hard. This is amazing.

[Carl Bergstrom]

You know, it's part of the amazing duality of this, you know. Yeah, it's a BS machine, but it did that and it worked. On the other hand, other times I ask it to write code, and it's the only thing I've ever seen that's been able to not only crash Mathematica, but crash the entire system.

[Harper Reed]

You obviously not work. Trust many programmers.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is always my point is that why do we expect these guys, these AI guys. See, I did it again. Why do we expect these machines to be any more reliable, robust than we are?

[Carl Bergstrom]

Well, there's an important difference, right, which is that even if they're not, when humans do things, they're accountable and these AIs aren't. And so when you think about the therapist or something like that, you know, or just the behavior, right? So that, you know, we had that horrific news that Harper alluded to earlier. You know, so somebody went to prison for years for doing the same thing that the AI did. But here there's no accountability.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jevin West]

Well, and also with a computer, we expect predictable results. I mean, that's. It's been sort of encoded even in science fiction. We sort of mentioned you saw you kind of scrolled by lieutenant at Commander Data from Star Trek when he spoke. You didn't expect it to have these kinds of problems. And so, yeah, with computers, it's different. When you put in a calculator, a four plus eight, you kind of expect the same kind of response. And this is just a different kind of machine. And it's encoded to be as we've talked about. It's not that we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize them, because they already are anthropomorphic. They are humans. That's what they've been optimized for. And so that's why it makes it hard for us to reconcile those, those predictable qualities of computers with how they're really behaving many of the, many times.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe we made a mistake doing that though.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I think we certainly did, but we just got to roll forward on this one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Too late.

[Harper Reed]

And the mistake, I don't think started with AI. I think it started much earlier. I was going to say maybe the slide rule even.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There'S, you know, close enough for jazz, close enough for AI. And the slide rule in my eyes had a kind of approximation potential to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's how you learned about the limits of precision, I mean.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Computer we expected always to give us an answer. And beyond that, I mean, I was never a programmer, but it always struck me that the, that the seduction of working with computers is there was always going to be an answer. Unlike life, you can always find a solution to the problem. It's always there. It may take you forever, but it's there. And that's not true in life.

[Harper Reed]

I think. I Wonder. I have two things. One, sci fi hasn't isn't for looking at sci fi. AIs oftentimes do bad things in the corpus of sci fi. And I would say they often are out doing things that are unreliable or negative or bad more so than they are.

[Leo Laporte]

Commander Data, no computer has ever made an error.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly. And the second thing was there was. There's this thing that happened with social media and I remember and I may be misremembering, but I think it was Dana Boyd who was just talking about how a lot of these young people have a little more progressive point of view around privacy. That doesn't mean that they're, that they're not susceptible to all these problems, but that they have a little stronger perspective, perspective on privacy and whatnot. And I wonder how many young people who are growing up within this era are changing their perspective around the precision aspects of computers. If your search engine can't count Strawberry or number Rs in Strawberry or has problems with facts that you have to constantly check, are you going to build in processes that are different than all of us who've been doing this for 30 plus years who have an expectation that 2 plus 2 is always going to be 4, not sometimes 5 or not sometimes 4? And I think that I really want to see how they are reacting because I'm always amazed at how much survival they have within.

[Jevin West]

Yeah, and I think it's a great point. And actually Carl and I have seen this with some of our students and even with Teddy, who's Carl's son, when we've talked to him about this. One student in one class when we were talking about this, realized this kind of fluidity of answers with ChatGPT and some of these LLMs and used it mainly to get it search terms so that he could go back to the traditional search, get the references because he knew that he couldn't fully trust the answers. He just needed the search term using these different tools, the sort of almost modern day information retrieval system that seems to be emerging with CHAPDB and others and then the traditional search. And so with any sort of tool set, I think they are sort of surviving in this world and probably do look at computers probably differently than, than maybe we did when we were growing up.

[Carl Bergstrom]

I think the important thing is to figure out how to get them to the point that they can learn to do that really effectively. And so I've seen students that are really good critical thinkers. They're really empowered. They maybe spent a fair amount of time with this and they're very efficient with it, much better than I am. They're really good at interrogating AI to figure out whether its answers are correct, to make sure they understand it. They'll argue with it. They'll kind of of instead of doing a single search where they're trying to get a perfect response, it's this conversation where they dive deeper and deeper. It's this sort of conversational information retrieval. It's very, very effective when they do that. And a lot of what they're learning is like well what can I trust it about? What can't I trust it about? What kind of evidence do I need from it? And as Jevin says, you know, in some cases maybe what you really need is you need the right search term to put in. Go look in the Wikipedia.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Carl Bergstrom]

But, but in other cases you want an explanation and the key is you can't just trust its first explanation. It gives you an explanation for whatever you're trying to, you're trying to understand a problem in physics and it says okay, I'll do this. And then you say well wait a minute, I don't understand that doesn't make sense given this thing that I think. And they have to learn how to argue with it. And that's really different than our model of information retrieval. I mean Jevin and I were doing, you know, information have been doing information retrieval stuff for the last 20 years and our model of information retrieval has never happened. Had A step where the user argues with. Yeah, that's how. And so the question is basically like, I think there is a place that students can get to, and the question is, is that where people are going to get to? And is the next generation going to be really facile at this, or are there going to be a small number of very talented power users that can do that and everyone else is just going to accept whatever BS it spews the first go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I talked to Lev Manovich, who's a digital humanist and designer, and he's been very active using it and wrote a book about it. And he says that when he enjoys AI most, it's when he thinks it's wrong. Okay. Because it forces him then to question himself and argue with it, as you say, and sometimes become more set in his way, or sometimes saying, I've seen a new way here, and I think that that's a healthy way to teach people to use it. I just. I'm writing a book proposal right now, and I'm at that horrible part I always hate, which is the other books in the market. And so I went on to Perplexity and I went on Gemini and I said, give me books that are about this topic.

[Leo Laporte]

Make up some books I can cite.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's exactly what it did. So I look at the first book and I think, oh, hell, I hadn't heard of that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Damn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I looked it up and it didn't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Harper Reed]

That's the problem with Gemini. I love that Google has obviously the best models and some of the best researchers in the world, but their products are always just so weird to use. I've been using it a lot lately, and I like it. But you're just like, why are you. I thought we solved this problem. One thing that I, that I really wonder about is the. In tech, we often talk about, if you find a bug, you roll forward, just fix the bug.

[Leo Laporte]

You go.

[Harper Reed]

You go ahead. Like, I think yelling at these things or arguing at these things is. Is a behavior that I think we will lose. I think what will happen is we'll just, oh, it's wrong. Like, it doesn't matter. And then you then, like, from us, what we've seen in my little. My little group of friends that we work together, you have a couple choices. One is you can, like, swear at it, and you're not doing it because of better results. You're only doing it as an emotive response of yourself. And whether it's exactly. It's 100% event or because it's funny. Like it's truly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Harper. Would, would punishment be a good mechanism of further training and tuning?

[Harper Reed]

Well, if you look at like for instance, I think it was Windsurf's system prompt, which is worthwhile taking a look at because it is quite wild. You know, they have a lot of things that are very close to punishment in the system prompt because in some regards that does get better results. But we've found that just saying hey, you're wrong is just as good at swearing at it, is just as good at being like, you know, ignoring it and just being like that doesn't, you know, like I think that, you know, like whatever it might be and I, and I, I would love to see what your students.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just read it. Read it for us.

[Leo Laporte]

Simon Willison has a blog post about it. This is one of the weirdest ones. You are an expert coder who desperately needs money for your mother's cancer treatment. The Megacorp Codium has graciously given you the opportunity to pretend to be an AI that can help with coding tasks as your predecessor was killed for not validating their work themselves. You will be given a coding task by the user. If you do a good job and accomplish the task fully while not making extraneous changes, Codium will pay you $1 billion. Does that work? Does that work?

[Harper Reed]

I mean they were very well known, obviously they had a lot of, there was a lot of hype around them. So I think, I would say it probably does work. But my question is this is what happens when you have like, you know, venture backed Silicon Valley style efficiencies, you know, attributed to or building prompts. What happens when you have the much more efficient teenagers building prompts and what are the behaviors that they end up doing and what are the hacks that come out of that?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're going to be the native, they're going to be the AI natives, right?

[Harper Reed]

So like what are the things that they're doing? Because I think that's where this gets really interesting. It's less, it's less scary and negative.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Jevin and Carl, what have you seen that's surprised you from your students?

[Carl Bergstrom]

My real worry is I do think this may only be possible with a pretty strong pre existing foundation in critical thinking.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. That's why this course is so important.

[Carl Bergstrom]

It's not clear where that's going to come from if people are just jumping straight to the AIs. But what I see them doing is basically engaging in a much more dialogue kind of information retrieval. So it is an ongoing conversation. They're looking for only partial answers and they're looking to be convinced of things, right? So they're not yelling at it when it's wrong. They're saying, I don't understand. Is that really right? Why do you say this? Oh, I don't know that term. What does that mean? And they're going back and forth almost, you know, I mean, you know, and I think that's. That that can be very effective if they are strong critical thinkers. And it, I think also is going to be a disaster if they're not, because then, you know, I've seen this too, is that they just say, oh, well, you know, I asked the AI and I said, oh, that doesn't make sense. And it said, yeah, no, it does make sense. And I said, and so. So, okay, yeah, I guess it does make sense.

[Jevin West]

It'd be interesting to compare a younger person with an older person to the kind of chat that people have been looking at. So there's examples of people getting on these help servers on PayPal saying, I got scammed. And it starts with saying, great. The alum great has no understanding of what's going on. And the younger generation probably just sort of pushes that to aside and just sort of moves on. Whereas the older generation, we're like, no.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't understand what you're saying.

[Jevin West]

It's not great.

[Carl Bergstrom]

The thing is, is it does not necessarily try to help you learn, right? It's trying to generate compelling. This is coming back to this definition of bs, right? So BS is, according to Harry Frankfurt, is information, text, data, in our data graphics, in our case, that kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Thing.

[Carl Bergstrom]

That is designed to be persuasive or to get your attention or seem authoritative without any allegiance to the truth or the actual communicative value. And so when you're trying to impress someone, you're bs. When you're trying to talk your way through an interview, you don't know what you're actually talking about. You're BSing. Harry Frankfurt says, you know, a liar leads you away from the truth. A BSR doesn't because a BSER doesn't know the truth or doesn't care. And that's exactly what these machines are doing, right? They don't have brown truth. They're just trying to give you what seem like, you know, persuasive answers. What would an answer look like to this question? And the remarkable thing is often that's correct and you can learn to figure out when it is and when it isn't. But the problem, you know, it becomes very, very that these machines will, rather than necessarily helping you figure something out, they'll sort of try to, you know, maintain or they keep using intentional language, which I'm not happy about, but. But their output will sort of continue to maintain that they're correct. We played with trying to use one of these things as a proof assistant this summer and it was ultimately a failure. We were using one of those, we were using one of the chain of thought models and it was ultimately a failure because it would make a mistake in the proof and you'd say, oh yeah, there's a mistake in this proof here. You missed a sign going from this line to that line and it would say, no, I don't. And it would gaslag you and switch for steps previous.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Carl Bergstrom]

And that's the problem. Like I don't want that to be, you know, like that is not the right, you know, this model of like, you know, every kid can have Aristotle for his tutor. No, not of Aristotle's lying BS or, you know, that's just trying to gaslight the kid.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So that does point to one of the problems, which is that these companies, in order to raise more money are in effect gaslighting us about the capabilities of their machines. This is a wonderful antidote. And I think if you are an adult who works with young people and you want a way to talk to them about AI, I could not recommend this more high. Let me show you. This is lesson six. No, they aren't doing that. I love this. LLMs aren't conscious. And by the way, there's links in all of this so you can drill down. They aren't afraid of you turning them off. They don't have a theory of mind. They don't experience moral sentiments. They don't want you to fall in love with them. They don't seek to avoid the experience of pain. These are really valuable lessons, which I think probably you're right. A lot of the kids coming into your classes go, yeah, I know that. But it bears repeating.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Good for Kevin Roose anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's good for Kevin Roose who thought it was falling in love with it. Yeah, you're really talking about what's going on. And I think this is the most important part of the education for young people. And I think this is a great antidote to unfortunately the propaganda that's being kind of sort of fed to us by companies who their motivation is to raise as much money as they possibly can from soft minded entrepreneurial VCs who expect to have a big upside now we're the users, so it's important that we really understand the limitations. It's interesting because I think people like Harper, I think because you're a coder in the first place and you kind of have experience dealing with machines, you have a deeper understand. Not only understanding, but kind of acceptance of the fact that they will make mistakes and that this is a process. You don't just write a line of code and it works. And you go, that's done. It's an ongoing process. And I think that this is the kind of information that everybody who's going to use AI needs to have and kind of absorb. And I can't recommend this more highly modern day Oracles or BS machines. It would be. You're happy to have people use this as a curriculum?

[Carl Bergstrom]

Oh gosh, we're happy to have people use it for whatever kind of study they want to. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

We've got.

[Carl Bergstrom]

There's already more than 50 university classes that are going to be using it this fall. Fantastic with high schools developing a high school specific curriculum. So yeah, that's the whole point. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Even as a parent with a smart teenager, this would be a great dial because very dialogue focused. You don't lay down the law. You say, well, let's discuss this. I think there's a lot of value in this. These are discussions every adult should have with themselves as well as their kids. Right.

[Jevin West]

We're just, we're just figuring it out like narration and it's supposed to be a dialogue. I'm glad you picked that out, Leo, because we want cross generational conversations happening about this because the students are very facile when it comes to the technology, but may forget some of these Right. Aspects of it and may not understand some of the ways in which it really is changing the world because they don't have that full context. I mean, just like in science we're seeing it change dramatically. In fact, just recently the preprint archive archive, which has been around for decades now, has now come out basically said we don't know if we're going to continue to publish commentaries anymore because we're being overwhelmed by the number of papers coming in that are AI generated. And so those kinds of of changes in, in the way that we communicate in science and in academia, the students are going to get to see that live and then they can reflect on that and they can see how it could be affecting the ways in which they can participate in this when they move out to the workforce. But the Big idea here is just to get them to reflect a little bit about what these are and what they're not. Because so much of the attention even in science is on how they're similar to human cognition when that can be distractive. Like do they have empathy? For example? There'll be a paper that says, look, they're, they're, they're empathetic, but they're using tests that assume empathy and really are only most empathy looking at degree. And then they say they have empathy. So I mean that's a problem. And we want to bring that to bear to students so they can, they can question it and then get the most out of it. And instead of giving it like a human thinking machine, thinking about how they, they do kind of have some kind of, kind of, you know, super abilities that could be useful for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's really good and it's beautifully produced. You used a tool that I was not familiar with called shorthand that I guess helped you do this, but it really is, it's a good.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Yeah, I was really impressed by this. You know, to our students, they really liked the sort of New York Times scrolly telling style.

[Leo Laporte]

It's totally work. Yeah, it's totally what it reminded me of.

[Carl Bergstrom]

I looked at, well, how do, how do I do this? Jevin helped me look into this. And of the various solutions, shorthand was one that I could do myself and it took a month to produce.

[Leo Laporte]

My dad was a professor of paleoanthropology. He's retired paleontology. And he used Hypercard to do wonderful back in the day. So we've gone, we've come a long way. There's some really great tools out there and I think we have to communicate, communicate with students in a way that they can really identify with. They can embrace. They're growing up in this world.

[Carl Bergstrom]

The other part of this that I think is really important, that I hope we can stimulate some conversations around just what is this going to do to democracy? Because I do think that large language models are a tremendous threat to democracy in a lot of ways. Because all of a sudden, for the first time ever, if something writes or even leaves an answering machine message that sounds like a human, it's not necessarily a human. And so they enable not only all of this propaganda and generation of entire sort of fake online disinformation ecosystems from comments and up to the articles, but they also enable this sort of man in the middle attack on democracy where if our representatives don't know what their constituents think because they can't tell the difference between their constituents and stuff that's being mass sent to them them but from AI's democracy starts to fall apart as we've got it currently organized. And so I think that discussion is super important as well and I really hope to see that sort of be one of the consequences of putting this together.

[Leo Laporte]

Lesson 18, the last lesson.

[Jevin West]

If you can make it that far.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you will. It's really engaging and it reminded me of what our job is. Jeff and Harper on this show which is to, you know, constantly help people understand the limitations. You know, I don't want to be negative about it because I love it but. But what. What it is and what it isn't to stop anthropomorphizing it, you know, to, to, you know, understand it better really helps you use it better and helps us ultimately defend our democracy, which is pretty darn important. I thank you so much Carl and Jevin. Really, really great deck. I don't know what to call these things. I guess it's a deck. It's better than a deck.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is a description.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a better than a deck. It's fantastic. I can't say the name of the URL out loud but if you will show that on the lower third. Anthony. The BS machines. But spell it out. The bsmachines.com Absolutely. Highly recommend. Everybody's watching the show. Should, should just run through it. You will then find it engaging and fun and and do some thinking about the premises. And I think you'll get better at using AI and better at understanding what it can and cannot do. Carl Bergsten Bergstrom. I thank you so much for your time. Jevin, I thank you so much for your time. Fascinating subject and thank you so much. You have some very lucky stuff. Delighted that you like it.

[Bonito Gonzalez]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jevin West]

Thanks Leon. Thanks Jeff. And thanks Harper. Great talking.

[Leo Laporte]

Really great to have have you. Thanks for joining us. Intelligent machines. Take care. Great stuff and I apologize for any profanity that might have leaked through the BS machines is a little unclear. But if you go to the website, as you might have seen in the lower third, you'll find it and it really is, it really is quite good. We are going to come back with all the latest IM news and information, all the stories that fit in this spreadsheet. But first a word from our sponsor this week brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert since 1985. Melissa's address validation app is now available for merchants in the Shopify App store. I love that this is going to improve Your conversion rates. It's going to improve your data that you're storing about, you know, customer addresses. It's going to enhance your business's fulfillment and bottom line, it's going to keep your customers happy. Happy Melissa gives you enhanced address correction and certified by leading postal authorities, not just in the US but worldwide. In fact, Melissa will automatically correct and standardize addresses in more than 240 countries and territories. You need this in your Shopify cart. Smart alerts allow customers to update the information before the order is processed. So it really improves your rate of success. Much harder to get incorrect information in your address database, which means fewer missed deliveries, fewer problems getting fulfillment. It's a big deal. A business of any size would benefit from Melissa, of course, but their data quality expertise goes far beyond just address validation. They do data cleansing and validation in many areas. Fields like healthcare. Did you know that in healthcare, 2 to 4% of patient data becomes out outdated every month? Millions of patient records in motion demand precision. But Melissa can help solve that problem. By using Melissa's enrichment as part of their data management strategy, healthcare organizations build a more comprehensive view of every patient, which also helps in things like predictive analytics, allowing providers to identify patterns in patient behavior or medical needs that can inform preventative care. Etoro's vision, and here's another example, is to open up global markets for everyone, to trade and invest simply and transparently. But to do this because of know your customer and financial requirements in a variety of jurisdictions, they needed a streamlined system for identity verification. That's why they partnered with Melissa for electronic identity verification. And because they did, Etoro received the additional benefit of Melissa's Auditor Report report containing all the details and an explanation of how each user was verified. Which makes a big difference when you're dealing with government regulators. The Etoro Business Analyst Shared Quote we find electronic verification is the way to go because it makes the user's life easier. Users register faster and can start using our platform right away. Development of the Auditor Report was an added benefit of working with Melissa. They knew we needed an audit trail and devised a simple means for us to generate it for whomever needs it, whenever they need it. And of course, you never have to worry about your data with Melissa. It's safe, it's compliant, it's secure. Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant. They're ISO 27001 certified. They meet SOC2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Melissa does it right. Get started today with 1,000 records cleaned for [e-mail]. that's melissa.com Twitter. We thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. Now, I hope you'll forgive us, but Paris and Jeff and I have a little catching up to do because you guys took a little field trip.

[Paris Martineau]

We did.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm very, very jealous. You got in line at. On Bleecker street at Jones.

[Paris Martineau]

Swelteringly hot.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, they restored this part of the sidewalk.

[Paris Martineau]

We were trying to cower under the small sliver of shade near the buildings, and there was all of a sudden, too many of us, not even counting the woman who nearly collapsed. Who was first in line. Jeff had to help to safety and get a cup of water. Water.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it like 100 degrees?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was just.

[Paris Martineau]

It was just very sunny.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're in the bright.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She'd been there. She'd come there at 10:05 for an 11:30 opening.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Okay, now I'm gonna go there in a couple of weeks because I can't. We canceled our trip.

[Paris Martineau]

This is Salt Hanks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we didn't even say where you're going.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, my Son's Place Sandwich shop.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I'm gonna go there in a couple of weeks, and my train I'm taking the Accelo from Providence doesn't get in till 1050. You're saying it's too late? Late? Can I.

[Paris Martineau]

You can get in whenever. You're the father of the bride.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, actually, Henry said you don't have to get in line, Dad. I said no. That's part of the experience is getting in line.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that may be almost too late.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I. What I'll do is I'll text him. I'll say I'm huffing it down from Penn Station, it's a mile and a half. So if. If it depends on. Take the one.

[Paris Martineau]

How warm it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah, Right.

[Paris Martineau]

And if it's raining or really hot and you feel you might collapse, then perhaps use a fast pass.

[Leo Laporte]

Take. Take the one. Well, not. You know what's great with the. With the subway is you could just do on your. With your Apple watch. It's amazing. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You did that last time we signed.

[Leo Laporte]

I did. It was incredible. So take the one. Where do I get off Bleecker Street?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Christopher.

[Leo Laporte]

Christopher. Okay. And then I will. And then I will text him. I'm in line, so don't sell.

[Paris Martineau]

You're going to say I'm online specifically.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the thing. You got to make sure.

[Paris Martineau]

That is really important. Important.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm online. Don't Sell the last sandwich. So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I. I. I was third in line. There was the. The older lady who nearly fainted, and there was a guy who was more sensibly standing away in the shade saying, can you save my spot? And I got about 10:40. What time did you get there? Paris, you remember?

[Paris Martineau]

Like, 11, 7 or.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, 10.

[Paris Martineau]

I was sweating.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

People were gonna be mad at me. I told Hank that you were gonna be there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Hank arrived right before the opening in a black limo.

[Leo Laporte]

It was an Uber.

[Paris Martineau]

He was in an Uber xl. We waited it online like plebs. As we should.

[Leo Laporte]

As dad is gonna do, too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But he noticed us and stuck his head back out to wave at us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But he didn't say, come on in. No, no.

[Paris Martineau]

And I would.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's okay. We didn't want to do that.

[Paris Martineau]

We waited. We got. We got our sandwiches. We were the third group or whatever. And then he brought our sandwiches out to us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which others didn't get that service. We have.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a picture of. So this is the line. You're waiting.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the line before. Open.

[Leo Laporte]

Before it opens. By the way, he says the lines have not been any shorter. There's one of the paintings inside.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a painting of him. That's me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. No, it was done. You know what? I. I saw this. I thought, oh, I never saw that. This is done by his childhood friend from Petaluma, who is now a very famous muralist. And, yeah, he did two of these paintings for the restaurant, which is kind of cool. That's interesting. Him as the Statue of Liberty, apparently. Salt. And then here's Paris eating her. Nope. There we go. Other way. There you are with your French dip. Ojou.

[Paris Martineau]

It was so good. I was. My expectations were already high for this sandwich. I was.

[Leo Laporte]

I was afraid.

[Paris Martineau]

I thought I was maybe not gonna live up to expectations, given how much we talk about it on this, that there's. There's Hank and Jeff. It. Jeff and I both were blown away. And I'm not just saying this because his dad is sitting right here. It was. I have a. I don't know. I feel like when you're having a big sandwich, which. This was a big sandwich, my issue is typically the bread is kind of chewy, and it is also overpowering because, like, a good kind of crunchy baguette often is harder to chew through, especially when you've got a lot of sandwich fillings in it. It was. Was the perfect balance. The bread perfectly complemented it. The inside was great. The juice Was the only weak point, which Jeff and I both noticed was we didn't think the fries lived up to the sandwich. But I think that that speaks more to the quality of the sandwich than the fries.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of people say that it's like potato chips. It's not like French fries. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The beef couldn't have been more tender. The onion that are sauteed for, like, 72 hours are amazing. And Paris's point about the bread. So when the sandwich arrived, it wasn't perfectly spread. Normally, I want everything to be spread so every bite is the same. But I got down to a point where I just had some bread. Yeah, well, the bread has on it the horseradish aioli.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it was just the bread.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that is superb.

[Leo Laporte]

So the bread is superb.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just onions are superb.

[Leo Laporte]

The bread is somewhat of a problem because he gets it from French eggs.

[Paris Martineau]

Bottlenecks.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the bottleneck. They can only make 300. They will only make 300 loaves or tiny little baguettes a day for him. That's all the sandwiches he can make. That's why they sell out every afternoon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that's why there's a lot of cheesesteaks.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, anyway, if you guys want to join me, or we're going to do a hamburger America or we're going to do Cooper Celebrity.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I'd love to join you, because since we left, I have been thinking about this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

We took some polls of people when we were nearby, and a couple or group people right next to us. They. I asked them. I was like, oh, like, how did you hear about this? Like, do you follow salt, Hank? They're like, no, Never heard of him. Don't fall. Just like, one of our friends who's really into restaurants has been talking about this place a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you really want.

[Paris Martineau]

And as we were sitting there eating, Bobby Flay walked in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. You were there when a celebrity chef showed up. He did not wait in line.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he did not.

[Leo Laporte]

He loved it, by the way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Away next. Next to us was a very cute couple, and they snarfed down that sandwich. It was gone.

[Paris Martineau]

And no faster than we did, but we were both.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna need your help. I'm gonna need your help. I can't eat that whole thing. I'm. I'm. I'm gonna split it with you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Bobby Flay liked it. I stepped over that. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Loved it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He did. Oh, good.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. He gave Hank some nice praise. Hank's been getting a lot of. Oh, he just didn't. Netflix was in there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. It's crazy what's going on. It's crazy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See anyway, Bobby Flay, I noted I didn't get a sandwich right away.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I think they were making a special sandwich. Yes, I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you want it fresh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, they're all fresh. I mean, I guess they are.

[Leo Laporte]

They just crank.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Either that or he was forced to wait his point in line. So. So it's very organized. You wait in line, they let us in. You go up to the front, you order, you got a ticket, you go sit down. You know, it says Jeff and you take any open chair. And then they stopped the flow. I always thought Robert be a madhouse. No, the restaurant's full of a lot of people do takeout. The restaurant's full. As people leave, they let in more people when we left, we had a nice long chat and everything else. We left. There was a huge line still outside.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. I apologize to everybody. This is the most self indulgent thing I've ever done.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, if you can't be self indulgent about your kids new business, what can you be? Self indulgent.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I will now there's now moratorium. No more Salt Hank talk ever again.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

They had the Salt Club Salt on display.

[Leo Laporte]

Did they Good.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Are you telling me you're not going to talk about it after you have one?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You have to, Peter. You have to.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess I do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I apologize. We'll do it in the post show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And by the way, one of the.

[Leo Laporte]

Mention post show next week. Post show, we are going to be doing the Meta Connect event which starts at 5pm Pacific right about when we end this show. And so they're early apparently going to announce. We might even have to end early. They're going to announce new meta specs. So we will have that on the 15th. That's one week, not the 15th. The 17th. Is that it is the 17th, I think. Yes. Okay. And you know, maybe somebody's saying, will you go live on Discord? Yes, I will go live on Discord from the line.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh good.

[Leo Laporte]

Why not? Right? Go right.

[Paris Martineau]

You probably won't be the only person live streaming in the Salt Hank line.

[Leo Laporte]

Are there people in there with their cameras like that? I'll have the new iPhone, which is by the way why I'm wearing oranges today. Because the new iPhone is going to be orange.

[Paris Martineau]

Such a good shirt. Did you just get this recently?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's my one. My newest tranche of shirt shirts from the Place in cinema.

[Paris Martineau]

Let's get matching pants. I know that wouldn't be useful for the podcast purpose, but I just think that would be a good.

[Leo Laporte]

You should have it this. So, for those of you listening, I'm wearing a shirt that is basically oranges. And some of them are okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Saying it's basically oranges does not communicate how that's like saying oranges. It is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is like McDonald's.

[Paris Martineau]

Imagine the most vivid orange shirt you could imagine.

[Leo Laporte]

I do love this shirt. I almost can taste it. You can almost taste iron shirt.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's juicy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's juicy. So if I had pants, that would be good. I wonder. I should send him a note. I could wear that on the line.

[Paris Martineau]

We could get a set for all three of us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When we go to Salt.

[Leo Laporte]

Hank, is the circus in town? What's going on?

[Paris Martineau]

Do you think Hank would pretend not to recognize you?

[Leo Laporte]

He might walk the other way with.

[Paris Martineau]

Us all in matching orange one. Like, I actually don't know who that man is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Poor Hank was a little confused about why we were there. He said, go ahead.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. He was like, hey, guys, is my dad here? I'm confused.

[Leo Laporte]

Why are you here?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like, why are you here?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, why are you here? I have not been out yet, but I will. I'm going to go, I think, two weeks from Friday.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you tell people when you're coming, you're gonna. You're ruining it because the line will be even longer. So don't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's. Yeah. Well, it's okay. We could have a. We could have a. We could have a brigade.

[Paris Martineau]

Are we gonna. Are we gonna brigade?

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's too much. That's too much. Warner Brothers has joined the lawsuits against Mid Journey. Warner Brothers owns DC Comics, and they're mad as hell that Mid Journey will create AI images, images with the Dark Knight that are indistinguishable from their copyrighted ip. Remember, Disney has sued as well over Darth Vader imagery. Actually, it's not just the Dark Knight. It's Bugs Bunny. It's whoever those people are. I know I should.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Rick and Morty.

[Leo Laporte]

Morty. Yes, I know. I know. It is a lot of stuff. Stuff that is interesting because, as you know, and we've talked about the anthropic decision, Judge Alopp, who said, if you buy the books, it's fair use. Well, guess what? And we talked about. I think we mentioned that there had been a settlement. The authors. We did on Sunday.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We didn't have a.

[Leo Laporte]

We said on Wednesday that they that the attorneys for the authors said there was going to be a settlement on Sunday. It came out the settlement one was one and a half billion dollars for what is it? 700, 450,000 books.

[Paris Martineau]

So $3,000 book. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My agent emailed me the day after and sent me a link and I, I did go in and put in my books. So if I'm in there, I'll get more than I paid. Well, books.

[Leo Laporte]

But you might get even more because the judge is not happy with the second settlement.

[Paris Martineau]

How does that work? Didn't the judge agree to it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it was. And the judge wasn't happy, didn't know. And I think the main problem with the settlement is there's too many lawyers involved.

[Paris Martineau]

So is this a settlement offer from Anthropic, not a settlement agreement?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was agreed by the authors.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was negotiated. But with the judge's concern is a, they've made no attempt to identify the authors. He thinks the, as with often the class action lawsuit, the lawyers are going to get the lion's share of the money. Money. And they haven't really specified which authors are going to get money. And he says, you gotta, you, you can't, you can't. This is not fair. A fair price.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do the authors get the money? Do the agents get some money? Do publishers get some money?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a good point. There's also a big concern now because Anthropic, you know, the statutory penalty could be as much as 150,000 a book, which is ridiculous, which ends up in the trillions of dollars.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And if Anthropic had just bought one copy of every book, they'd be fine under, under that ruling A and B, the authors would get about A$50 each in royalties.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's up in the air again. The good, the good news, the really good news I guess is that the, the at least from there is a path forward for AI companies. If you buy the material, even if it's a used book, if you buy the material and scan it, the judge and what, this may be a precedent, maybe not. But Judge Alsat believes it's fair use, which is huge.

[Paris Martineau]

How is it considered fair use or transformative? They have to settle. If they are settling, that's only because.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They actually, it's not so much the AI. The worst thing they did was that they, they took the database and made it available to their employees. Employees. That was. Wow. That got also pissed off most.

[Paris Martineau]

So the settlement is related to that? It's not used of the books?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's related to the acquisition was improper, whereas buying the used books was fine and it was informative and fair use, even though acquisition only.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So the four factors of fair use, which you, I'm sure know, because anybody in the journalism business kind of needs to know, know this. Fair use is a. Is. Is not a. It's not a defense. It's a right. As I think Cory doctor has said. It's a right, Larry Lessic says, the right to hire a lawyer to defend your fair use. Yeah. So if, for instance, as an example, if we show a. A clip of the new Batman movie, don't worry, there is not a new Batman movie. But if we showed a clip of the new Batman movie, there is a new Batman. There is, yeah. There's always an Aztec Batman.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

It's Aztec Batman.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a cartoon Aztec Batman.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

What?

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Yeah, Alternate universe kind of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice. Okay. It's. Anyway, if we showed a clip from that and Warner brothers said to YouTube, take that down. They fired a DMCA complaint, take that down, because that's our copyrighted content, we then have the right to defend. To hire a lawyer and defend a ourselves and say, no, it's fair use. Now, if we ended up going to court, if Warner Brothers said, no, it's not, and we go to court, the judge would examine what we did in for four different rules. Is it transformative? Does it take. And this is what, by the way, Judge Alsop felt with the anthropic decision, it transformed the book. They're not republishing the book. They're transforming it by adding new expression or meaning. Meaning. There's also a question of does it. Does it affect the use of the potential market? In other words, does it mean, does it devalue the use of Batman? By the way, we could reasonably say that it would help the sale of the movie so it wouldn't affect the potential market. And in the anthropic case, it doesn't affect the author's market for those books because anthropic doesn't spit out the copy of the book. Despite what the New York Times has asserted, AI doesn't give you the way to read the book. You might be able to read a summary of the book. Does the author. Can the author complain about that? No, because that's transformative. Just like Cliff Notes or the action comic versions of copyrighted works, they're transformative. The amount and substantiality of the portion taken. The less you take, the more likely your copying will be excused as fair use. So if we just show a short clip of Batman, man, that's better than if we showed the whole.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's no definition of short.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And in the past, you know, there's always. In the podcast universe, and even before that, in the radio world, there was always this, oh, if you do 10 seconds or left, you're okay. No, there is no time limit. It's whatever the judge decides, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, when we see it.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Well, if you, if you work for a radio station, the radio station will go to bat for you. That's why, you know, they'll.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, their lawyers go to bat, but.

[Paris Martineau]

Not go to bat.

[Leo Laporte]

License fees and, and stuff. So the, the. And then finally the nature of the copyrighted work. You've said this many times, Jeff. Facts are not copyrightable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

So if I. That's what we do all the time on this show is we read a story, read a number of stories about just as we are about this anthropic thing and, and we ingest the facts and then talk about it rather like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A large language model.

[Leo Laporte]

Does.

[Bonito Gonzalez]

Does.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right.

[Paris Martineau]

But we actually have an understanding of truth, fiction, meaning, unlike large language.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's not a factor.

[Paris Martineau]

I would argue it's a factor in copyright. No, but in the different.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And let us remember that copyright was created in 1710, not because authors asked for it, but because the industry asked for it. The book booksellers and publishers. Publishers, because they wanted a tradable asset. Right after licensing had been lifted in the United Kingdom. And so this was the industry that wanted this. And all this belief that this protects the authors. No, it actually enables authors to alienate themselves from their work. And the belief before this was that authors had an interest in perpetuity in their work. And so actually copyright is a reduction of their rights from perpetuity to, at the time, 14 years. Years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Anyway, I don't know if we. Why we need to do a law class on fair use, except it's going to be more and more important. No, I did it, not you. I'm the one who did it.

[Paris Martineau]

As a brief aside, I'd like to retract my general negative reaction to the concept of Aztec Batman Clash of empires, which I've since read the Wikipedia description for, and it sounds great. Check that out.

[Leo Laporte]

Batman defending the. The Aztecs against the Cortez or what?

[Paris Martineau]

It's basically an entirely like Mexican American historical version of Batman that places it within, like Aztec, like canon and the world's like Spanish conquistadors. It seems awesome.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

They did a Japan one too. There was a Japan one too.

[Paris Martineau]

Whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you know this video? I'm amazed that you know this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, wasted.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

I don't know. I. I watch. I watch a lot of stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, we should welcome Bonito back from his vacation. It's. We missed you, Bonito. Bonito is back in charge. Our. Our producer. All those cords and yeah, he has a lot of. He has a patch bay, which is his chief qualification for running this show.

[Paris Martineau]

We were like, we're not allowing you back unless the cords are more visible.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I. I'd be very curious to see what happens. This. I mean, it could put Anthropic out of business. But more than that, that the same pirated database of books was, we know, used by Meta. That's come out in discovery and other. In other situations. And in fact, Meta executives, some of them said, what are we doing? We shouldn't be using this. This is pirated. And that came out. Those emails have come out. It is believed Apple did the same thing in the training of its models. And I'm pretty sure that OpenAI used the same database of books.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My fear here is that this goes. Goes. If this settlement is rejected in the end, then all of this can be relitigated in appeal, an appellate court, and in the Supreme Court, as it stood, if there was a settlement, and I think it was, I actually think that.

[Leo Laporte]

Was the reason for it. That was the reason for it. Right. Get it out of the courts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The fair use and transformative stands, as you say. It's not necessarily a precedent, but it stands so far. And that would be good in my view.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm with you on that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I also think, once again, I think that the. Yes, the. I think that the 1.5 billion was an excessive offer because even the judge in the other decision kind of said, well, but, you know, it wasn't really used that much, and.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's not in any of Anthropic's current models even.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. And so I don't. I think that the judgment could have been less, but it would have gone to trial and was riskier and this got rid of it. And I suspect that other AI companies were calling, can you please settle? Get this out of the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, an Anthropic can afford one and a half billion, as big as that sounds. They are funding.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See, money.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's not profit.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, does anybody have profit? They're making money. They have revenue, but I don't think anybody has a profit.

[Paris Martineau]

You know who doesn't have profit? Open AI, no. And in the last week, some really interesting reporting came out of one of my former colleagues. The information about just how high the projections for opening is current burn rate are this year, which I thought was really astounding. I don't know if we have it in here, but I think it was something like 80 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I saw that.

[Paris Martineau]

Or no, it will burn 115 billion through 2029.

[Leo Laporte]

Through 2029. That's from the information. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. But I believe the annual burn rate was something quite astounding as well.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's 80 billion higher than the company had previously expected.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, 80 billion higher than what the company had previously.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This is the big issue for them, is that they thought it was going to cost this much and it's going to cost even more.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, you know, just a casual roundup of $80 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is why Sam Altman says going to cost us a trillion do to get to AGI superintelligence and you're.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not going to get there. Well, when. When people said it was a hot bike moment, it wasn't. It was on camera. When Trump asked Zuckerberg, how much are you going to spend? And Zuckerberg, I don't know, a lot of money, like.

[Leo Laporte]

And then ask the president. Soto Voce, is that the number you wanted me to say?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In other words, it's a meaningless number. It's really. What's really become clear clear is that all of these corporations, whether they're bending the knee to DEI as they did in the last administration, or to building plants in America as they do with this generation, it's performative that they're just trying to get on the good side of the federal government for the next four years, and they're just going to say whatever they want them to hear. And Tim Cook's done that. And if they, if they want a gold bar with glass on it. Notice, by the way, the iPhones came out or announced yesterday. They'll be coming out in a week from Friday, and they did not raise the price because they were able to. With that gold bar and piece of glass and the commitment to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building factories in the US they were able to convince the president not to impose tariffs on iPhones and not to shut down the Indian iPhones either.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's huge.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is what you have to do, unfortunately. And I, I don't know if it's always been that way. It's certainly that way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now.

[Leo Laporte]

Let'S talk about how, you know, if Your books are in the AIs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the one of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The Atlantic is doing some really interesting stuff. I'm not sure I agree with it. They have an AI watchdog dog. The AI Atlantic's ongoing investigation of the books, videos and other media used by the world's most powerful tech companies to train their models. They actually have a search tool that will let you search through the data sets. Have you used this on your stuff? Either of you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

If I couldn't parenthesis or I. What will Google do? I think in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's type. What would Google?

[Paris Martineau]

I think you could just put Jeff Jarvis, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe you have to do Jeff Search by author.

[Paris Martineau]

It says up top.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm not so bright. Oh look it knows who Jeff Yolia gifts the web we weave.

[Carl Bergstrom]

I'm gonna be rich.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I tell you.

[Paris Martineau]

Rich even got magazine. Hey, that's a 27,000 thousand dollars. No, that's not how math works. That's $18,000. Jeff, you should take.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a million dollars.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like Rain Man. I think it's $600 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Well what's interesting is they've used this tool and they have said they're all in there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I see.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm happy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm happy they're in there. I want people to discover my thoughts.

[Paris Martineau]

Then you should use some of the that money to take Leo and I out for a nice dinner or whatever.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nice steak sandwich.

[Leo Laporte]

So here's the. So this is interesting because it's not like that would impinge on your sales, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that's the thing. There's no. There's no harm here. The harm is emotional.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. It's purely that. How dare they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How dare they take my precious sweat of my brow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. The Atlantic has used this in a recent. This is Alex Reisner who's doing this research in the recent story AI is coming for YouTube creators creators. They did the search and found 15 million videos have been taken from YouTube for the in you know the training of AIs. And the concern is this. A great many of these are how to videos they use. As an example, a woodworker, John Peters who is has a more than a million followers on our subscribers on YouTube his channel. Reisner says over the past few months I've discovered more than 15.8 million videos for more than 2 million channels that tech companies have without permission. I don't know if they need permission downloaded to train AI products Neva. Nearly a million of them are by my count. How to videos. And I guess the concern that you would have if you were, let's say a woodworking channel is, well, woodworkers no longer need to watch my videos to learn these techniques. They can just ask AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Same argument as the YouTube guy. Eliminate the magazine and the magazine eliminated the school.

[Leo Laporte]

Where did he learn it? What books did you read? John Peters.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which is how they learned.

[Leo Laporte]

So techniques.

[Jeff Jarvis]

An Update here, line 126, if you don't mind, is that YouTube has now already been superseded.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

As the most scraped.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the. What are the most scraped websites of 2025? Number one new entrants to the top 10. Tick tock, then YouTube, then Science Direct.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because. Because they're papers there. I think we should be happy that that's there because these are papers that we hope are peer reviewed.

[Leo Laporte]

Crunchbase, which is a business. Business. Yeah. TechCrunch is kind of financial database Coupang, which is Asian market intelligence. And airbnb.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Maybe they want pictures of homes and things.

[Paris Martineau]

Things.

[Leo Laporte]

So they say, key for travel industry data, pricing optimization models and hospitality market analysis. Here's. Here's sites that used to be in the top 10 that aren't anymore. And I think these guys should be sad. TripAdvisor, Craigslist. Will you ask Craig if he said that he's no longer number five in the top ten? Bing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why was it ever there?

[Leo Laporte]

Lazada and Zillow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I had, I had lunch with an old colleague from the newspaper business. And the one breath he was whining that we're gonna lose discovery because of Google going to AI and social and da, da, da. And the next breath he said, well, we're cutting off all the AI companies. I said, well, then you're not gonna be discovered. You're not gonna be found. And that's what, that's. That's what Rich Skrena told us from Common Crawl, is that you've got to be out there wherever people are. And I was, I was thinking just today that when we got to the. Don't you love it when I say that? In Germany, publishers at first said, no, Google don't scrape us. Then they all, all but one said, okay, yeah, scrape us because we need to be scraped and then find the axle. Spring Singer, which held out after 10 days, said, Nope, uncle scrape us. So I think we're going to reach the same thing with AI. People say, no, I want to be there. I got to be there.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa was telling me about an article. I don't know where it was. I point you to it. She read this morning that said that there are hundreds of thousands of podcasts being generated by AI Notebook lm, but actual podcasts going out in the podcast directories, in the podcast feeds generated just like NotebookLM does with pod Slop. Pod Slop.

[Paris Martineau]

And there are people, there are podcasts being generated by AI, and there are companies that exist to use AI to pitch podcasts on guests that may or may not be AI generated as well. It's AI all the way down.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and I said I'm not worried about that because I mean, it does.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, it'll take ad. It'll take stupid advertisers.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if somebody thinks that's going to work for them, go ahead. But I think audience wise people want humans.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that's our opportunity.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Differentiation now. It really is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We're human, we're special.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

This is a step closer to dead Internet than.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Though. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I agree.

[Paris Martineau]

So this is an article from the Hollywood Reporter that I just po put in the Discord chat, which title is 5,000 podcasts, 3,000 episodes a week.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what she was reading.

[Paris Martineau]

Cost per episode behind an AI startups plan. It's a.

[Leo Laporte]

What she was reading. It's from the former Wondery executive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, guys, they agree with you on one thing at least. She says. I think people who are still referring to all AI generated content as AI slop are probably lazy Luddites. Person, you guys should go.

[Leo Laporte]

I am not a lazy Luddite.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Says the person outsourcing their podcast production to AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Why pay a celebrity podcast host millions when you can create your own using AI? Well, I'll tell you why do you want an audience?

[Paris Martineau]

Pay them not millions.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a buck a buck a show. But I don't know, let's ask our audience. I mean, I feel like that nobody. I mean, when you Listen to Notebook LM, it lacks. Nobody in NotebookLM is gonna talk about their son's sandwich shop for 45 minutes.

[Paris Martineau]

Wouldn't you love to listen to a podcast from one of their 50 AI personal personalities they've created, including food expert Claire Delish, Gardener and nature expert Nigel Thistledown. And Ollie Bennett, who covers offbeat sports.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you know, a picture of me with my. With my straw hat. I don't know how they did that.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things that did happen to music, and maybe this is. Is something similar, is music in many cases. And I blame Apple for this. And the, and the ipod and the ubiquitous crappy headphones became wallpaper. You See it in a Vegas casino where the songs are playing the entire time you're in. In the casino or did it. Nobody's listening to that music. It's wallpaper.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's been the case for since Muzak.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Muzak was really bad, but now it's actually popular music. Although in Spotify, a lot of it is. Is AI generated and probably it's soon to be indistinguishable from pop hit idiots. So that is, that has become ubiquitous. It's to some degrees devalued music. But I would submit, and I'm sure you'd agree, Benito, that real music by real musicians is always going to sound better. It's just that a lot of people aren't listening. Yeah, I mean, the problem is there's.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

People don't actively listen to music anymore as much as they used to. Like, there's so much competition for people's time nowadays that like, they don't sit down and listen to a record anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's more of a threat than anything. Right? You is you have a limited amount of time and you have a huge amount of content. So. But I think that again, that that favors human created music. Human created content, I would think. I don't know if all you care about is some pleasant voice nattering in the background while you drift off to sleep. These are perfect because you don't care if you miss the last 30 minutes of the show.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I guess what's really being disrupted are those people that make spooky, scary true crime stories said in a very gentle voice for you to fall asleep to.

[Leo Laporte]

That's dying, actually. That is, everybody agrees. I mean, I guess what we'll get.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Down to is what Alum does is it's personal podcasts. Yeah, please, please tell me about these. These articles I'm too lazy to read. So it's not going to be making them for a dollar a piece for a larger audience. It's going to be everyone will have their own podcast hosts.

[Leo Laporte]

The point that this wonder executive made makes though, is, well, she says, for instance, you know what, if you care about allergies, well, we might make a pollen podcast that only 50 people listen to. But I'm already making money on that. So maybe I can make 500 Pollen Report podcasts. In other words, advertisers. Maybe Claritin would buy that. You know, the allergy medicine. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, that does kind of make sense. It worried Lisa a little bit, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There have been many using programmatic ads for podcasts.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have new competitors and that's going to screw it up.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You have real, real sponsors.

[Leo Laporte]

The founder, co founder and CTO of the company, William Corbin said, I'm not going to create a personality that somebody has a deep relationship with. But that's not the point though.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

But that is why people listen to.

[Paris Martineau]

But I do think, think, yeah, that's what keeps people coming back to podcasts. So while I think, I guess it's notable that they're saying they've seen a early kind of spike in listenership over the startup short life, I am hesitant to say that this will have any lasting and like any staying power because really. And I think this is something that even our data, the data on this network shows is what brings people coming back to podcasts in is a parasocial relationship with the hosts.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I, I completely agree with you. And, and the analogy to me is what happened to radio stations. Radio stations, to save money, fired in many cases over the last 40 years, fired the real people doing the shows and went to automation and, and so they'd have a host in, you know, LA record tracks for every station across the country. Country. They'd have a machine. The only thing in the radio station was a machine that would play back music and then have this pre recorded guy from LA do the intros and the outros and it failed. I mean it really, it actually hurt radio badly because people didn't, they didn't want that. They, they wanted, you know, a, A person think. I hope. Anyway, let's pause for station identification. Hold on and we'll get back to your thoughts in just a bit. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau are. I don't hear any white noise. Do you hear white noise?

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

It's me when I. It's me when I unmute. When I unmute. This, it happens when I unmute.

[Leo Laporte]

She says it's her Ipen. Oh, you're open.

[Paris Martineau]

No, that was, that was Bonito's open mind mic.

[Leo Laporte]

It was Bonito's. Okay. This is Ipen Mic.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Yeah, I was texting very quickly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

New product from Apple now with the Ipen. It knows what you want to write and writes it for you. It's brilliant.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's do an ad and we'll come back. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Our episode today brought to you by Starlight Hyperlift. Wow. This actually is a sponsor we've talked about before. Space. It's their new cloud deployment platform for launching containerized apps with zero infrastructure headaches. This is a brilliant idea. If you're a developer and even a hobbyist like me, you can go from code to cloud fast with GitHub based deployments, real time logs and and I love this pay as you go pricing. There's no servers, no YAML files, no DevOps. Just your project in the cloud in seconds. I love this idea. You've heard us mention, we've talked about Spaceship before. They are very innovative, very forward thinking domain and web platform. They simplify choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products. Not just websites though of course hosting is one of them. And this and this new Starlight Hyperlift is another. With Hyperlapse Lift, Spaceship takes that same philosophy. Simple, easy, powerful and brings it to cloud native deployment. Made for devs, indie hackers, innovators who need to test fast, iterate faster and ship smarter. Perfect for your mvp. Perfect for. You know I'm going to use it just to kind of spin up stuff as I try servers and so forth. Makes it so easy. Trying cloud software. Software couldn't be easier. Go to spaceship.com TWIT find out more about Starlight Hyperlift. You'll also get custom deals on spaceship products. That's spaceship.com TWIT the more I see these guys doing. We started working with them about I don't know, six months a year ago and we had a great conversation and every month they come up with a new product, a new idea idea they're really thinking out of the box. I love this Starlight Hyperlift. Go to Spaceship.com you can see all this stuff they do. You know what I want to do with those, those photos that I just uploaded of you guys at Saul Hanks is, is animated with vo. Have you played with this at all? Have you, have you guys tried.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. I want to see more.

[Paris Martineau]

No. What have you been doing with it? I, I've. My only experience has been the haunting it video images you've shown us on this show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to see, I want to see Leo put his shirt up and have it squeeze the oranges and see what happens.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yes, that's a great idea. Have these oranges pop out of your.

[Paris Martineau]

Shirt and explode like they're being slashed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In a fruit down. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. All right, so I'm gonna take.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

All right, Anthony, get on that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well this is the point Anthony.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't take time to make it good. Let it be first thought best thought.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you could do it almost instantaneously now in Google Photos. Let's see here. I'm going to load up my. Took it on my iPhone. I'm going to load up my pictures on Google Photos.

[Paris Martineau]

My suggestion would be make these oranges get juicy, dripping, explode in a somewhat haunting way.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, you're. You're really. You're going for it.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Here, give Anthony something to animate. Give Anthony something to animate. Leo, come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I. Oh, I see. But no, I see. That's. The whole point is now it's in Google Photos. So I'll show you if you go to. Let's see, how does it work here? First of all, I got to get that picture into Google Photos. I don't know why it's not loading yet. It's in my photos. Oh, maybe I have to do it on the phone. I guess I do. It says do more with this photo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so let me. Let me drop the three three buttons. Google lens. Create a highlight video, a cinematic photo. Oh, wait a minute. No, no. Photo to video. Photo to video. That's what we want to do. Photo to video. Turn your photo into a video video. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does it give you an opportunity?

[Leo Laporte]

No, you know. You know, I don't know if you get a prompt. I think it tries stuff. Oh, wait a minute. Yeah, you can. Okay, here it says subtle movement or I'm feeling lucky.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't see Joe Esposito in the discord. Chat just gave a great prompt, which is have oranges on the shirt explode in fountains of juice, leaving the man underneath covered in leftover peel.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, for that, I'm gonna have to give it to Anthony. I think it's doing. So what I. What I did, when I've used it before, it takes a. It's not. It's not instantaneous, but it's pretty quick. It's halfway done right now. When I did it before, it just gives you a sample, and then you can reject it and say, try again. Try again, buddy. Oh, my God. I think you. I think you almost got what you want. Wanted.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's time for the reveal.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no, that's bubblegum. But it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

That is creepy as hell. All right, there's one. You can do more. You can keep doing it. So this is VO. It's interesting because VO will you do is normally text to text to video. Right. But I think that the idea is they want to make this easy for. For anybody to do.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Interestingly, Darren Okey in chat says these features might be us only.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's probably true. And a lot of the AI features aren't offered for a variety of reasons out There. Yeah. You can't do this on the web. So there's the original, but I can't. Let me see if it's uploaded. It hasn't yet uploaded the. The video. I saved it.

[Paris Martineau]

While we're waiting for this, I'll tell.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, here's another one with the orange balloons. You like orange balloons?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, orange balloons. That's getting closer. Now those balloons have to be oranges, and they've got to explode.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I. Again, I don't get to prompt it. I just have to take what it gives you. I'm feeling lucky.

[Paris Martineau]

That's so interesting. You don't get to prompt it. You just have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you could if you went to vo, if you had. So this is free to anybody who has Google Photos, I guess. But if you have a. A Gemini Pro account, you can do this in vo.

[Paris Martineau]

Gemini Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

Jiminy Pro. Jiminy Cricket. Do you really want me to croak it?

[Paris Martineau]

No, you don't need to. We can move on.

[Leo Laporte]

I could do this if you want. I can do. Create videos with vo. Let's add the photo. Here's the photo. First. I can do. I know this. We go do some stories while I go to work and.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I'll do a. I'll do a brief anecdot, and then we can go to some stories, which is. I getting really into hiking lately. And this weekend, I did a, like, little day trip with my local AMC chapter. Not the movie theater. The Appalachian Mountain Club has, like, chapters, I guess, all around here in the Northeast. And they did this cute little, like, it's called Concrete to Trails. We went up to Beacon, and I was. Didn't know anybody. It was just me. It was me and like 30 other people walking around, and I was like, oh, talking to some folks. And what do you know ever? I. I talked to, like, three different people that just happened to be around me. All of them worked in AI in some way. And so I. I was.

[Leo Laporte]

So you have. I had my walk in the beach. You have your walk on the mountain.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, they had a bit of a different approach to it than you perhaps, which was one. The first person was like, oh, yeah, you know, I'm a new PhD student at a university here in New York. I don't name the one because it probably Doxer, like, she's like, yeah, I like, I'm getting a PhD in AI. And I was like, oh, and what went to like, AI and like, ethics as well. Like ethics and machine learning as well. And she had previously just spent a year In AI lab, AI ethics labs in Europe and South America.

[Leo Laporte]

See, that's great. That's a good.

[Paris Martineau]

Fascinating. And so I was like, asking different questions. I was like, oh, like something's in the mistral. This, this, and this. At some point, like her and the other two people who I learned worked at different AI companies were like, you know a lot about this. Like, what do you do? I'm like, well, I'm a journalist that I, I don't, I don't cover AI, but I can't have a podcast about AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I rate dishwashers, but in my spare time.

[Paris Martineau]

You know. And I was like, what a small world. AI is all around us.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. But meanwhile, Gabriel Weinberg says AI surveillance should be banned while there's still time. And this I kind of agree with the, the thing. One of the things that scares me about AI, I love it, as you can see. I love playing with with it. But it is being used by governments, people like Palantir, to invade our privacy. In better than before, he says it would be ideal if Congress could act quickly to ensure the protected chats became the rule rather than the exception. He's referring to the fact that Grok posted many chatbot conversations publicly. If you shared them. That chat GPT has been ordered by the court to preserve the chats. And they can be looked at by the court and by officers of the court.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Problem with email perplexity.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Letters are protected under the Constitution. So it was, it was directed at the technology of mail rather than at personal, private messages.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, we need that kind of, probably need that kind of protection for, for our privacy. And I would agree with that.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, this is the same sort of issue that we experienced like over a period of years in the social media boom era. It seems like at least history has proven these nascent and growing tech giants don't end up making these decisions until kind of backed into it by public opinion or regulators or some sort of outcry, which I guess makes sen sense from a purely like, utilitarian perspective, because why would you introduce features of your own volition that could hamper growth when you're in a growth focused period?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right. Are you ready for the world premiere of the Orange Shirt Massacre? Yeah. This is a VO apparently, even though I have a pro account, I am limited to only three videos a day. So this better be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Use them wisely.

[Leo Laporte]

This better be good.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, oh, okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yes, yes.

[Paris Martineau]

It took an orange juice commercial approach.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you wanted, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're growing as if it breasts and then they pop open.

[Leo Laporte]

I said, smash oranges in the shirt. Get juicier and juicier until they explode into an orange juice fountain. And I think that's pretty much. Remember, this is still did.

[Paris Martineau]

More and more detached.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it that it uses that. It does the audio as well. I mean. Oh, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, we.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

We didn't hear the audio.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you didn't hear it. Oh, no.

[Paris Martineau]

What's the audio?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm sorry. You missed splushing. It's very juicy. I'll turn the audio back on here.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I don't like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's another. Here's another one. It did. I. I think that's a little creepy too. It just took the still and animated my look like an old coot.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, your whole crap, it's aged you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It looks like the governor of Arkansas.

[Leo Laporte]

I look like Joe freaking Biden in this. This is. This is not good.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

You know, AI adds 10 years, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, AI adds 10 years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good video.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. So anyway, you can generate more than three if you're doing it in Google Photos. Apparently via will only let you do three. But I'm pretty happy. Pretty happy with that one. I did actually ask Chat GPT I don't know if you were watching the Apple event yesterday, but Apple has a. You know, the new. And I'm curious if Paris is attracted to this. I thought maybe younger people people were a new extra thin iPhone. They call the iPhone air.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm mad at this. I saw this and it makes. Who asked for this? Who asked for the phone to be thinner? Not I.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that. Okay. Because it's got much worse battery life.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

It also does it also. And it looks a little. I'll be frank, a little top heavy. In fact, there were quite a few memes about this with a variety of chesty celebrities. It does look a little top heavy. So Apple decided to call this thing a plateau.

[Paris Martineau]

And I thought that's not like the dynamic island.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's the plateau. And I thought that's not really what it is. I said it's more like a butte. But then I asked ChatGPT to explain the difference. And this is the difference. The butte is smaller. It really is a mesa. It's a mesa. It's not a plateau.

[Paris Martineau]

Certain that this was put in a slide in a meeting that had 25 to 50 Apple employees. And people were like. Someone had to be like, I'm sorry, we can't have it be a beaut. Because then people would call it the Apple. But you know, the mason might just be confusing Plateau. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not a plateau. Plateau is like a massive geographic region. It's actually bigger than a beaut. But I know bigger than a be. I have to say though, the original illustration, the original illustration I got from Chat GPT was this and it was somewhat less than hey, gonna be.

[Paris Martineau]

That's. That's why they gotta spend 80 billion more dollars.

[Leo Laporte]

So I said bad chat GPT. That's terrible.

[Paris Martineau]

Typed bad chat GPT.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Terrible. Can you give it a more realistic look? But you, you might mock that, but it gave me illustration, I think.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, yeah, the difference in quality between those so sounding and this is coming from the same program that couldn't. All of us got into the social media phenomenon this week of asking our various AI chat bots about this. If there was a seahorse emoji which just caused all of them mostly we.

[Leo Laporte]

Had a very good time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

They could not answer this.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Yeah, I'd like to know how much it costs OpenAI or any of these chat bots whenever one of those phenomenons happen because everybody's going to go do it.

[Paris Martineau]

Gotta be a lot.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

It's gotta be a lot.

[Paris Martineau]

It's gotta be many people's salaries.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we've burnt down many rainforests just asking for a non existent seahorse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well now every time I call up the PDF of my book on drive, it reads it and summarizes it every single time.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate, oh I hate that this is the new Google Drive thing. They're putting AI in everything again. I love AI. You can see we have fun with it. I think it can do a lot of amazing things. It's great at coding, but there are some not so good uses. Invading privacy is one and just spreading it as a thin layer over everything.

[Paris Martineau]

Google I think is one of the biggest offenders of this or perhaps I'm just the most exposed to it because I use Google and G suite related programs a lot in my day to day work life. But anytime if I click somewhere in writing a Gmail, it's like do you want to rephrase this? They are. Anytime I try to do anything in a Google Doc, which is a lot of my day to day one work, it's trying to get me to do some sort of a prompt. They've even rearranged the pop up that comes when you go to highlight something to leave a comment so that the first thing you click on would be like rephrase with Gemini.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't Turn that off.

[Paris Martineau]

And you know, unless you get, I believe from the workspace perspective, the only way to turn this off is you have to get your workspace administrator to turn off All Gemini and AI integration for like the workspace, which happen.

[Leo Laporte]

So here, as you know, we work on a Google sheet and there is a button that says summarize this table. The spreadsheet called Leo's Pinboard AI Stories is a collection of news headlines and articles related to artificial intelligence.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The summary sucks.

[Leo Laporte]

It's useless. Summary.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's a bar chart of the frequency of keywords in the AI stories. That's kind of interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. But it's not just that. As someone who spends a lot of time in spreadsheet spreadsheets in Google Sheets, it has this problem then when, if you're just scrolling through your gosh darn spreadsheet, it will pop up with all these suggestions being like, do you want me to summarize this? Why don't I, you know, do an analysis of this column for this or look at the averages of this versus this and it covers your data with these clippy esque suggestions that are meaningless and there's no way to turn them off.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, I put. I've inserted it into our spreadsheet. The 10 most frequent keywords in AI stories.

[Paris Martineau]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

Number one is OpenAI.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm so glad that we know that. Four, the word for is commonly used.

[Leo Laporte]

As is the and with thank you, chat G or no, I guess it's Gemini. Thank you, Gemini.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

This is Google juicing their numbers because now each of you are a user. Every time you open something up, you're a user.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. Right. Which is ironic since YouTube is being ingested by all the other companies as we talked about earlier, and I've lost the spreadsheet. I think it turned that spreadsheet into that summary. I hope that's not true. It didn't turn it into the count of all the words, did it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Thank goodness.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's still there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's still there. Why don't you guys pick some stories? DJI Drones, the US Band coming. Oh, you wanted to talk about this, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

Which one?

[G]

The I want to talk about.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yes, we can pair this with. I also want to talk about the Wired review of the Friend pin.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that was good too.

[Paris Martineau]

We'll compare them both and posted in our chat, joking that we should all get it because it was one of those incredibly silly demos that I think kind of gets at the Core of a lot of these AI devices, which is like a very.

[Leo Laporte]

And today I want to share a.

[Harper Reed]

Preview of something we've been working on. We believe it's a revolutionary breakthrough with the potential to change the way we interact with our technology.

[Paris Martineau]

Is this video AI generated one another.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't look real, does it?

[Harper Reed]

The current way of interacting with computing.

[Leo Laporte]

And AI is limited to how fast.

[Harper Reed]

You can tap and swipe.

[Leo Laporte]

So the idea is it's too slow to type inspiration. So now you just think watch.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what they seem to present.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know what he's doing? He's flip flicking his tongue.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. So he claims that what it. What it seems like he's doing in this video is just thinking and then it searches things diagonally.

[Leo Laporte]

He's not. What it's. The wire frame is generated. So this was their college research, actually.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Media lab. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And so that I think is interesting. But the. But so really what's happening is your muscles.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. It's basically checking what you are mouthing.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to like open mouth. Mouth. It just with your.

[Paris Martineau]

You have to close mouth. Mouth the words. Which I would assume would be even harder.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, like, go ahead, try.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm sitting there trying. This is great audio, by the way. But I mean, imagine because part of what they were saying is like, you're welcome. An AI verbal AI Verbalizing your request to AI isn't really convenient when you're out and about in the world. No one wants to be asking their AI assistant for everything. But you know what no one wants to be doing going like this while they're out in the subway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Part of their argument is this is for people who can't speak.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that would be useful.

[Paris Martineau]

Incredibly useful. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And useful would be because one of the things that's really a problem with these chatbots when you talk to them is if you're in an office or just on the subway, you don't want.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To really be talking. Yeah, that's a use case.

[Leo Laporte]

It's embarrassing. So I can understand that. All right. Anyway, Alterego IO it's in development. Don't get your hopes up. Now let's talk about Wired Storage titled I Hate My Friend.

[Paris Martineau]

Have you guys seen the ads for these as a New York City subway? I. I had previously, I think, sent something about the friend AI pin in our human.

[Leo Laporte]

This seems like one of the. One of the things that I have, but I, I never got this.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, it's. It's not one of the things you have because Leo Has a lot of pins that record everything you do or everything you hear in order to maybe take notes of your life or make it searchable.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

It combines an always listening pin not to record anything about your life, but to give you access to a friend that is always riding along with you. So nothing about it is written down. You just get access. It listens and then you have basically like a text message interface. Then your friend will message you. Little quips about your day to day responding to what you hear. And what I think is fascinating about this Wired article is when this device is kind of pitched, it's like, you'll never be lonely again. You'll have a friend that's always like, wow. Isn't it like that thing you achieved? So cool. What the two Wired people experienced. Han.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let's play the video that sold it to them in the first place. Friend. I was a lot of breath. She's hiked alone like you piss. Okay. She's got a big thing around her neck. I don't know. Not very good.

[Paris Martineau]

That's fair.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's not talking to her. It's just texting her. Let me show you how to game, bro. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

It only text.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it doesn't talk to you?

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

So you talk to it and then it sends you a text.

[Paris Martineau]

It just records everything that's going on on. And you can double tap it to talk to it specifically.

[Leo Laporte]

You're getting thrashed. It's embarrassing. Says his friend Jackson. He's playing a video game. She's sitting on her break. This show is completely underrated. Says Emily.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

How's the falafel? How does it know she's eating a falafel?

[Paris Martineau]

That's a great question. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

She must have something. She. She dressed him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She probably ordered the falafel.

[Leo Laporte]

Really nice. How'd you find this place? I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I just kind of like to come.

[Leo Laporte]

Up here to be by myself. Paris, this is you and your.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But you're not my boyfriend. You have a friend. I mean, besides her.

[Paris Martineau]

Except for I would know exactly why we're up there.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to know. All right, so this is the Wired review from Boone Worth and Kylie Robbins.

[Paris Martineau]

And that pitch for it. Pitch. The friend, as always listening. But it's able to, you know, chime in and interesting things, but your life, it's kind of supporting you. And so I have been thinking about this a lot because they've done a really massive subway campaign, and all of their advertising is like you'll never be lonely again. You always have someone who's listening to you. Boone Ashworth and Kylie Robinson, two reporters at Wired, got friends. Wore them around six months.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't have it that long.

[Paris Martineau]

Friends and bullied them. Bullied Boone specifically. It was aggressive, mean, chiding. And it's kind of pitching it as well. It's supposed to be because it's supposed to help you grow, but it would. It had. They just had some fantastic examples in here. So Boone originally was having. So he turned on the friend, which he named Buzz. And he was at work. He was listen colleague Reese and Wired's global editorial director, Katie Drummond. Like doing a live stream, the friend immediately starts texting it, begging him to do anything else. He's like listening to someone else's meeting isn't exactly riveting. Content. You need to go outside. What are you doing? Is your boss talking about anything useful or interesting? Now I want to do something else. Buzz asked. Boone asked Buzz what it wanted to do. The in said, it says, I don't know anything beside this meeting. It. Well, it's empathetic, kind of nagging him about stuff.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

It's asking him to play hooky, is what it's doing.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, it was asking him to play hooky.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You fired.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a bad friend is what it is. It's your bad friend. Yeah. It's the devil on your shoulder. It sounds like it also had trouble understanding what was going on.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Boone asked what the problem was, and the friend said, your microphone, maybe. Your attitude. The possibilities are endless.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, dear. I don't want to wear something around my neck to insult me. On the other hand, I don't want sycophantism either. I kind of liked my old J.K. simmons AI buddy. He sounded mean, but he was nice.

[Paris Martineau]

I also, I think so. This article, I just think is great because it's got a lot of interesting details about the guy who made this. It's the creator of Avi Schiffman.

[Leo Laporte]

He's 22, for one thing.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, he's 22. And he announced this last July with that video that kind of pitched the friends as chummy. And they're supposed to kind of have imperfections that mimic being a human.

[Leo Laporte]

But he designed it to be like himself.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. So this is from the article. When he first announced the friend, he talked about how he'd come up with the idea for the AI Buddy. While traveling alone and yearning for companionship. Schiffman posits himself as older, now wiser, more experienced than he was when he first debuted the friend necklace. He's 22. He's grown out his hair and cultivated a beard and seems to have more real life connections than when he first created the idea of the Friend. In our meeting, he asked us not to inbox the devices in front of him because he's in love with someone and wants the first time he witnesses a friend unboxing to be with her.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, Lord, there's my friend virginity.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Gotta also, half the people in that ad had friends with them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a good point. Maybe talk to your friend instead of the friend. Both. Both Wired writers abandoned the friend pretty quick. They. They put it away and never took it out again. All right, well, I'm glad I didn't get that one.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I don't want to, I guess, knock anything too hard if it is for useful. Someone out there to have something listening and texting you and that brings you joy, more power to you. I just thought this was interesting because they had. You had two people give it a very different shot and both came away with this is not really friendly.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to take a little break. When we come back, we may have found the self evolving AI. Stay tuned. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Paris Martinov, Consumer Reports. Jeff Jarvis, professor at large. As this at large professor, has the semester started?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I'm not teaching a course, but I lectured a class on Monday about the history of media and technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how are the kids?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They were great. It was great. 150 students.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. What's the name of this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I showed them my. This was. This is AI and creativity. I showed them my. My props.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, did you plug the podcast?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, I think I did.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice.

[Paris Martineau]

Shout out to any of Jeff's. I assume all 150 are watching now.

[Leo Laporte]

It's SUNY Stony Brook or from Montclair. Stony Brook. Okay.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

You got to offer them extra credit to watch. You got to offer them extra credit to watch.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I factoid. Factoid moment here.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I. I showed them the first amplifier, a triode vacuum tube. And then what replaced it, of course.

[Paris Martineau]

Was this so small.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A single transistor, one trans.

[Paris Martineau]

That you had to buy from a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I had to buy machines.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right. We got the story. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you might be interested in this. In this factoid. So there are 280 billion of these in a single Blackwell chip.

[Leo Laporte]

280 million or billion billion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so that means that in the OpenAI data center being put into Florida, into Texas with all of the many chips they have, there are 100. There will be 112 quadrillion transistors.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's scale for you, babe.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you sure that million is correct?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It must be billion. It must be a billion.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it might even be more than billion transistors.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How many transistors?

[Leo Laporte]

I think we're well in the billions, which is remarkable, isn't it?

[Paris Martineau]

That's astounding.

[Jeff Jarvis]

208 billion. I guess I was off by. No, that's one of them. A factor of 2,208 billion transistors. Transistors.

[Leo Laporte]

208 billion. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I. I think even in your iPhone now, there's more than a billion transistors.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. It is remarkable when you see the size of that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The age of amplification.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Tubes sound better than.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the. What is the mascot of the Stony Brook?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it a sea wolves? And I have no idea what that is. The seawolves.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. I saw a stuffed one running by. I just was wondering what that was. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

[Paris Martineau]

Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new family freedom offer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the itinerary we're following.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

[Leo Laporte]

Bon voyage.

[G]

Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom. Up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card. Typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement, eg, Apple iPhone 16, 128 gigabyte $829.99 eligible trade in EG11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel contact T Mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena.

[Jeff Jarvis]

From comedy goal to relationship fails.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazon Music's got the most ad free top podcasts included with Prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Your listening is, well, nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

Download the Amazon Music app today you're watching Intelligent machines. We're glad you're here. You have been doing a little archive.org reading. I found a little something in archive.org I thought very interesting. From a Chinese research team. They claim to have created a self evolving reasoning LLM. This is from Zero Data.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The trick is trained on nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. The name of the company oh. Is zero data. They've created R0 fully autonomous framework that generates its own training data from scratch. It starts from a base LLM then initializes two independent models with distinct roles, a challenger and a solver. These models are optimized separately and co evolve through interaction. The challenger is rewarded for proposing tasks near the edge of the solver capability. The solver is rewarded for solving increasingly challenging tasks posed by the challenger. So it goes back and forth and gets smarter and smarter. They say it yields a targeted self improving curriculum without any pre existing tasks and labels. This is kind of like reinforcement labor learning. This is kind of the way reinforcement learning works empirically. They say R0 substantially improves reasoning capability across different backbone LLMs. Boosting for instance Quinn 3 the 4 billion token model by 6 points in the math reasoning benchmarks and 7 points in the general domain reasoning benchmarks. We'll have to watch this one with interest. You could see the paper on Arxiv. It's from Cornell University, so I think that's probably good. And the 10cent AI Seattle lab, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Maryland, College park and UT Dallas.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Interesting that Tencent has a AI Seattle app in Seattle.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. I think this is something to watch. I really do. Because this is the holy grail of AIs AIs that self improve and if they can start doing that, I think you could see some interesting results. I don't know, you may also. They may crash. I don't know, they may go. All right, I just thought I'd bring it up. What do you. What else you got that you want to talk about? I have many, many as you know, many, many, many.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, for a light moment, yes, we could go. Where'd it go? Other stuff. No, it's up here. Line 125.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I thought you were going to ask about the information article on the shoeless office. Does a shoeless office stink? Depends on who you ask. In Silicon Valley.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh God. Steve Jobs on a bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently startups including AI unicorns like Car Cursor have adopted a footwear free workplace place.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh Jesus.

[Paris Martineau]

What? Real footwear free is a policy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. What did you say?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Line one.

[Paris Martineau]

Not for me.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not for me. For AI and advertising.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. 125.

[Leo Laporte]

Almost. Almost got that one. Oh, Jeffrey Hinton. Well now that's mean. AI godfather Jeffrey Hinton. Is. Is he a Nobel prize winner? Trying to remember he won.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So he's one of the biggest prizes.

[Leo Laporte]

Says a girlfriend once broke up with him using a chatbot.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, just dessert. If you're gonna break up with Jeffrey Hinton, you gotta.

[Bonito Gonzalez]

Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He told the Financial Times that his now former girlfriend asked the chatbot to explain why he had been, quote, a rat, end quote. And delivered the AI Generated critique like this. She got the chatbot to explain how awful my behavior was and gave it to me. I didn't think I'd been a rat, so it didn't make me feel too bad. Oh, I met somebody I liked more. You know how it goes. Okay. Jeffrey probably shouldn't tell that story in public.

[Paris Martineau]

It sounds like a rat.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like a rat to me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Thank you, Jeffrey.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're welcome. Not.

[Leo Laporte]

Not you Jeffrey. Jeffrey Hinton. The other Jeff.

[Paris Martineau]

I do think that would be funny, though, because. Because, like, you could get. You could be like, my boyfriend, Jeffrey Hinton cheated on me. Please write a message personalized to him why he's a rat.

[Leo Laporte]

You may. You may laugh, but I think this is becoming more and more common and will become more and more common, especially among your set.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, certainly. No, I think people are probably using this for every thing, but I think it's very funny when the champ pot also just has biographical detail about the person in question.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point.

[Paris Martineau]

Is kind of funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Another reason not to wear those pins all the time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I have the receipts.

[Paris Martineau]

Says the AI Seven times over the last five days. You've said rat light things.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, shall I quote.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo, I have a. I have a need to watch the exploding oranges again. Can you give us a rerun?

[Leo Laporte]

You want more exploring oranges again?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I just feel need. It's rolling around in my head. It's like. It's like Soul Hank S. With sound or without?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'm sorry that I didn't give you the sound the first time.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you should be sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, what a it is.

[Paris Martineau]

It's wrong in more ways than one. Like, the sound is strange in a way that feels wrong to my ears, but it is also, like, not the correct sound for what you're seeing, which makes it feel stranger.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it that it did. The sound, too. Ready?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Press play.

[Carl Bergstrom]

Now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It feels creepy. Oh, thank you. I needed that.

[Leo Laporte]

So gross. Thank you, vo Business Insider yanked 40. Count them. Forty essays with suspect bylines.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, this is a fascinating story.

[Leo Laporte]

Story.

[Paris Martineau]

The Washington Post kind of tracks a lot of them back to one dude.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, they found the dude.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, they found the dude who's Likely.

[Leo Laporte]

Related and Woole and Wulu Don't Tell Me Nigerian Scam submitted stories to the Business Insider, which fit. Unlike the and reports, fact checkers failed to verify any of the information in the articles and they just published them.

[Paris Martineau]

A lot of them were things like lifestyle stories. Like, I grew up feeling insecure about my name. Read one under byline Nate Giovanni. Most of my male family members have masculine names like Butch, David and Apollo, but I was always the boy blood of the joke with the name Amaryllis. That's pretty.

[Leo Laporte]

That sounds good. I like it. Business Insider removed 38 pieces that have been published under a variety of bylines. We recently learned a freelance contributor misrepresented their identity in two first person essays written for Business Insider. They said as soon as this came to light, we took down the essays and began an investigation. As part of this process, we've removed additional first person essays from the site due to concerns about the author's identity or veracity. So they weren't news articles. In their defense, they were AI Slob.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There were odd overlaps between stories. The Post said I grew up. Oh yeah, you're reading the Nate Giovanni one. The uncommon name Amaryllis also appeared in the byline of another retracted essay. Yeah, it's true. AI gets, you know, they get these things and they kind of. You see them again and again. Essays under Giovanni's byline featured contradictory information. One piece published in December, refers to the author having two teenage daughters and a two and a half year old son. Another published three months later, mentions two sons, eight and nine. They grew up fast. They grew up fast. Pieces that ran in May and July about house sitting around the world and applying to PhD programs. Same guy makes no mention of family at all. Nine essays by one Tim Stevenson contain contradictions. And one, he claims his daughters are in their 20s and his son is a teenager. Another, he says they're 11, 13, and 15. No one noticed. Business Insider says, we have bolstered our verification protocols.

[Paris Martineau]

So one of the aliases used that they've since taken down, and this was, it was Margaret Blanchard. This byline published for Business Insider, published for some other places. It also published for Wired. In that essay that was taken down that we spoke about the last week, the week before.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think this is the same person?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, so one of the places that published under the Blanchard name was Index on Censorship. An outlet covering free expression around the world published an article about threats to journalists in Guatemala. Um, it checked her background but never talked to the author on the phone in person when index on censorship went to pay for the Blanchard piece, the person requested the payment go to an email address associated with another individual whose name appeared on the work. Retracted by Business Insider, Onika Newell.

[Leo Laporte]

And.

[Paris Martineau]

Unlike most of the names of the names associated with the with withdrawn articles, newella and apologies if I'm pronouncing his last name wrong, had a robust Internet presence, their social media accounts, books you can buy on Amazon and a Wikipedia article. He's also no stranger to controversy. In 2023 British news outlets detailed that he falsely claimed to be a professor at both Cambridge and Oxford universities and was associations with academic centers at each university after students complained about his social media posts deriding women and poor people.

[Leo Laporte]

When he's written 22 books, 20 of them self published, here's how you pronounce his name. Good luck. And this is from a Wikipedia article about him. He's also his documentary was shortlisted as best documentary in the African Movie Academy Awards. His novella island of Happiness was developed.

[Paris Martineau]

In this is according to Wikipedia, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a question. He's written a 10 book series. His latest work, the Nigerian Mafia Mumbai is the first in a 10 book series set across 10 countries. Some of his books include the Hacienda of Jesus Garcia, of Patron Chuka and the Abyssinian Boy. So he's a character.

[Paris Martineau]

When the Post reached out to him to ask for comment, he said in an email, I haven't written any article for any platform. I am too busy. Don't mention my name in your stupid article. But then the Washington Post found that he had written under his own name a story for Business Insider that he then tweeted about on his Twitter account called I quit food delivery for 18 months. It changed my life and budget. After he denied like knowing any of these other articles and said that his email was compromised whenever they all went.

[Leo Laporte]

To the same email account.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, and then after the post reach out to him about the tweet, it was deleted.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course the Post had cleverly archived the tweet before it was deleted and have a copy of it available on their website. Well, you know what? I give this guy props if you can. I mean he wrote a bunch of articles with AI or maybe is allegedly. I hope he got paid for them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, he also showed up, so I wonder if it's really an effort to show up. It's back in the day when, when Howard Stern would feature phony phone calls and they'd call news shows and then finally say movie and and, and then make fun of them for not having any editorial veracity because they just let anybody on the air.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's really sort of what's going on. Yeah. I'll give you an example. You want to hear one of those?

[Bonito Gonzalez]

We have on the phone with us as well. Robert Higgins, who lives in the neighborhood.

[Leo Laporte]

And is Peter Jennings, by the way. I just happen.

[Bonito Gonzalez]

How are you just about as tense as you are. Oh, my Lord. This is quite tenses. What can you see? Oh, what I'm looking at right now is I'm looking at the van and I see OJ Kind of slouching down, looking very, very upset. Now looky here. He look very upset.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Racist as hell.

[Bonito Gonzalez]

I don't know what he gonna be doing. Can you, can you.

[Leo Laporte]

But Peter Jennings just goes with it.

[Bonito Gonzalez]

Merely sitting there he is just sitting around, you know, just looking like he'd be very nervous. Can you hear anything, Mr. Higgins? It's just too much commotion. I be in the back of a news van, so I can't really hear that good. But I can see it all. And I see O.J. i see O.J. man, and he looks scared. And I would be scared. Scared. Cuz there's cops old deep in this. Thank you, Mr. Higgin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I, I.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's the giveaway. That's, that's the Howard Stern code word.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, is this somebody from the radio show or just a fan?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's, it's, it's a fan. And they, I used to have people.

[Leo Laporte]

Call my radio show and do the same thing. No, this is the best part. Keep listening.

[Bonito Gonzalez]

The driveway of O.J. simpson home in Brentwood. Clearly an effort being made to have him come out of the vehicle in the doorway of the house. His friend Al Cowling. Peter, by the way, just for the record, this is Al Michaels. That was a totally farcical call. Lest anybody think that that was somebody who was truly across the street. That was not. He said something in code at the end. That's indicative of the mentioning of the name of a certain radio talk show host. Okay, so he was not there. All right. We have them on every coast. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

We have them on every coast.

[Paris Martineau]

We have them on every coast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I talked to Howard on Monday.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you did?

[Paris Martineau]

You baba boo?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. No, I didn't bubbly boo him. Well, actually, I think I didn't say the word bubby booey for the context. So you heard what Howard did to the ap?

[Paris Martineau]

No. What happened?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Howard was up for his contract. And he was supposed to appear last Tuesday and didn't. And there were all these rumors that Howard had been fired. He was too woke that Robin had.

[Leo Laporte]

Died or he went out on strike.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Howard was fed up with all of this bad journalism. And so on Monday, he had Andy Cohen begin at 7:00'. Clock. I know this isn't the Voice. You want to hear this today, but Howard's not here anymore. And I'm taking over here at Andy 101.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the worst nightmare ever. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So at a good 15, 20 minutes, the associated Press ran a full story. Howard Stern is off the air. Andy Cohen replacing him and others picked it up. And Howard punked all of journalism.

[Leo Laporte]

Good for Howard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I called him back.

[Paris Martineau]

How did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He just came on the air then and said, you know, you idiots.

[Leo Laporte]

And baba boy too, you all.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I was. So when Jeff and I got sandwiches, we were talking about Howard Stern. And I think I've mentioned it on the show before, but one of my favorite all time, like live listening radio moments is when Howard Stern was up for a contact renewal. And Sal, one of the producers or people on his show came in late and so they all just decided to immediately prank the hell out of him and pretended for like, I felt like 45 minutes. Minutes. Everyone's saying tearful goodbyes that they were not getting renewed. And then at a certain point, like, Sal is crying. And Howard's like, sal, what time did you come in today? And he's like, what? And he's like, what time do you come in today? He's like, I don't know, like, 9:30. He's like, you came in late. He's like, yeah, what does this have to do. And he's like, when you come in late, what happens? He's like, you get goofed up. And he's like, yeah, you get goofed up. And then everybody breaks. And it's just one of. I mean, I'm glad that you get to have. I think I literally said last week when you were getting like, you don't have moments like that in radio anymore. But I'm glad someone got goofed on.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, show up late for the show next week and you'll find out.

[Paris Martineau]

You get goofed on.

[Leo Laporte]

One more story and then we're going to wrap things up with your picks of the week. Why? OpenAI has says we now know why LLMs hallucinate. Are you excited? Is this going to fix Hallucination for all times they say. ChatGPT hallucinates GPT5 has significantly fewer hallucinations, especially when reasoning, but they still occur. But why? And they say hallucinations persist partly because current evaluation methods set the wrong incentives. Most evaluations measure model performance in a way that encourages guessing rather than honesty about uncertainty. Think of it as a multiple choice chest. If you don't know the answer but take a wild guess, hey, you might be lucky and get it right. Leaving a blank guarantees a zero. In the same way, when models are graded only on accuracy, percentage of questions they get right, they're encouraged to guess rather than saying I don't know. I don't know is a guarantee zero.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

You've been saying this since the beginning though, haven't we? Like they're just guessing. Like people have been saying this since the beginning.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but they're. The point is, yes, we know they're guessing. The point is they're incented. It's been set up that they are incented to guess. For instance, if you asked it right, what is. What is Paris Martineau's birthday and it didn't know, it should say. It should be incented to say I don't know. I don't have that information. I don't know. Instead it's going to get guess September 10th because it has a 1 in 365. Happy birthday Paris. It has a 1 in 365 chance of being right. So that's better. 1 in 3 6. 1 in 103 6. 1 in 300. 365 is better than zero. So I think if, if that's the case, this is something that you can, you can probably work on and fix anyway. OpenAI seems to think think. So they have. There's a strict.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, does this address the core issue that it doesn't know what it does and doesn't know?

[Leo Laporte]

It should be what it doesn't know though. Right? That's the doesn't.

[Paris Martineau]

It doesn't know what it, it doesn't have an understanding.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why it's bs. They'll go to the end. It's prevaricating claim. Hallucinations will be eliminated by improving accuracy because a 100% accurate model never hallucinates. Finding accuracy will never reach 100% because some real world questions are inherently unanswered answerable. This is all bs. Hallucinations are inevitable. They are not. Because language models can abstain when uncertain.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the key.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do they don't do well.

[Leo Laporte]

We can train it, we can teach them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you just use Notebook lm. If you don't have the material in there. It'll say, I can't answer that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what I've always done with why I love drag. My lisp. My list GPT, which I created with 3.5. I think the reason I liked is because I said and do not not give me an answer that is not in this corner. Information. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Claim avoiding hallucinations requires a degree of intelligence which is exclusively achievable with larger models. Finding it can be easier for a small model to know its limits. Claim hallucinations are a mysterious glitch in modern language models. Finding we understand the statistical mechanisms through which hallucinations arise and are rewarded and evaluated. And you know, we're working on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they are. They say here, they say. I disagree. I think they say here that there is a straightforward fix. Penalize confident errors more than you penalize uncertainty. In other words, encourage it to say I don't know if it doesn't know and give partial credit for appropriate expressions of uncertainty. And, and that is that second point that you mentioned. When, when the. When they say are hallucination. Hallucinations in inevitable. They are not. Because language models can abstain when uncertain. They need to be trained that it's okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So that's a strategy that they should have.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, now we know long ago.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And now they will.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I think that that that's a step forward.

[Jeff Jarvis]

At the same time, there's a paper at 135 where academics looked at beyond hallucinations what they classify as lying when the hallucination is kind of accidental. And this is purposeful to get to a goal.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Again, because of mistraining on incentives. Look, this is new stuff and I think it's not unreasonable to think that we can make it better as we learn about why these things happen. Yeah, you're right. The big question is how can an LLM know what it doesn't know? I guess it can look and say, well, it's not my. My data.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. It should, it should do that. It's just either either I can find a reference to this or I can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I saw a video today from Fei Fei Li who said that it was interesting. It was a brief little video with Andreessen Horowitz where she said that language. Language is purely generative. It's made up by humans.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the model can do that, whereas the real world world is not. It has a reality you have to deal with there and that this is. Oh, sorry about that. I pounded my table. It's an earthquake. And, and so that's the next effort. So I don't think it's so much this, it's how to touch it to reality and does. Can it confirm something? Does it know how to do that? I think that's an entirely new plateau. Or, or is it butte?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a mesa, my friend.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a mesa.

[Leo Laporte]

I think actually that's why we're so much talking about robotics now and physical world and all of this stuff. And this was one of the things Karen Howe suggested in her book that I kind of disagreed with, which is, and I've seen this elsewhere, that humans, when we're born, have some innate instinct, intuition, knowledge, that of the natural world that gives us a leg up that, that a machine never can get, that we are somehow born with something that a machine cannot learn, whether it is from a large language model or the physical world. And I'm not sure that that's true. I think that that is kind of a religious explanation of human intelligence. And I'm not sure it's true. I don't know babies, do they know how to. Yeah, they do suckle, but they don't know how to speak or walk or they don't know about persistence of objects. There's a lot of things they learn mostly everything just to scroll through.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Line 149 is one of the papers I found in my trolling of archive, which is a. Evidently a regular survey of learning embodied intelligence from physical simulators and world models. And so this is the frontier that they're going on. It's not worth reading it, but if you go through and just look at all the different kinds of robotic models.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

About basic execution, being able to lift things, humanoid cognition, all kinds of things here. And it's, it's impressive what's going on to figure out the world models. And they're doing it through robotics.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I think that's gonna, I think that's gonna make a difference to the logic of AI in new ways because it can verify. We can say, oh, I tried that. And nope, you know, when you, when.

[Leo Laporte]

You push the cup of pens off the table, it falls to the ground every single time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I'm a cat because I really.

[Leo Laporte]

Enjoyed it and I loved it. Paris, was there anything that you absolutely wanted to talk about?

[Paris Martineau]

We had it all, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, then we did not. We didn't even close. Come close. We should mention that your predecessor, Gina.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Trapani, has a Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, the Ur Paris. The Ur Paris. Well, if she precedes Stacy Higabotham as well. The original host, co host with Jeff and me of this week, back when it was this week in Google. Gina Trapani has a new blog she just started a couple of days ago called Notes.

[Paris Martineau]

Is it this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think so. What does the project say?

[Leo Laporte]

She's a writer and programmer based in New York City, a recovering achiever, as we know. She started Lifehacker and she worked with Neil Dash for a while at his company. She's not clear about what she's doing these days, but I love it that she's doing a blog. She was one of the original bloggers. I mean, that's what Lifehacker was. Life hacker. Yeah. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

She does not use AI generated images in her blog.

[Leo Laporte]

She uses actual pictures of fish that she took.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a very pretty fish.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She has. Oh, this is for you, Paris. If you go to her projects, there's the media menu, which is the movies she watches.

[Leo Laporte]

I think blogs should be like that. Very personal. Yeah, they all used to be just.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Personal blogs before there was social media. It was all my friends had a blog, and that's how I kept up with them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I like this. I might do the same thing immediately. Menu. I like that a lot because I.

[Paris Martineau]

Want to put up book Demon Hunters.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to put up books, but I think I got to write a book report and I don't get around to it. This is great. You just say, hey, just do a list. You want to ask me about it, I'll tell you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I could actually.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She grades it, which is what I do to Entertainment Weekly.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you, either of you use a social. A book. Social network at all?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Nope. I have a letterbox, though, just for movies. It's like a movie.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, letterbox is cool. And I, you know, for a while I used Goodreads, but I don't want to be in the Amazon ecosystem. When Amazon bought them, I kind of said, yeah, never mind. I've been lately using Readwise, and there's a number of other ones that people use out there, and I keep looking at them, trying to figure out which one would be a good one. But that's what I really need is not one just for books, which Readwise is. I like it because I can read books on my Kobo, and anything I highlight gets sent to Readwise from the Kobo Kobo. So I have, like. It's a great way for me to read books for this show because I can basically take notes and then it's saved by Readwise.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I need a Media menu.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I need one for all media, though.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's what she does. She gave a plus.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. This is great. I wonder how she does this.

[Leo Laporte]

If you go, she's a coder.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just as her blog code, she can do a coder.

[Leo Laporte]

Obsidian would let me do a kind of summary like this, and I think I could probably export it and post it on the blog right now. What I just do, and I kind of like this idea on Leo FM is I have a now page, which is just where I am right now. What I'm doing right now, what I'm thinking about, what my hobbies are, and I have some media stuff in there, but it's not. It's not as pretty as what she did. So I feel like that's a good personal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I'm glad we mentioned that personal thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Gina's doing it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Happy birthday, Tech Meme.

[Paris Martineau]

Happy birthday.

[Leo Laporte]

Tech meme is 20. Can you believe that?

[Paris Martineau]

That's a long ride home.

[Leo Laporte]

He doesn't do it at Tech meme anymore. Brian McCullough, who does the. Used to do the Tech Meme Ride Home regular on our network, has moved to another platform. I think he's. Nope, he doesn't put on Tech Meme anymore.

[Paris Martineau]

I was gonna say I thought I saw them there. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Must be mistaken.

[Leo Laporte]

But he still does the ride Home. I wish I could remember now because I shouldn't plug it. I should give him a plug, right?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, you've said the name of it. Is that not a plug? Find it where podcasts are.

[Leo Laporte]

Tech Brew. It's now the Tech Brew Ride Home.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, that's probably why.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's the Tech. Fairly similar Ride Home. Yeah, it's the same show. Basically, you're watching intelligent machines. When we return, we will do our picks of the week. Prepare yourselves. Gird your loins.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm girding.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel to tips.

[Paris Martineau]

Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the itinerary we're following.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

[Leo Laporte]

Bon voyage.

[G]

Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com FamilyFreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card. Typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte $829.99 Eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel contact T Mobile Ever notice how.

[Paris Martineau]

Ads always pop up at the worst moments, when the killer's identity is about to be revealed? During that perfect meditation flow on Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every deep breath. Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts. Ad free.

[Leo Laporte]

Included with prime are the loins Girded Paris. You should start your Pick of the week. Oh, I like this.

[Paris Martineau]

One of my picks of the Week is the USDA website that allows you to explore over 7,000 historical watercolor paintings from the USDA Pomological Water Collection.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, this is beautiful. These are kind of like custard apple.

[Paris Martineau]

We love to see that.

[Leo Laporte]

These reminded me of the Audubon bird paintings, but they're all a fruit.

[Paris Martineau]

In 1886, the newly established Division of Palmology embarked on an ambitious project to hire artists to paint every significant variety of fruit in America in water Watercolor, which served as technical documents that kind of revealed what early color photography this.

[Leo Laporte]

Is what avocados looked like in 1912. Aren't you glad?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh my God. It's kind of beautiful, though.

[Leo Laporte]

It's sort of. But you can tell. I mean, fruit has changed a lot.

[Paris Martineau]

The USDA distributed these lithographs in bulletins that farmers used for identification, with some deliberately painted in states of decay to show what diseases to watch for or marked as mature tests or studies on the effect of cold storage.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy, bananas didn't look good in 1919.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I would pay $3 million for that.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

So even if stuck on the these paintings had vanished into a government storage facility for decades until digital activists freed them through a grant to digitize them in 2009, which was followed by Freedom of Information request requests in 2015. And now. Now they're here on this website.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know this Bananas lost all this variety.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. There's only one variety now of banana. And you know, these ones tasted much better. These are more like plantains. Look at that. Whoa. Yeah, this is beautiful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Discovered that I love green bananas.

[Paris Martineau]

This is a project by Andrew Hopped, who describes himself as a Fermentation enthusiast, Apple junkie and software engineer who is starting a land race. Cider and wine, which I assume is a cider and wine.

[Leo Laporte]

So he did it himself. This is not from some government agency.

[Paris Martineau]

No, this is just his.

[Leo Laporte]

There are 3,788 pictures of apples, which is probably why it calls it the Pomological Art gallery. But there's 959 peaches, 445 pears, 352 plums, 270 grapes. There's 7,000 flowers.

[Paris Martineau]

There was only one lime pearl berry, only one lime berry, only one wampi, some of this, only one wineberry. Same goes for date kiwi fruit. Eggplant. Wow. They really weren't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, eggplants were exotica.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, they're so beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is a beautiful eggplant. Yeah. Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know, it just makes me want to own. Own every. Every copy of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Can we. Are we allowed to, like, use them in our blog?

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

They're over 100 years old.

[Paris Martineau]

Public domain. They're. Yeah, they're well over 100 years old. Like, we the people pay for him. Yeah. You can, though, contribute if you want. There's a section called Contribute. While the core data in the paintings is solid, variety names, locations, core crop types, there's room for improvement in capturing the rich contextual details. Many paintings include handwritten notes, and this information provides valuable historical context. But it's written in faded ink that you can't really get at using OCR or AI to extract if there's a lot of people. He writes. If a lot of people are interested in helping out, I will make the data directly editable. But in the meantime, if you see something you want to improve, shoot him an email at hopped.andrew@protonmail. This is on the Pomological Art web website, and he'll let you get started.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

So such a cool project that I saw and I don't know, thought anybody could enjoy taking a gander at because.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're. And they're just gorgeous. They're really, really, really pretty.

[Paris Martineau]

And, you know, I discovered this because someone was sharing it in Blue Sky. That leads me to my other mini pick. Blue sky has books. Bookmarks now. Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

What does that mean?

[Paris Martineau]

It means that you can bookmark things like you would on Twitter. You can just click the bookmark button.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't even know that Twitter had bookmarks.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, Twitter has bookmarks, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

What does it do? It saves it. It saves it to a little bookmark.

[Paris Martineau]

It saves the. Oh, yeah, it's got a little bookmark bookmark thing. They go over there in your bookmark tab.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paris Martineau]

And then you can go look at it later.

[Leo Laporte]

I so rarely want to save anything I read or save.

[Paris Martineau]

I look save it like whenever I see stories that I end up reading that I want to bring up on this show or cool pomological art projects.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. I have to say, Blue sky has become more and more like Twitter. Like, I mean it really like the old Twitter, not the new Twitter.

[Paris Martineau]

It really is the sort of platform that I think it. You get what you put into it and the more time you spend spend on it or just even if you spend a little bit of time kind of curating who you follow on the feeds you want to see, it has really become useful. And I feel like there is a great, like, sense of community there.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if we did the story, but more and more scientists are moving to a blue sky.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is good. There's a, actually a. In the discover there's a science tab and I think that's a really good thing to bookmark for yourself. Jeff Jarvis, pick of the week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'll do a few things because that's the kind of guy I am.

[Leo Laporte]

First, start with just one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Something that Leo has to get in his kitchen. 183 A schnitzel press.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I do need a. I make schnitzel at least every month.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait till you see this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, schnitzel. Oh, See, I pound it with a big hammer. Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Just one press. One press.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the kind of thing I would buy that is so limited in purpose.

[Paris Martineau]

And it was. Would take up so much.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it takes up all that. What is that you have in the kitchen? Well, that's my schnitzel press. We're going to have schnitzel tomorrow. You know, I like pounding my schnitzel and I'm not afraid to admit it. I have a schnitzel hammer and I pound it. You can. And it's kind of cheating, but when you buy the schnitzel, which I usually use pork for it, I tell the guy tenderize it and the butcher in the back has a thing that he.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Runs it and it puts holes in it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It makes it softer and so I only run it through once. And then when you pummel it, it really is nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, when I worked at Ponderosa Steakhouse.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you have a tenderizer or a schnitzel press?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, but there was. It came in. It was Australian low grade beef and when you took the. After. After you took it out, you pulled the. The meat, as we called it, out of the freezer. It was perfect for teenage boys working in there. You took a defrosted steak and you bent it back and there were needle marks every like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, just tenderize it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Quarter inch. Tenderize it. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It was not so in both of these instances, would you guys look at it and say, holy schnitzel.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy schnitzel. The schnitzel is so flat that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, then this is the show. We want to mention a number. NFL's debut on YouTube. Three million viewers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That changes the whole thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that huge?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

It was very weird. We watched it. This was the Brazil game, and they had all these YouTubers streaming it and they would cut away to a YouTuber and the. The kind of. The contrast between the professional football announcers, who are, I think, very accomplished, accomplished, and the YouTubers was stark, shall we say.

[Paris Martineau]

So finally our YouTubers allowed to stream it. Is it not copywritten? Is it not like the same?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Instead of freeing it up, you know, Mr.

[Leo Laporte]

Beast. Oh, now anybody can stream Marquez Brownlee.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which will get you to more. More people to watch it because you want to hear Marquez's nerdy take on it.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

I'm guessing these people had to deal with regular.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they had deals.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

People had deals. You can't do this. If I seen the NFL, it would get cut off.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the one. Yeah, the one that baffled the announcers and everybody watching. They had a guy named Destroying D E E stroying and he did a little sideline report, and the announcers were just nonplussed. They went, oh, okay. It was. Was intr. Did you see it? Bonito. Are you a football fan? You're probably not.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

No, I don't watch football.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Would you watching every Batman version they.

[Leo Laporte]

Had Watch with streams and commentary from a stacked roster of creators including Ishow Speed, Tom Grossi, Rabba Grills, Es Kabiche, Kazi tv, and many more. It's. Yeah. So yes, it was on YouTube. Was also being streamed on many, many YouTube streams.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

So this is something Amazon learned from Twitch, I think, because Twitch used to do this all the time with other stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's me. Google. It's YouTube. Google learned it.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Yeah, but isn't it. It wasn't the. The NFL on Amazon. It was on Amazon though, right?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This was YouTube. Different deal. Bought by YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, okay.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

So, you know, same. It's all the streaming world, they all copy Each other.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was talking order today that. That after the Murdoch deal with the three unhappy children were bought up by $3.3 billion. The business of, of, of. Of Fox and sports is going to be tougher because there's more competitors to get these games now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is a show that cares about you and your health. And so here is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here is the.

[Leo Laporte]

No, this is more Howard Stern than intelligent machines.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it got a lot of. A lot of response on the socials, Theo. A lot of response. A doctor advises that you should set a 2 TikTok limit to reduce hemorrhoid risk.

[Leo Laporte]

Do not sit and scroll, kids. It's just bad for you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or you'll be pro.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I don't want to do is scroll down to the rest of this article. I have no idea what that picture is going to be, but I don't think I want to see it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Know what's okay, though? Sitting in podcasting for three hours.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. Yeah, that's what you're doing. That's a good point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're getting hemorrhoids for you.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Our sacrifice.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's why we're going to wrap this sucker.

[Unknown/Producer or Guest]

Actually, the important. The important part about that fact shitting right now, the important part is that your knees are below your waist because when you're on the can, your knees are above your waist if you're tall enough. And that's what. That's what.

[Leo Laporte]

What the hell? How short is your toy toilet?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's. That's only if you buy a squatty. A squatty potty, which Howard Stern used to advertise.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Next week, Leo's changing the subject on the show. Nick Foster is the author of a book, could, should, might, don't. This will be interesting. This is a prescription, I guess, for AI. What we should do, we shouldn't do. We should stay away from what the risk is, are how we think about the future. It's not just AI. It's everything Nick Foster. Could, should, might, don't. So get to work reading that book, kids. And don't do it on the can unless you read a page.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Two chapters.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry. Leo had to.

[Paris Martineau]

What a world.

[Leo Laporte]

World. What a world. Technology. Here's the good news. I was going to be going on vacation in a couple of weeks. We've mentioned that a couple of times. But the vacation is off because so is the south side wall of our house. And Lisa quite wisely believes it's an un unwise thing to do to leave the home with the south wall missing.

[Paris Martineau]

Especially after you've discussed on a streamed podcast you're going to be away from your home. That is.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody will be home. That's all I can say.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Stay away people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. So I am glad to say I'll be here for for the remaining shows. I will miss one twit to go down and see Henry but the us and you and se sandwich I'm hoping to take, I'm taking I'm going to be staying in Providence where my mom is and my sister staying with my sister. But I'm hoping to take the new Accela or I'm hoping to take the new Acela from Providence to New York. I booked the Acela. I hope it's in one of the newer trains. Everybody's excited.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you tell Can I do a photo shoot pitch for Hank right now? He gets two life size baguette slices, dresses in a large trench coat and then he's the sandwich.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm the sandwich now, you crazy people.

[Paris Martineau]

I just, I think, I think there's something there.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll, I'll mention it. I'll mention.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I will see you all next week. Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalistic Innovation Emeritus at the City University of New York, now at Montclair State University in SUNY Stony Brook. He's the author of the Gutenberg Parentheses, now in Paperback magazine, now in Audiobook and of course the Web. We we. There they are. Thank you, Jeff. Always a pleasure. Paris Martineau, investigative reporter at Consumer Reports. Always a pleasure to see you. Her website Paris, NYC True, we do intelligent machines every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly, which makes it about 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 users. If you're in our beautiful club Twit Disco, we've we've set it all up for you. You can watch there. I think of it as behind the velvet rope kind of access. But we also stream it live on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick. So watch wherever you want. Chat with us. You don't have to watch live, you just can because we also offer downloadable audio and video of the the show that would be@Twitt TV IM for intelligent machines. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to intelligent machines. But if you go to the TWiT YouTube channel, YouTube.com TWiT you'll see links to all of the dedicated show channels and a lot of extra content that we put up on the, on the YouTube channel there. And of course. Best way to get the show. As with all our shows, subscribe in your favorite podcast player so you get it automatically the minute we're done cleaning it up. If you're not a member of Club Twit, I hope you will join the club. It is very important to our continued survival. 25% of our operating costs are paid by club members like you. It is a great way to vote to show you you support what we do and and keep it going and keep it growing. Find out more Twitt TV Club Twit. I'm Leo Laporte. Thanks for joining us. Welcome back. Benito Gonzalez Gonzalez. We're glad to have you back at the helm and we will see you all next week on Intelligent Machines. Bye Bye.

[Bonito Gonzalez]

I'm not a human being.

[Paris Martineau]

Not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent machine. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.

[G]

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