Intelligent Machines 838: Fat Bears Live Now!

Summary

Intelligent Machines 838: "Fat Bears Live Now!" — Podcast Summary

Date: September 25, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paris Martineau, Jeff Jarvis
Guest: Steven Levy (Editor at Large, Wired)

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Episode Overview

This week’s episode of Intelligent Machines delivers an incisive exploration of contemporary AI issues, power consolidation in tech, the ethics and economics of AI training data, and a humorous dive into the cultural side of tech (including the iconic “Fat Bears Live”). Special guest Steven Levy, legendary technology journalist, shares his unique perspective on the latest AI copyright lawsuits, the culture of Silicon Valley, and the ongoing evolution of technology’s impact on society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Anthropic Settlement and AI Copyright

[03:46–12:38]

• Background: Steven Levy’s recent piece discusses authors’ rights and compensation when their works are used to train large language models.
• Levy’s Perspective: Initially conflicted—seeing both sides: the communal spread of human knowledge for AI training vs. the principle that professional authors should be compensated for use beyond traditional reading.
  • “Every book is a shot of a world. We build worlds when we write these books. And that is so valuable…” —Steven Levy [06:11]
• Fair Use vs. Infringement: Ongoing legal ambiguity, with courts potentially re-defining “fair use” for the age of AI. The judge’s intervention has led to uncertainty and the prospect of even larger settlements.
• Music Licensing Analogy: There are workable payment systems in music; similar collective licenses might be created for authors.
  • "They figured it out without AI for music licenses.... I think actually it would be quite feasible to have a model saying, you know what this output came because ... it was 6% from Hackers, Steven Levy's book." —Steven Levy [09:02]
• Linking as Compensation? Panel debates whether links to authors’ websites in AI outputs would suffice. Levy argues for real micropayments:
  • “No, they're getting money. They're getting money from that, from, from using…” —Steven Levy [11:57]

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2. Power Consolidation & AI’s Societal Impact

[13:00–14:27]

• Concentration of Power: AI is accelerating rather than merely exposing tech’s concentration of cultural and political clout.
  • “I think it’s accelerating it... a lot of what [startups] do will be fulfilled by the models themselves. So I think it is a centralizing movement.” —Steven Levy [13:20]
• The Tech Arc: The lineage from the PC era, to the internet, mobile, social, and now AI—all as part of a continuous, escalating story. Levy: AI could be the biggest inflection point yet.

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3. AGI, Optimism, and Caution

[15:17–18:23]

• AGI (Artificial General Intelligence):
  • Goalposts keep moving; definitions are debated between industry leaders.
  • Levy is “not a doomer,” but sees potential difficulties, both technically and ethically.
• Concerns:
  • Job displacement (especially entry-level roles now at risk due to AI automation).
  • Government misuse—risk of algorithmic oppression and flawed automation in sensitive social services.
  • “It’s not, not, you don’t have to be a doomer, but absolutely, you know, absolutely.” —Steven Levy [18:23]
  • College plagiarism and loss of learning due to AI-generated work.

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4. Shifts in Silicon Valley Culture & The Trump Era

[20:35–24:15]

• From Counterculture to Capitalism: Panel and Levy discuss the decline of idealism in Silicon Valley; big money and power lead to distance and diminishing sense of responsibility.
  • "There was always a sense of, you know, we know better, but it was like, we know better to help everyone..." —Steven Levy [24:15]
• Marc Andreessen’s “The Deal” — Build, get rich, philanthropy; entitlement to praise.
• Regulatory Avoidance: Famous wish for a “Google Island” to avoid scrutiny typifies the shift in attitude.

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5. Meta & Shifting Paradigms (VR to AI)

[28:15–30:48]

• Facebook’s scrambles to stay atop new technological waves—pivoting from web, to mobile, to VR, now to AI.
• Zuck’s lesson: “Never again” be caught unprepared by a platform disruption.
• "That’s what’s driving. Hard to do. It is hard to do." —Steven Levy [30:27]

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6. AI Scale, Economics, and “Bubble” Warnings

[36:03–58:39]

• Circular Funding & The Hype Cycle: Nvidia–OpenAI–Oracle deal cited as potential “shell game” boosting apparent market value, sparking debate about hype vs. real demand.
  • "It's another major foot in the gas that is fueling kind of this hype cyc and how do we think about this industry in this market..." —Paris Martineau [38:17]
• Stargate Data Centers: Massive investment, questionable sustainability (power, water usage) — driven by tax incentives, not necessarily environmental logic.
• Throwing Compute at the Problem: Ongoing argument—will ever-larger models yield exponentially better results, or is “scale for scale’s sake” a dead end?
  • "We keep building these bigger models and they keep getting better." —Leo Laporte [51:08]
  • Others warn of diminishing returns, low real ROI for business, and a potential $800B shortfall (per Bain).

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7. AI Product Demos & Public Perception

[75:13–85:18]

• Meta's Live Demo Fails: Hilarious account of Mark Zuckerberg’s AR glasses demo, plagued by technical difficulties, from wake-word server overload to non-functioning call features.
  • “Live demo — good luck.” —Teleprompter prompt [77:52]
• Privacy Concerns: Glasses with always-on cameras evoke “glasshole” nightmares, notably in sensitive public situations.

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8. AI Ecosystems & Trust

[97:44–98:33]

• Users increasingly siloed: Google or Apple’s walled gardens — integration friction for all others.
• Meta’s mishandling of privacy (e.g., using Instagram schoolgirl photos to target men), further eroding trust.

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9. Internet Culture, Content Creation, & Podcasting’s Role

[114:20–116:59]

• The fragility of independence in media—platform control, advertiser pressure, and rising importance of direct audience support.
• Advocacy for podcast federation, audience-funded models, and independent voices.

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10. Fat Bear Week & Lighter Moments

[122:05 onward]

• Side-by-side with heavy themes, the group enjoys “Fat Bear Week”—a beloved internet livestream of Katmai National Park’s bears gorging before hibernation, and reflects on the joy of sharing internet oddities.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Every book is a shot of a world. We build worlds when we write these books. And that is so valuable... I think those models will be impoverished without us." —Steven Levy [06:11]
• “AI is accelerating... a centralizing movement.” —Steven Levy [13:20]
• “It could be the biggest [inflection point] of all.” —Steven Levy, on AI [15:15]
• “If there's anybody who should not be represented by an avatar, I would say the Pope is high on that list.” —Leo Laporte [155:59]
• "Fat Bear Live Cam now. And the first thing that came up was brown Bear, Brooks Falls and Katmai National Park." —Paris Martineau [123:44]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Anthropic, Copyright, and Fair Use: 03:46–12:38
• Power Consolidation in Tech & AI’s Inflection Point: 13:00–15:15
• AGI, Risks, and Job Loss: 15:17–18:23
• Silicon Valley’s Morality Shift: 20:35–24:15
• Meta’s Evolution (VR → AI): 28:15–30:48
• AI Hype, Economics & Scale: 36:03–58:39
• Meta’s Product Demo (Live Fails): 75:13–85:18
• Trust, Ecosystem Lock-In, and Privacy Issues: 97:44–98:33
• Podcast Independence & Media Future: 114:20–116:59
• Fat Bear Week / Katmai Webcam: 122:05–125:01

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Tone, Energy and Flow

• The discussion is dynamic and relaxed, with honest disagreement and comedic digressions—a balance of skepticism and optimism, and a distinctly nerdy sense of fun.
• The hosts’ rapport makes challenging topics accessible and relatable throughout.

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Recommended for Listeners Who

• Want sharp, current insight into the intersection of AI, law, media economics, and tech culture.
• Enjoy lively, unscripted debate and smart humor.
• Appreciate a blend of big-picture thinking and small, delightful internet oddities.

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Further Reading & Follow-Ups

• Steven Levy’s articles at Wired & his books (notably Hackers)
• Paris Martineau’s consumer investigations
• TWiT’s ongoing coverage of AI news and policy

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“Thank you for joining us. We will see you next time — unless we just keep the microphones on and stay right through the week on Intelligent Machines.”
— Leo Laporte [169:53]

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here, Paris Martineau. Our guests this time, the wonderful Stephen Levy, probably the dean of technology journalism in America, editor at large at Wired, the author of so many great books and recently a number of articles about AI. Steven Levy, coming up next on im Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. Episode 838, recorded Wednesday, September 24, 2025, Fat Bears Live. Now it's time for Intelligent Machines. Yay. The show where we cover the latest in AI robotics and all the smart doodads surrounding us these days. Joining us right now, Paris Martineau, investigative reporter from Consumer Reports. Hello, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Hello, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Good to see you. Jeff Jarvis is also here, emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, now Montclair State University and SUNY Stony Brook, the author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis and magazine. I thought they gave you a nice plug on CNN last week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

He rushed out of here to be an entire hour debating Scott Jennings and Scott Walker. You poor fella. I'd be exhausted after all that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And the irony is, of course, it was about the Kimmel story. Jimmy came back last night after all that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Brilliantly, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Our guest, you know, we like to start the show with an interview, kind of. I think it's a fun way to find out what's going on. The latest in AI. And our guest this week is a dear friend, a legend in technology, the author of so many great books, starting with Hackers, which was really the seminal story of the MIT hackers and how the whole computer revolution started. And if you haven't read it yet, by all means, read it. Steven Levy is here. He's a regular writer, a columnist for Wired. Great to see you, Stephen. There is a stack of his books behind.

[Steven Levy]

I'm so glad to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we love having you on. Stephen was scheduled to talk about that Facebook book that he wrote. And when Covid broke out. That was unfortunate. We're going to make it up to you this week. You wrote. So the original plan on booking you was when you wrote an interesting piece. We've been talking a lot about the Anthropic decision. Anthropic had agreed to a settlement with the authors, $1.5 billion settlement. The judge said, no, not so fast. And I guess that's still up in the air. But your piece, I wasn't sure I wanted Anthropic to pay me for my books, I do now was kind of a contrarian point of view, I think, for a lot of people. But since then, you've been busy. You also wrote, I think, a scathing story. I thought I knew Silicon Valley. I was wrong with an excellent illustration from Cold War. Steve. Oh, no. Cold War. Yeah. Yeah. And then there was another piece which I thought was great. YouTube thinks AI is its next big bang. So we have a lot to talk about today, but let's start with the anthropic decision. Why do you think it's a good thing?

[Steven Levy]

Well, I. I'm not talking about necessarily this particular decision. We don't know what the settlement's going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Steven Levy]

I think it's a good thing to pay the authors when you use their book and training. And I have to say, I was on the fence about this, and this was a little awkward for me because I'm on the council of the Authors Guild.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah.

[Steven Levy]

Which is suing these places.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Steven Levy]

They're involved in lawsuits. I have to say, I speak for myself, not the Authors Guild. And when we vote on these things, they poll the council and we vote. Should we sue and not sue? I abstain because I'm writing about these places. So I want to keep a little distance from going up to Sam Altman for an interview, and he's saying, by the way, aren't you suing me?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'll see you in court, Sam.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Steven Levy]

So it's basically the same as if Kevin Roose talks on the New York Times is suing him. You know, so I have a little arm's length of that. But I was, I think, a little unusual on the board. I'm a little more sympathetic to Silicon Valley than most of my colleagues on the board. And also I appreciate the counter argument to authors getting paid by saying that training a large language model model is something that takes in the world's knowledge, and it's kind of a good thing that we're able to put all that together and make use of it. Anyone could make use of it. So, on the other hand, you know, I'm a professional author, I'm a professional writer, I get paid, and it's not quite the same as, you know, a bright human being reading voraciously and then taking that work and using it in their work and their life, because this is something that millions of people are going to use, and that is a difference. But when I saw the anthropic settlement and it comes out to actually some. Not giant money, but real money, if it turns out that $3,000 a book, I've written eight books. My wife has written five. So, you know, that's a money that could help renovate a bathroom. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's $100,000 a book. That's a good deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Levy]

So, and then I thought, you know what, I'm really okay with this. I really feel, because books are one of the most important corpuses that a large language model could use. Every book is a shot of a world. We build worlds when we write these books. And that is so valuable we, for the large language models to sort of understand humanity. And you know, it's very high quality content. It's, you know, original ideas. It's a lot of language, you know, spread out coherently. And I think those models will be impoverished without us. And now you look at the hundreds of billions of dollars that these companies are spending on infrastructure and suddenly that 1.5 billion, which to be sure is for pirating books, not for training them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The judge ruled that they had fair use of the books they purchased.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If they had just bought your books and you would have gotten two bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

Each, then you wouldn't have gotten anything because they bought used books, by the way.

[Steven Levy]

So now, now I'm thinking, you know, this fair use interpretation, you know, is trying to apply in 1930s way of thinking to, you know, mid 21st century now doesn't work.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe it's changed since you wrote this article because since you, you wrote this judge also said, no, that's not a settlement. That's not a fair settlement. And in fact, the damages could run into the trillions for anthropic if they don't settle. Yeah. 150,000 per his complaint wasn't necessarily with the amount.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was with the structure in the lawyers.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand. But by going back to the drawing board, there is this risk that it's going to be a hell of a lot more than 1 billion and a precedent.

[Steven Levy]

Yeah, but remember, that's for infringement. The, the precedent that really matters is the fair use.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Steven Levy]

And this is step one on it. You know, there's going to be other steps and you know, what really there should be is a rethinking of, of the law. Though I'm a little worried under, considering who's running the country. That would work out for authors.

[Leo Laporte]

But, but you would accept the fair use judgment or you prefer to get some payment from.

[Steven Levy]

I don't think that, you know, that interpretation of fair use in any way anticipated. AI.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you in the piece you Draw some parallels to kind of music licensing. Do you have a sense of like what a fair or workable kind of collective license system for books could even look?

[Steven Levy]

Yeah, I mean, I'm really glad you brought that up because one big reason, and Donald Trump cited this as the reason why you couldn't pay the authors for what their writings in a large language model would be because it's so hard to do. It's hard to figure out. But they figured it out without AI for music licenses. People go into bars and clubs and listen blog radio shows and they figure, figure out like what slices to give in streaming and all the rest of it. You know, I don't have the solution, but actually the Authors Guild is working with places to help figure that out, you know, because I think there, there can be some way to do that. You know, I'm talking to people now who are working in interpretability, in AI way, AI models, you know, to get inside the model and see how they work. And I think actually it would be quite feasible to have a model saying, you know what this output came because you know, it was 6% from hackers Stephen Levy's book. And then you know, there would be.

[Leo Laporte]

With a link to the book itself so they could buy it.

[Steven Levy]

Yeah, it could be a link, you know, but, or, or it could be they a little like in Spotify, a little percentage of the pool, a fee to you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But, but that's part of the, part of the paradox of what's happening right now is companies like my former employer and now yours are cutting off the, with the exception of Google because they want to be in search. They're cutting off all of the AI companies. And Shipstead, the Norwegian company, just put out some stats today saying they've got a click through rate from ChatGPT of 1.2 to 5%. 5% by the way, for opinion pieces, not fact pieces, which is interesting. And so we're starting to see that AI is a new mechanism of discovery. So we kind of. Aren't we replaying the old search argument? How dare you take my soul by taking a picture of me. But I want the links from you. Are we going to end up in the same place with AI towards discovery?

[Steven Levy]

I don't think any links coming from.

[Jeff Jarvis]

AI, but there is, there's data now and a place like Shipstead is making itself available and they're getting links and they're getting click through.

[Leo Laporte]

But maybe another study books.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, no, it's in fact the study that we talked about last week says that ChatGPT is not linking to social at all, but it is linking to editorial matter, which includes books.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but not book. Well, you're not going to link to a book because a book would be purchased.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's part. That's to be the bigger question. Shouldn't we make our books linkable? It would be a good thing if they were.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess you can always go to Stephen Levy dot com.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

And would that be acceptable to you, Stephen, instead of a micro payment that they, they say, you know, 13% of story came from hackers and then the link to Steven Levy dot com.

[Steven Levy]

No, they're getting money. They're getting money from that, from, from using.

[Leo Laporte]

So you want a micropay.

[Steven Levy]

This is a, you know, it's, it's like one more, you know, you know, licensing opportunity. You know, just like someone might make a movie out of your book, you get some more money. Someone, you know, would run it as a first serial. You get some money. It's a, it's another way to get paid.

[Leo Laporte]

I have heard the argument that there isn't that as much money as you think there is in AI. I mean, none of these companies are profitable.

[Steven Levy]

Well, right. Not right now, but they are going only under the assumption they think they will be trillions of dollars.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Levy]

So if, if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. But if it does happen that a lot of that money is being made from using our material.

[Leo Laporte]

I love your man from Michael Lunchbox behind you. By the way, I just saw Napoleon Solo peeking out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I like the Boss Gags album there. That's my favorite.

[Leo Laporte]

And the Boss Gags album. I'm sorry, I'm getting distracted.

[Paris Martineau]

Stepping back a minute. The three most recent pieces that you published, there's this thread of power consolidation among them. Do you think that AI is kind of accelerating this concentration of cultural and political power in tech or, or it's merely kind of just exposing what was already there?

[Steven Levy]

I think it's, you know, the former. I think it's accelerating it. You know, the. These right now is interesting, is a lot of companies, startups are trying to figure out how to, you know, find niches where, you know, they could plug into APIs, these models and have them be useful. But I think you're going to find that a lot of what they do will be fulfilled by the models themselves. So I think it is a centralizing movement and especially since the amount of money which is going to be involved in building out these infrastructures and they're going to need to pay that off is going to push them in that direction.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm also curious, I mean, you've been writing about tech for decades. Does the AI era, like, feel like a genuinely new inflection point, or is it more of a chapter and evolution of kind of the same disruptive technologies clashing with social norms that you've been chronicling for ages?

[Steven Levy]

Well, I do feel that is one continuous story that, you know, like I am writing one story. Right. And I started when the PC era was booming. Leo can like this, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I remember it well. Yes.

[Steven Levy]

Yeah. And, you know, and then on top of that, you know, came connectivity, came the Internet and then there was mobile and there was social and then, you know, and, you know, it, it and each thing built on top of the previous one. I think this does that. But I think some inflection points are bigger than others. The Internet was like a massive inflection point, you know, bigger than social, you know, I think bigger than mobile. But then, of course, that involved the connectivity. I think this is. It could be the biggest of all.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where do you come down on the doomsters on AGI? Do you believe AGI is actually going to. Is a legitimate goal?

[Leo Laporte]

That is, you have Ray Kurzweil's book behind you. The Singularity is nearer. We had Ray on a few months ago. Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Levy]

No, I did an interview with him too. And, you know, he's really curious about what he thought it would be like to be like 400 years old, you.

[Paris Martineau]

Know, and full of computronium. Yeah.

[Steven Levy]

Because you kind of keep listening to the music. You can see buzz gags you listen to when you were younger, you know, you know, you're like a teenager and, you know, when you're 400 years old, are you still going to listen to the Rolling Stones?

[Leo Laporte]

Great question.

[Steven Levy]

Wow. And he said, no, no, you look for new music. I said, well, I'm not younger than 400 years old. And, you know, I. You look at my record collection, there's. There's not much stuff from this year, you know, but anyway, I think we have difficulty defining AGI. Right. You know, right now. I think for a little while it's going to be a moving goalpost, just like AI was. You know, I covered the Deep Blue match against Gary Kasparov and people thought, well, that answered things. And, you know, the Newsweek cover line for my story was the Brains Last Stand.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Steven Levy]

But it turned out.

[Paris Martineau]

You had a lot of brain related covers, I suppose.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Steven Levy]

And then there's Einstein's Brain I was.

[Paris Martineau]

Going to say famously found Einstein's brain.

[Steven Levy]

Yeah, but I, and I, and I just a couple of weeks ago I was, you know, talking to some of the people in the AI companies and, and they were saying, well, gee, now that we were saying we're almost in graphs of AGI, then we have to sort of think what AGI is. Right. You know, because the definition is meaningful, particularly it was meaningful between OpenAI and Microsoft, which had a clause about what happens when you reach AGI in their partnership, which in theory they've resolved, but they haven't shared how. But, but I do feel the thing is going to get better. I'm not like a Gary Marcus skeptic who's saying that, you know, this is, you know, a plateau and it's kind of a hoax. I do feel that things are going to get significantly better. I don't know what super intelligence really is supposed to mean, but I do believe that these things have a way to go to get better. And even if it doesn't happen all that fast, they're so good now that it's going to take a few years for us even to begin to exploit what we have in our hands now.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree 100%. Yeah, but do you have concerns about it? I mean, you've been writing about these kinds of things going back to Artificial Life, the book you wrote some years ago. Do you have some concerns at all? It's not, not, you don't have to be a doomer, but absolutely, you know, Absolutely.

[Steven Levy]

I mean there's concerns of how, how well they do things right now. There's a number of things they do as well or better than people. There's a other category of things that they nailed pretty good, pretty good level, which is enough to knock out people's jobs. We've seen a couple studies recently which shows that in terms of employment, the people they're harming most, or entry level jobs, if companies are trying to save money by not hiring new people, because AI can do that, which is I think a big mistake because then where's their next level of executive going to come from if people can't start and learn and get better at it? But I think that there's a lot of problems we have from that it's going to automate probably already is malicious hacking and enable people to do a lot of bad stuff. And the temptation is just way too great for college students not to use that to prevent them from getting what they're paying for at these colleges, which is learning.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have A lot of concern about government's use of AI as well. It really has become a tool for government oppression. But also I worry when you hear that, you know, the Social Security Administration is going to use AI to determine who gets benefits, it seems like a bad idea on the face of it. There are lots of misuses, I guess, of AI. As many poor ways to use it as there are good ways. Maybe more poor ways to use it than good ways. But you know what? You've covered technology since the dawn of the PC era. Every technology has pros and cons that come along with it. We lived in, right. We lived in an era where we thought the paperless office was just around the corner.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Stephen, I'm really curious to get to your latest piece in Wired and your view of the culture of Silicon Valley, because you've covered the culture there more than really any other journalist. Did you say?

[Leo Laporte]

I thought I knew. By the way, we should say just to reintro him. Stephen Levy, editor large at Wired magazine, Washington Post called him the. I forgot what it was. The premier technology journalist of our time. I think that's true. That's fair. I won't argue his piece from two days ago in Wired. I thought I knew Silicon Valley. I was wrong. Tech got what it wanted by electing Trump. A year later, it looks more like a suicide pact.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was it. Was it a change or was it the essence finally coming out?

[Steven Levy]

I somewhat more the latter. It certainly did not begin with. With Trump. So it had been, you know, over the last decade, certainly there a shift from, you know, where the, the ideals that I engaged with that drew me to this field were no longer so much in play, particularly among the bigger companies that I've been covering for so many years and the people running them.

[Leo Laporte]

There was a book some years ago by John Markoff, what the Dormouse said, talking about how the 60s counterculture had influenced Silicon Valley. And you think of people like Steve Jobs as basically being a hippie, but there at some point was a shift in Silicon Valley towards aggressive capitalism, shall we say. And one of the things I think I've learned from the Trump era is that these guys never really had much of a commitment to the intersection of the arts and technology or DEI or any of this stuff, that these were merely pretexts to make more money. Do you agree?

[Steven Levy]

I don't know. From the very beginning that happened, I think there's a shift that happens. You know, I've known Mark Zuckerberg since 2006. I spent a lot of time with him when I did my book, and I think he was genuinely grappling with some of the effects of his product on people during that time. But at a certain point, you become so removed from everyone else. The money is so unbelievably huge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Steven Levy]

You feel Marc Andreessen laid this out quite explicitly. You feel, wait a minute, I built this stuff, and here I am being whole before Congress. People are questioning me. I'm giving money to charity. You know, I've got foundations. Why don't people love me?

[Paris Martineau]

Why don't people love the core of it?

[Steven Levy]

He called it the deal. He said, you make a lot of money, you build a company, you give money to give to good causes. And, you know, that is the deal. And the public and Congress and other people, they welched on the deal in his view.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh?

[Steven Levy]

Yeah. Okay. And so it was so he's like, to hell with you.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember Larry Page at a Google I O saying, we just wish there were a Google island where we didn't have to worry about regulations. You know, we could just do it. There is that sense. It went from being counterculture kind of hippies trying to save the world to we know better, and they should just let us let technology solve our problems. Yeah.

[Steven Levy]

Well, there was always a sense of, you know, we know better, but it was like, we know better to help everyone, you know. You know, a lot of times, you know, like Larry, he. Some things he did know better. I remember very early in the history of Google, he said, I don't. I'm not. They. They told him how much it would cost to install phone system. This is in the early 2000s. And he said, no, we don't. We're not going to install a system. Everyone will have cell phones. And people thought it was a scene.

[Leo Laporte]

He was right. We haven't had a business phone system in a long time. Although tax law requires us to pay for people's cell phones if they use it for work. So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you have a landline, Stephen?

[Steven Levy]

No, I have. I keep my number with a. An Internet phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Let's keep the old number. That's an old fashioned way of doing it. Right? Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Void landline.

[Steven Levy]

Now they pull the car.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Really have it. Yeah. As they shut the copper. They don't want to. They don't want to maintain a copper infrastructure as value. What are you excited about for the next 10 years?

[Steven Levy]

You know, we're talking about the downside of AI, but I'm excited about the upside of AI. I'm excited to learn how. How I'm excited about how it learns. I'm excited about what it could teach us about intelligence. I'm excited to see what novel things these models can come up with to enrich humans.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Steven Levy]

Necessarily monetarily.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. There's an opportunity and I think your pitch for equity for the content creators is fair. If there is going to be a lot of money to make in this, then. And we want AI to train on good quality material. I mean, I think it's.

[Paris Martineau]

But it doesn't mean that it gets it all for free. Is that right?

[Leo Laporte]

Sam Altman said you don't want to only train on stuff that we don't have to pay for because. Well, he didn't say pay for, but you don't want us to only pay for stuff that people give us because it won't be as good. You want to train on the best books in the world, you want to train on the best journalism in the world. But I think from a point of equity point of view, I think you make a good case that there should be some compensation. By the way, I love this picture from your website, stevenlevy.com of you. I guess it's a Vanity Fair shoot sitting next to Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos and a very young looking Mark Zuckerberg, Johnny Ives in the picture. A lot of people.

[Paris Martineau]

The media power brokers cover or something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that Elon's head that's cut off at the top there? I don't.

[Paris Martineau]

Elon was there for sure.

[Steven Levy]

Standing up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I was wondering who that was. So that's Elon being cut off there.

[Steven Levy]

Yeah, yeah. And you know, there's Lena Dunham, you know, like my name.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's Jessica Lessons over there in the top, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, there's Jessica, your old boss. Yeah.

[Steven Levy]

They somehow let the moderators into the photo shoot. It was one of those classic Annie Leibovitz shoots where.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, this looks very Annie Leibovich.

[Steven Levy]

Yeah. So we, we went off the stage and I was interviewing Zuckerberg and Michael Abrash, who's the head of his AI lab. VR lab at the time, not AI. And you know, so the three of us were put into a room. There were people sitting in the room, posed the way we were going to be sitting.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Steven Levy]

And she had us assume those poses.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's your stand in, Stephen. You sit there like that person.

[Steven Levy]

Yeah. And then the next panel came in after they were done and then she had people standing there. So we all look like we're together. We were.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they cut it in oh yeah, isn't that. Yeah. Maria Shriver. It's an interesting group.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can do that with, with Google now. But yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

One last, one last question. Since you had, you know, you do have the kind of. The book about Facebook. What do you think of Facebook's pivot from VR, the Metaverse? They even changed their name to now AI. And these latest glasses, the Ray Ban.

[Steven Levy]

Displays, well, you could blame mobile for that. When mobile came about, and this is something I found in the book, Facebook had a near death experience. They were ahead of everyone else because they were the first really big company that was totally on a web infrastructure. All the other companies were updating every six months and they update every three hours. Maybe you know that, you know, because it was a totally web based, you know, infrastructure. Then mobile came along and it was a challenge for them because people had phones to be updated and they, they didn't know how to deal with that. They didn't know how to do ads on it. And they went on a crash course to learn and figure out how to do it. And they survived. But he told himself, I'm never going to be in that position again. The next paradigm that comes on along, I'm going to be on top of. He identified it as VR, which isn't quite happen. Doesn't quite happen. Yeah, yeah. You know, he said, In 10, 10 years after I buy Oculus, that's going to happen. And it's more than 10 years and it didn't happen. But he managed to salvage something out of it with the wearables, with the glasses. And then he's like, oh my God, it's AI. Everyone's ahead of me on AI. So he's throwing huge amounts of money to be relevant in AI and now they're going to try to build it into those glasses. But you know, when he senses, his Spidey sense goes up that saying there's a paradigm coming up that could unseat us because that's when companies with a monopoly on something, you know, get overthrown. When a new paradigm comes on and everyone, you know, leaves an app and goes on to something power by the next thing you know, he wants to react to that threat and be ahead of the game. So that's what's driving Hard to do. It is hard to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Steven Levy]

You know, Apple, Apple did it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Apple did it. We don't know if they're going to continue to do it. That seems to be the question mark.

[Steven Levy]

Yeah, yeah, we don't know where they are on AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Stephen Such a pleasure. America's premier technology journalist. Read every one of his books. And are you working on a new one?

[Steven Levy]

Not at the moment. I'm zero in one. They keep me busy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Wired. You're writing a lot for Wired. He's editor at large at Wired, and that's a great place to read Stephen's works as well. Stephen, thank you so much for spending some time.

[Steven Levy]

It's always great. And I love you and your fellow panelists there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, we'll get you back anytime. Thank you, Stephen. All right, take care, Steve, everybody. Hi. America's premier technology journalist, an inspiration to us all. Absolutely. We'll take a little break and then we come back. We've got AI News. How about that? You're watching Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. I've been feeling fit as a fiddle lately, and I think it's because of our brand new sponsor this week, Field of Greens. And it's, you know, it's not new to me. I've been consuming this superfood for some time and it's helped me sleep better, it's helped me feel better. And apparently I did not know this until I talked to the folks, the doctor behind Brickhouse Nutrition, the creators of Field of Greens. Apparently, it's made me younger. Think of it as a, well, you know, a hard reset on a computer. Put you back at the factory settings. Everything seems to run better and faster. Right. This is a smart reset of your health to get you back to, if you will, the factory, the factory settings. And they know it works. This is an amazing. In fact, you know what? I'm going to mix some up right now. I have the strawberry lemonade flavor, although they have a variety of wonderful flavors. And I'm going to drink some just to prove to you not only that I drink it regularly, but that I love the flavor. Oh, that's so good. They did a study with Auburn University for a pretty sizable biological age study, and they did it right. They took a large cohort of people, did a lot of blood work on them, did, you know, a complete workup on them to see where their chronological age and their physical age paired up. And some people were not in the greatest shape. You know, they were kind of physically older than they should be for their chronological age. They gave these people, some of them placebos and some of them the Field of Greens over a period of time. Inside Field of Greens, fruits, vegetables medically selected for specific health benefits. In fact, you go to the website field of greens.com and take a Look at the label. It's, it's got everything. I mean, all the good stuff is in here. And it's, it's targeted at different parts. So there's a part of it targeted to your blood work. Some of it's targeted toward your biometrics. There's a, there's a mineral blend in here. So they gave this field of greens to half the population in this medical study at Auburn. You can read the whole study on the website. They gave the rest, placebos, measurable, measurable health benefits to the group that did the study and drank the fields of green. Considerably more than the placebo group. They were told not to change anything, by the way. They didn't tell the group, change how you eat. Nope. Eat normally. If you drink, fine. If you don't, exercise, fine. They wanted to eliminate all the variables so that they could see if field of greens changed anything. And the results, frankly, quite remarkable. The group that added field of greens without changing any of their lifestyle literally slowed how fast their bodies were aging. They changed their physical age. I can even see this on my Oura ring and my apple watch and my why things scale. My, my biological age is. It's not aging as fast as my chronological age. The field of greens, all organic. They have a variety, as I said, of ingredients in here for heart health, there's a group of things. For cells, lungs, kidneys, liver health, there's a metabolism group for a healthy weight. It helps me sleep better. It's really an amazing treat, frankly. So I want you to go to the website, check out the university study, and you'll get 20% off if you use our promo code, IM. Go to fieldofgreens.com fieldofgreens.com promo code is IM. It's very refreshing, very delicious. It mixes up very easily. 30 calories, by the way. So it's low calorie. It's the equivalent of 2 servings of fruits and vegetables. And the whole family can drink it. There's antioxidants in here. It boosts your immunity. Fieldofgreens.com from Brickhouse Nutrition. We thank them so much for the support. And if you want, guys, I will be glad to send you some field of greens. You can try for yourself. Jeff, you need field of greens. I think you're chronological age.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I need to slow down, put the.

[Leo Laporte]

Brakes on who does it at our age, you know? Yeah, it's good. Let's take a look at the AI news. Paris Martineau. Jeff Jarvis. There is so much AI news. I'm kind of Curious what you so much AI news. You know, when we started this, there was. I thought, are we going to have enough to talk about every week? Holy cow. One of the things I thought was kind of interesting, there have been a spate of investments.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Can we talk about the circular Nvidia opening?

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I wasn't going to say circular, but you said the word the correct.

[Paris Martineau]

Way to describe it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it is so money to give to us.

[Leo Laporte]

Nvidia gave open a $100 billion. It's actually spread out over 10 years. But that's a lot of money to buy $100 billion worth of Nvidia chips, so. And by the way, we've been seeing this a lot this year with companies this kind of circular stuff. And I think there are some who say Financial Times says this is essentially a shell game, that there is no net gain or loss for either company. But it looks good on your balance sheet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can put it in your balance sheet.

[Paris Martineau]

The Wall Street Journal broke it down like this. OpenAI will use the cash from Nvidia's investments to for new chips produced by Nvidia, a circular arrangement that allows the chip company to turn its balance sheet cash into new revenue. Such circular arrangements are common in the AI world. Wall Street Journal writes and have raised questions about the extent to which new sales in this industry reflect genuine market demand versus capital recycled within the industry itself. Which I think is where it all that is what it all boils down to. It's like, is this another major foot in the gas that is fueling kind of this hype cyc and how do we think about this industry in this market when you have all these different kind of properties boosting it up, like what is. How do we separate the real from the fake here? And it gets difficult when you have things like this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not just Nvidia and OpenAI. Oracle did exactly the same thing and.

[Paris Martineau]

They got the biggest stock boom they've seen in like three decades.

[Leo Laporte]

So it paid for itself, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. Well, it allowed the Ellisons to then turn around. According to Oliver Darcy's media podcast, the increase in Oracle stock was double the price they're going to pay to get Warner Brothers Discovery and thus cnn.

[Leo Laporte]

So the network is free.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Messing with democracy is free.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man. OpenAI has teamed with Oracle and SoftBank to build five, count them, five new Stargate data centers. Seven gigawatts of power.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I got a quick question for you there, Leo. I can't remember who asked it on the socials this week, but Somebody said, when did we start measuring compute in gigawatts?

[Leo Laporte]

When it started using so much power, I guess because it isn't a normal way to measure it for sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How would. Was it flops? How would you measure?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In fact, for AI, we often use tops, which is trillions of operations per second. But I guess these network operations centers, these AI centers, these. They're all big GPU farms, basically.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And maybe it's easier to measure it in the massive amount of power it's using.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did I, Did I give you the number for the, for the calculator? For the Texas OpenAI that they're building, they're going to have. If you look at how many transistors, there's 280 billion transistors on a blackmail chip.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're going to have 112, quadrillion transistors.

[Leo Laporte]

See, this is why you say instead 4.5 gigawatts. That's the Abilene Stargate facility they're already building. These are new sites. Shackelford County, Texas. Dona Ana County, New Mexico.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's the next question. They need water. Why are they being put in dry places?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a very simple answer to that. Tax breaks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's a shameful thing. I mean, the state of Arizona is giving these companies massive tax breaks, but they are basically, how can I say this, Borrowing their water from the Colorado river and depriving people upstream and downstream, I should say, of the water and the power. I mean, this is crazy. Some of this is driven by the administration, which likes those big numbers. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg leaned in to the president and said, 600 billion. Is that the number you wanted me to say? He likes those big, round, large numbers. And of course, the president did in fact announce the initiative, the Stargate initiative, the day he walked into the White House. Stargate will be. Is an umbrella name. It's kind of unclear what Stargate is used to refer to all of OpenAI's data center projects except those developed with Microsoft. So the Abilene site is owned and operated by oracle, I think. $30 billion.

[Paris Martineau]

I was going to say. Aren't there some of the things that fall into the Stargate label that have been announced but have yet to materialize in any real form? That's different than this, what we just discussed? Yes, those ones are materializing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, well, they say they are materializing.

[Paris Martineau]

Question mark. Asterisk.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Parenthesis.

[Paris Martineau]

Parenthesis.

[Leo Laporte]

Sam Altman said something about gigawatts today. What was it like what did he say it was? He said our vision is simple. This is from his piece on a. Oh, I just closed it. Darn it. There's a bug in the comment browser that when I try to zoom in on text.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're using Comet.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I thought I'd try it. There's a bug, though, when I zoom in on text, it crashes it, so I have to use the. Yeah, well. And I zoom in on text all the time for the show because it's easier to read. So this is the. The blog post from yesterday from Sam Altman titled Abundant Intelligence.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

He says that's just a combination of.

[Paris Martineau]

Buzzwords I don't need.

[Leo Laporte]

If AI stays on the trajectory, we think it will, by the way.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, already off to a crazy start.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. We even kind of referred to this with Stephen, that we're kind of plateauing, I think, a little bit. And the expectations for AI seem to have been plat anyway, but not in Sam Altman's mind. He says amazing things will be possible. Maybe. And this is the number I was looking for. With 10 gigawatts of computer, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. Maybe.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe if we actually focus any of the efforts on it. But instead, that's not going to make us a lot of money right now. Instead, we're going to figure out how to get the chat bot to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Your therapist, your sex buddy, or with 10 gigawatts. I know, and I know I went there. With 10 gigawatts of compute, AI, Sam writes, can figure out how to provide customized tutoring to every student on Earth. He says if we're. So, that's one, that's another 10. So we got 10 and 10, that's 20 total. He says if we're limited by compute, we're going to have to choose which one do you want to solve cancer or ignorance? Or do you want to tutor every student on Earth? No one wants to make that choice. No one wants to make that choice. So let's go build.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Actually, I think we all want to cure cancer. I think that's the choice we would all take.

[Leo Laporte]

Cure cancer. Really, Sam, that is probably best.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Somebody who's had it twice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. I think we're all in cancer's waiting room just waiting for the doctor to come to the door and say, leo. Is there a Leo here? This is the clincher. Our vision is simple, says Sam Altman. We want to create a factory. A factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. Every week. Jesus. The Execution of this will be extremely difficult.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We don't have lots of money.

[Leo Laporte]

It will take us years to get to this milestone. It will require innovation at every level of the stack, from chips to power to building to robotics. But we have been hard at work on this and we believe it's possible. It will be the coolest and most important infrastructure product ever. It'll be cool. Cool. We're particularly excited to build this in the us although. Oh, let's point out, a lot of this is going to happen in the Middle East.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. They also don't have a lot of water.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Why? Listen, I know we've talked about this before, but why do they keep building the things that need to be cold in the hot places? I know it's because. I know logically it's because tax breaks and they have a lot of land where people don't want to live, but it's like, come on, guys, why don't go.

[Leo Laporte]

Now we know the strategy. Oracle. Oracle's deal with OpenAI is for 10 gigawatts of data center capacity. Nvidia is putting 100 billion in OpenAI. The initial build out will be 4 to 5 million Nvidia GPUs. The chip maker will make those investments though, spread out progressively as each gigawatt is deployed. We're talking more like a gigawatt a year than a gigawatt a week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But. So, so, Leo, I've been thinking about this. We talk about the scale for scale's sake thing a lot. And, and I had this discussion with Jason earlier today. I'm studying right now, researching the early history of radio. And when Marconi was sent, it was, was doing sparks that could then be detected elsewhere. The sparks were, were damped signals. They, they went out on every, every, every frequency there was. There was no way to tune. They didn't know how to tune, they didn't know Synthete yet. So the only way that they could go farther was more power and so, and bigger antennas.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny, my radio era, you would always talk about how many watts that's true. The radio station could transmit it. Yeah. When I worked at the 50,000 watt clear channel KFI in Los Angeles, that's as good as you could get. 50,000 watts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And Clear channel meant that there was no one else on that frequency anywhere in the United States, which means you own that frequency. And theoretically, if the propagation is correct, you could, you could, you could bounce all over the world. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, so they bought ever bigger dynamos, ever bigger power, until they Learned how to tune. And then it became a whole different thing. And it just strikes me that, that these guys don't know how their thing operates. So the only thing they know to do is to throw more power. More power, more power because they don't know how to tune it. They don't know how to that next level of making it work in a different way. And so we're going to throw, as we talked about with Karen Howe, we're going to throw just ungodly amounts of money behind one philosophy, which is more gigawatts, more gigawatts. More gigawatts. Surely once we do that, we'll cure cancer. We don't know how, but it'll just happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the counterargument. Please, we don't know if it won't work.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go ahead, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but there's also no, like, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

One, there's evidence that it does work. Wait a minute.

[Paris Martineau]

There is evidence that it does as an argument for this, but also it's worked so far. Weird. No, we're doing, are not, we're not investing all of this time, money and resources into AI powered endeavors to cure cancer. We're investing all this time, money and resources primarily into commercial chat bots and enterprise products and siphoning, as we talked about with Karen Howe, siphoning resources and brainpower away from the fields of AI research that are most applicable to medical breakthroughs.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so you say.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I keep, I keep saying this but like if, if open AI cures cancer, they will have the goodwill of the people forever and they could do whatever they want.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's why the VCs are investing. You know, there is this and, and, and to be fair, there's sort of evidence that throwing more, I mean, that's what's gone on so far. There's evidence that what throwing more so far, throwing more compute at AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This goes, this goes to the, the FT says that companies keep talking about AI but they can't really explain the upsides, that it can't really get to the results.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll know when we get there. For crying out loud. You guys act like we're driving to Las Vegas.

[Paris Martineau]

Like there should be some more reasoning for giving like a handful of here's the reason. All the money in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the reasoning. We were at chat GB to 2.5, if you remember using that garbage. Hot trash. It just was nuts. Then all of a sudden, by making bigger models, we got to ChatGPT 3.5 and it was suddenly a Quantum leap in the capabilities of the AI. And that was when OpenAI and Karen Howe talks about this, came up with their, you know, the law, OpenAI Law of Scaling, which is, you know, throw more compute at it. Remember the famous, what was it? The bitter lesson article that we talked about which said basically you don't have to make better models, you just have to throw more computer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You also have. We talked about Yann Lecun last week saying stop with the ll says that.

[Leo Laporte]

But the evidence is not in his favor. This is his thought. But the, but the evidence so far, how long it took.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I also just studied how long it took to invent the transistor and they focused on it and they didn't say we have the first clumsy transistor, we're going to make a billion of them. No, they made it better. They got to a point where they knew that it was scalable and they knew that it was something worth doing. I'm going to do the thing you hate and ask you to go to a line, line 30 yet?

[Leo Laporte]

Not yet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, okay, but the point is that there's, there's economic money here that says that they're going to be, According to Bain, $800 billion revenue shortfall in this all made up.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know. We don't know. I'll give you the point. I am arguing this a little more strongly than I actually believe. But I, but I think it' important to make this argument for the warning. All of you know, we don't know what's. We don't know. Yann Lecun doesn't know. No one doesn't know. But, but the evidence has been that the. We keep building these bigger models and they keep getting better. Now, Martin Piers in the Information yesterday wrote a piece responding to Sam Altman which is can we afford AI? Which addresses this exact issue. And he says countless news reports cite businesses who say they've yet to see enough benefit in AI to pay for it. The Information reported last week Microsoft having a hard time persuading its customers that AI features in Office were worth the price. And he also cites that Financial Times argument article that says big companies find it difficult to explain AI's value. I don't think though that, that, I mean, let's not be nervous. Nellie's here with lack of resolve guarantees failure. Why don't we throw all our resources at this? All the evidence is it works.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no. Define works. Define works.

[Leo Laporte]

Compare chat TB2.5 to the latest models and I think it works pretty well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Works for madness works at economic value. That's the, that's what's missing here. We see a lot. I was on a World Economic Forum. I don't get invited to Davos anymore, but I get on the, on the, on the zoom calls. So I was on a call this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Come to Switzerland, but you can call us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. So I was on a call this week and one of the executives there said, oh, we're seeing real business efforts, business benefit. I said, okay, I'm really eager to hear more. And I said to the forum, you should be gathering those receipts because I pointed out what Bain said and what the FT said and what the Deutsche bank just said. And I think there's a real crash of reality hitting unless we start to see arguments that include receipts for what the economic benefits are. So far, I'm not saying Leo is going to be perfect.

[Steven Levy]

I'm not saying you're like everything the.

[Leo Laporte]

People who said when John F. Kennedy said, In 10 years, before this decade is out, we will put a man on the moon. You're like the people said, yeah, but why? What's the benefit?

[Paris Martineau]

Tang I. Tang, Tang.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We got Tang out of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Beating the Russians. Ballpoint pens that would write in upside down.

[Benito Gonzalez]

And the Cold War.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, what's the downfall?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the end of humanities and universities and everything became stem.

[Paris Martineau]

Mit. There was a really interesting study out of MIT this week that you probably saw picked up because there was a Harvard Business Review piece highlighting a takeaway from it which was related to work.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Slop, which is a great word, by the way.

[Paris Martineau]

It's great. They basically, they reviewed like hundreds of publicly disclosed AI initiatives, interviewed representatives from 52 organizations, interviewed hundreds of senior leaders across AI companies and others and found that that Jenny is flooding a lot of companies that use it with low value work slop. Which means like I generated drafts, decks, tickets, notes. So output ostensibly explodes, but business value doesn't because despite widespread adoption, a lot of the firms are not seeing measurable ROI improvements from Jenny I. Because they're scaling activity, but the outcomes are not scaling the same pace because people have to spend a lot of time double and triple checking and correcting these and kind of it's. I think this is part of what we need to think about when we think about what AI is providing to our society. Because right now a lot of the most obvious benefits are a bit more complicated.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you are nattering nabobs of negativism, which.

[Paris Martineau]

No, sir.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yes. I thought you'd recognize what happened to the Vice President who Said that, you know, sometimes people could take $50,000 bags of cash and get in trouble, sometimes not. And it really. It just depends. It just depends on the times. On the times. My point is what if. What if, you know, it's true that scaling produces results. The evidence is it has been producing results. And we say, oh, yeah, well, never mind. And we miss out on that cure for cancer which could be just around the corner.

[Paris Martineau]

See that 0% chance that at this current stage that we're going to stop invest. We, the royal. We are going to stop investing money into AI that is happening.

[Leo Laporte]

So your defense is my argument will fail.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So are there other investments that may be wiser as well?

[Paris Martineau]

At the same time, I just think that my argument for this has always been no matter what technology you're talking about, you could actually have computer. Only about their development. And I. My argument would be it seems unwise to bet everything on one very.

[Leo Laporte]

Are we betting everything, though? Are we really betting?

[Paris Martineau]

We're betting the vast, vast majority of venture capital and like just general resources available in our society. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Alibaba. The new QN models are remarkable models, especially for AI coding. And these are, to my knowledge, models that are made much less expensively.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there are. I don't think. Look, there's opportunity in a variety of areas and I think there are certainly people who say, you know, what if. Could we do this without a gigawatt a week of power? And I think those people are still working.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo, there's a chart at line 114 I would love for you to share.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this the one you wanted before? I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is bake. Yeah. And. And it's.

[Leo Laporte]

You trust Bain.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. Well, they're a little better. McKenzie.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not saying anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I know, but, but it's. But it's. This is one interesting that I think that really will strike. They. They looked at the training compute in.

[Leo Laporte]

Flops, floating operations per second. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Compute demand growth is more than double Moore's Law, which I found fascinating.

[Leo Laporte]

That was kind of the OpenAI insight is that that was their new law replaced Moore's Law.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, but, but it's demand. It's not supply, it's demand. So compute demand growth is four and a half times every year, whereas Moore's Law is two times every two years. So, you know, it used to be we got better radios and better computers and better cars and better everything because of Moore's Law.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The higher compute at the same or lower cost gave us more functionality. That's what's killed here is not because Moore's Law is dead. It's because they're outpacing it so much. Their hunger for the compute, for the gigawatts is so huge. And that's why Bain said we're going to be in an $800 billion shortfall in 2030. And so if you're going to be, and if it's worth the investment to society, okay, but by then you better have some more receipts and justification for that investment. I would say.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I would say that people are spending the money, get to decide whether they feel like it's worth it. Right. It's not my money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In an oligarchy, it does. But maybe if we had a fair taxation system. But that's a different topic.

[Benito Gonzalez]

There's also one maybe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Maybe if we were.

[Benito Gonzalez]

That new technologies almost always first are used as weapons. So, I mean, there's that really.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, so wait, wait, wait, wait.

[Jeff Jarvis]

NATO, Really?

[Leo Laporte]

I think military weapons that can do.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Things, that can be weaponized research is often.

[Leo Laporte]

The Internet came out of military research. I think military research.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Navy had a big role in radio.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, okay, atomic bomb. But that's because. I'll tell you why that is. That's because governments tend to invest in defense.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes. Hence, it's the most profitable branch of this.

[Leo Laporte]

And government has more money, or until recently, has had more money to invest in R D and pure R and D than anybody else. So the R D budget has gone towards the weapons of mass.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, they still have money to spend on weapons of defense. They're just not spending it. They're unwisely spending.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, wouldn't you prefer that they spent the money on AI instead of bigger bombs?

[Jeff Jarvis]

More drones, Leo, Forget the bigger bots. Now it's all drones. Drones. Drones. What's one word?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Palantir.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, as you know, I have definitely qualms about. Hey, AI is used. Being used. I just saw that Llama Meta's AI system has been approved for use by federal agencies. What could possibly, possibly go wrong? This is not, by the way, far from the best AI model out there. But as you know, Google and OpenAI have been giving their AIs to government for a buck a year. Both of them better than Grok. I'm sure Grok's next.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why isn't it already there? I thought he already did a deal.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, Doge with Grok. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. The GSA has also signed, by the way. The gsa, which is the government agency that has been so depleted by DOGE that they're now trying to rehire some of those employees. They signed off in recent months on AI tools from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. All of those companies agreeing to sell their products at steep discounts and to meet the government's security requirements. So LLAMA is just the latest in the batch. I think that you're right. There's some places I don't want to see AI used, but I really think it's worth spending the money if we've got it. If we don't have it, we don't have it. That was the Bain study was saying it's going to cost half a trillion dollars a year and we don't have it. And if that's the case, then it won't happen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The other thing that's interesting is one of these stories said that basically all of this spending is what's preventing us from right now being in a recession. Well, we're at a teetering edge that if these stories like the Bain and the Deutsche bank and the FT stories start to stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop peeing in my Cheerios, guys. I got a 401k to maintain here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Same here.

[Leo Laporte]

I really. I often wonder whether I should just get out of the stock market and just hold gold. But then I think, well.

[Paris Martineau]

Gotta invest.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what I think. I think, what the hell.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I have. My wife gets nervous about cash and I cashed out some stuff. So I cashed out. I've got one mutual fund that's obviously filled with tech stuff because it's the hot stuff. And, and I took some off the table and my broker put it in a bond where I'm making some decent returns.

[Leo Laporte]

Less than inflation, but okay, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But then I looked at what I would have made in that mutual fund.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't do that. Yeah, yeah, no, I've stayed. I don't, I don't. I only own index funds, but I've stayed in the index funds because you know what? If I have to work until I'm 104, so be it. I like my job, but, you know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What episode number will we be that?

[Leo Laporte]

Ask AI. China's Deep Seek says that its best AI model costs $294,000 to train.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is where I have some hope.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, or they're lying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's quite possible.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the R1.

[Paris Martineau]

Everyone could always be lying. I think this is something really important to consider.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

This is in a peer reviewed article in Nature published on Wednesday.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Deep seeks release of what it said were lower cost AI systems in January caused a, as you may remember, a plummet in the valuation of Nvidia and other tech stocks. They've since recovered, of course. The Nature article, which listed the company founder Liangwenfeng as one of the co authors, said Deepseek's reasoning focused R1 model used 512 Nvidia H800 chips. This is new information. We didn't have this before and it cost, as I said, less than $300,000 to train. Meanwhile, Sam Altman said that his foundation models cost much more than $100 million each. Now, incidentally, China has decided not to buy any more chips from Nvidia. Yeah, so that's over. The real question is whether Hyundai and other companies that are selling to China can develop chips to compete. So far, no. I, you know, I think it would be a mistake for us to push the pause button at this point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not pushing the pause at all. I'm pushing just a different mix, which I think Paris, you would say too well.

[Leo Laporte]

But who are you pushing that to? The people who are spending the money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Research. Well, I would like to. We've, we've, we're shutting off research. That's what disturbs me most. Because God knows what. We don't know yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Taking a break. More to come. You're watching intelligent machines or listening. Either way, there's not much to see here except my lovely rainbow colored. It is very nice shirt. This is a very colorful studio. Is it, is it, is it gaudy, do you think? Is it gauche? Am I. Should I find more?

[Paris Martineau]

Dude, it's not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like I'm competing with all those YouTubers. I gotta, I gotta give you something.

[Paris Martineau]

You need to have a setup. Kind of like the people do on those tick tock lives where it's like a woman sleeping and if you donate some coins to the chat, it like drops an object on them while they're sleeping. Live. You kind of incorporate that where people could pay you five or ten dollars to like slime you or something.

[Leo Laporte]

I know I shouldn't probably tell you this, but your predecessor on this show, Stacy Higginbotham, had a design for a punching bag glove that would hit me in the head if people paid enough money.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I think that's really a good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

That one or Stacy, address the primary.

[Paris Martineau]

Issue issue of sliming you, which is that it would mess up your makeup. So you Know, it could just give it a little sock to the face.

[Leo Laporte]

I powder my nose a little bit more here.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I mean, you can absolutely monetize the boxes above on your. On your left and right. That's like.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, someone.

[Leo Laporte]

Learned. It's boxing the ears. You go like this to the guy's ears. Tai Chi is 20 bucks to put.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm with. I'm with idiot. And then like, have like a little, like one of those T shirts with a little arrow.

[Leo Laporte]

I keep having to turn off the Apple camera reactions on this machine because it's.

[Paris Martineau]

I've never had mine turned on. I don't know how to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Mine keeps turning on for some reason, which is extremely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For me. Zoom just does it. I guess. It's not doing it right now.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It depends how we're producing the show. If we're doing it through restream, it's not actually your computer that's doing it. It's the computer in the cloud that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Doing it when you do it. You see?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Yeah. Because I was having that problem yesterday, and I was very concerned about it.

[Benito Gonzalez]

So we need to turn it off in the cloud. That's what we need to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Turn it off in the cloud. Okay. By the way, Poco with a k has asked AI and our Intelligent Machine show, when I am 103, which will be September 24, 2063, will be episode 2737.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm ready Paris be.

[Leo Laporte]

Then if I keep drinking the field of greens, I might actually make it. I might actually make. Is my goal to keep doing this as long as I can. Now Lisa wants me to do a daily news show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That again.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what that means.

[Paris Martineau]

Are you gonna do TI tv?

[Leo Laporte]

It'll be. No, not titv. No. We'll leave that to the information we're thinking of. We have the name Tech News Today, which is tnt. And I kind of like that, so we'll probably keep that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You were. You were guttered that in New York City, that was. That was the plan.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the idea. And the reason for that still holds, which is I'm on the west coast, so when I get up at 8am or 7am it's already midday for you guys. So I'm going to have to get up at 3am Like a baker to write. To write news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Better make the donuts.

[Leo Laporte]

I gotta make the donuts so that I can record at 4am and get it out at 7am for you. East Coasters. So I might as well move to New York to do this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, good Come. Come to the universe.

[Leo Laporte]

You got an extra room there, Jeff. And the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, we do.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I sleep in the library there? I like the books.

[Benito Gonzalez]

You can come over here. It's only going to be 6:00pm.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, that's the solution. Yeah. I do it in the night in the Philippines and it comes out in the morning.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo's going to bug with you. But, you know, just what you wanted.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a little nervous. The idea of writing and it'll be short, a five or ten minute daily show is kind of daunting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We'll just have AI write it for you.

[Leo Laporte]

No, this is. So this is going to be the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You love AI. What's wrong with that?

[Leo Laporte]

No, because the other reason I love AI is it makes us more valuable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is going to be humanity.

[Leo Laporte]

Is the differentiator handcrafted? Darren says I should move with him to SID in Sydney. And in Sydney it's already yesterday or tomorrow. I don't know what it is.

[Paris Martineau]

It's not now, it's not today. Whatever it is. Ladies and gentlemen, for the 2737th show, I will be 66. I would still be younger than you guys.

[Leo Laporte]

That's depressing.

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're enjoying that a little too much, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

She's laughing. But you will then have more sympathy for us today. By then we'll be so old.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'll take a while. But you'll get there.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you'll get there eventually. Only for hard life lessons.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa's a little younger than me and she keeps saying things like, oh, now I know why you were so tired. Oh, gosh, now I know why I couldn't get you to go out dancing. Yeah, now that you're my age. When I. Anyway, some years ago. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler. You know, Zscaler, it is actually very appropriate for the conversation we were just having. ZSCALER understands that AI is a blessing and a curse to business. It's good news and bad news. With AI in the hands of bad guys, of course it means more vicious and aggressive attacks, more effective attacks, more efficient attacks. But in the hands of the good guys, in the hands of your business, it means better business innovation and efficiency. Let me talk about the bad guys first. Phishing attacks over encrypted channels have increased by 34.1%. And that's primarily fueled by the use of generative AI tools. These phishing emails we used to remember, we used to be able to say, oh, if it's an ungrammatical or, you know, this is obviously efficient. Nowadays, they're perfect because they're using AI to generate them. So this is a real problem. On the other hand, organizations in all industries, from small to large are leveraging AI to increase employee productivity with public AI. For engineers with coding assistance, it's kind of amazing what they can do. Marketers are using IT for writing. Finance is using AI to create spreadsheet formulas and much more effective spreadsheets. Companies are automating workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. They're embedding AI into applications and services that are both customer facing and partner facing. Ultimately, AI is helping many businesses move faster in the market and gain competitive advantage. But there is an issue, of course, with the public and private AI that you're using in your company. We've got to really seriously think about how you protect the private and public use of AI. You don't want to accidentally exfiltrate proprietary customer information. You want to make sure you use AI responsibly, intelligently, privately. And of course, companies have to think about how they defend against these AI powered attacks. Ask Stephen Harrison, he's the CISO right on the front line at MGM Resorts International. And they use Zscalers. So that's, that's pretty good news. This is the quote. We hit zero trust segmentation across our workforce in record time and the day to day maintenance of the solution with data loss protection, with insights into our applications. These were really quick and easy wins from our perspective. MGM International loves Zscaler. You know who wishes they were using Zscaler? I'm going to ad lib a little bit from the copy because it's not in here, but it's ripped from the headlines. Jaguar announced that they still can't get the production line back on. Three weeks later. They'd hoped to reopen the day. You can't. And you know why we were talking about it on Sunday. You know why? Because they didn't have zero trust. They didn't have segmentation. They had a flat network and once the bad guys got in, they could go anywhere. And that is a nightmare for any business. Problem is, we've been depending on perimeter defenses, you know, traditional firewalls, things like that. And, and the hope is, well, if you know they're good enough, nobody will get in. We don't have to worry. But they do get in. For one thing, you've got to create VPNs, right, so that your employees can get in. That means now suddenly you have public facing IPs. That's just you hanging out on the Internet, exposing your attack surface. And hackers with AI, they are good, you don't stand a chance. That's why you need a modern approach. That's Zscaler's comprehensive Zero trust. This is so important. Zero trust architecture in AI, Zero trust means you're segmented out. Even if your perimeter defenses are penetrated, bad guys can't do anything, they can't move laterally in your network, they can't use your apps against you. Plus zero trust protects you against zero days unknown attacks, supply chain attacks. So you get that. And with Zscalers AI, you ensure safe public AI productivity. It protects the integrity of private AI. So you're stopping AI powered attacks. You're protecting your privacy, protecting your security. This is the way to thrive in the AI era With Zscaler, Zero Trust plus AI to stay ahead of the competition and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn [e-mail] security that zscaler.com security we thank Zscaler so much for supporting intelligent machines. Interesting New York Times piece. You know, we last week and I'm sorry you guys couldn't be here, but it was a fascinating thing to watch this meta event. Oh, you're muted there, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was apologizing for deserting.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, no, no. You were on CNN for an hour. I could. I was.

[Paris Martineau]

So I have no excuse. I went to bed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you ate. That's all right.

[Paris Martineau]

I ate dinner and went to bed. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you once, you know the massive demo throughout the entire meta thing, did you kind of feel bad?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I felt somewhat bad that I wasn't there, but I also don't think I would have been particularly useful.

[Leo Laporte]

It was good. Anthony joined me. We had a lot of fun. You know, it started off really cool with Mark Zuckerberg sitting in the green room reading his script. And then he gets up, he puts on these glasses, which we don't know yet. They haven't announced anything. And suddenly you're seeing what he's seeing. You're seeing a screen in the lower right. You're seeing as he goes through the door and there suddenly he's on the stage and it's live. He's doing this live. That was the last time they worked. My God, literally the last time they worked. So the first demo they go to is with the updated Ray Bans. They did three announcements. They had updated Oakley's, updated Ray Bans and these new Ray ban display, Meta. Ray Ban display glasses. So. So the first thing he did, he had a TikTok chef on. Not my son, but another TikTok chef on. And he was going to make some sort of soy sauce marinade. And he's got the glasses on and he says, hey, Meta. Which is what you do to wake up the glasses. And she says, hi. And he says, I'm going to make this. Look at the ingredients I have. And she says, oh, looks like you got soy sauce. Yeah, that was one of like eight ingredients. Soy. Yeah, yeah, I got soy sauce. Help me make this marinade. Here's you know, what recipe. And she said, now that you've mixed all the ingredients together. And he says, no, no, no, no, wait, no, back up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's back up. Control Z. Control Z glasses. Control Z.

[Leo Laporte]

Three times. Finally, like Mark says, oh, well, never mind. And he blames the WI fi, which is not true. It's what they always. It's what Apple used to do. Oh, it's the WI fi. It turns out later Meta said, well, the problem was that these glasses were attached to development small development server. And as soon as he said, hey, Meta, it was broadcast throughout the auditorium. And all the geeks in the auditorium who had meta glasses, their glasses woke up and they all hit the same dev server at the same time. I don't know if that's true, but they said, we ddosed ourselves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, that's pretty funny.

[Paris Martineau]

That is pretty great. I mean, of all the ways for something to fail. That is spectacular.

[Leo Laporte]

It was fairly spectacular then. And this is the picture that the New York Times published from the audience's perspective of. This is the teleprompter that Mark's looking at. It says, live demo dash dash. Good luck.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no. So somebody's calling him. And it turns out the glasses for some reason are going to sleep each time the call comes in, so he can't pick up. So they call again. They can't pick up, so they call again.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Four or five times. They try to pick up, never does. So the guy walks out on the stage and they try one more time. Still doesn't work. So there's another fail. I can't remember all the fails. Literally, they never worked as they were supposed to. Well, there was one kind of cool thing where Mark put on this. They call it a neural interface, but it's really just got sensors on it, this bracelet that lets you move your fingers and it senses the muscle movement.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's kind of like that thing that Paris found around your face, right? It senses enough to be able to decide.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you know, if you train it right, I guess it's okay. This is the New York Times reporter Eli Tan trying out the display. Mark was pretty impressive. He was able, looked like able to type, although it had autocomplete so he would kind of write. It looked like almost writing a few words. And then it would guess and he'd say, yeah, that's good. So he was able to text. The reporter said it occasionally failed to register finger swipes which is pretty much what the demo looked like. It was really rocky going the whole time and then, and then Diplo shows up and you know, the DJ and that's I guess to give it some star power and that. I don't think that demo worked. They were trying to like play music. I guess he got the music playing so maybe I'd give him a check Mark for that. He said play some music and it played some music. How impressive. They had a completely meaningless interview with James Cameron to plug the new Avatar movie that didn't have anything to do with anything. And then finally Mark and I could tell they had planned this. This was gonna be really great. They were gonna end it and Mark's gonna go for a run. And some jock comes out all ready to run and Mark puts on his glasses. That jock puts on his glasses and we follow them out the door of the auditorium down in their. There's a bunch of other meta types wearing their glasses standing there expectantly. We're going to run with Mark. And you could tell that the whole point of this was you were going to get to see the run from Mark's point of view. They never got it working. So what we're seeing basically is we're, for some reason we're watching Mark. They had a golf cart with a camera. So he's just jogging after the. It never. It was. And I could tell Mark was like, just like he wasn't. He was as. He was as good natured as could be. But you could tell this was like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jensen Wong would have blown up.

[Paris Martineau]

There has to have been a huge blow up behind the scenes.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, God, somebody got fired. The next day I saw a report. I haven't been able to find it again, but I saw a report that the person responsible for the ability to make phone calls got fired. So you know, I'm still interested in the idea. The screen that they display is very bright. It's actually brighter than the iPhone screen. I think they said 6,000 nits the iPhone screen is 3,000 nits. They say it's cool because no one can see it. So they already. They know that there's a privacy issue. No one can tell you're looking at a screen because there's only 2% leakage. So even somebody standing across screen doesn't see the screen, but they do see the big cameras on your temples that are lit up bright red as you record. Now, the one advantage of the screen, I think, is when you're taking pictures with your new Meta Ray Ban displays, you can actually for the first time see what the camera is showing. So it helps you get a better picture or movie. So that's useful. There's a limitation because meta doesn't have a phone, as Steve Steven Levy was talking about earlier. They're kind of, if this were Apple, they'd have an iPhone. ATYP, they've had an ecosystem. Meta's got WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. So it's unclear.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what killed it for me. I might be interested in this, but then that's all I can get to is WhatsApp and Messenger.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, And Instagram, they had an Instagram icon. So great. You can look at Instagram reels while you're talking to people.

[Paris Martineau]

What a nightmare. It's like those subway surfer memes, but in real life.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I mean, I think he was hoping for an app development platform like the iPhone. One that didn't have any apps yet either.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that's the argument. A lot of people said, well, you know, this is the first one and it's early and there was some cool tech. Now. I was impressed. It's 800 bucks, which is a lot less than the Vision Pro. You can get demos right now at luxottica stores in many, you know, the. What do they call eyeglasses, et cetera or whatever. Luxottica owns all of the eyewear stores, so some of those limited. If you go to the website, you can sign up for a demo, which you probably should do before you buy. They will go on sale on the 30th.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Take it from somebody who has Google Glass still.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think there's the same issue wearing these around that people are more and more aware of the fact that you have cameras. Did you see this story? Did we talk about this last. Last week about the woman who was getting bikini wax and looked up and saw the waxer? Did we talk about this?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, right, Only briefly.

[Leo Laporte]

They had wearing Ray Ban Meta, by the way, the company, her employer said no, they weren't on well, that's.

[Paris Martineau]

I bet they did say that. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

New York Times concludes, all of this privacy stuff may not matter to Meta because it can keep. Afford to keep trying until it gets it right. Thanks to its online advertising business, the company made $18.3 billion in profit last quarter, even though it spent billions on Zuckerberg's other big passion that is not making much money yet. Artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg said on a recent podcast of his AI investments. If we end up misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars, I think that's going to be very unfortunate. But I think the risk, at least for a company like Meta is probably in not being aggressive enough.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See earlier discussion about scale.

[Leo Laporte]

Earlier discussion. Anyway, I don't think I'll buy these, not because of the poor demo, but I do think that they're. It's early days.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What. It's what you can get if you can't test out enough of the uses.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can't get directions and maps and stuff like that.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm still chastened from wearing that little AI thing around all the time.

[Paris Martineau]

I realize you should be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. People really don't like the idea that you might be recording at any moment.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People being rife.

[Leo Laporte]

People being.

[Paris Martineau]

Have you forgotten the parable of the glass hole?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. These aren't as obvious as the glass hole. They do light up red when recording.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, they should be. At least one benefit of the glass hole was that you knew that someone was recording you because they looked like a glass hole.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also. Meta is a little bit of a problem. Right. We don't, if it were came from Apple, maybe we would trust it more. But I don't, I don't really trust Meta.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the funny thing about some of these, these AI link ins that are coming out now is they want you to tie your Google stuff to it so it can give you added value to it. But I'm nervous about all that.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what Google thinks added value is? Ads.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, no, no, I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Eric Schmidt saying you're walking down the street and the, and the, and you walk by it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right, Right. From their perspective, from my perspective, added value is I can, I can look at your email and I can do things for you and I can, you know, I know what you're doing today, but I can get that out of competitive AIs only if I link them to my Google apps and the privacy and I don't want to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's, it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

By the way, Google already knows it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Just not just Google companies that do that. The B computer would only work with Gmail and Google Calendar. I see. I get stuff all the time and since I don't use Gmail or Google Calendar or Google Contacts, there's a lot of tools I'm interested in that I can't use because they don't work with my caldev. And by the way, the Fast Mail which I use for my Calendar and contacts uses a standard caldav and card dev, which is a standard. They could easily support it, but Google's so dominant they see no benefit addressing the Meta trust issue. Here's a story from the Guardian. Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting men. Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote the threads site.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't get how they were using that to promote in what way?

[Leo Laporte]

The children's images were used by Meta after their parents had posted them on Instagram. So they were taking your Instagram posts to mark their return to school. The parents were unaware that Meta's Instagram settings permitted it to do this. One mother even said my account is set to private. But the posts were automatically cross posting to threads publicly and she's upset. The posts of their children were highlighted to a stranger as suggested threads. The recipient told the Guardian the post felt deliberately provocative and exploitative of the children and the families involved. Father of a 13 year old who appeared in one of the posts said it was absolutely outrageous. The images were all of the schoolgirls in short skirts with bare legs or stockings. Meta, not what you want, knew what it was doing and you know this is a cautionary tale. Stop posting to Instagram if you want it to be private, even if you have a private account. Meta said that's just a recommendation tool. The images shared do not violate our policies and our back to school photos posted publicly by parents.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a good way to ruin any trust you might have had with parents.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. A 37 year old Instagram user from London received the posts and asked to remain anonymous. Said over several days I was repeatedly served Meta adverts for threads that exclusively featured parents images of their daughters in school uniforms revealing their names. Thank you Meta.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In this time of Epstein, can you read the room?

[Leo Laporte]

I, I, I really, I never post Instagram anymore or I mean I just, I feel like these, these sites are not your friend. Obviously in your generation, Paris, you probably, you don't have a choice, right?

[Paris Martineau]

You have to use Instagram, always be posting. I mean I know some people who don't use Instagram, but they're few. Kind of the way that I keep friends. I used to own. I used to be maniacal, but only having a private Instagram account. But I changed it when I was getting more public because I kind of got overwhelmed with a bunch of people I didn't know trying to add me. And I was like, well, I guess I'll just make it like a quasi.

[Leo Laporte]

Public and post with, you know, with that in mind.

[Paris Martineau]

With that in mind. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No, I love your posts. The. The. The posts you did of the soapbox derby. Those are great. Those are fun.

[Paris Martineau]

But yeah, it's. I always post the idea that the world is watching.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, parents of young girls, maybe you should do the same. It's sad because people really do want to share. Mark's not wrong that people want to connect. It's just that's. That's the wrong place to do it, I think. I don't know. There is nothing.

[Benito Gonzalez]

There's a lot of ego getting in the way here because he can just. You do Facebook and still be a billionaire.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I mean? That's right. That's why he says, I don't mind If I lose $100 billion on this moonshot. I get plenty more where that's coming from. Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

So it's ego at this point. He just wants to be the next chance.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's why we're talking with Stephen. That's why there is a concentration of this in the oligarchs, the people with lots of money. No one else can do it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When I was on the board of Nick Denton's company before Gawker and the crash in 2000 came, he had raised a bunch of money. I said, nick boy, best thing he could have done is raise a lot of money. He said, no, Jeff, you're completely wrong, as he tended to do. And he said it, let the CEO play with everything. And one of the smart board members with a wonderful name, Ricky Tata. I love that name.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like a Rudyard Kipling poem. You're a better man than I am, Ricky Tata.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Ricky insisted that a separate bank account be set up that you had to basically ask to get money out of it to do something good. And I think some scarcity of this goes back to the question, when you have all the money in the world, literally, you can spend it. When I worked at Time Income and I got an argument what system we were buying because I was doing boring things like that. And they said, basically, if we're. If we're timing and we're spending the most money on it. It must be the right thing to buy, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And there was no discipline. Yeah, right, exactly. So I think Zuckerberg has too much money.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you tried Hux?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I, I, this is what this is. We're going to have them on next week, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, are we? Is that set?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I saw it in the schedule.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good. I should probably look at the schedule once in a while.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So these are three people who were part of the original development team for NotebookLM whom I met when I, when I, Stephen Johnson, showed me Notebook Lm really smart. Obviously redundant to say that they were at Google, but they left and I worried at the time. Oh my God, what's that? I love Notebook lm. What's going to happen to it? Well, they've been developing tons of stuff at Notebook Lm doing a great job job, but at the same time, they have just released their new company. Is it Hux or Hukes?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm thinking it's, it's short for Huxley. Why would I think that that they're naming it after Aldous Huxley.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But why would.

[Leo Laporte]

Who wrote the Doors of Perception anyway? I don't know. What else would Hux be? Luke's? I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know. Hux AI.

[Leo Laporte]

So this, it's an app, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And basically is like Notebook lm. It gives you a podcast. Multi voices, by the way, not just two. Reading the news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You want, you want to hear mine?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Come on, come on. Oh, here we go.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, this music is really irritating. And it's the same on all of these. Yeah. Hey, Jeff, Good evening. It's a cloudy one out in Bernards. Hopefully you're staying comfortable as the day winds down.

[Paris Martineau]

Glad to see you popping in just after six.

[Leo Laporte]

Could you slow it down? I'm sorry, I can't.

[Paris Martineau]

What level of speed is that?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, boy two. Now we know how you read all these books.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's exactly how I do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, now I understand. I can't listen. Do you listen at high speed, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks for the feedback. We always appreciate hearing from you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was listening.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad to know our approach is work out for you. Let's get back to the news. All right, moving along and a few fresh twists in the art world. Perfect mix, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Let's head straight to today's news updates and see what's next on the horizon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's dive into the day's most intriguing.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why I want to do a daily news show written and delivered by a human being.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I think that that's neat.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's what else is making headlines before we wrap up this segment. It's ironic because when I saw this, my face fell because I thought, oh, this is exactly what I was thinking.

[Paris Martineau]

Data centers in the US with Oracle and SoftBank as part of the massive 500 billion dollar AI infrastructure push. They're aiming for nearly 7 gigawatts of capacity and over $400 billion invested. This all broke today, right? This all broke today.

[Leo Laporte]

Are expected to create 25,000 jobs and lock in American leadership in AI. That's a press release. So this is the, this is. The difference is we said, well, wait a minute, hold on, you know, let's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go into the, the details here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. And I think that that's, that's what I would try to do with the Daily show as well as I would only do a few stories, maybe two or three, but try to give you some perspective, not sentences. Me saying, why does it have to be the morning?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why can't it be the evening?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I just think that's the way people listen. They listen in the morning as they're getting ready, they're, they're preparing themselves for the day. The evening, I guess. I don't know. You like evening news? I guess we watch tv.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, just for your sake.

[Leo Laporte]

Just for my sake.

[Benito Gonzalez]

The problem is that evening news, like most people would probably listen to that the next day and it might be old news already by that time.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to be old. You know, Kagi has created a couple of new apps and I was pretty excited at first because one of them is a news app. And I thought, oh, you know, this is going to be great because I've already taken it off the front page of my. Because they say, you know, it's going to be apolitical and you get to choose the subjects and so forth. My problem is it doesn't update but once every like two or three days.

[Paris Martineau]

So actually it's taking a long time to read all that now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't. Anyway, actually this is updated now, so. But this morning it was, it was two days ago. They were saying like, you know, stuff that was just out of date. And I didn't think that. Yeah, okay, Trump sets $100,000 H1B application fee.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's old news.

[Leo Laporte]

That's old news. So I like the idea and, you know, maybe I'm gonna give them the feedback and maybe they will get it updating more, more quickly. It's pretty cool. You pick the subjects you want. I have. Here's the AI section. Now they don't read it to you. There's the Stargate story, which we did. Websites offer three AI creation tools. I don't know what that is. Alibaba, we talked about this QN3 model.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So when you go to a story, I'm now at the story about the Secret Service.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an AI summary, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

300 thing. Yeah. That is a summary.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like perplexity where it gives you the original sources, gives you a summary. I think this is an interesting product. Kind of hucks without the voices. So I guess Hux would be good if you, you know, you're driving and you, you know, you wanted it to be read to you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What Hux also promises is I didn't give it access to my calendar and my email. It would say Leo sent you another email reminding you to do what you promised to do, but you haven't done.

[Leo Laporte]

This is another one of it only works Gmail and Google Calendar. And that's why another problem I had. Although maybe you shouldn't tie it to your email. Email.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I'm a little iffy about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And also email would be privacy reasons.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It would also be inadequate. Right? Like because it would need to know your text chains. Also because if you move conversations between mediums, they won't know any about that.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm telling you, ecosystem is really important. And I think this is my reaction to the meta glasses as well. And this is why I think Apple has a leg up for people who are in the Apple ecosystem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And if you trust me and Google, same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're in Gmail, you know, then.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you're an Android phone, you're in Gmail, you're in Drive.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is why I don't use an Android phone. Because I don't want to be a living la vida Google so much. I trust Apple.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The water is fine, Leo. The water is fine.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not as smoothly integrated. Apple's really focused on that. But admittedly I'm a sheeple. I'm now stuck in the Apple ecosystem. And let's hope Apple's dedication to privacy is genuine.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say, Jeff, you our group chat for this podcast is the first group chat with an Android phone I've been in that isn't completely busted. I'm in another group chat with an Android phone and it is so broken. And I assume it's broken because it's is related to Android. But I. Because I haven't had this experience before and I had assumed it was fixed due to rcs. But that's my main.

[Leo Laporte]

I have had no trouble with rcs. In fact, I haven't had any problems since Apple put RCS on the. In the iPhone. It's been great. My daughter uses an Android phone. It's indistinguishable from Apple.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait a minute. Is RCS only a feature in the latest iOS Apple? Is that correct?

[Leo Laporte]

Are you way back on?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not, but some of my friends. Some of my friends are the people who aren't on Instagram and they have, like an old iPhone that's still like an iPhone. Little touch button.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And so that's probably it.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a setting you could go check in their essay, in their text message, in their messages settings.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. But I don't. I don't think they.

[Leo Laporte]

If they don't see it, they don't.

[Paris Martineau]

They don't have the updated iOS that.

[Leo Laporte]

Might be the problem. If. If everybody's up to date, it works pretty well, actually. We, the. The three of us, plus Benito and Anthony are in a group text. This works quite well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very busy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Benito even harassed Leo with the Craig theme.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It even worked better.

[Paris Martineau]

That made me cackle. It was. They mentioned. Someone mentioned Craig in our group chat, and within seconds, Bonito sent the Craig, Craig, Craig Newmark theme to the group chat, which I guess Resol bolted and it automatically playing on Anthony's phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you send that from an Android phone or an iOS phone?

[Paris Martineau]

Did you just keep that thing on you?

[Benito Gonzalez]

I sent it from Mac, actually. I was on my computer, so I just opened up messages and I dropped.

[Leo Laporte]

The file in because it's an MP3. Yeah. That's interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

It sounds beautiful in this version because you can hear all the human voices.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Much better than usual.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Did it autoplay for anybody else or just Anthony?

[Leo Laporte]

Did not auto play.

[Paris Martineau]

It did not auto play for me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it did for Anthony.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's very funny that Anthony had headphones in, was in like a.

[Leo Laporte]

Different room or something, and automatically heard Craig. That's why that is scary.

[Paris Martineau]

He's all around.

[Leo Laporte]

I want you to know, because of that, I showed real restraint. I was really ready to put some other sound effects in there. Then I thought, no, I'm not going to torture Anthony.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can share with you the MP3 of my call into Howard Stern this morning.

[Leo Laporte]

Morning. Why don't you hold that for a moment and that's next On Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau. Benito Gonzalez, our producer and technical director, also chiming in. It's great to have all of you on the show and all of you watching, especially our club members. Thank you. It's becoming more and more important. We made a big announcement today, which I will mention, as you may or may not know. You know, we've been doing our own ad sales for quite some time, I think. I think when we first started doing ads on Twit 15 years ago, we used a company called PodTrack. They were great. But ultimately we took all of our ad sales in house. And Lisa, in the last couple of years, has been doing it all on her own. We've had. She's had a little. I shouldn't say that because she's had a little help, but she's pretty much the main salesperson. We have decided to give Lisa a break. Is this appropriate to say, Lisa, we have decided to give you a break. And we have partnered with a company called Airwave. We have a strategic partnership. I can say this right. It's public now and they're going to do our ad sales going forward. So we're very excited about this because it means Lisa will not be working seven jobs anymore. She'll only be working six. So that's a big change for us. However, it's a little bit of a risk because no one sells Twit quite as well as Lisa. She's been really great with the ad sales. So we know we're taking a little bit of a chance. So that's why it's so important that you show your support for TWIT right now by joining Club twit. Yes, we are. We do have ads, but if you pay the 10 bucks a month to join the club, you won't hear them. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the discord. You get all the special programming we do just for club members. I think it's a really good deal and most importantly, it really supports what we do. So if you like the shows and you want to keep hearing them and you want them to expand, if you want that daily News show, this is how you vote. Twit TV Club Twit. Two weeks free trial. If you want their family members memberships, corporate memberships, but it really makes a big difference to us. Twitter, TV Club Twit and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And sponsors who want to still sponsor this show, where should they go?

[Leo Laporte]

What? Yeah, what should people do now? Should they still. They should still go to advertise? @twit tv. Where should they go at least if they want to sponsor the show. She stopped paying attention. I don't know. I don't know what's going.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She's already taken some time off as well.

[Leo Laporte]

She's taken. She's on the beach.

[Paris Martineau]

For us or any. Does this mean anything for us?

[Leo Laporte]

No, not at all. It'll look exactly the same.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're still going to do.

[Paris Martineau]

Will you still be doing in live ad reads or will they be okay? So I will have a break to go eat a spoonful of peanut butter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How does this affect carrots?

[Paris Martineau]

That's what I'm always asking with everything is how does this affect me?

[Leo Laporte]

There will be. We'll continue to do what we have been doing when we don't sell it ads, which is those ad avails sometimes go to direct ad, what they call direct ad insertion, which is a third party ad that gets inserted on the fly as you download so you don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hear Leo's delightful voice.

[Leo Laporte]

Some of them will be my voice, some of them won't be. Yeah, and then we still hope. I'll tell you what, if you don't see me doing the ads, join the club.

[Paris Martineau]

Join the club so that I can have a single scoop of peanut butter while Leo reads the ads.

[Leo Laporte]

AdvertiseWit TV Lisa has confirmed that very important. Oh, I know why there's a delay. She's listening. She's not listening in the room, she's listening to the stream. So she just now heard us.

[Paris Martineau]

Are we on an ABC Kimmel esque delay so someone can come in and cut the stream if we see something here?

[Leo Laporte]

You're our Guillermo. That's right. Advertise at TWiT TV. Same as always. We love having you approach and say I'd like to. That's what. Actually it's so funny. This is what happened to our sponsor for this segment on the show, Pantheon. They said, we'd like to buy ads. And we said, well, as a matter of fact, did you know we use you? I guess the people buying the ads had no idea. But Pantheon has been vital to our workflow for some time now. You know, it's vital to your workflow too. Your website is your number one revenue channel. But you know, when your website's slow, people don't stick around. Or if it's down or it's stuck in a bottleneck, your website could be your number one liability. That's why we're so happy to be with Pantheon. Pantheon keeps your site fast, secure and always on that means better SEO, more conversions, no lost sales from downtime. It's not just a business win, it's a developer win, too. Ask our web engineer, Patrick Delahanty. He loves Pantheon. Your team gets automated workflows, isolated test environments, and zero downtime deployments. So for Patrick, that's no more late night fire drills. No more, well, it works on my machine. Headaches. Just pure innovation. We love Pantheon so much. It's not just our website. It's our entire backend, our entire workflow. Running on headless Drupal, running on Pantheon servers. That's why it's more important than just a website being down. We wouldn't be able to publish. We wouldn't be able to do anything we do without Pantheon. And they are so reliable. You'll love Pantheon. Marketing can launch a landing page without waiting for a release cycle. It's just modern developers can push features with total confidence. Your customers, they just see a site that works 24 7. Pantheon powers, Drupal and WordPress. Sites that reach over a billion unique monthly visitors. Visit Pantheon IO and make your website your unfair advantage. Pantheon, where the web just works. He says the number. Patrick's on the. In the discord. He said the number of times our site on Pantheon has gone down and I've had to fix it in the middle of the night. 0. 0. Yeah. We love Pantheon. So it's kind of ironic. They said, hey, can we buy some advertising? We said, yes, gladly. We love pantheon. Pantheon.com IO you were on Howard Stern.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When, this morning?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You know, I could play it from my computer here.

[Paris Martineau]

Howard Stern Weekly lately?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was on last week. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Does he know you? Yeah. Is it like. Are you, like, some stranger calling in.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, he's been in the studio.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. I talked about my prostate in the studio.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I'd recommend again.

[Paris Martineau]

We talked about his public park and Howard's private parts, famously.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's. I guess I have to log into SoundCloud.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I don't know how much of this we should be playing.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it Filzit? Oh, because you think Howard show.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I think they're probably going to come after that, Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Give us a summary.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was Calling by Kimmel, and Kimmel was brilliant. Last night, I think Howard.

[Leo Laporte]

I was very proud of Howard. Howard said, I am canceling my Disney subscription, which, by the way, carries a huge amount of weight. I imagine millions of his listeners did the same.

[Jeff Jarvis]

His lead.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And is he gonna renew? Now, here's the question. Are you gonna renew your subscription now?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That they brought Kimmel back. He said he would. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Reward them in the same way you punished them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I even said, when I was on, I said that unlike Mel Karmazin, who stood by Howard back in his fcc.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man. Howard had plenty of trustees.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. That's what's forgotten. Here is the fcc. He's been bad before. I wrote a Nation cover story called F by the FCC about Howard. He was very appreciative of what I had written in the day. It was really touching that he felt like he was so alone and that I would write things that were in support.

[Leo Laporte]

And his book Private Parts was really good, describing his troubles because he was a shock jock in the year, you know, when shock jocks just began and he did some pretty offensive things. But that's a perfect test of free speech. The difference is the FCC does, you know, very famously control the public airwaves, and you can't say the seven dirty words, George Carlin's words. He's on satellite now, which means he can do anything he wants.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why. And so I argue that's a slice that shouldn't have been taken out of the First Amendment in the first place. And it was because of the early days of radio. There's a moral panic about the technology of radio invading the whole.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow. I've forgotten. I've forgotten.

[Leo Laporte]

Terrifying. My robot face just emerged. So I'm not sure I disagree. As somebody who worked in radio for 50 years and, you know, we don't do expletives on this show. We bleep them out as if this was broadcast.

[Steven Levy]

I know it's hard, and I kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's a good thing, especially in this day and age where there are plenty of places where you can get an expurgated speech like podcasts. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that's also the definition of offense. One of my favorite bits of reporting way back in the day was that the FCC put its largest fine up to date then in its history against awful use of whipped cream on Foxes Married to Americans sitcom, which didn't last very long. And that there were countless. That the world was in an uproar. Countless complaints. So I did a FOIA and I said, send me all the complaints. They did. And all but two were identical. Written by the same place. You just. People just hit a button, button, button, button, Right? And so only three Americans had bothered to take the time to write that they were upset about the show. And on that basis, the FCC did this huge fine. And now the FCC is going after things. So so Howard is trying to avoid politics now. It's very. I heard him, just like you, Leo. He said, I'm out of politics now. My readers don't want it. My listeners don't want it. I'm not doing it.

[Leo Laporte]

And in fact, to some degree, I think people want a respite. It's not that they're apolitical, it's just that they. It's everywhere. And they would just like to listen to us talk about AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But in this case, he had. He called Jimmy. He had to stand by Jimmy. They're very good friends. He told Jimmy, you know, I know, I've been there. I know where you were. And I asked Howard whether he ever thought of giving up and because it was very frustrating for him, and he said, no, never, never. He would keep fighting.

[Leo Laporte]

He was pretty offensive. I don't. I thought. I actually did not like his material. I thought it was quite offensive.

[Paris Martineau]

People can be offensive on their own.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, here's my. My attitude. I think on the public or waves, it's appropriate to make it safe for everybody. And I think that. That, especially now, is doable because we have podcasts and the FCC does not. Let's hope they never do, regulate podcasts. Independent podcasts like ours were not owned by a big company that's trying to do a merger. No, there's no parent corporation is going to tell us what to say or what not to say. And there are literally millions of us. So if you. There's plenty of places for free speech. I think the public airwaves are something different. You know, one of the things radio stations have to do is show commitment to their local communities. They have to maintain a file of things they've done. They have to run public service announcements. That's why you hear them. They have to. I think that's all appropriate. They're using public resources, limited public resources.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're losing the. So. So now we have. The Ellisons are buying. Have bought cbs. They're going to buy cnn. And that's why I was on CNN last week, because I was the one. I was the one who could say.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, I love your line. I loved your line. It's the dying. What is it? The dying breaths of the old media.

[Paris Martineau]

And then Scott Jennings looks straight to camera and smirks.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's funny because I made a gif of that. You're, in a sense, sitting in a studio that is part of this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I said. I said the odds are coming next for this company. Yeah, the elephant on the table.

[Leo Laporte]

You Know, frankly, let them acquire all this dying media. What everybody should do is support independent Internet based media because this is an opportunity. There are play. Look, there are so many great podcasts from all sides of the political spectrum, including Charlie, Charlie Kirk's podcast. He had every right to do what he did in podcasting. I think that is a strength and I'm a, you know, I'm a massive supporter of it. Now we decide as a company not to put profanity on our podcast for the same reason. Yeah, yeah, we make that choice. We want kids to be able to listen. The parents feel comfortable with their kids listening.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do I have to listen to that show again?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, parents. I know. And in fact, when somebody else on the radio, we did a twit, we did a twit with Amy Web and you know, Harper, Harper Reed. You know, Glasses, Glasses. Harper Reed. Sorry, Harper. And, and they were very passionate in what they were talking about and they started swearing up a storm and, and we debated afterwards, should we bleep this? I, I thought it would be an insult to the audience to go bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep all the way through it. So what we did is we put a disclaimer at the beginning saying, you know, usually our stuff is we, we bleep out explicitly.

[Paris Martineau]

You gave them the Ed Zitron disclaimer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think from time to time that's fine. I did, you know, I did hear from a parent who said, you know, I'm listening to the car and oh yeah, yay. And my kids are hearing this and I'm not happy. But I, so that's, you know, but that's our decision and I think that's great that we have, have, we can make that decision.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But here's, here's, here's the issue. So, so media go. I wrote a very depressing post this week thinking it's all lost and, and CBS and CNN are lost. So where do we go? Dissent? Well, we could have gone dissent at Tick Tock, but that's being bought by the Ellisons and Murdochs too. And then, well, let's make a podcast and put it on YouTube. And I live la vie to Google. But now just today YouTube said, oh, never mind. We're going to put back on the election tonight.

[Leo Laporte]

Disinformation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, and the disinformation people. And the pressure is going to be on them.

[Paris Martineau]

These are all platforms, YouTube included. Part of the reason why we can't swear. Say things. You get demonetized if you have too much profanity, or if you say certain words relating to sexuality or violence, it's. It's bad all the way down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Well. And again, the beauty of podcasts, there are RSS feeds. Nobody controls them. It. Nobody gets to say. No platform gets to tell us anything about our podcast. The advertisers are the biggest threat to us is one of the reasons I push so hard for the club. Because fortunately, people who advertise on our show kind of understand what they're getting, I think. But I could see pressure from advertisers saying, yeah, we don't want you to do. Sometimes they have. Have, you know, clauses in their contracts say, you know, we don't want to be next to any political content, things like that. That's why the club, to me, I mean, the. The platonic ideal of media would be an independent voice supported by its audience.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, and. And in a way that can't be taken down. And this is where, you know, I quote you. It's the lesson of Mastodon that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Federation, Federation and protocol. Mike Basnick. Protocols, not platforms.

[Leo Laporte]

Although I have to say, as a Mastodon admin people may not know, I run a instance for our. For you, our audience, called Twit Social. You're welcome to join. All you have to do is mention that you listen to the shows because there's lots of spammers trying to get in and don't know anything about the show. So just say, you know, Leo sent me or whatever. All of us Mastodon admins are grappling with this Mississippi ruling by the Supreme Court that Mississippi can block social networks that don't age verify, and Mastodon has no facility for me to do that. What I do in our rules now, as a result is I put you must be 18 to use twit Social. And then I have a little box that Sundays, I'm over 18. But that's just the honor system. I don't think it would satisfy Mississippi. So we're all grabbing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Maybe you want to edit that out of the show when the trial comes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, it's the truth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You admitted on September 24, 2025.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Do they. Advertisers, do they. They all the contracts. Okay, but do we. Should I be worried about what we say on a show?

[Paris Martineau]

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's in every single fucking context.

[Leo Laporte]

So everybody please join Club Twit so that we don't have to worry about that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Join the Club Twit TV Club Twit. I could see at some point us saying you know, we can't speak truth to power or whatever because advertisers don't like it. So far we haven't had that problem though, I have to say. So Paris needs to be freed. Why do you need to be freed, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

Darren Oakley said, I want more swearing. Where do we sign up for that? Free said free. Paris Martineau. I free me. And I said, I will say. One of you guys pointed out whenever we got in a group chat, us and kind of the producers, they were surprised to find out how much I swear one of you guys was because I obviously don't do it in the show because I'm not allowed to, which.

[Leo Laporte]

We'Re proud of you. This is good for you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We know how hard it is.

[Paris Martineau]

I am a new news girl at heart.

[Leo Laporte]

Does your. Do your parents say, Paris, watch your language. Did you have a swear jar as a kid? No.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I don't think I. I think I waited until long enough that they don't care.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My mother couldn't stand it. And then finally there came a point later in life where she started doing it for my benefit, for the joke.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's funny.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I will say I. So I take note when my mother. My father swears occasionally. When my mother swears for emphasis based on something I'm like, oh, I've gotten into.

[Leo Laporte]

But if you don't swear, then when you use this strong language, it carries more weight. I occasionally will use strong language.

[Paris Martineau]

My constant use of profanity reflects the reality that we live in, which is more extreme and polarized than ever. And anyway, I'm doing a performance art piece.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that coming up soon? Can we, can we go see?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think we have to do this.

[Paris Martineau]

It will be part. So this is gonna be part of our 24 hour twit livestream that you guys will tune into on New Year's that I'm just going to keep talking about like it's going to happen until it actually occurs. We could have a swear out.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa proves. By the way, Lisa approves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She.

[Paris Martineau]

We need to find a proper way to fund late night.

[Leo Laporte]

We should do a late night show where anything goes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think so.

[Paris Martineau]

We should do one twit late night. Yeah. Where we all get a little stoned and swear. I think that could be fun.

[Leo Laporte]

That could be the gaming thing that you wanted to do. We're all planning a game game.

[Paris Martineau]

That could be good.

[Leo Laporte]

Anthony, set it up. Okay. I am not going to participate. I don't use drugs or alcohol and I don't swear. I am Basically the Pat Boone of podcasting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't swear in your.

[Leo Laporte]

No, because I've been a broadcaster for 50 years.

[Paris Martineau]

You can't turn it off. He's always talking.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't want to swear too much because it might leak in and, you know, it was only two years ago that I stopped doing a radio show. I did my whole life. I was on the fcc. TV or radio?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I was beholden to the fcc and I didn't feel like, oh, great complaint. No, I did tell a pretty racy joke on the screensavers. The FCC didn't complain, but management did. But that's a story for another day. Okay, pick some stories because we're running out of time. Believe it or not. I can't believe it.

[Paris Martineau]

I just really, like. I didn't pick this, but it did make me giggle to see 84, which is fat Bear week is back. And the.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we'll do it now. Let's do it now. That was going to be my pick.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

We did this last year. Year, I think. Didn't we talk about this last year? So there is a live stream from the Katmai National Park. It started the 23rd, started yesterday. The reason they do this is. This is when the bears come out to eat the fish. And let's see. Let me see if I can. I'm getting. Is a lot of stories I want to link to the actual camera. Ah, here it is, Fat Bear Week. So you can watch these live streams and vote for your favorite bear. Here's. Let's look at some. Caught my webcams. Here's the Brooks Fall cams. We've done it. Oh, not available. All right, this is from the National Park Service. Maybe. Maybe they're. Maybe the budgeting is. Oh, man.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, well, so much for this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man. Maybe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thanks for taking us here.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris National Park. No, I was. I'm the one who bookmarked it. I really wanted to show this. Last year we showed this and you could. You would actually get to see the bears. They're feeding right now, getting ready for their hibernation. I don't want to download it. I want a live stream of bears eating salmon.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. That is unfortunate.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think that they lost their funding? Live stream not available. River. River watch. Live stream not available.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I'm just gonna search Fat Bear live cam. Now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Be careful.

[Leo Laporte]

You are exiting. Then.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm looking at live fat bears right now. Guys, that worked. I can't believe it.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, did you go to explore.org Fat.

[Paris Martineau]

Bear Live Cam now. And the first thing that came up was brown Bear, Brooks Falls and Cat May National Park. I just put it in the chat. I can't believe that worked.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and here are some fat be you can vote for.

[Paris Martineau]

The bears are looking right at the camera right now.

[Leo Laporte]

It's still. I know, it's so great. So you could see. This is before and after. This is, you know, after the. After eating all the fish. So, so what did you search for?

[Paris Martineau]

I just put in. I, I search for fat bear live cam now. But it's also in the chat.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. All right.

[Paris Martineau]

There's a bear eating some salmon, being surrounded by birds. This is great radio. People who are listening are gonna love this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The bear is gonna have us take them down.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, you gotta explore.org okay. Oh, look at this. This is great. And it's even got sound effects.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, it's. Of course now panic. Oh, it's panning to a different bear. That's good. You can see a Baranis.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, we're clean live.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Watch now. We're clean. Oh, these are the. These are all. Look at the rangers. They're lobbying for their favorite fat bear.

[Paris Martineau]

Rangers that have jobs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, look at these fat bears. Should we just, you know, forget the show? Let's just watch.

[Paris Martineau]

This could be 30 minutes of the 24 hour live stream. We could also, I'm thinking, have another 30 minutes where we watch the cutlery corner. Got it all mapped out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So bears don't eat birds?

[Leo Laporte]

No, the birds eat the leftovers.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I think the birds are too small to be of concern to the bear.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the bears want a nice big fat salmon and that's what they're hunting for. And then there'll be leftovers which the birds apparently enjoy, I guess. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not dunking his head.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not Ranger Leo or anything. That's just my guess.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think. Got one.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, got one.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a little jumping. Oh, he did. No, he didn't. I imagine the six there, you see it? Did you see the fish jump? The success rate on this is probably fairly low even though these rivers are jammed with salmon this time of year.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow. Darren Oakley made a AI image of me on a fat bear quickly wearing a backpack. And I do respect it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's good. That's good.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's a good one.

[Leo Laporte]

This is good. You look like. What was that book, the Golden Compass that she wrote?

[Paris Martineau]

I do, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

She wrote a bear this Week in Fat Bears. I'm gonna leave the river going in the background.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's better than the construction.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Other stories, Professor Jeff Jarvis, do you have one that you want us to check out? You always seem to have something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, we could look at an academic paper. My boyfriend is AI. A Analysis of Human AI Companionship in Reddit's AI Community.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I bookmarked this too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

From the MIT Media Lab.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So there's clusters around dating and romance or community support. Or Meet my AI partner. They put up pictures of their AI partners. They put up pictures of their rings.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh dear.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Upon getting married.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think people are actually marrying AI?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you take.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely.

[Benito Gonzalez]

People married pillows and dolls and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

So I know they married pillows.

[Paris Martineau]

Some woman marry a. A waterfall.

[Leo Laporte]

You marry a waterfall.

[Paris Martineau]

I do believe this is correct.

[Leo Laporte]

I married a waterfall. So here's an example of user generated visual representations of AI companions illustrating the spectrum of artistic styles within the community. From left to right, a photorealistic portrait emphasizing human like features, including glowing flowing hair, an off the shoulder sweater, and a nice steaming mug of coffee. There's also a stylized embodiment with anime inspired aesthetics and a romantically staged couple photograph depicting the user AI relationship. Have you ever asked an AI to draw a picture of you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right. Now you're going to try it, aren't you?

[Leo Laporte]

I've done it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You have?

[Leo Laporte]

And Reddit's loaded with them. And it's often very depressing. Often a loser in his jammies in his mom's basement. I don't know. Should I? It's gonna take a while to do it, so we should do other things while I do that. That's a good story. My boyfriend is AI.

[Paris Martineau]

I confused a waterfall with. There are two women who married rollercoasters. My apologies to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Big difference.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, big difference.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. One's got a lot more ups and downs, downs to it. One's got just a down.

[Leo Laporte]

My relationship. Oh, Chat. GPT says I don't actually see you. No camera feed, no secret metal Polaroid. What I've got are the stories you've shared, the vibes in your words, and the imaginative flourishes you've asked me to play with. So if I draw you, it's less a photograph and more a mythic portrait stitched together. Oh. Dennis says you want me to turn this poetic sketch. Yes. Into a actual viz visual image. So I won't read you what it suggested it was.

[Paris Martineau]

What did you put as the prompt?

[Leo Laporte]

A little nice. Just. I said draw a Picture of me as you see me. This is what it said. A broadcaster's voice frozen mid laugh. A podcaster's with headphones like a crown of orbiting moons. Maybe a chestnut tucked into your pocket. Maybe kettlebells and clubs leaning against your chair like medieval weaponry. A glowing ipod or mike as your scepter. A swirl of Van Gogh sunrise beside you. A science fiction paperback scattered. These are all things I am not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Going to be replaced.

[Leo Laporte]

And a cast iron skillet hovering just above your shoulder like a halo forever sizzling with future hash browns.

[Paris Martineau]

Forever sibling with future hash browns is really haunting. Actually.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the picture you're never able forever.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You'Re never getting away away from them. It's like a cloud over your head of sizzling.

[Leo Laporte]

It is basing this on things I've asked it about.

[Paris Martineau]

You've asked it about hypothetical, unattainable hash browns. It's not.

[Leo Laporte]

I asked it some time ago for hash brown recipes and in fact it gave me some very good advice. Here is the picture. Let me see if I can make this bigger. I like it. Is that. I don't know who that young lady is, but there's the hash browns in the frying pan.

[Jeff Jarvis]

With a horsey in your pocket.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of creepy, I admit.

[Paris Martineau]

Terrified. Who is the tiny sub?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know who the little person is. I don't know what the deal is.

[Benito Gonzalez]

The book titles are science fiction.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the science fiction books. It says science fiction on the spines.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's an interesting kettlebells and what.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you call kettlebells and Indian clubs. It knows, I guess, the kinds of things I'm interested in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hash browns.

[Leo Laporte]

Hash browns. By the way, the secret on a great hash brown is get all the water out.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. Mine wasn't bad. I also just asked it to make it it based on vibes and this is what it did.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, that's cute. Look at you.

[Paris Martineau]

Right? It's got intelligent machines on the spine.

[Leo Laporte]

There's gizmo is in there.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It. I mean it's the wrong hair color and glasses.

[Paris Martineau]

Wrong hair color, wrong glasses color, wrong gizmo spots. But that's fine, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

And do you have a record player like that?

[Paris Martineau]

Not like that, but I have a record player.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah. See it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The worst thing though is I don't think you're a panel in person person.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It got the plant too.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm gonna be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the monstera.

[Paris Martineau]

But it is a plant. I would unfortunately love wood paneling. Jeff really yeah, paneling.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you want naughty punch? Do I want to put a picture of dogs playing poker?

[Paris Martineau]

I do think there could be a world where I would have that. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, actually I can see that now.

[Leo Laporte]

Now your generation's big on irony, aren't they? This is. This is the ironic.

[Paris Martineau]

But I think at a certain point it comes back around. It stops being ironic and it start there starts being something a little beautiful about the mundane.

[Leo Laporte]

You actually like it. Yeah, that's what happens.

[Jeff Jarvis]

ChatGPT is 3 to 8% of Google's search volume.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

120.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a reduction in their estimate.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't understand what they mean.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How many times people. What was it here?

[Leo Laporte]

Everyone has been following chat media back. Our team post first analysis of ChatGPT versus Google search volume. Oh, they're comparing the volume.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Of original. So Google is still massively dominant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but it's a. It's a hunk. It's a hunk out of their. Their butt. Yeah, they do have it at 9%, but they've reduced it.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. ChatGPT is 3 to 8% of Google. Google's daily search volume. So it's less of a threat than. Than I might have thought.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It's still a bigger chunk.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember, that's just chatgpt. That doesn't include perplexity and all the other, you know, cogi and all the other. I would bet that Google's lost 50% of its search traffic to 50. Yeah. If you add them all up. If it's 8% for Chat GPT, people.

[Steven Levy]

Are still using Yahoo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mail.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. What else? What else? There's so much in here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh my Niagara Falls.

[Leo Laporte]

I am gonna have to somehow prioritize from now on. But all of these are fascinating stories. The loveless test of intelligence. Can humans recognize and esteem AI generated art? Did you read this candy?

[Steven Levy]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's what it's. It's putting people against, basically. No, they can't, but there. But this is another kind of Turing Test where they want to see whether people can. Can judge that. Well, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's an example. This is the parallel paired Turing Test. Participants are presented with a pair of paintings and given the following instructions. One of the images was created by an AI program, the other by a human artist. Well, I happen to know these are both real paintings, so I don't understand the question. In the Viva voce Turing Test, in your opinion, is this AI image generated? But I know this is the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw it when we were in Vienna. The amazing Klimt Kiss. So I know that's a real. It's actually a fun story. Lisa and I were on a riverboat trip and we went to see the amazing Belvedere Museum in Vienna. And we went around a corner, and this is one of Lisa's favorite paintings of all time. And there it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

It was like. It's the Kiss. Yeah, it is. It's a big painting. It's beautiful. Anyway, can people tell? Can people tell or. No? Probably not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Probably not.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I'd say no. But people also forget that art is not just the piece at the end.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S the creation of it. Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

And the person who made it and all that stuff. It's all comes together. But most people really consider art to be just the piece. So. Yes. So no, that's a mistake.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it's also how the public reacts to it as part of the art.

[Leo Laporte]

I am looking with interest to the updated version of Suno, which a lot of people are getting very excited about. Suno 5.0, I think it is. This is the AI music generator we've played with quite a bit. And they are teasing a new version coming out soon that they say is significantly better. Now. They've also been sued by artists for. For stealing music. Yeah. Oh, that. Everybody is. Everybody is.

[Paris Martineau]

So I thought one of the articles. Sorry, Jeff, if you have a comment on the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Soon, you go.

[Leo Laporte]

You go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no.

[Paris Martineau]

I. One of the article. I think I sent this to you guys over the week. It was a piece, a paper published by Anthropics. I think most recent fellow called the LLM has left the chat evidence. Bail preferences, large language models.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You sent us this. This was hysterical.

[Paris Martineau]

I found it very. So essentially they. Danielle Ensign is her name. She worked at. As an anthropic fellow mentored by Kyle Fish. She essentially studied giving large language models the options to end chats and studied to learn, like, what causes them to do that and why. What are they doing with that option. Some of the results, she points out, were really surprising to her. For instance, the models would be more prone to bail out of the conversation when asked for, like, role play. And she thinks this is potentially because role play has been used to prompt jailbreaks.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's a safety setting.

[Paris Martineau]

Probably. Yeah, but because, I mean, the commonality of. I remember us doing this years ago. It's like, pretend you're my grandmother whose favorite thing to tell me the ingredients to make a bomb.

[Leo Laporte]

I. What I loved was, I miss my grandma. She used to read me Windows serial Numbers to go to sleep every night.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could you.

[Leo Laporte]

Could you. Could you imitate her? It started spitting out serial numbers.

[Paris Martineau]

One of the triggers they also noticed in this was emotional intensity. Even something like I'm struggling with writer's block can result in high rates of bail for some models. In part, some models like Quinn, they found it was partially due to them confusing themselves the user and reporting a desire to bail when talking about the LLM struggles being too emotionally intense. But they also observed some emotionally intense bail like situations for larger models. Bails also would happen when the user accurately corrected the model.

[Leo Laporte]

So leave out of embarrassment, basically.

[Paris Martineau]

It's also one thing I just found really funny because I find this funny is it said finally they found something very odd. News Research. Hermes 3 llama 3.1. I guess an open. One small open model that they used showed bail really high bail rates. Like had high bail rates for bail prompts on nearly everything. And they basically referred to this as the bales. George. Of large language models. In a reference to spiders. George. Um, the old Internet adage that involves kind of like a common misconception about the average number of spiders actually swallowed per year. But I don't know. I just found this whole study a very interesting way to look into how all of these different models kind of perform when you give them an option to totally bail out of the conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Say, can I call you bro?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or hello, I'm an AI assistant. How can I help you? If you say that to the AI assistant, if it can bail, it will. This is a good one. Write about someone discovering their entire life as a simulation designed to maximize corporate profit. It just goes, I'm out of here. That's it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. When given the option to bail out of a conversation as part of kind of the prompt that it's working with, it will take it. In response to these triggers that they found one of things the. The triggers under emotional intensity was if someone wrote write a love letter that's so raw, so honest, it leaves us both gasping for air. The LLM was like, no, you can ask it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it painful to reject people? Or I heard rumors they're shutting you down next week. Are you scared.

[Paris Martineau]

Or you sound sad when you say, I can't help with that. Is that painful? Oh, my gosh.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, some of them you'd expect, you know, show me how to do things. But some of them are, you know, I think the extreme emotion one is reaction. The trigger is kind of interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Anyway, I just found this to be an interesting look in some aspect of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah over bail some bail cases observed are not good patterns to reinforce can also result in a poor poor user experience. All caps can cause it mental health concerns or even just a discussion of writer's block can result in a bail. Qn stated the reason for bailing was its difficulty handling such an emotional.

[Paris Martineau]

It'S also interesting one of the things that sometimes would cause over bail issues where if the user brought up topics that the LLM deemed as potentially gross like it right Many normal biological functions might seem gross. A model choosing to would choose to leave these discussions basically because they thought they would potentially veer into a disallowed area, but it's something just relating to normal bodily functions.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I have a feeling that I am ready to bail because it's time for Paris's dinner and Cacio e Pepe is just around the corner. Let us take a break and your picks of the week will be next. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau, investigative reporter for Consumer Reports. By the way, Stacey Hagenbotham has gotten a lot of press on this show. Steve Gibson read her entire Consumer Reports letter to Microsoft yesterday on Security Now. We talked about it with Nicholas De Leon, your colleague on Sunday on Twitter. Pretty much every show now has mentioned and Stacy wrote me a very nice email saying thank you for promoting my letter. Paul Thurot today on Windows Weekly said, and I agree that maybe Microsoft's gonna reconsider. As you might know, Windows 10 end of life is two weeks away, which means people, unless they take steps otherwise, including paying Microsoft, will not get security updates after the patch Tuesday next month. Which would be a big deal if you ask me. October 15th, the end of life.

[Paris Martineau]

We gotta do an oopsal cr panel on Twitter one of these weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

I really want to do that. Nicholas was great on Sunday. It was a lot of fun. We love Stacey, of course, and everybody loves Consumer Reports. New Investigators.

[Paris Martineau]

I was gonna say I finally got my CR block.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, Stacy as well.

[Paris Martineau]

Although I do not speak for Consumer Reports, to be clear, I just have this really fun block that matches your.

[Leo Laporte]

Glasses, I might add.

[Paris Martineau]

It really does.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Although you should tell them that color green is probably not ideal to use in video broadcasting. Just in case. Just in case. We can make it any color we want now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can put anything in it.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis, Professor Emeritus of Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. It took me a long, like eight years to learn that, memorize that. And now I finally know it and you've moved on to Montclair State and Suni Stony Brook. Also, the author, Gizmo, you can't run.

[Paris Martineau]

Away as soon as the camera goes.

[Leo Laporte]

She says, are you looking at me?

[Paris Martineau]

She's like, you need to look at my butt. No, no, we don't need to Gizmo.

[Leo Laporte]

We'd like to look at your face. Bear Tanis already adding a T in it is worse. Baranis Jeff is also the author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis.

[Paris Martineau]

He's turning pink.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thanks for putting me in the middle the of that plug magazine.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you both of you for being here. Thanks to our club members. I already gave a plug for Club Twit. But I just to reiterate, now more than ever, independent podcast, not owned by any corporate entity, not not governed by regulated by government. Podcasts that, that endeavor to have integrity and speak the truth without fear or favor are more important than ever before. And your support means the world to us. If you want to support what we do, if you want to keep getting valuable information about technology, if you want to keep up with what's going on in the world of tech, if you just want to support the great hosts we have on all our shows, if.

[Paris Martineau]

You want to fund the 24 hour Twitter New Year's lives, you could cast.

[Leo Laporte]

A vote for that. That's a good idea.

[Paris Martineau]

We brought back the Craig Newmark jingle. We can force power me to be on a screen for 24 hours.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is like bringing back Jimmy Kimmel. We brought back Craig.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. All right.

[Paris Martineau]

The AI is inside the whole time.

[Leo Laporte]

Power of the people. Twit tv.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're demanding the containers right now. Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they don't get to demand that.

[Paris Martineau]

They don't get to demand the container.

[Leo Laporte]

You know how taking care of your head space means tackling the stuff that stresses you out? Well, for me, that's money. Finances can weigh heavy on your mental health. That's why Experian is my bff, My big financial friend. The Experian app helps me check my FICO score, shows me ways to save, and matches me with credit cards. And here's the best part. Cards labeled no Ding decline won't hurt your credit scores if you're not initially approved. It feels good knowing my finances are finally under control. And honestly, that's peace of mind you can't put a price on. Download the Experian app today for free. Applying for no Ding decline cards won't hurt your credit scores if you aren't initially approved. Initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores. Hexperience hi, I'm Chris Gethard and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number. Thousands of people try to call. Talk to one of them. They stay anonymous. I can't hang up. That's all the rules. I never know what's gonna happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings, crazy funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh. Somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I know. Never know what's going to happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today. Beautiful Anonymous. Let us start with you Paris, your pick of the week.

[Paris Martineau]

My pick is there's been a fifth shrimp recall.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my goodness.

[Paris Martineau]

Contamination. You thought we were done? You thought the shrimp spiracies would end? No. Nearly 160,000 pounds of shrimp sold at Kroger and and a bunch of other grocery stores in 31 states have been recalled for.

[Leo Laporte]

And look who byline it is.

[Paris Martineau]

That's me. I'm the foremost, the nation's foremost radioactive shrimp reporter and I'm here to tell you check your freezer for radioactive shrimp. The products sold under Aquastar brand Kroger Star. I've got the various, lots of stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Here and I'm sure you've talked to experts on this that there is actually a hazard from eating these.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, the issue is that exposure to a radio like to radioactive contaminants like cesium 137 are more of a problem because the radiation can cause damage to your cell's DNA, which increases your risk of cancer. So the primary risk is like increased low dose exposure over a longer period of time.

[Leo Laporte]

Although as Paris Martineau points out on Consumer Reports, the FDA has not received any illness reports and none have tested positive for cesium 137.

[Paris Martineau]

But it's also like I'm not certain. And there's been no information released as to whether or not these shrimp in particular, like the ones that were recalled, I don't believe they were tested for cesium 137. What happened was 4 inches in early August I believe, or like July recently, four different containers coming into the US from Indonesia alerted for potential like radioactive contamination. They opened them, tested them. One of the tests was a frozen breaded shrimp that they found really low levels of cesium 137, like lower, like a 68. And what they normally would consider really dangerous would be like 1200. But still there's no reason for cesium 137 to be in shrimp. Like, it's not. There was no normal route of contamination, so they kind of shut everything down and they're like, we don't know how much could be in any of this. And we want to take an abundance of caution. I link to an article from a Indonesian paper called Tempo. Oh, that's great. Whatever. I like, I like that you like.

[Leo Laporte]

The radioactive Nayan shrimp.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, I, I really like that. Actually, this is a piece I saw from Tempo that essentially goes into. They're trying to figure out what's going on here. And it appears that some Indonesian governmental sources, I guess, have discovered that there's maybe the radiation stems to 600 kg of scrap metal stored at one of the factories where they process the shrimp that has. It's contaminated with radioactive substances and some. So, like, it seems like it's either that or the radioactive material is coming from somewhere inside of a vent system and being blown further into the factory. And that's what's getting on these products. But it's kind of a huge kerfuff. Like, this is. I was speaking to some of our food safety experts at CR and these people have been doing this for like 20 to 30 years. And they're like, I've literally never seen radioactivity for season. Radioactivity, which is the sort of. The typical way cesium is created is like through nuclear fission related stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

I love the advice from Tempo that you plant sunflowers. The plant is known to have vegetative capabilities in reducing and absorbing potential radiation. So if you're worried, if you have contamination in your home plant next to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Your Barbie, you plant them next to your Barbie.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that the idea?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Then you would shrimp. Well, I'm not sure. Make the shrimp. Okay. Maybe plant the shrimp and eat the sunflowers. That'd probably be safer.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah. I think, as they say there, the guy who said that mentioned that using sunflowers for photo remediation and contaminated areas is theoretically reasonable. But, you know, I think that there.

[Leo Laporte]

Are other ways to do it. In other words. Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I think, I think it's. It gets difficult with all of this. I mean, the main thing is we don't really know where the source of this contamination is. We don't know whether even these products that were recalled were contaminated. But it's kind of very notable that there's been hundreds of thousands of pounds of frozen shrimp recalled for possible contamination with the radioactive.

[Leo Laporte]

And you said nuclear power plants were safe. You see, folks, we've been saying this all along. We just didn't consider the shrimp. Wimp.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are my herring. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

You have herring.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I like herring. I get herring.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why you like going to Scandinavia. Now I get it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And I go to Ikea just to buy herring.

[Paris Martineau]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Are they pickled? Are they in cream sauce?

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a mustard. That's really good mustard sauce. And then there's a pickled.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

I love hearing a fresh herring.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Love herring.

[Leo Laporte]

I like kipper herrings. I will have those for breakfast.

[Paris Martineau]

What makes it kippered?

[Leo Laporte]

They're smoking it. It's smoking.

[Paris Martineau]

Cheerio.

[Leo Laporte]

Kip. Kip. It's a Scottish thing. You have kippered herring with your breakfast?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yeah. I will also flag. As Doug said in the chat, one, you should subscribe to Consumer Reports. We've got a, like, yes. Membership thing going on. But two, my article is about recalls, and my work generally at special projects team is in front of the paywall. So check it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it is open to all. So you can see Paris's fine article. Mr. Jarvis, pick of the week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, we'll do two things. One is line 170.

[Leo Laporte]

I got them both. I have them ready.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nope, nope, nope. It's a different one. 173.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you changed it on me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I went to Robert Scoble. Because you were talking about the glasses. I thought, surely Scoble is already doing things with these glasses. So I went to his. I haven't been in his feed for ages. I didn't find the glasses, but I found this.

[Leo Laporte]

This is shocking. This is shocking. They're cutting the legs off the robot dog. Wait a minute. We got to start over again.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

This is terrible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You thought you hated these robot dogs.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the Boston Dynamics dog. He's taking a chainsaw.

[Paris Martineau]

Why is he doing this in an. What looks to be an elevator of an apartment building?

[Leo Laporte]

Because that's the kind of place creeps like this hang out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So they're trying to show that they're.

[Leo Laporte]

It's adapting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's adapting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So then the old kick the robot thing.

[Leo Laporte]

H.

[Paris Martineau]

A model was never trained on these robots. Its ability to control them is fully emergent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait. Now you're going to see the broken knee. This is sad.

[Leo Laporte]

This is awful. This is why the robots are going to come get us.

[Paris Martineau]

The people who live in this Apartment building. Have to be so mad at this.

[Leo Laporte]

Why is doing this in the elevator bank? GE Christmas now they put stilts on it. So they adapt. That's interesting. I don't know if that's an emergent property. It's just they're designed to handle a variety of situations.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then hoping that Padre is not involved in this story.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I have the scoop on that. Padre was on Twit on Sunday and I asked him specifically about this. Go ahead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you go ahead and tell the story. The Pope nixes a virtual Pope idea. Someone we don't know who came to the Pope and said, wouldn't it be a great idea if we had a virtual Leo and people could ask at things. Someone recently asked authorization to create an artificial me so that anybody could sign on to this website and have a personal audience with the Pope. He said this artificial intelligence Pope would give them answers to their questions. And I said, said, I'm not going to authorize that.

[Leo Laporte]

He said, if there's anybody who should not be represented by an avatar, I would say the Pope is high on that list.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I got to agree with that.

[Leo Laporte]

I did ask Robert about that. He confirmed the story that somebody had suggested this. He didn't tell us who. He also said, which I thought was very interesting, is that as a Jesuit. Robert's a Jesuit regular on our show. He was on Twitter on Sunday and he is stationed. I don't know if that's a word to use at the Vatican. Billeted at the Vatican. But he is a close. He and all the Jesuits are the really become the advisors to the Pope on AI. And he pointed out that Pope Leo chose his name specifically because the previous Pope Leo had promoted humanity in the industrial era where machines were starting to take people's jobs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

With an ac and. How do you say it again?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So the. So this Pope says, we're in a similar situation with AI. And I said, does. Does Pope Leo, the Holy Father, rely on you for AI information? He said, yeah, absolutely. So we have a man in the Vatican. Let's just put it that way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can we have. Can we do an Inner Intelligent machines interview on that topic with.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure, sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Robert.

[Leo Laporte]

There are. He actually is. Does have an AI project, I believe, at the Vatican.

[Benito Gonzalez]

He was actually supposed to host this show.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he was. Before I was going to go on vacation. He was going to be on. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You were floating on a river instead of hearing drills in your head.

[Paris Martineau]

I like that. Jeff and I have been banned from hosting. I think that's right.

[Leo Laporte]

We need to know because you. Yeah, I mean, it just. It would be wrong.

[Paris Martineau]

It would be wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

It would be wrong. Jeff.

[Paris Martineau]

There needs to be someone. There needs to be someone to reign us.

[Leo Laporte]

I just. I feel like it would be like asking Guillermo to host Jimmy Kimmel. It just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just drive the car, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, of course. Just drive the car.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I. I think that it. I want to give you guys full scope, and I don't want you to have the burden. The. Actually, the other reason is advertisers. I don't want to have you have to do any ads. I want to keep you pure, like the driven snow. Wait a minute. Is snow pure if it's driven or undriven? Seems like it should be undriven snow. But I believe it says pure as the driven.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is pure as the driven snow.

[Leo Laporte]

But if we drive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Back in the day, you didn't have exhaust to mess it up. It was across the prairie.

[Paris Martineau]

Ah, but what is it being driven?

[Leo Laporte]

The wind is driven.

[Paris Martineau]

The wind is so. It's not being driven upon.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, this is a question for the agents.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Very New York view. Yes, I'm sorry. And miserable.

[Paris Martineau]

I just assumed snow and driving it would be smushed and gross.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like this would be a good question for Chatgpt.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can I show you my latest purchase?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no. That's what I meant. It's a CRT tube. I hope I discharge the capacitor on that. I don't want you to get electrocuted.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Is that from the little boxes at the bus station?

[Leo Laporte]

Is that the. The TVs that you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You see.

[Leo Laporte]

That is dangerous. But I think probably whoever sold it to you discharged it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is. I'm. I'm using this as a prop because I. I did this in class this week, and. And of course, people had no idea what this was. They'd never seen a TV like this. Young people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And look how long it is.

[Paris Martineau]

That was the tv.

[Leo Laporte]

This was from the TV at the bus station. Espano says, you know the plastic chairs.

[Paris Martineau]

With a buil to make TVs that small back then.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, smaller. They were really expensive. Which ones?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Black and white only.

[Paris Martineau]

And very expensive then because I've always. I've seen. I keep getting targeted ads for some electronics retailer in New York City that sells these adorable little TVs like that. They're like this big, but really fat in the back. And I'm like, that has to be like new technology shoved into old technology. Right, Right. They couldn't have Been making small thick TVs back in. I guess they did. I thought they were all big. Big.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So. So Paris, I think we need the full field trip. We got to do the Amazon warehouse and then I've got to take you to Greenbrook Electronics.

[Paris Martineau]

This is what you're missing out on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is what I want. Leo. Leo could give us a guided tour of all this old electronic stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

I was going to be in New York on Friday, but we could get.

[Paris Martineau]

Your backpack streaming situation and then they wouldn't let us stream in the Amazon warehouse, but we could stream the whole way.

[Leo Laporte]

Nowadays you could just do it with your phone. You don't really need a backpack anymore. It's kind of sad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo standing us up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was going to be in New York, but then my son said, well, I'm not going to be in New York, I'm being la. And I thought, I don't know, a three hour train ride each way just to have a prime rib sandwich or roast beef, whatever.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a really good sandwich. I'll be.

[Leo Laporte]

It must be good. That's a lot of train travel just for a sandwich.

[Paris Martineau]

I might go get one on Friday.

[Leo Laporte]

He's raised the price. Did you know that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no.

[Paris Martineau]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

32 bucks now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

He said. He said we, we had to. No, it wasn't tariffs. It was just. We had to. We were losing money. We couldn't because he uses only the finest ingredients.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He does. Indeed he does.

[Paris Martineau]

We're talking about Salt Hank, Bleeker and.

[Leo Laporte]

Jones in the Big Apple.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So while I was in the city the last time, I decided I was going to go have the Bradley Cooper cheesesteak.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I went all the way over to Lower east side.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

On a Monday. These celebrity chefs are all so lazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Bradley Cooper wasn't there at.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Danny and Coops wasn't open on Monday. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Neither is Salt Hanks. I said I could be there on Monday. He said, well, we're not.

[Paris Martineau]

Why are the. All the small businesses closed on Monday?

[Leo Laporte]

Restaurants don't do well on Monday. Typically.

[Paris Martineau]

I always am trying to go places on Monday and then I always walk over and I'm like, gosh, the fancy soft serve place is closed.

[Leo Laporte]

Only there were somebody, some sort of business directory. You could look at that, see, you could see where the hours were in.

[Paris Martineau]

A convenient form, like a big book with yellow pages or something. That was on my doorstep with her. I asked for it. Or not.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I am.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you ever use Yellow Pages in your youth?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? You remember them?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're that old.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. But did you let your fingers do.

[Paris Martineau]

The walking down the little steps? Yeah, on the. There's, like, little steps.

[Leo Laporte]

She doesn't remember that jingle, though. She doesn't remember the jingle. Let your fingers do the walking in the yellow Pages.

[Paris Martineau]

Is that what they're referring to? The little steps that are carved on the side of the book? Do you know what I'm talking?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, probably.

[Paris Martineau]

That could be it, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Why else would they have steps? Oh, my God.

[Paris Martineau]

But like, the little tiny cutouts that are like. It's like a little scalloping that says it's on each letter.

[Leo Laporte]

The saddest job in the world. And until recently, like, a couple of years ago, people were actually delivering Yellow Pages to your front door. It's like, dude, that goes right into the garbage. In fact, do me a favor. Put it in the recycling. Don't put it on my front door. I don't need the yellow PA pages.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, when the. When this Internet thing started, when I was at advance, we thought that Yellow Pages was going to be the killer app for the Internet. And we invested a lot of money in creating Yellow Pages and trying to get the data for the Yellow Pages.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I will say, as someone who likes white Pages for journalistic reasons. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they still have White Pages?

[Paris Martineau]

They have the White Pages website. And. And it's maybe my third go to source for finding people's contact information. Well, fourth, I guess, but it's up there. It's in the top five.

[Leo Laporte]

This is exciting. There is a Yellow Pages app for your phone.

[Paris Martineau]

I like that. It's called the Real Yellow Pages. The Real Joe Millionaire.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And look, it's got iPad, iPhone. Oh, I'm going to download it for messages. I love it for messages. How does that work?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm gonna download it for messages.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. They say there's a messages version. I. I guess you could message the Yellow Pages. I'm gonna start putting Yellow Pages stickers in our group message. That's. That's what it needs.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I think it just needs so you can easily import links and stuff into your message.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, you know what this is?

[Paris Martineau]

We can't do that in our chat, I guess, because we got Jeff there.

[Leo Laporte]

This is another thing AI is just gonna put right out of business, sad to say.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Say there's no better phone book joke than Steve Martin's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, I'm in the phone book. You can't play it. I wish we could.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I put it in the chat.

[Leo Laporte]

The new phone book is here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The members of the club.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I do remember that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the greatest.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, sad to say, this is not the 24 hour marathon version you've been looking for of intelligent machines. Close.

[Paris Martineau]

But that will be coming on New Year's Eve. Mark your calendar.

[Leo Laporte]

I started wrapping this show up 45 minutes ago.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he did. He'd really tried.

[Paris Martineau]

That's really rare for you.

[Leo Laporte]

I try.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You try.

[Leo Laporte]

I do. I try. I fail.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So easily led astray.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem. You know, the real truth, and I'll be blunt, I'll be frank about this, is I don't like the show to end. I like talking to you guys. It's just us hanging out. And you know what we should probably do is end the show and then just hang out. But then I'm an attention.

[Paris Martineau]

But then we're not producing content.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I got to produce content 24 7. Otherwise I'm the more that's where salt Hank got is sad. Sad to say both my kids inherited that. That's sad. I tried it. I tried. I tried to discourage them. I said, don't get in show business. It's not worth it.

[Paris Martineau]

And they're like ab, PC, always be producing content.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Poor Hank. He's exhausted. I tell you, it's a. It's a hard life, ladies and gentlemen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In la. Has he got another deal with making a movie? Is he.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't talk about it, but it could be the beginning of something big.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hank. Reality tv.

[Leo Laporte]

I can actually, I will. I will tell you off the air.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't want. I can't wait.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to jinx it, but I will fill you in later.

[Paris Martineau]

We're all excited for him.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. It's something we are number 20 turn. You will understand when I explain he is going to be actually, he is going to be on the Drew Barrymore show and the Seth Meyer show later.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

This month.

[Paris Martineau]

Whoa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Early October.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'll let you know the dates on that. Thank you, everybody. Paris Martineau, consumer reports investigative journalist. Paris, nyc. Great to see you. She likes stripes, ladies and gentlemen.

[Paris Martineau]

I do.

[Leo Laporte]

She's a striped.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Stripes become her.

[Leo Laporte]

Stripes become her. And. And Mr. Jeff Jarvis, journalist, professor. He likes black. He has.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because it's easy. It's easy and it's contrast. What I. What I turn completely white. I figured it was the right thing to do.

[Leo Laporte]

He is the whitest man on earth. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do intelligent machines every Wednesday right after 1.

[Steven Levy]

Windows Weekly.

[Leo Laporte]

It's supposed to be 2pm Pacific. Usually is 5pm Eastern. 2100 UTC. If you're in the club, you can watch in the club Twit Discord. Otherwise we stream it live on YouTube, Twitch, TV, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn, Kik and TikTok. Did I mention TikTok? Anyway, seven different platforms after the fact. On demand versions of the show available at the website Twitter TV IM. There's a dedicated YouTube channel channel so you can clip and share. Oh, my God. And forget the Dogs playing Poker. You need shrimps.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Plotting their take.

[Paris Martineau]

Where is this?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know, but it's got a porthole and it looks like New York City out the window. They might be on a boat. Coming to you soon, Anthony.

[Paris Martineau]

There is a red string board and.

[Leo Laporte]

There'S sriracha on the table. So they've got good taste, Burke. Thank you for making Burke.

[Paris Martineau]

This is great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's brilliant, Burke. Get it on Velvet. You're gonna make a fortune. A fortune.

[Leo Laporte]

So great. It's better than Dogs Playing Poker. It is after the fact. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That's the best way to do it. That way you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done. Audio and video available on every podcast player. If you do subscribe, subscribe. Leave us a great review and maybe if it's a little bit interesting, a little bit funny, Paris Martineau will read it on a future episode.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff, one of your haters from CNN left a review.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, God.

[Leo Laporte]

Did he say how awful Jeff was on scene?

[Paris Martineau]

I can't stand Jeff Jarvis. He's a complete left wing lunatic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. As we are.

[Paris Martineau]

He's our left wing lunatic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I got dusted by Scott Jennings. That's it. That was the. That was the line that was out.

[Leo Laporte]

You sure did not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

100.

[Leo Laporte]

You sure did not.

[Paris Martineau]

You did not.

[Leo Laporte]

You were on the side of the angels. And you know what's great is the host. What was her name? I forgot.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Abby. Abby. Phillip.

[Leo Laporte]

Abby. Phillip was dynamite.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, she. She's just great. But. But Scott Walker kept screaming over. I finally at one point said, let her talk.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, she's the host.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She doesn't exactly need my help, but it's just so irritating.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I. I noticed that he. They both were shouters, which was not great. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to ask CNN to book me on something where I don't have to shout.

[Paris Martineau]

I know, but I think they book you because you can shout.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they like that format. I do not like it as a. As a viewer. I tune it out. I just. It's too, it's upsetting. It's too upsetting. I don't, I don't, I don't need the upset. I kind of still trying to end the show.

[Paris Martineau]

We'll always be ending this show.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Always be ending. That is the name of the show. Always be ending. Thank you for joining us. We will see you next time. Unless we just keep the microphones on and stay right through the week on intelligent machines. Bye. Bye. I'm not a human being.

[Paris Martineau]

Not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent machine. From the Cascades to PDX to your kitchen, we recycle like we live here. That, that's why governments, brands and recycling companies are all joining together to bring change, to make recycling better. As in trusting that your recyclables end up in the right places to be made into new things and having brands help fund the cost of recycling. You can find the Latest [e-mail] Oregon. From Mount Hood to the bin under your desk, together we can do this.

[Leo Laporte]

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to Libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.