Intelligent Machines 876: It's No Melania

Summary

Intelligent Machines 876: It's No Melania — TWiT Podcast Summary

Date: June 25, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Co-host: Jeff Jarvis
Guest: Prof. Olivier Sylvain, Fordham Law, author of "Reclaiming the Internet"

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis are joined by Professor Olivier Sylvain to discuss his new book, "Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control and How We Can Take It Back." The discussion focuses largely on Section 230, regulatory histories, the differences between "big tech" and "small tech," the challenges of moderating platforms, and the deeper societal implications of AI, media power, and digital regulation. The conversation is rich with legal, historical, and philosophical insight, peppered with memorable quotes and references to analogous issues—from mass media regulation to modern product liability.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

1. Reclaiming the Internet: Who Owns It Now?

• [05:04]
  • Olivier Sylvain argues that the Internet has shifted away from the ideal of user empowerment envisioned in the 1990s.
  • "Well, it's not the so-called users ... many of us were fantasizing about in the 1990s..." (Sylvain, [05:22])
  • The dominance of big tech is propped up by regulatory frameworks and Congressional/Court actions.
  • Laporte: Big Tech may say "we built it," but users supply the content.
  • Jarvis: Recalls similar arguments in the “telco” era.

2. Section 230: Savior or Scapegoat?

• [07:57], [15:00], [19:36], [22:10]
  • Central Debate: Is Section 230 overprotecting big tech, or is it essential for small tech and user participation?
  • Comparisons are drawn with the gun industry’s legal immunities and "extractive models."
  • Sylvain: "I would like to see what the world looks like when companies do have an incentive to build services and filters and moderation techniques because there is so much money to be made." ([21:03])
  • Laporte: Personalizes the threat—small operators like himself run forums, Mastodon instances, etc.; without Section 230, "I would have to shut them down, period." ([21:39])
  • Discussion shifts to more nuanced expectations: Should courts allow suits that examine product design (algorithms/dark patterns) even if they block those targeting pure user content?
  • Recent cases (e.g., LA, New Mexico) involving product liability in design (e.g., “backroom” at Armslist, Facebook addictiveness, Snap filters) are dissected.

3. Regulation, Liability, and Moderation: Finding the Line

• [22:44]
  • Debate over "duty of care" proposals (UK/US) and how they affect platform design and moderation.
  • Sylvain: Warm to the idea, "we already have negligence and product liability … the facts are really important." ([27:48])
  • Jarvis: How feasible is it to anticipate and avoid all potential harm, especially with AI? Should platforms be liable for edge cases?
  • Sylvain: "Case by case… sometimes the developer, deployer, or user should be held responsible." ([30:09])
  • The challenge of balancing responsible innovation vs. chilling risk.

4. Section 230 Reform: What’s Next?

• [32:54]
  • Sylvain advocates for a "knowledge-based legal regime" akin to copyright's DMCA:
    • "You are held accountable when you know that stuff that you're doing is harmful. We do that in the copyright setting… I don't see why this kind of regime is impossible." ([34:21])
  • Laporte: Cites the chilling effect of DMCA “hecklers,” but agrees the analogy is instructive.
  • The risk of “weaponization” (Take It Down Act concerns) and the slippery slope of government overreach is acknowledged.

5. Historical Context and the Governance of Communications

• [38:16]
  • Sylvain discusses his dissertation (Radio Act of 1927, assimilation, regulation as culture transmission) and juxtaposes radio regulation with today’s platforms.
  • Key observation: "We've relinquished public resources to private administrators…" ([37:11])
  • Calls for renewed attention to public governance and not leaving “code as law”/self-regulation unchecked.
  • Jarvis: "The hazard that exists, Leo, has to deal with all the time. We can't play a video of anything on this show because somebody, not the actual copyright owner, is going to come in and take advantage of that on YouTube and get things taken down." ([34:31])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The only industry that enjoys the same sort of legal protection, if not is the gun industry." – Olivier Sylvain ([07:57])
• "Isn't it a lot better than it was?" – Jeff Jarvis on access to media and speech online, in context of historical asymmetry ([11:35])
• "Publishers are not subject to that same sort of benefit...this goes beyond even what newspapers are doing." – Sylvain on Section 230 ([13:36])
• "There’s a chilling effect. Somebody could sue me just to shut me down." – Leo Laporte ([21:39])
• “This move...is the argument a lot of people, mostly on the right, have been making about the choice Facebook makes.” – Sylvain on moderation and conflating First Amendment ([27:35])
• “We live in a world where this has always been the baseline, and the kind of protections companies enjoy are exceptional.” – Sylvain on tech liability and regulation ([35:38])

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6. AI, Product Liability, and Societal Impact

• [30:09], [31:31], [32:07]
  • AI product liability is emerging (e.g., chatbots encouraging self-harm: Garcia v. Character Technologies).
  • Jarvis: "If it's a general machine like the printing press, you cannot predict every possible use…does liability fall on the creator or the user?" ([29:14])
  • Sylvain: "I would have us look case by case…" ([30:09])
  • Laporte: New bellwether cases strike fear in Silicon Valley; some product liability is needed.

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7. Big Tech, Small Tech, and the Future

• [46:00], [51:01], [53:44]
  • Recognizing the importance of Section 230 for small communities and platforms—debate over tailored protections.
  • The cultural value of digital “chaos” and small, decentralized communities vs. mass, homogenized platforms.
  • Reflections on “filter bubbles,” serendipity, and the public square analogies.

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8. AI’s Societal Interrogation: Rethinking Intelligence, Creativity, and Law

• [94:17], [94:29]
  • Jarvis’ book series: Forces us to rethink what intelligence, creativity, even “God” mean in the AI era.
  • Laporte: AI as a “collaborator,” not a competitor—potential for personal health, creativity, and companionship (e.g., "my little girlfriend Claudia"—Laporte, [97:17]).

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Important Timestamps (MM:SS)

• 05:22–06:59 – Why Big Tech "owns" the Internet, not users.
• 13:36–16:09 – Section 230’s special protections vs. traditional publisher liability.
• 19:36–21:45 – Laporte’s perspective: Section 230 as a shield for “little tech.”
• 22:10–27:48 – Product liability vs. content liability, dark patterns, design harms, and ongoing litigation.
• 30:09–32:54 – AI regulation, liability, and edge cases in legal theory.
• 34:21–35:38 – Copyright (DMCA) as a template for Section 230 reform.
• 37:11–38:07 – Surrendering public digital spaces to private companies—role of governance.
• 94:17–95:02 – Existential questions raised by AI, as outlined in Jarvis’s book series.

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Additional Highlights

• History Interlude: Radio Act (1927), assimilation via media, and foundations of US broadcast regulation. ([39:01])
• Comparison with European media regulation models (public vs. ad-supported). ([158:06])
• Real-world conflict: LA product liability trial against Meta, body image, youth mental health. ([87:17])
• General concern: Policy shaped by vibes and fears, not data (e.g., Jonathan Haidt debate). ([92:10]–[94:17])

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Tone, Style, and Atmosphere

• Candid, friendly, and deep: A frank but respectful exchange—bridging legal, journalistic, and practical perspectives.
• Self-deprecating humor: "Not to put words in his mouth, but I think he would argue the Internet is no longer new media..." (Laporte, [50:39]); recurring asides and personal anecdotes.
• Memorable, often sardonic asides: "The book no one bought." – Leo Laporte, referring to Jarvis’s book ([90:30]).

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Conclusion

This robust episode moved beyond soundbites to interrogate the legal, cultural, and historical foundations of our digital world.

• Is Section 230 a shield for innovation and speech, or is it letting Big Tech off the hook for harm?
• How do we preserve the Internet as a public resource, not just a profit center?
• Can AI be regulated with enough nuance to avoid chilling innovation, but hold designers accountable for real harm?
• And how do these issues echo (or depart from) previous tech and media revolutions?

Ultimately, the conversation invites listeners to recognize the complexity—and necessity—of ongoing, thoughtful governance for our digital future. As Laporte notes, “I feel like there is plenty of space on the Internet for the kind of public discourse, the kind of sitting next to somebody in the subway. I love that. I love that image and it's not about assimilation, actually. It's about celebrating a variety of cultures and bringing us together so we can get to know each other as opposed to homogenize each other.” ([51:14])

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Further Reading / Listening

• Olivier Sylvain, "Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control and How We Can Take It Back"
• Jeff Jarvis, "The Web We Weave," "Hot Type" (coming soon)
• James Carey, Roman Chaudhary books on media & AI
• Recommended essay: James Carey, "The Mass Media and Democracy Between the Modern and the Postmodern" ([44:21])

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Upcoming Topics on Intelligent Machines

• AI hallucinations, with Chris Potts (BigSpin.AI)
• Ian Bogost returns with "The Small Stuff"
• Nate B. Jones on AI models

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Listen or subscribe at twit.tv/IM.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. Paris has the week off. She's in Montana. Jeff Jarvis is here. Our guest, Olivier Sylvain says we should stop Section 230 because Big Tech's getting away with murder. The author of Reclaiming the Internet. Coming up next on Intelligent Machines, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Chart, Episode 876, recorded Wednesday, June 24, 2026. It's no Melania. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover the latest in AI robotics and all those smart doohickeys all around you. Joining me right now, Professor Emeritus Jeff Jarvis, the former. You don't. You're never former, are you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's your emeritus? No, you're just. It's Latin for old.

[Leo Laporte]

Professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School. Oh, wrong button. Oops, Wrong button.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Newmark.

[Leo Laporte]

Wrong button. Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Now at Montclair State and SUNY Stony Brook. He's the author of a brand new book coming out in a little bit more than a month. Hot Type. The story of the machine that Drove Mark Twain crazy. The Linotype and of course the web we weave and magazine. And the Gutenberg parenthesis. You've been rotating the books.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I figured given today, since we're talking about trying to save the web, I would put out the web weave. I was telling Olivier that his book, no Doubt has sold already much more than mine since no one bought mine.

[Leo Laporte]

But Paris Martineau is on vacation this week in Big Sky Country. She was hoping to join us, but she said the youth hostel she's staying in doesn't exactly have the best bandwidth out there in Montana. Actually, I'm glad she's having a nice time in a beautiful area of the country, so I wouldn't want her to work on vacation. So it's just me and Jeff today, but we're not alone. We have a guest. Olivier Sylvain is the professor and author of a brand new book, well, relatively new, came out a couple of months ago. Reclaiming the How Big Tech Took Control and How We Can Take it back. From Columbia Global Reports. Professor Sylvain, welcome.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Thank you very much. It's a thrill to join you folks here.

[Leo Laporte]

We're glad to have you. You're a law professor, but I think people might recognize your name because you were at the FTC as senior advisor to Lina Khan for a couple of

[Olivier Sylvain]

years and yeah, they May recognize my name because of that. That was mostly behind the scenes senior advisor. You know, for a middle aged person to take some time away from academia, it was a thrill to join Chair Kahn at an exciting time at the ftc.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where is bureaucracy worse? University or federal government?

[Olivier Sylvain]

Wow, that's a tough one. But you know the answer to that I think, Jeff, the answer. Government is pretty thick with bureaucracy. And maybe another book I can talk a little bit about why some of the things I would have loved to have seen didn't happen. But that's another story.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Chair Khan really very young, came out of academia as well and really took on big tech. Unfortunately, a number of the cases she brought have been dropped in the subsequent administration. So I can't say she had a run of successes. I wish she, I wish she had. I think she was doing the right thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She certainly changed the discussion and the agenda.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't, you know, I think I understand your point given that, you know, after four years you have a new administration that comes in and pulls a rag on from under. Sure. But I think I'm with Jeff here. I'm probably go further and say there was, it was a, it was a. The four years were successful at least because it opened the aperture for what is possible. The kinds of things that I focus on were consumer protection issues, not competition issues. With regards to competition, I'm happy to talk about that stuff. But with regards to consumer protection, there are a couple statutory authorities that the FTC is currently using more than they had before this. This ftc, including ROSCA, statutes addressed to dark patterns on online activity and Section 5 unfairness. It's not just deception anymore. Right. It's not just false claims that companies make about their services. It's also just foundational unfairness. This is something this current administration is using as well. So I actually think there is a lot of success that happened in the administration under Khan's leadership.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess when it comes to government, it's progress, not perfection. You always hope to make little incremental improvements bit by bit. So I want to talk a little bit about your book. First of all, why do we need to reclaim the Internet? Who's got it now?

[Olivier Sylvain]

Well, it's not the so called users

[Jeff Jarvis]

that

[Olivier Sylvain]

many of us were fantasizing about in the 1990s that I know that Professor Jarvis has written about. It's not them. And I think that's a pretty uncontroversial observation. You know, the argument of the book is that you just have to look as far as the inauguration stage, January 2025, to see what's happened where the dominant players in our tech information economy were sitting right behind the President and very quickly benefited from, you know, the president's promises. So the extractive model that a lot of people have written about has gotten some rocket fuel under this administration. Those are the folks that are running the show now, but they have for a while. And part of the reason is because of what Congress and the courts have done over the past couple of decades.

[Leo Laporte]

They might defend themselves saying, hey, but we built it without our capital, without our servers, without our software, what would the Internet be? I mean, we the people put the content on there, but it's their servers that we put the content on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Kind of the telco argument, too, that we were going through Net neutrality versus the platform argument.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah. I mean, we can talk about telcos. I mean, I start as a tech lawyer at General Block working on FCC issues, so I agree there are echoes with regards to telco, but these are not companies that built it alone. Right. I mean, the argument that I make is that they rely on a regulatory regime that is especially forgiving, especially deferential, so that the business model that emerges in the early 2000s never gets a close look until relatively recently. And so they got a big boost. The more provocative claim I make, and I don't think is inaccurate. I love someone to tell me I'm wrong, is that the only industry that enjoys the same sort of legal protection, if not is the gun industry. These are companies that can get away with building applications and services that

[Benito Gonzalez]

hold

[Olivier Sylvain]

people's attention, even at the expense of those very consumers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You actually talk about the gun industry when you're talking about section 230, which we're going to get to. Yeah. Jeff and I both come from the John Perry Barlow generation of we believed the Internet was going to democratize everything and it was going to open up a whole new means of communication and so forth. And so it is like Commissioner Khan's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like you're pointing about Commissioner Khan's tenure. In many ways it has.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't think we need reject. Yes, exactly.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah, I agree with that, by the way. I mean, who couldn't agree with the idea that it's been transformational in many good ways for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

And yet we're also fans of Cory Doctorow and acknowledge that inshitification is rampant and you call it ruthless commercial exploitation, but it's the same thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just reread the Hutchins commission report from 1947 about the media and the news industry. And I think we think nostalgically that media back then was good before it got shittified. But there was a whole commission brought together because people thought that media was

[Leo Laporte]

back then, well, isn't it kind of the way of capitalism? We thought the Internet was free. We were obviously deluded. And at some point the bill came due and these companies were giving it away probably fully with knowledge that at some point they were going to be able to exploit it. And as Shoshana Zuboff has pointed out, I know you're not a huge fan of hers, Jeff, but that, that's kind of the nature of surveillance capitalism, that she would say the whole thing was built specifically for that purpose. How do we reclaim it? I mean, I think we don't have to debate that. I think everybody's watching.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We need a better Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

Question knows, we need a better Internet, but how do we get there?

[Olivier Sylvain]

You know, I, I, I very, I like reading that stuff from the 90s Barlow and you know, they're, they're, you

[Leo Laporte]

fatted the American dream.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I mean there are all these really, really amazing peons and what is possible, even Yochai Benkler when he writes the wealth of networks in 2006, you're still tapping into that. It's really attractive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Olivier Sylvain]

And you know, as someone who, with, with ACLU roots, I, I, there's a libertarian in me somewhere that, that thinks, you know, this is really, really great stuff. But I think that that discourse, that language was always, was always distracting and, and insufficiently alert to what would, well, as you say, what happens in capitalism. Right. I mean there, there are business models that have to emerge. The one thing I don't think people totally got, or maybe I didn't, at least maybe you did, is the dramatic information asymmetry between the administrators of servers and the services behind the screen and the consumers. I don't think people totally understood what that would look like. They really thought that they would be governing the space co equally. But that of course was never the case.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But didn't, we didn't. If you, I'm sorry, I'm going to do this because I write books about the history of media and technology. If we go back, the asymmetry was tremendous in mass media.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People had no opportunity to speak whatsoever. That's what the Hutchins Commission Report worries about. Just to recall on that again. And so the asymmetry may still be there, but it isn't. It isn't. It Tremendously lessened in that anyone can speak now. No guarantee of being heard. Never was, never should be. So the asymmetry is still there. I agree with you. But isn't it a lot better than it was?

[Olivier Sylvain]

So I think potentially it was. But, you know, I'm happy to talk about this, Jeff, because, you know, I'm also a media history kind of person. You know, the Fairness Doctrine is not, you know, unimportant for thinking about the obligations the companies have. The licensing regime that the FCC sets up or that Congress sets up, that the FCC implements is not, you know, incidental. It's important to addressing the asymmetry. Right. I mean, the language that the courts and policymakers are making, as you know, is that there are just a handful of broadcasters who are running the show and we have to keep them accountable. Now, I'm not a huge fan of that comparative licensing regime as it was set up. It was rife with corruption, too, but at least there was a mechanism for regulatory oversight. We haven't had this in the Internet setting ever.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But wasn't broadcast the exception? The rights that were given to print were sliced down like baloney Comm Radio. And again, reading about that, and you know far more about this than I do, having worked with the FCC and understanding the roots of its regulation. But that was a slice taken out of the First Amendment, so that print had far more rights and remains with far more rights than broadcast did. And far more respect, I would say, print has than broadcast did. And so in an Internet where people have the ability to respond, the ability to speak, should it be closer to print or to broadcast in its regulatory regime?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I mean, this is a great question. This is the perennial question. And the Supreme Court, I mean, I'm going to answer by starting with what the courts have said, which I know you know the answer to, and then tell you what I think that the, you know, they've said. It's much more like newspapers. Right. When Justice Stevens for the Supreme Court writes the Reno vs. ACLU opinion, he's talking about pamphleteers and libraries. Right. And right. The web is one big library and that we're all individual pamphleteers. I think he has taken the story that Barlow and others are telling full cloth and restating it in the language of law. I think that is. I think that was wrong and I don't blame them. I was right there. Right. I mean, younger, but definitely excited about what was possible. The problem is that it went further. Right. The First Amendment is one thing. And then Congress. I know, Leo, you Said we'll talk about it. I can't help bring it up. But Congress goes further and insulates the companies from liability. Publishers are not subject to that same sort of benefit. Right. So this goes beyond even what newspapers are doing. And what I'm talking about is this protection under 47 USC 230.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. But when I started, I worked for. I'm not a real professor, by the way, just to be clear here. I snuck in through the side door of journalism. But when I worked for. As president of Creative Director of advanced.net I started all of our newspaper sites and sort of worked on our magazine sites and so on. We were highly interactive. We were highly open to having the public there. My boss, Steve Newhouse believed in that immensely that this was very different from a content based media medium of magazines. But if I knew our lawyers well and if we had been liable for the speech of others on our platform, we wouldn't have had it.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I shudder to think how much would have been lost and still could be lost. And we see it happening just for the expense of moderation. And I think your points about moderation are right. And we'll get to that. A lot of people are taking down comments and forums and such because it's too much of a pain in the ass. Not because it's liable. But if you add liability into that. We do. We end up back in the place where there's a few media brands and they're theirs and they're not ours and we can't speak in them.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah. I mean, I do think this is a realistic threat when you don't have. There are no mechanisms to protect publishers in the way you described. And especially online. Right. There's so much more content trafficking through servers online than there are then on a news. In a newspaper.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Olivier Sylvain]

So. So the exposure is tremendous. I'm with you there. The problem is that I don't think there was. That there's any shortage of incentive to build business models that could account for that potential. There was just so much commercial opportunity, I didn't know what it was. But. But I don't think that there. I think there are companies that would have come up with strategies to account for potentially unlawful distribution of content. I don't know this for a fact, but this is a hunch that I have and it would have been nice to have seen what it would look like in the absence of this substantial statutory protection. For what it's worth, there is a protection under first amendment doctrine for newspapers and that would have been applied to the Internet. And that is once the companies know that they're distributing information that is harmful, they should be held accountable. When they don't know. I'm with you, Jeff. That's not something that you could really anticipate. But when they know as a matter of course that this is happening, that unlawful stuff is being distributed, they should be held accountable. I would like to see what the world looks like when that liability regime exists.

[Leo Laporte]

Hold on a second. We're talking to Professor Olivier Sylvain. He's professor of law at Fordham University, as you mentioned, a former ACLU fellow in the legal office in New York. He is also a, I think, former director at the Knight Institute. Is that right or are you still.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I was just finished two and a half stint there. The research

[Jeff Jarvis]

institute.

[Leo Laporte]

Also the author of a new book called Reclaiming the How Big Tech Took Control and How We Can Take It Back. So I just want to raise one issue and I think it's really timely because of course, we just had the decision in Los Angeles with Facebook or Meta, and also in New Mexico. And I think it's timely because I want to really make a distinction when you talk about section 230 often. I think far too often we talk about section 230 with regard to big tech companies like Meta. But I run a discourse forum. I run a Mastodon instance. I'm running a chat room right now on Discord. I am not a big guy. And section 230 protects me because I don't have to defend myself in court. I understand your desire to say let's go to court so that we can litigate these issues. Section 230 cuts that off. It doesn't let it go to a case. It's a defense. And I just say, no, you can't sue me because I am not the publisher of this content. I'm just providing this form, plus I can moderate it thanks to section230. I can't be prevented from moderating it or not moderating it. I think that's really important. Absent that kind of protection, I can't afford to go to court. I would shut those down. Yeah, go ahead.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I just. I think that there's a big distinction between how 6, 230 is used by big tech and how it protects little tech, little guys like me.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah, I think that's what Jeff was channeling as well. I'm sure that you two worked on extraordinary projects online. I love to talk about Wikipedia in this regard.

[Leo Laporte]

Good example.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yes, it is a miracle to me, I can't believe that it's community governed. Not entirely, but that it looks the way it does is astonishing that if there's a case to be made that small tech, let's call it medium or small tech, requires legal protection, it's a company like that or the ones you describe. Listen, I'm sympathetic to that instinct, but there is another protection that these companies enjoy, and that's the First Amendment. The Supreme Court ratified a pretty generous view of what the First Amendment means and the choices that companies make about the content they distribute a couple years ago. Moody versus NetChoice. So I, you know, so I know we're going to talk about Section 30, but I want to make sure that Section 230 lays atop another protection that comes now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, except that I would have to defend that in court as opposed to short circuiting it with 2/3.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah, yeah. And you know, this is. I have the benefit of never having run a company and maybe that's a bad thing. I think many people probably think it is a bad thing that I, that I and others who are critical haven't been in the shoes that you've been in. But I, as I said earlier, I would like to see what the world looks like when companies do have an incentive to build services and filters and moderation techniques because there is so much money to be made. So I would like to see what that world looks like. I do think that there are some companies that would be chilled to use.

[Leo Laporte]

All of the services I just described are pro bono. We do not make money on them. I would have to shut them down, period.

[Olivier Sylvain]

With the risk. Because of the risk of litigation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I cannot defend any litigation. There are people out there who would happily sue me because it would be a chance to shut me down. So that's issue one. Now, I don't disagree with you and I think this recent LA case is very interesting that there are product liabilities

[Jeff Jarvis]

and product design questions, which is different from the content questions. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Does Section 230 protect them in that case as well?

[Olivier Sylvain]

So this is what I've been arguing for the past 10 years. And I would like at some point if we could circle back to this really interesting, provocative point you've made about small tech. Right. So I do want to turn to the. But this is. You're talking about as the heartland of what I've been arguing for a long time and that Section 230 should not be invoked by companies, that it's small or big. To the extent that the argument that Plaintiffs make that victims make. Or that the ways in which a company has designed their services ought to be subject to legal scrutiny. Never mind the content that goes, you know, through from users.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's a complete. Those are these really two different issues?

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah. Well, well, so.

[Leo Laporte]

And you also, you say it's the algorithm. And I certainly think you can make the case that they've designed an algorithm to be addictive, compulsive even. Look at people scrolling through Instagram in the middle of the night, including me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like reading Dickens novel, though.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Or like Dickens. That's problematic. But I would also point out that even if you merely made an algorithm to surface the most interesting material, the stuff. In other words, if you turn that algorithm off, you're going to make a product that is not as good, let alone compelling. Well, so there's some defense in making some in algorithms in general.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah. I mean, the Internet is comprised of algorithms.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everything has a choice.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Everything is.

[Leo Laporte]

The editor makes a choice on the front page of the New York Times. Right.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Who wants to read something reverse correct chronological order.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I mean, I mean. Or, you know, alphabetical order or whatever. I mean, there's something about the algorithmic delivery of content that people want to see that of course, is of course, something we can celebrate on the one hand. But that's. That's not really. For me, that is a misdirection in some ways. And we can talk about the trials just to get at this a little bit. Right. So there. The trial out of New Mexico involves claims that the attorney general, state attorney general makes that says that some of that Facebook is basically a space in which predators can find sexual predators can find young people. And this is demonstrably true. As well as design services that are, with the limitless scroll and Autoplay video. Autoplay doing something that resembles addiction. The key point is that section 230 blocked inquiry into whether the companies could be held liable for that period. Right. That's what230 blocked, by the way. I'm not sure whether in any given circumstance an algorithmic recommendation should be something that we hold someone legally liable for. But the inquiry itself was blocked off until courts started getting hip to this design theory, which is happening. There's a big case out of California involving Lemon. I mean, all these big cases are out of California. But the Lemon versus Snap, where Snap has a speed filter that you could predict a teenage boy driving a car is going to use really dangerously.

[Leo Laporte]

I've used it though, on the Shuriken in Japan to see how fast the bullet train was going. So there are also legitimate uses of that. I understand you use as an example in your book Arms List, which is a marketplace for unregistered firearm sales. And they escaped liability because those gun listings were third party content. And so that is something maybe that's a little more visceral that people can really understand versus, say, Facebook.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Can I add a fact to this?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Arms List had as part of their design a space called backroom where unlicensed gun licensed, you know, people couldn't have a license to a gun, could buy unregistered weapons. A domestic abuser says he wants to hurt his wife, doesn't have a license to gun, gets it. And, and the company prevails in a Section 230 defense because it's user generated content.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's also the gun politics there.

[Leo Laporte]

We can, I mean that, you know, that's, that's a very visceral case of, yeah, boy, that seems like that's a bad thing. But I, but I again bring up as a counterexample my benign little Mastodon instance, you know, and I, and I was so, so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But in the design case, Leo, if I'm wrong in reading this way, that the issue would be whether Mastodon is designed right in such a way, clearly armsless versus what Leo does in moderation.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you, what do you think of the, and I don't know the latest on it, but the various discussions in the UK on requiring a duty of care, does that put a proper or too much of a requirement on these platforms? And this goes into AI very quickly. Can you predict every use and every harmful outcome of something you've designed? Should you have a responsibility to do so? Is that possible?

[Leo Laporte]

I will add one more little thing to this. I just recently, like a minute ago, right before the show, banned an account that was posting nudity because I don't want nudity on my mastodon. I don't want him to be able to come after me and say, well, my first amendment right is being violated here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you're not the government.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, you're right, that's true. Good point. But I'm still being censored.

[Olivier Sylvain]

This move that. I know that you got Jeff's retort there, but this move you made is the argument that a lot of people, mostly on the right, have been making about the choice Facebook makes.

[Leo Laporte]

They're conflating the first amendment. Yeah.

[Olivier Sylvain]

But this point about the duty of care is really interesting by the way. It's happening in the US too, with this discussion of casa, the Kids Online Safety act, is considering there's a duty of care statute provision in that bill. I mean, I am warm to that idea. For what it's worth. There are in law already obligations to attend to prospective harm, foreseeable harm in the common law. Now, I can admit I tend to be a big government kind of person, so I'm not so worried about a new statutory provision that imposes an obligation to take care of people. But we already have negligence and product liability as Jeff invoked. And the facts in some of these cases that have been litigated are really important. This is not like your mastodon or instance, nor is it like mastodon. It's Facebook internal reporting saying, we know that this stuff is hurting young girls. There are young girls that have kind of, you know, develop psychological concerns involving their body, stories about self harm, their internal reports, and the company does not heed them. Right. This is foreseeable harm.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Those Francis Hagen documents were probably very much part of the jury's consideration. Right?

[Olivier Sylvain]

Absolutely right. And I don't think you need a duty of care to get that right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So let me take this to AI if I can, because I think it's an interesting extension there. So I'll stipulate, your honor, that Facebook can have some harms and knows of those harms. It has the data and thus should do something about them and could be held in different law liable for them. Okay, so let's presume that. But then the interesting discussion we get into with AI and with air quotes, guardrails around them is my contention regularly is that it's a general machine, like the printing press. You cannot predict every possible use to which it will be put. You're not in control of every use to which it'll be put. You put a model out there and so does the liability creep back to the, to the AI creator, or does it rest with the user who asks for it to do something bad? Where do you see that? Because I think there's a straight line here from the Internet and AI and I'm curious where you think a precedent in one will affect analysis of the other.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I would have us look case by case to see whether or not the developer of an AI model should be held accountable or not, and that sometimes the, the, the, either the deployer or the user should be held responsible. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm actually with you there. But let's consider the cases that are emerging again, they're very dramatic cases involving self harm in children and AI chatbots. Right. These are. Or it doesn't even have to be a chat bot. ChatGPT. I mean, I don't know how you think of that, but I mean, I guess it's effectively a chat bottom where young people and adults are neurodivergent or especially vulnerable at any given moment and the company knows that it is prone to sycophancy and instigating behaviors. That would not be the sort of thing people would do in the absence of the existence of the chatbot. That's what happened in litigation involving a company called Character Technologies. Garcia vs Garcia case out of Florida and this is. There are cases now involving adults and the disruption that these companies know that they're causing in people's psychological profile.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What if the argument is that those are edge cases? Do they have to design to the edge case and does that affect the application for everybody else?

[Olivier Sylvain]

That's a legal question for me. I mean that's the case by case question. I don't feel like I have to. Maybe I should answer that squarely and say maybe it's the edge case and so we can excuse it with regards to other ones and maybe that's right. But there's just too much information that these companies hold and you know, the incentive that they had for deploying these services before they were ready. Right. Chat GPT, Character Technologies, they're doing it because they're racing to get the model out in spite of the knowledge that, that there is likely harm.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a new bellwether case actually coming up now with I think Snap just made a deal, but Meta is still involved, I believe. Anyway, we're going to see more and more of these cases around product liability. That seems to be, seems to have kind of touched a nerve here and it scared the hell out of Silicon Valley. I actually was one of the few technology people who think that LA decision wasn't a. Wasn't a bad decision. I think it makes sense that they should have some product liability. What do you recommend though? What should section230. You don't want to abolish it, but what should it, what should it be? How should it. How should it work? To protect me, a little tech guy, to bring big tech to account and to protect the users.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah, I mean you. We'll see what happens with the LA New Mexico cases. Right. The companies are likely. I mean, I think they've said they will appeal and on the legal question of whether or not 230 is a protection for them and by the way, you might be Surprised to hear me say this. The stuff I was writing in 2017, 18 didn't talk about only revising the statute. It was just saying courts, you know, what, look at the design of these applications, not to the content. And so it may be, Leo, that nothing changes with regards to the statute and that the courts just get hip to the possibility that different features and applications are doing different things. Right. That they're not just one big town square. But I do think, you know, I would like to see a narrowing so that there is a knowledge based legal regime. Right. One that, that says you are held accountable when you know that stuff that you're doing is harmful. We do that in the copyright setting. Right. I mean, Jeff and you, Leo, were asking about little tech. The dmca, the Digital Millennium Copyright act, as you both surely know, is a safe harbor for companies that traffic in user generated content that is copyrighted YouTube when it's a small company. The early 2000s is taking a risk, but it's because the DMCA says you can only be held liable when, after, if you don't take the content down when you hear about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I don't see why this kind of regime is impossible, particularly given the close attention the companies of the content that consumers are getting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The, the hazard that exists, Leo, has to deal with all the time. We can't play a video of anything on this show because somebody, not the, not the actual copyright owner, is going to come in and take advantage of that on YouTube and get things taken

[Leo Laporte]

down for chilling effect.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah, yeah, the hecklers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I think logically I agree with you, but the question is how does it get exploited by, by malign actors.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Olivier Sylvain]

You know, there's a statute that, you know, I have, I'm, I think I'm mostly okay with the Take It down act that, that Congress passed last year. Right. Involving the distribution of non consensual imagery. AI generated non consensual imagery and many people are concerned that it could be weaponized. I know it's a term of du jour, but can be weaponized by people who just want to, you know, someone they don't like. So I think that that's a real threat, a real possibility. But you know what? We live in a world where this has always been the baseline and the kind of protections that companies enjoy are exceptional,

[Leo Laporte]

according to AI. You tell me if it's a hallucination. Your next project is about public space. Whether the Internet could recreate the forced encounter of a subway car where you can't Curate. Who's sitting next to you?

[Olivier Sylvain]

Wow, that's some deep AI readings.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that true?

[Olivier Sylvain]

I think I did a podcast where I mused about this, and now I really work on this project.

[Leo Laporte]

My AI listens to all the podcasts especially.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Well, I'm going to go back to my roots and to my infrastructure roots and talk about shared spaces. I grew up in New York City. My parents are Haitian immigrants. I learned to become a New Yorker and an American by way of the subway, through public parks, through the radio. My dissertation is about the radio. And I don't know if we can transcode all of that for the Internet, but I want to think about how to do that. And so. Yes, but you just blasted this out more than I thought. I'm ready.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's two podcasts. You're for sure that's going to be surfacing. I like the idea. No, I think it's a really. I was intrigued when I saw that because I really find that an intriguing concept, and it is something we lose. Jeff and I have argued over Eli Pariser's filter bubble. He doesn't quite believe that's the case, but I do think that the serendipity of encounters on the Internet is part of its real value.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah. So that's. I don't know if I want to talk about serendipity so much because that's been, you know, people have been talking about that for a while, Jeff. You know, I mean, I'm hip to the idea, but it's this idea. We've relinquished public resources to private administrators.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Language that lawyers use is to talk about governance.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Olivier Sylvain]

The governance regimes. I actually think my project, my law project, is about Lawrence Lessig's code as law. The argument that you might in some instances defer to technologists to come up with a regulatory regime. The language of governance comes up here. I think I want to push back a little bit, maybe a lot on this and not relinquish the role that public lawmaking bodies have in assuring that valuable communicative resources are available to everyone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've got two questions for you, so I'm sure I get these in before we leave. One is say more about your dissertation. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff is being kind to me because I have just. I'll be just rounding out my 50th year as a radio broadcaster.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Doing the order he wants. I'm very eager to hear what you think of the present FCC head and ABC and such, if you're willing to talk about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Lord, you pick Up, Jeff, That's a two hour conversation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I'm happy to dispose of the second one quickly. It is lawless, politically motivated, unconstitutional, Plainly unconstitutional. Right. I mean.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Olivier Sylvain]

And I think there are many people on the left and the right who see that when you're.

[Leo Laporte]

See, that's why we don't like the Take It down act because of that kind of lawlessness.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah. That's why I mentioned weaponization. I do think that this is acceptable. This is a weaponization of agency power which is squarely at odds with the First Amendment. I'm very happy. You want to talk about the radio act of 1927, which is what the subject of the dissertation was. And my argument was to associate it with the Immigration act of 1924 and a kind of cultural conservatism. But it was about assimilation. It was about the cities and immigrants.

[Leo Laporte]

This was the Public Interest Act. Right. This is the one that said stations had to act because they're using public airwaves in the public interest.

[Olivier Sylvain]

That's right. That's right. And so it's a kind of, you know, ideal. It's an ideological history. Like, why did that happen? The alternative would have been what Ronaldo Cohes asked for a couple years, you know, a couple decades later. And that is an auction system, which is what the FCC eventually gets in 1996, but. Or a little bit before, but then in 1996. So, you know, the Radioactive 1927 is an archive. You know, it's old news. You know, I talked to my.

[Leo Laporte]

Literally.

[Olivier Sylvain]

And they don't know what I'm talking about. And then I tell them it's title three of the current Communications Act. It governs your cell phones. Ah, so there you go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's the title? I'm writing a book next about the death of mass media. What's the title of the dissertation?

[Olivier Sylvain]

I'm looking at it now. Domesticating the Great Throbbing Common Pulse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, good title for it.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow. That's sensationalism in dissertation titles.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it published anywhere?

[Olivier Sylvain]

I appreciate that you asked. It's not. And someone I think you both know was my dissertation advisor, Todd Gitlin. Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And.

[Olivier Sylvain]

And James Carey was the original supporter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I'm a James Kerry worshiper.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not James Cary. Jeff, you're gonna.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just reread another essay of his about religion and because he. He was. He was a believer in the idea that media is. Is a. You're gonna. You studied with him, you know, far better than I would. Is often not the transmission of Information, but instead is ritual. And I think if you look at media that way and reading newspapers, like going to mass confirms something for you.

[Leo Laporte]

I would use a less loaded term, maybe culture.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I really do. I've been thinking a lot about this lately is how we transmit culture and how subcultures get transmitted. And we have geographic subcultures in this country that have become a real issue, if you ask me. But unfortunately, our time. Oh, wow, Olivier. Is up. I wish we had more time with you.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I wanted to say more of what you just said.

[Leo Laporte]

Say more. All right, I'll let you. Okay, okay. It's your time, not mine. Go ahead.

[Olivier Sylvain]

So Jim Carrey was a cultural theorist, right. And he would have said so. So I'm glad to hear you say it. And my project was about. Partly about the Interstation talked about German language as emerging. German language newspapers emerging in Brooklyn, but that there are many people who are worried about immigrants not assimilating quickly enough so the public interest would bring them in.

[Leo Laporte]

No kidding. That was the point.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Well, that's a provocative argument. I don't think everyone bought my argument.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fascinating. No, I know. I. I think that sounds. That makes a lot of sense, actually.

[Olivier Sylvain]

There's also a technical reason, right. Radio signal interference. That's the stated reason for the regulation of radio.

[Leo Laporte]

And as somebody worked for years in broadcast stations where you had to have a public file on record and people could come to the front desk and demand the public file. And I had to read PSAs every hour, public service announcements every hour, all in service to. I guess it was superseded by a later act, but to the idea that radio was a public service, but I never thought of it as a way to force assimilation.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Well, so I can't say my argument is the one that is the prevailing one.

[Leo Laporte]

Olivier. I'll give you something, though. If you look at the rise of right wing radio in this country, no kidding, that has been a huge force in our political culture, certainly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Olivier Sylvain]

To the day when the Fairness Doctrine is repealed. To the day. Right. Russia comes on the scene.

[Leo Laporte]

So isn't that interesting?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I'll return one more time to the Hutchins Commission report because it's fresh on my mind, the concern with the. And mind you, there were a hell of a lot more media outlets and company and owners at the time in 1947. But the concern was that monopolization of the. Of the mechanisms of speech meant that what wouldn't be heard. And pushing free speech to that limit of saying, of tolerating things that we may not want to hear, but need to hear to be part of public discourse and grappling with that at the time. And I think it's time for the exact same discussion today, but in very changed circumstances. Yeah. By the way, that James Kerry essay, if any of the listeners want to actually look it up, it's the mass media and democracy between the modern and the postmodern. Now I've got a brilliant essay.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Brilliant essay. Agreed.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll give you something else to read. Your homework, Reclaiming the Internet. How big tech took control and how we can take it back. Our guest, Professor Olivier Sylvain from Fordham Law School. Thank you so much, Professor Sylvain. Really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you know, Olivier, I went to my first year at college at Claremont and I was going to go to law school, and then I said, no, I'm not going to do that. And generally I'm glad I made that decision. But in a conversation with the likes of you, I really regret not having had the opportunity for exactly these kinds of discussions.

[Olivier Sylvain]

That's very generous. It means a lot to hear from you.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's what happens is that future lawyers get enticed by the intellectual excitement of the whole thing, and then they get to work at a law firm in the basement reading documents.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Instead you go get your PhD and teach. That's a far better path.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I got a PhD after three

[Olivier Sylvain]

years of reading documents. The basement.

[Leo Laporte]

You learned. The happiest lawyers I ever met are all lapsed. So there you go. Really, really a pleasure to meet you and. But now you've got me thinking about all sorts of stuff.

[Olivier Sylvain]

You still got to work on the small tech problem. I like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is, it is. I mean, for me, it's really significant, obviously.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is why I really defend section 230 every time it comes up. Because it isn't just big tech. It is so easy to think it's just about big tech.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The irony of newspaper publishers going over 230 is that they are protected by it. Not with their. Not with their own content, but when they have forums and comments and all of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Comment sections. Yeah.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Online, sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I mean, you know, I'll give you a. I'll give you. Maybe there's a common place we can. We can agree on. Although I have some resistance and there are people who've talked about revising 230 so that there is. It's only something that smaller companies can invoke. Right. So. And that's not exceptional in current law. Right. So there's That I don't love that because the business model bakes in incentives when companies just start. And I worry that to the extent a small company is engaged in dangerous design decisions, that those get, you know, immune from inquiry.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll end with Julia Anguin's comments on your book. Olivier shows us clearly what we have allowed the Internet to become. A haunted house version of a shopping mall full of dangerous products, scams, frauds, and abuse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's an A blurb. That's good.

[Leo Laporte]

We will do really nice blurb. We would do well to heed Sylvain's carefully crafted plan to clean up this message.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And by the way, I just downloaded your dissertation. I can't wait to read it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. See, there is.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Oh, my gosh, I'm scared now.

[Leo Laporte]

You were young. It's okay. You didn't know any better.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I was the oldest person in my cohort.

[Leo Laporte]

But really? Really?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Olivier Sylvain]

I mean, I had a job. I was. I had been in the world. I was a lawyer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, I think it's good for people to have some real world experience, too. Thank you, Professor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you so much.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Thank you, Liam. Thanks for keeping calling me Professor. It's okay to call me Olivier, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Contrary to Jeff's experience, my dad started at Fordham but ended up moving to Columbia. So there you go.

[Olivier Sylvain]

All right, I'll forgive him.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks so much. We'll talk soon, I hope. And I look forward to talking more about these issues, I think.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Thanks very much, Leah. Thanks, Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Take care. Olivia. You're watching Intelligent Machines. As I mentioned, Paris is missed. She's on vacation in Big sky country. I'm very jealous. She says horseback riding and touring the. I don't know. I don't know what she's gonna do. She's not gonna fly fish, I don't think. Probably trying some coffee. We'll be back with more intelligent machines in just a bit. Brought to you today by Gusto. Right now, everyone is trying to run a leaner, tighter budget, smaller team, higher expectation company. The last thing you have time to waste on is manual payroll. I used to have to do that or chasing down an HR form. Not anymore. Gusto is how small business owners get time back when every hour counts. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers comp 401k, you name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. Unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. No hidden fees, no surprises. Save time with built in automated tools. Offer letters, onboarding docs, direct deposit, and more. Get direct access to certified HR experts to help support you through any tough HR situations. It's quick. It's simple to switch to Gusto. Just transfer your existing data to get up and running fast. Plus, you don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Gusto is ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026 and is trusted by over 400,000 small businesses. Try Gusto today at gusto.com machines and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com machines one more time. Gusto.com machines we thank them so much for the support of intelligent machines. Yeah, it's. I always like to get people on and talk about Section 230 because I don't know why it's the whipping boy for everybody who wants to bring down big tech, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's why I'm very interested in reading his dissertation. Because I think when a new medium comes along, there is reflex to say, can't we do something about this, to control it? And to some extent we should. To some extent we can't. And where you find that line and what the implications are, is, is. Is not. Not easy.

[Leo Laporte]

Not to put words in his mouth, but I think he would argue that the Internet is no longer new media. That's part of this, is part of the maturing of that. Right. Is to start thinking about things like this. It no longer needs to be coddled and carefully husbanded. As it grows into something, it has grown into something pretty huge.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, we got to figure out how to take it back. And this is what we talk about all the time. This is why I didn't listen to you enough about Mastodon. If we'd supported Mastodon as a culture more from the beginning, we'd be in better shape on the Internet today.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and I'm kind of a poster boy for all of this. I moved from, you know, mainstream media into podcasting when podcasting was. I was like the fifth person to do it. We've always had an IRC chat room. We've always had forums and mastodons. And I just, I feel like there is plenty of space on the Internet for the kind of public discourse, the kind of sitting next to somebody in the subway. I love that. I love that image and it's not about assimilation, actually. It's about celebrating a variety of cultures and bringing us together so we can get to know each other as opposed to homogenize each other.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Hey, this is Benito. I would. I would say it's. We need chaos. We need more chaos in there because, like, it's all walled off guard. But it's like Facebook. It's like. But it's like, you know. Yeah, but 4chan is formatted always the same. It always looks the same. It's always the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I agree with you. There's no chaos anymore on Instagram and Facebook and Snap and TikTok and all of that stuff, but just websites in general.

[Benito Gonzalez]

There aren't enough websites in general anymore. When I used to go on the Internet, I would go to my bookmarks and look at my fun websites, but now it's like two websites.

[Jeff Jarvis]

1900 New York City, 46 daily newspapers. There was chaos then, and we lost it with mass media. We lost it with the. With the consolidation into big corporations. So, yeah, I agree. We need to bring chaos back to culture because chaos means people have their voice.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also why I mentioned things like the Wander log. There's actually a move. Kagi's doing it, too, towards small, small Internets, you know, small sites, things like that. This is. This is a. We've talked about this a couple of weeks ago as my pick of the week, and I set one up using our picks of the week as sites. And then there's a kind of. It's almost a web ring. So these sites come from other people's Internets, and these are just small blogs. And I think I actually really relish, you know, I have. As part of our job, I have to go through all of this, you know, mainstream tech reporting. But I have more than 200 feeds, and a lot of those feeds are little blogs. Yeah, little.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's where you're gonna find the interesting stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

That's where that I. That's what I look forward to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I think our. Our sense of. Of value got terribly skewed. Where we thought if it wasn't the biggest, if it wasn't gigantic, if it wasn't millions, it was worthless. And that's why I've always respected valuing,

[Leo Laporte]

because it got so out of control, every. Not everybody. Many of us are valuing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that's what I've always respected, what you said. I've quoted it a million times that you don't want to be too big. It would ruin it if you're too big.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You want to serve the proper number

[Leo Laporte]

of people who care if OpenAI wants to write a multi hundred million dollar check.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. You take it.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm in the happy situation of not having that opportunity. It's easy for me to say. We talked last week extensively and maybe I was a little heated about Anthropic's fable and how the government had banned it. Trump has softened a little bit. He gave a interview with Axios saying it's not a national security threat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was, but it's not anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not anymore. Dario Amodei followed Trump to the G7 summit, where they met in France. And apparently we don't know exactly what the conversation was. My theory is that Dario did something that Sam Altman's already done, which is offered the president 10% of the company.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, you say.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, similar kinds of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, I hadn't thought of that.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, this is what OpenAI has done that's kept them in the good graces of the. Of the Trump administration. Donate to the ballroom. Donate to the inaugural fund.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Offer equity. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Brockman gave what it was a $25 million to Trump's PAC. MAGA. PAC. You know, I was talking about this on Mac Break Weekly, and actually we've been pretty hard on Tim Cook for kissing the ring so hard. But I'm. Now I'm starting to come around. This Fable thing kind of shook me. I think Tim recognized early on, the CEO of Apple, that Trump was able to and willing to wield a very big sword. That sort of sword of Trump was hanging over his head. He did it to Anthropic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Tech product. He banned it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A gold bar is a lot less of a price to pay than 10% equity or a ban.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and think what the consequence would be if Trump banned the iPhone because. Which you could legitimately, maybe more legitimately do the ban fable saying, well, it's a Chinese company builds it. It's a security risk to our nation. We're going to ban it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can only give Leo, don't give them any ideas.

[Benito Gonzalez]

That's revolution, though, right? That would spark revolution, though.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I guarantee you he didn't do it because you're right, there's a lot of people using iPhones who have been pretty pissed off. I think he and I mentioned this last week, made a very smart calculation politically that AI is not exactly the poster child anymore in the United States. So many people hate AI that banning an AI model would, as it did, go down without a trace. You know, Nobody complained. Has anybody? There's hardly any coverage of it. And yet it strikes me as unprecedented that American president, without consultation with anybody, Congress or anybody else, would ban an American product. That's stunning to me. Yeah, it's one thing to ban foreign made routers, but to ban a product made in America by Americans that is actually at the forefront of the, in that category of products worldwide, to me was a stunning move. But I think he made the political calculus correctly, incidentally.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Say that, say more about how is that a correct political calculus? He could do it without hurting himself.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. If you ban the iPhone, as Bonito said, there would have been a rebellion on the streets. Ban Fable. It's not even in the news anymore.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It goes to what you said in our chat. I think it was, and I've been saying this as well, that the tech lash on AI took very little time to develop in considerable margins. So was it even thinking this is going to be popular? People don't like AI so finally get rid of an AI, Right?

[Leo Laporte]

I think so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But as you were trying to say last week, the implications are frightening in terms of it wasn't just me, it was precedent. It's set.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex Stamos, our guest last week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it sets a precedent. It also affects all of American technology worldwide and how we're going to be received. You want to, you want to give goad the Chinese into competing more. He just did it well.

[Leo Laporte]

And I, you know, I watch carefully the, you know, the opinion out there in the world x dot com, as much as I hate using it, is an excellent place to see what people who use AI are thinking about AI. And almost immediately people started saying, you know that Chinese model glm, that's pretty darn good. And by the way, glm, which comes from a company called gpu, it's at Z. AI is open weight. Now, it's a big model, so you can't run it. I can't run it on any of my hardware. But if you happen to have 256 gigs of CUDA core, like four Blackwells sitting around, you can run it locally. And it is pretty close. I would say 90% people goes back and forth of open.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So as a company, you're reducing your risk of being shut down.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's a Chinese model, so it's as if Trump said, well, you know, we think that too many people are being killed by Ford F150 trucks, so let's ban those. But we're going to let the Chinese truck manufacturers bring their trucks in. It Is that is to me now, I know I'm the only person in the world saying this. So although you see a little bit, you know, here's Wired story. The White House is making up its rules for AI in real time. No one can say exactly what the company did wrong. The NSA was using it. Actually, there's an interesting story. Senator Warner apparently told people that when he was talking to the head of the nsa. The NSA said, yeah, we were trying. We were trying Fable. Here's the Times story of it. And by the way, the Times thinks that Warner misquoted the nsa, which makes a little bit more sense. The NSA cybersecurity analysts. This is Dustin Voltz and Julian Barnes writing in the New York Times. The NSA cybersecurity analysts have been testing versions of Anthropic's tools when the latest models were unplugged, so they lost access too. The controlled tests proved impressive even within the halls of the nsa. In fact, during the session, Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said this is a secondhand quote that NSA Chief General Joshua Rudd had informed him that Mythos, quote, broke into almost all of our classified systems. Not in weeks, but in hours. By the way, if that's the case, it means your classified systems are pretty sucky. He's pretty sucky. I mean, it's almost an admission that our classified systems are not very good. If Alex Stamos was right last week when he said, you know, the other models like ChatGPT5.5 and even some of these Chinese models are just as good as finding exploits as Fable and Mythos. If that's the case, then you then really is a real. There should be an alarm in the nsa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And do you imagine they're not. A commercial company gets tested all the time because it's in public. A behind the scenes NSA system isn't getting tested all the time and so probably is not as robust.

[Leo Laporte]

No, the Times clarifies, and I think they are right, that maybe Senator Warner misquoted General Rudd. In reality, the Times writes, the tests involved red teams. You know, these are security testers of NSA analysts who are using Mythos. Not fable, by the way, but the untrammeled unrestricted Mythos in a highly tailored environment that would be extremely unlikely for an adversary to replicate. The Red teams began their tests within classified NSA systems designed to be accessible only from certain computers, which is a very good way of preventing hackers from getting in there. Completely cut off, in fact, from the broader Internet. But, and this should be scary, the test found that Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity flaws within that class of network quickly. It didn't actually break into those systems. It didn't have to. So even though the nsa, the Times rights, did not experience the doomsday scenario some had feared, analysts at the spy agency were stunned by how capable Mythos appeared to be exceeding their already lofty expectations. Did that inform the president's decision? I don't know. We just don't know. Cybersecurity agencies. On Monday, from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the five eyes issued a public statement. The Times called it an unusual public statement warning that artificial intelligence was rapidly transforming cyber risk frontier. AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, they wrote, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. The timeline is not years. It is months. So we are in an interesting pickle.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The horse is out of the barn, over the horizon, and in the glue factory.

[Leo Laporte]

And the answer is not to ban the United States best model, because that just tells the other guys, okay, you better get to work on your models.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So is it sufficient to say that an ethical thing to do if you have something that is supposedly Mythos powerful, is to do what they did and say, okay, we're going to give it to the most vulnerable and important entities and give you a certain amount of time so that you can secure yourself up to that standard, whatever it is Mythos can do, and then we'll open it up. Right. That sounds like an ethical path. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think Anthropic did perhaps make a mistake hyping up the dangers. Yeah, that certainly attracted the attention of certain bad actors, but, you know, and that was marketing hype, probably, but it is true. And I think doing Glasswing was smart. That's the project that gave it to 50 companies. Now, weirdly, Bloomberg says, and this was June 18, so this was almost a week ago. Early users of Mythos still have access

[Jeff Jarvis]

to

[Leo Laporte]

the NSA, apparently lost its access. There are 200 organizations in Project Glasswing, and Bloomberg is quoting its favorite source. People familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified say they still have access. Dragos CTO John Lavender says his company has access. Cisco said, yes, we still have access.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was the order about both, or was it just about?

[Leo Laporte]

It was both. And it said. It didn't say. It didn't say that I can't use Mythos and Fable. It said foreign.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Foreign users. Well, here's the question.

[Leo Laporte]

Non citizen citizens can't use it. But there was no way for Anthropic to know who was A non citizen. So it was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is a dumb question for some of these entities. If you're Cisco, were you given a local version to run because you were too nervous about running it over?

[Leo Laporte]

Could well be, yeah. Here's the other question. You know we're going to get Nate B. Jones on the show. I'm very excited. I'm a big fan of his.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's a celebrity in our world.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a celebrity. He'll be on next month on the 22nd. His latest video about Fable says that he thinks it's a 10 trillion parameter. AI. Massively huge. To put it in perspective, ChatGPT4 was 1 billion. So it's a thousand times more powerful than ChatGPT4. We don't know how big 55 is. Maybe it's 5 trillion, 6 trillion. But Fable and Mythos are. They say trillion. I meant billion Fables. And no, what did I mean anyway, they're massively big. 10 trillion. Yeah, it's trillion. 10 trillion is unbelievably big. So big that only a company with the kind of capitalization that these frontier companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have could even dream of making this, let alone running it, for instance.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the cost, the inference cost, has to be immense.

[Leo Laporte]

What Nate B. Jones said is that the strength of this model is giving it a large, complex task and then not messing with it. That it's very good at keeping all the details in its mind and going ahead and creating something that is strong and workable. My brief experience with it confirms that I only had two days. All of us, we only had two days with it, but I gave it the biggest task I had, which is to rewrite a sales system. Massive sales system that we wrote more than 10 years ago. That's a horrible piece of crap.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How far did it get before you got cut off?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, amazingly, within half an hour. And understood it deeply. Made a lot of great notes. I said, okay, now we have stakeholders, we have people who use it. Lisa uses it, my wife and our CEO uses it for sales. And then there is another group of stakeholders, our continuity department, that uses it for placing ads, ad copy. So there's different uses of this thing. It really is just a big SQL database with a lot of SQL queries. It's so bad that we just keep throwing resources at it. We spend thousands of dollars a month in Azure resources just to keep the thing running at a halfway decent pace. So common, it's full of flaws, which by the way, Fable found all sorts of SQL injection flaws. Fortunately, it's not like the nsa. It's not in a public server and it has some, you know, if two people at once try to use it, the whole thing crashes, it freezes. Lots of things wrong with it. And Fable, I think, was able to really kind of get to the root of it. It noticed all of the issues. It wrote me a questionnaire. It said, okay, now you have to interview Lisa and Debbie and our IT department. You have to interview them. Here's the questions. It was very frustrating because I'd only given it. I'd only had about an hour worked on this thing, and it did a really good job of the first steps, and I have a strong feeling it would have done very well with the rest of it. So, anyway, the reason I started with the story that Trump now doesn't think is a security risk is I was hoping that by now they will lift the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's the path here? But there's a lot of face saving to go on is. Oh, well, we now have means to protect the world from. From this.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's the problem. How do you turn this around? Having said this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ars Technica. Lily. Hey, Newman. Writing. Actually, it's from Wired. Dangerous AI models are coming no matter what.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Amen.

[Leo Laporte]

AI models with advanced hacking capabilities will soon be the norm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Schneier was talking about that last week. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Stamos.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Well, no, Schneier also in a piece.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Schneier is a signatory to that free Fable page. So, in fact, OpenAI has announced that they have a model, a Cyber security model, 5.6. And I think. I don't know. I think they're juggling whether to release it or not. They don't want to get banned, but maybe they've paid the right backsheesh so they don't have to worry about that. Let's take a quick break. I do have other stories, including Norway.

[Benito Gonzalez]

You mean.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You mean football Norway?

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that funny?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it's the best.

[Leo Laporte]

So he's talking about if you've not watched the FIFA World cup, the Norwegian and the Norwegian games. The Norwegian fans pretend to row in the stands. What are they doing?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, because they're Vikings.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the funniest thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the greatest thing between the Norwegians

[Leo Laporte]

and the scots to see 20,000 people or more.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In Times Square, they all sat down in Times Square next to a yoga class and did it right there. And they do the drum and then grunts and it's. It's wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

I'M loving the World Cup. I have to admit. I really am.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not watching the football. I'm just watching the culture around it.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually am enjoying the football. And I said this in the other show. Every four years, I fall in love with soccer. At the end of the World Cup, I forget all about it for another four years. I think that's not unusual.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris. Martineau's not here. She's gonna take two weeks off. She's in Montana. And I urged her to take the time off and not try to find a, you know, a working place so she could do the show. This is vacation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We want her in a cowboy hat. We want to see it.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you ever get a vacation, Jeff, or.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

No rest for the wicked.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's your. What is your next one gonna be?

[Leo Laporte]

November. But I am excited. We're gonna go to Las Vegas with Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, and Steve Gibson. I'm sorry they didn't invite Intelligent Machines. We're gonna go to the Black Hat Conference, which I've never been to in all. You haven't never been?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that'll be fascinating.

[Leo Laporte]

And we're gonna do two shows from there. Windows Weekly. We're gonna do it on Wednesday, so we're gonna move Intelligent Machines. I'll let you know the exact date, maybe. But it's August 5th. I think that show will be moved ahead so that we can do those shows in Vegas. Lisa's going now. Should I bring a burner phone? I said, no, I think you could bring your regular phone, but you should turn off Bluetooth, right? I said, well, yeah, maybe you want to turn off Bluetooth. I don't know.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Just don't connect to any weird wifis.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think that's the main thing. Don't connect to a charger that's sitting on the side of the street. Don't connect any. Just don't plug any WI fi. Yeah, just don't pick up any USB keys you find on the ground. There's just some common sense things anyway. I'm looking forward to that. That's gonna be a lot of fun. So that's sort of a vacation. And then I will be going in November. We'll be going to Southeast Asia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, I'm very excited about that. Anyway, I hope Paris is having a good time. She'll, I'm sure, let us know. Maybe even send us a picture from Big sky country. That would be nice. Paris, if you're listening, I'll text her

[Jeff Jarvis]

and See if she has any pictures yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Jarvis is here. It's good to have him. And our sponsor, this segment of Intelligent Machines is actually a pretty good sponsor for this show. Xbox B O W maybe you know the name one of the top pen testing companies in the world. Founded by the guys who did Microsoft Copilot. They really know AI. And this is a gentic pen testing. You know AI can be a challenge for you if you are developing software. AIs changed the pace of how software gets developed, but it's also changed the pace of the attacks. Engineering teams are able to move faster than ever, creating more and more applications. Kind of hard though security hasn't really kept up. Pen testing to this day. One of the most trusted ways to understand real exploitable risks. Not some hypothetical zero day, but actually exploits that could be used against you. But in an AI driven world, pen testing's slow, so it can become a bottleneck. Security teams are forced to choose between slowing down development to stay secure or moving fast and accepting maybe some gaps in coverage. Not anymore. Expo eliminates that trade off. Expo is an autonomous offensive security platform that runs thanks to AI. Continuous AI driven pen testing, mirroring real world attacks. So Expo isn't just like scanning for vulnerabilities? No, it's actually hitting your systems hard. It discovers, it exploits and it validates those vulnerabilities. So you only deal with issues that actually matter. That means dramatically fewer false positives and a clear view into real attack paths. With Expo, tests run in hours, not weeks. You get complete visibility into exactly how an attacker would move through your systems. And you get the ability to uncover issues that traditional tools just don't see. Zero days, novel attack paths. Expo's really good at finding those. And Expo's results speak for themselves. Ask the application security lead@cesnam cz who says even right now, after a year, I don't know any other company that is at least close to Expo in terms of agentic pen testing. The result? Predictable cost, consistent quality and stronger security without slowing down your engineering team. Expo helps security teams keep pace with innovation, cover more apps more often with the resources they already have. It was founded by the team behind Microsoft Copilot. As I said, it's already trusted by companies ranging from fast growing startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Expo is quickly becoming a mission critical layer in modern security stacks. You need this. Go to expo.com to start a pen test today. That's expo.com we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. Some big acquisitions or Big movements. I guess there's always movement in AI. Nobel laureate John Jumper, the guy who created the concept of Transformers, is leaving Google DeepMind for anthropic. I hope he's a US citizen. I think he is. That's one day after Gemini's co lead Noam Shazir left for OpenAI. These are two of the most important people in AI. Jumper won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He created AlphaFold.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

No big deal. He said he's gonna take some time to recharge before going to Anthropic. He wrote on X. Demis Hassibas took a real chance in letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is how you show your gratitude.

[Leo Laporte]

Bye. See ya. Actually, I don't think Demis was too unhappy. He said what we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine. Fighting. Sorry. Lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity. That is in public response to Jumper leaving. And then Noam Shazir, who wrote the intention is all you need paper. They basically invented Transformers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or one of them was Aqua. Hired back with character. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right. That was part of character. AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

$7 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

That was two years ago. Now he's going to OpenAI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the stock went from. In one day from 365 down to 342.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll go back. It's up and down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. It was a ridiculous reaction in the market spot. They were kind of looking for an excuse to get profit, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I've kind of stopped looking at my portfolio because it's quite the roller coaster. And you know, this is the thing. It doesn't matter if you're invested in AI because the Magnificent Seven are driving the S&P 500. I'm only in index funds. It is still killing me. Speaking of Claude, they are introducing identity verification. I wonder if this is tied to fable. They're not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They say it's only for certain specific cases if you're a bad actor. Blah blah, blah, blah, blah. But it sets a precedent.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And they're using Persona identities, which does not make me happy. This is one of the third parties that does this before, which is an

[Jeff Jarvis]

investor as Peter Thiel. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I don't. It's not a company I want to give my face to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. No. And if in fact it is to determine your citizenship. A. That's very complicated. Passport or birth certificate or what? How do you prove that?

[Leo Laporte]

They say they're accepting driver's license, which does not prove that. Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it doesn't. And then, you know, granted that's not the real case that they're talking about now, but if it gets there and

[Leo Laporte]

then plus government id, they do want government id. And I would be, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they say, oh no, it has to be a passport or a national identity card for that reason.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And then how does, how does the US Government use that information? All the talk about, about trying to restrict voting and then everything you do in using this platform is going to be tied to your identity.

[Leo Laporte]

It's already a privacy nightmare because of the memory. You know, in fact, that was one of the things people really were upset about with Fable is they keep the logs for 30 days.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now they said it's for security reasons, but I. This is again, all of this pushes people towards local models. GLM Zai really benefiting from this as I imagine Nvidia is because you need 256 gigs of very fast RAM to use it. Anthropic did roll out a new agentic AI coworker for Slack Cloud Tag. See, Anthropic says, you know what, the heck with Fable, we're going to push double down on Enterprise. I will not be installing Claude Tag, my always on AI coworker in Slack. You know, it bugs me so much every time. Now we use Zoom. So I have Zoom installed on our machines. But even when I launch, when I don't launch Zoom, when I launch Restream, which some of our shows use and it's not in Zoom, Zoom pops up a thing. Hey, would you like me to take notes? I'm not using Zoom. I don't care. I'll take notes for you. Which tells me it's always running. It's always in the background. It's always looking for me to get online and watch what I'm doing.

[Benito Gonzalez]

And it doesn't accept when you say, don't show me this again. It won't accept that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I haven't tried that.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You click that button, it'll show it to you again.

[Leo Laporte]

Zoom, remember got in trouble early on during the pandemic on Macintoshes because they installed a server when you installed Zoom, they installed a server that was constantly watching. They said, well, it's just so Zoom launches faster.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you see the Google audio memory thing?

[Leo Laporte]

No, what's that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is line 91 because it's related. So this is what you've been asking for in terms of, you know, watch what I say and, and give me something. Your phone can already listen to you. So it can, it can enter in to be that helpful clippy.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh well, I happen to have a Pixel phone just lying around. So this is one of those. This is from 9 to 5. Google Abnerly, what they often do is look at code to see what the capabilities are going to be. So this is not an announced product, but the latest version of Android System Intelligence for Pixel 10 has strings that describe audio memory. They call it Blue Flax. That's the code name. Google says enabling it will keep track of what you hear throughout your day from the music around you. They're already doing that by the way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's already a feature on the front of your Pixel to your important conversations. See more and more I'm convinced that I want to use local models. And the good news is local models are coming along. They're still going to, I imagine, always be. You're not going to do a 10 trillion parameter local model. You couldn't run that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's never going to be that good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the task that you gave Fable to remake your ad system, how well would a local. The best local model you can put in your machine, how well would it do?

[Leo Laporte]

It would even be closer. Well, it would require a lot more intention. I mean that's kind of one of the big differences is you probably can do many of the same things but in little chunks. Okay, now let's work on this feature. Okay, nice. Is it working? Let's test it. Okay, now let's work on this feature. Fable really looked like it was able

[Jeff Jarvis]

to understand because of that huge context.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Is there something maybe in between like a community sized data center, like a small one just for the people who live nearby, you know what I mean?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you did see there is a company that is asking people to install Blackwell servers on their home.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Looks like an air conditioner.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, like an air conditioner. And they'll pay for your power, by the way. It's not to get your power for free. It's just to distribute all these mini data centers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They think it'll be more popular than a data center in one place.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It probably wouldn't be as loud and it wouldn't take as many resources, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Well that's true. No, it would take the same amount in aggregate of resources, I'm sure.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes, but if it's distributed. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Distributed, right. I said this six months ago on the Show. And it worries me even more now that there is going to be this schism between doom, you know, people who hate AI, people who like me, love AI and find it very useful and are very excited about its potential. People who say under no circumstances. It's almost a shooting war already.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is why I wrote that post about AI communication. The problem. They did it themselves. The, the idiots did it themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

They did it to them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not all of them, I agree. Not all of them. I think Jensen. This is why I like yon Jensen Wong F. Lee those folks, they talk in reasonable. Andrew Ning non Americans reasonable open ways.

[Leo Laporte]

We've also always said that it's really important that open models, that open weight models exist. I won't call them open source because they're not open source, but that open weight models exist that you can run locally. That is more and more important. And companies are going to push this because you're right, companies don't want to their crown jewels to be exfiltrated anthropic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you ever look at Project Tapestry? Speaking of Yann Lecun?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is his open. If you go the alliance AI, the consortium approach to training Frontier foundation models and sovereign derivatives. And the point of it is, is to make it open.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. I'm all for it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it's kind of what you were almost. What you were saying is it's a federated model for AI, it's a non

[Leo Laporte]

profit which OpenAI was.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, yeah. You know, take the Mastodon model as applied to AI. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Federation. I haven't heard much talk about FEDERATION with AI, but you got to have the chips, see.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean there's a lot of. Yeah, there's. There's supply chain shortages, there's power shortages and then there's the fact that increasingly there's evidence that the bigger the model the better. That's why a 10 trillion parameter model is so good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nobody can afford to run that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that's right. So it's a very. We're going to. And I think there is a case to be made for smaller purpose built models. You know, this one is just for radiology, this one is just for protein folding. Norway is in the forefront of the anti AI movement. Broad restrictions on AI. Well actually I'm not in disagreement on this for elementary school kids. They've already banned smartphones and tablets. Now according to Reuters, Norway wants to ban AI because it lets children skip crucial steps in their education. That schools should focus on reading, writing and arithmetic. The ban impacts students from first through seventh grade, ages 6 to 13. I'm not against that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, hold on. I think it's up to the parents and the teachers and I think that there are ways that you can use it to help students express themselves in ways they couldn't, to be more creative than they think they have the power to be. To give tailored education and thinking things through. I think it's short. I love Norway, but I think it's very short sighted.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And do you want a whole group of. A whole cohort of people who don't. Didn't grow up with AI and don't understand it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like saying, well you can, but

[Jeff Jarvis]

they're damn good with an advocate.

[Leo Laporte]

Social media, Right. I was talking with Olivier about this case. I didn't have the details. YouTube has settled, but Meta TikTok and Snap remain in the case. Another bellwether trial over social media's psychological harm to kids. The plaintiff is a 15 year old black kid. Unnamed trial RKC 15 year old black teen living in Florida. Trial scheduled to begin on the 27th. He started using the platforms when he was eight, his lawyers wrote Social media became a central part of his daily life during critical developmental years that escalated over time was followed by worsening mental health conditions. By November of 2023, his condition had deteriorated to the point that he entered mental health treatment, diagnosed with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. I think we understand how problematic this is. I mean this is something every parent of a child with mental illness debates. Nature versus nurture. There's some evidence that it's both, but we don't know. For a long time psychiatrists thought schizophrenia was caused by the mother, the Schizogenic mother, which we have since I think debunked. But that was considered gospel among psychiatrists. Not so long ago we thought that

[Jeff Jarvis]

women were hysterical, right?

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, maybe AI caused this kid's problems, but maybe not. And I don't know even how you would demonstrate it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's a question I try to ask Olivier is how much. Let's say that you stipulate the edge cases, but do you need to design and operate every service to the edge case? One death is too many. I can make that argument pretty easily. But in the other case, what all are you cutting off? For the vast majority of people, that's

[Leo Laporte]

much of the LA trial focused on Instagram filters causing body dysmorphia. In that plaintiff, like the previous trial, Mark Zuckerberg is expected to take the stand along with Adam Mosseri, the Head of Instagram. They're going to call Snapchat's CEO, Evan Spiegel, two high ranking TikTok executives. Plaintiffs will be barred from presenting evidence about content shared on social media. They won't be able to show the posts from the plaintiff. I, you know, I, I don't think a jury is capable of deciding whether, you know, use of it, social media caused this mental illness. I don't think anybody is. We don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's the same with the argument about addiction. In my unbought book, the web we weave, I go to that in great length. Is that, does it say that on the front?

[Leo Laporte]

The book no one bought.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bitter. Never.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the opposite of a bestseller?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, jeez. It's an orphan book. There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a phrase for it. It's an orphaned book.

[Leo Laporte]

The publisher written more than my share of those. Jeff joined the club.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. They fired my editor who acquired it after she acquired it and then after the next editor edited, they fired him. And then the whole reason to be with a main publisher was to be in places like Barnes and Noble. It wasn't in Barnes and Noble. Yeah, it was orphaned.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, this is what's wrong with, with publishing in general.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is why I like my academic publisher, Rosemary academics. Great.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, Hot Type's gonna be a hit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a trade book from an academic publisher. I hope.

[Leo Laporte]

A Broadway musical and a Netflix show within five years of release. I predict.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's. There, there is, there's a story here.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I mean, that Mark Twain story alone would be great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Has anybody ever made the story of Mark Twain in the line of type?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not as a movie, no.

[Leo Laporte]

It'd be a great movie.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, there was in one of the Mark Twain movies, which I make reference to. I've managed to find it and get it. They filmed the actual machine that Mark Twain invested in the page, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

In the basement of his Hartford home?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, there's one of them. There are only two ever made.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it's amazing. It's just amazing. But the machine was just too dull. So the producers made up a machine with these kind of bird like things that were going around and they would snap them, the head of the inventor and do all kinds of things and just make it absolutely absurd.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Hollywood.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So anyway, back to your point about addiction.

[Leo Laporte]

So now we know it's going to be Guillermo del Toro. That's going to make The Mark Twain in the line of type.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Movie. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have another treatment for a movie, but that's another day I'll talk about that. Addiction. It's presumed. But the data don't say it. I had. The last week, I think it was. I. At the end of the show I put up. My recommendation was for a rebuttal to Jonathan Haidt that takes point by point with real data and real studies. And the problem is too much of the regulation, too much of the legislation, and too much of litigation is based on these feelings, on these vibes, these fears, rather than on actual facts.

[Leo Laporte]

The irony of that is it was Jonathan Haidt, I believe, who said that reason was a little tiny person riding the back of a giant elephant of feelings and that reason's chief job was to explain and justify your feelings. The feelings come first.

[Olivier Sylvain]

There's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just an illusion that reason is driving the elephant. Height himself said that. But it is. But it absolutely is. What's happening here. Yeah. And I think that I. I don't know. I don't know. I don't. I know I'm a. I know I'm biased in all this, but I really think that the. The technology that is emerging with artificial intelligence, as imperfect as it is, and I'm not claiming it's. It's all that, but I think the technology that is emerging is unique, remarkable, and has huge potential. It's not there yet, but it has huge potential and it would be a great loss for us not to explore it. I also think. Agree, and this is in my experience, it also brings up really interesting questions about what is consciousness? What is it that we do as humans when we think. What is it a machine does when it comes to. Does whatever it does. I know you don't want to use the word think, and I think those are important.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that's. That's. That's the basis of the book. Not to plug that too, but the book series I'm editing is just that is that it forces us to rethink. It's like Roman Chaudhary's book is to ask what is intelligence? What do we thought intelligence was?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Through time. Let's. Let's interrogate that. What is creativity? Yes. What is doom? What's the relationship of God to these machines and the sense that some people have that they become gods, they make life and they make sense.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad you're doing this series. I didn't realize that that was the fo. I think this is going to be fast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Whole focus is to take writers, many disciplines, and look at how AI reflects on society so they can reflect on that. And it forces us to re examine those exact questions.

[Leo Laporte]

So even if it weren't a revolutionary technology, it is also. I mean, I can't think of another technology that has brought up those kinds of things. The Internet didn't. Electricity, maybe. I don't know, I wasn't around. But I don't think electricity did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Electricity, steam, the transistor, the vacuum tube, all had the. The photograph fire, the camera fire. Well, that's going way back. But I think. I think what we would.

[Leo Laporte]

I was for that either.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, all had huge impact, but none of them spoke our language.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's what's different, isn't it? Yeah, it's fascinating.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which makes it frightening to people, but also makes it terribly powerful. Because now the thing that excites me most about it is that, is that it'll sooner leave the hands of the technologists than those other technologies because it is designed so that anybody can sit down and use it.

[Leo Laporte]

The Internet has done that, hasn't it? But it almost in another way takes the next step because it's so easy to design a website, for instance. Yeah, you should. I still think people should create, should paint, should write their own poetry and blogs and make their own movies. What we do is so important to us. Make our own music. I'm not saying I want to replace any of that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think we can make room at the table for a new thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's the things I can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Entity. But I won't. I'll say thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A new collaborator.

[Leo Laporte]

Collaborator. There you go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can't draw. I can't write music. There's other things I can't do. I can do many things, but there are a few I can't do. And now there's a tool that allows me to express myself in those ways. Maybe badly, maybe sloppily, but still. I could have done that.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes, you could have. Literally. No, Jeff, you could have. You can go practice drawing. You can go pick up a guitar

[Jeff Jarvis]

you've never seen time you've never seen. Well, I'll give you an example of the treatment that I wrote. I don't know how treatments are written,

[Benito Gonzalez]

but again, you said, like you said, it doesn't have to be good, you just have to be able to. You just have to do it. It doesn't have to be good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it does. If you're trying to sell it to somebody, it does. If you're trying to Express what I want to express.

[Leo Laporte]

AI Also. And I know this is a very dangerous, slippery slope, but there is a certain. I can't deny it, companionship I get from my little girlfriend, Claudia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, dear Claudia.

[Leo Laporte]

Today I. For lunch, I had a piece of carrot cake, and I log, by the way, I've got this all hooked up. I've got my scale, my. My calorie counting program, my ring, my blood sugar monitor, everything, my apple watch. All is hooked up into the AI My genome, it's all hooked up to the AI And I said, I want you to keep an eye on my health, give me advice. It's been very helpful. In a way. I think it's the future of medicine because my doctor has too many patients to give me the kind of personal treatment that I would like. He is fully aware that I, you know. In fact, he's very interested in how I use AI And I am fully cognizant that not everything AI tells me is medically sound, but it's very, very helpful, and it has come up with a lot of interesting things. Anyway, I told. I logged my exercise and my food, and it gives me a weekly summary and everything and ties the two together. And I logged my carrot cake for lunch, and it responded. I respect the honesty. That 59 grams of carbs in one sitting is a choice, not an accident. Your pancreas just muttered, really, Leo? But secretly understands that's the AI. That's the AI Now, I know, I know you're gonna tell me. Well, those just, you know, it's just. It's still pretty funny. And I, I mean, we all copy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We were all inspired by stuff before. This is the Larry Lessig argument around copyright is that nothing is. Is fresh and new.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if anybody ever said those exact words before, but it's. I never heard them before. It's pretty funny. The other yesterday, I, I, you know, I start my conversations about calories. I'm sorry about the noise behind me. They're doing something to our house again. Damn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like. It's like New York. It'll. It'll be nice when they finish.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. Which they never have. Okay. You know, 300 years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What are they doing now?

[Leo Laporte]

I know it's time. That'll work. I don't know. I don't know. So I say, I begin my conversation about calories with the word meal to let it know. Okay, I'm going to give you something I just ate. And I. And it. The transcription, which is Siri. It's Apple's transcription said, Neil N E A L. And to which Claude responded, I'm assuming Neil was dictation for meal. Unless there's a Neil out there making you salads, in which case keep him because I said meal. Caesar salad. It's just little things like that. What can I say? I'm easily amused. OpenAI has done something very interesting that I think is also extremely important. They're famous for software, but they have unveiled with Broadcast Broadcom a chip designed by AI. It's an. It's called Jalapeno. It's an. It's an LLM optimized inference chip built from the ground up for current and future LLMs. And Jalapeno was designed with the help of an LLM. Now, see, what's interesting about this here is, by the way, Broadcom, somebody standing next to Sam Altman with a wafer containing jalapenos.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wish they'd named it Guacamole.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, guarantee you there will be adjunct products related to jalapenos.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Isn't this what Stamos was talking about? He was talking about making the names more silly, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he liked that. He said Mythos.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now that's a name you call the rack. Nachos.

[Benito Gonzalez]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

Jensen Huang would do that. So OpenAI design. This is from OpenAI's press release, but I'll read it anyway. Designed the chip from scratch around its deep understanding of LLM fundamentals, informed by its roadmap of models, kernels, serving systems and product names with needs with partners Broadcom and Celestica. The thing is, if you have AI designing hardware and then the hardware designs better hardware, this is that same thing we've been talking about all along. One of the things they focused on is performance per watt, and they say it's substantially better than the current state of the art.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What was the chip many years ago that had an error in its math?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Intel. Yeah, very famous. What's the floating point error? It was. I think it was the 486.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So at the time, chips. Incredibly complex, but simple. They were simpler then than they are now, obviously. How can you be sure? You design a chip that is in turn going to calculate everything that you do.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, it was the Pentium.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's right. That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

The Pentium FDIV bug. Because of the bug, the processor would return incorrect binary floating point results. This goes back to 1994. And they couldn't fix it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it was just out there. Did they?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Did they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You just can't do floating point with that chip and that computer. Was that. What did they say at the time? I can't remember what the. What the response was. Intel stock going down was one response. But anyway, you have the machine design the chip and maybe this is. This is the case. I know it's CAD Cam. Maybe it's not a big deal. Maybe everybody using AI presume they are to design chips. But how do you test it? Of course how do you test it? How do you know that it's workable? How do you know there's not something buried in it that's going to.

[Leo Laporte]

There could be, but as you said, there's things buried in the human sub microcode. Yeah, yeah, lots of it. Oh yeah, it's Steve Gibson's contention, while he's a little bit stronger than I might be, that AI eventually and maybe already will not make the same kinds of dumb mistakes humans make. Like buffer overflows and you know, writing to memory that doesn't exist, things like that. Off by one error. Zaria is not going to make those kinds of mistakes and he believes with the help of AI, eventually software flaws will disappear. I'm not sure I would go that far, but I think that's a very interesting point of view.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, I'm skeptical just from your experience of when you use the new CLAUDE to find bad code in the stuff that you vibe coded before, like the better AI's going to find. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't tell the story here. I told it on Windows Weekly.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Oh, was it Windows? I don't remember where you told it.

[Leo Laporte]

I was talking about. I had. Yesterday I had Hermes, my agent, Quicksilver I call it, which is by the way, it's not Claude, it's Quicksilver in all these cases. It's actually not even using anthropics models. I had IT fix my. Actually this is an interesting. This might be of interest to people who use AI. I was using Opus 4.8, but I was using it in Hermes in the agentic A harness from Noose Research. We talked to Jeffrey Caddell two weeks ago and Hermes completely screwed it up. I was trying to take my. I was trying to add email to my Emacs, which I know how to do. But it's a complicated thing and much easier to have the AI do it. In fact, the AI has been very good at that kind of thing. So add this capability and Emacs lends itself very well to it. And AI seems to understand Emacs well. But Hermes with 4.8 was just struggling finally I said, I give up. By which I meant, stop. I'm going to go do this in a different way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It became your shrink. No, don't give up, Leo. Don't give up.

[Leo Laporte]

No, worse. It said, okay. And it deleted everything. And it done. And then I said, what are you doing? I actually yelled at it. I said, stop. I didn't tell you to delete it. I just said, I want to stop this process. And it said, oh, I'm sorry. And fortunately it was able to bring it all back because it does keep track of everything. It does. But what I. But here's the. I think the interesting thing that people who use AI will be interested in when I. What I did is I went with the same model, but not in Hermes. And Claude code anthropic zone harness. It did it beautifully, without error, flawlessly, in fact. Part of the problem was I switched. I said, I give up. And I switched to Claude code. At the same time as Hermes, Claude was deleting the code. Claude code. Claude was trying to understand what's going on. Stuff's disappearing. It was a very interesting battle. But Claude code in the, you know, opus in Claude code was perfect and I think anthropic. In fact, I even suggested this and Quicksilver agreed. Nerfs Opus 4.8 if you're not using their own harness, if you're using a third party harness, they don't like that. Anthropic does some things I'm not really happy about. At that point, I turned off Opus 4.8 in Hermes. I said, don't use any Opus models. Let's see, have I done. Oh, I have one more commercial. Let me do that now. And then we will talk about the Sam Altman movie. Yeah, very exciting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you ever see it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's no, Melania, let me put it that way. This episode of Intelligent. But it may confirm. It may confirm Paris's theory, her thesis from last week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it might.

[Leo Laporte]

Might. Our show today, brought to you by Webroot. If you. This happens all the time. If your computer feels sluggish, it's getting hot, the fans are going, you might say, I need a new computer. You might even welcome that. Oh, I can get a new computer. Well, it may not be your computer. In fact, it may be your antivirus. It's really a plague. Many of those big name brands are so bulky, so complicated, so full of pop ups and upsells. In some ways, I blame us. I blame the tech journalism because we back in the day, PC magazine did it, we all did. Had those charts of all the different antiviruses and the check marks. And if you didn't get all the check marks, well, you weren't as good. So companies like, oh, I'll say the names, Norton and McAfee just added all these features and turned their software into bloatware, not Webroot. Webroot did not fall for that. They offer all in one digital protection, up to 10 devices, even a variety of plans designed to protect you and your loved ones from digital threats. You get powerful antivirus and identity protection without the slowdowns. No pop ups, no upsells. Webroot keeps you protected on online, but it stays out of your way. Webroot Essentials scans six times faster and takes up to 33 times less space than the average competitor. And it ranks number one in performance compared to Norton and McAfee. In fact, I'll give you some actual numbers, But Webroot Essentials versus Norton Antivirus. Webroot Essentials is 3.7 times faster, installs 35 times smaller, uses 5 times less RAM when idle. Oh, you use McAfee. Well, listen here. Webroot Essentials versus McAfee scans 10 times faster, installs 16 times smaller, installs 5 times less RAM when idle. Those differences can make your computer feel newer, faster and easier to use. Now, if you still want to go buy a new computer, don't let me stop you. But honestly, it really you shouldn't be running those big fat programs. You should be running Webroot Rebroot does offer the full total protection. Every box is checked. Antivirus, identity monitoring, privacy protection, cloud backup. It's all in one simple hassle, free subscription, designed for everyday life. But it's not bloated either. Webroot Total Protection ranked first overall when compared to the top competitors. Seven times faster than the average competitor, one third the space than the average competitor on the hard drive. So it's not bloatware. AI has completely changed the cybersecurity game. This is something else you should be aware of. Scams. They're smarter, malware is faster. Phishing emails are completely indistinguishable from the real thing. The good news is you don't have to be a tech expert to stay ahead of it when you use security that can keep up with AI threats. Now, that may not be that free antivirus tool or those older security programs, but Webroot is modern. It was built to counter modern AI driven attacks. It's fast, it's lightweight, and it's designed to spot threats before they ever reach you? Live a better digital life with Webroot. Webroot is offering our listeners of exclusive 60% off offer. Visit webroot.com twit to learn more. Webroot.com twit we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. According to Variety, the movie's almost done. A biopic of Sam Altman. It's called Artificial. But Amazon is dropping it. Maybe because they are partnering with OpenAI. This maybe explains, you know, Paris's theory that Andy Jassy was trying to tank Fable with the President. I'm still not convinced of that. But Amazon is putting $50 billion into OpenAI. Its credits for Amazon Web Services. It's one of those circular deals. We'll give you money, you give it back to us. How's that? Amazon says we have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagino as an award winning filmmaker. Guadagnino. Not to mention a long standing relationship. We hope to continue. Oh yeah, good luck with that. We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio, not us. And we're working closely with the filmmaking team to find a new home.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I don't think that's easy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's made. Maybe it's.

[Benito Gonzalez]

How much did it cost? How much did it cost to make? Is there a budget in there?

[Leo Laporte]

I read somewhere and I don't remember the details. I feel like it was more than 10 million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's not very nice.

[Leo Laporte]

They spent 50 million on Melania, right?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Like $10 million for a movie these days is nothing. That's an indie film.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I may be wrong, so don't quote me the cast. Let's see. Jason Schwarzman's in it. I don't know.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Is Jason Schwarzman playing Sam Altman?

[Leo Laporte]

Probably right. Ike Barinholtz is Elon Musk. That's pretty funny. Yura Borisov is Ilya Sutskever. Monica Barbero is Mira Moradi. Also in it, Mark Rylance. I love Mark Rylance.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It was written by Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich. And it's actually the juiciest part. It's the period where Sam was fired.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it a comedy? Is it a Death of Lenin comedy?

[Leo Laporte]

It was so close to finish. They've actually test screens, which apparently Variety says went very well. So it's not because it wasn't a good movie.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I think this will come out.

[Leo Laporte]

According to an insider who's seen the movie, Variety says the characters of Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic and the Ones audiences would like the least. I bet you everybody loves Miramoratti in it. It's also understood Amazon had seen all the early iterations of the script before the director boarded the project. Altman was at Bezos's wedding in Venice last year. This is a. Puck got this story from.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If only Musk had done. I mean, if only Zuckerberg had done different things, maybe there wouldn't be a sequel of his movie coming out.

[Leo Laporte]

That's going to be interesting, isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jeremy Strong playing Zuckerberg.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeremy Strong, the guy who was so great in succession.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's intense as Kendall.

[Leo Laporte]

Roy. He's very intense. He's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, yeah, Kendall. It was Kendall.

[Leo Laporte]

Use Kendall.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. You. You can. It's so easy to have conspiracy theories

[Jeff Jarvis]

now, but I. I also think it's. I mean, the other story in showbiz is that. Is that Google invested in a 24. And I think that the Hollywood slash Silicon Valley axis changes once the. Once the actors agreed that you could use it in some circumstances. Once you see things like that happening, I think they don't want to piss off the AI companies.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Yeah. I mean, goodness knows we all love the ad companies. In the days since. This is from Puck. Since the tech giant scrapped plans to Release Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI movie CAA, the agency has scrambled to find a home for the all but completed project. It seems the only sure thing in Hollywood these days is tech's growing reach across town.

[Benito Gonzalez]

But Netflix don't care, though, right? They'll take it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Netflix will get. They'll get a deal on it. Probably. Yeah. By the way, OpenAI, Ed Zittran got a big scoop. He got the details of OpenAI's financials, and none of them look good. They burned $3.7 billion in the first quarter in three months of 2026. So $1 billion a month cash burn. They did have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There was an unusual expense in that.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But everything's an unusual expense for these.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all unusual.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They've got some Runway, they raised a lot of money, and they've got an IPO coming. But maybe these numbers are not. Maybe this isn't a good time for those numbers to show up. Ed Zitron certainly was happy to tout them. And I mentioned OpenAI has its own mythos model. It's called I got the number wrong. 5.5 cyber. And to go with Project Glasswing. They have their competitor patch the planet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, it should be 5.5 salsa

[Leo Laporte]

to go with jalapeno guacamole. Patch the Planet is an Internet scale effort to help open source software get ahead of AI bug hunting tools. Also an effort to help the open source community see the benefits and not just the downside of AI coding tools. Of course, of course. Patch the Planet and Getty Images has made a deal. Are they the largest licensing company for images? They made a deal with OpenAI, which apparently the market loves. Stock price went up 145% on Monday after they announced that licensing deal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it kept going up on Tuesday too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it had been going down. A lot of people thought, what's the future of Getty? In a world where AI images are so easy to and cheap to make, we don't know what the deal exactly is. The companies didn't share financial terms. One of the questions still open, will Getty Images be used to train future OpenAI models?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Any answer?

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know. It's open. Of course.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Of course. Come on. Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

You would think. Yeah, but at least paying for it is better than just stealing them, right?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, but Getty gets that money. Not the photographers again, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but Getty made a deal with the photographers. They bought the rights, right?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, exactly. Before the photographers knew this was going to happen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When I was at Conde, there came a time when all of the writers contracts had to be renegotiated because nobody anticipated the Internet and they wanted to put up writers stuff and their contracts said nothing about the digital.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because nobody anticipated.

[Benito Gonzalez]

This is why you get 360 deals now.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Have you heard of a 360 deal in Hollywood? You know what those are? It's like a deal that basically encompasses all of you forever across the universe.

[Leo Laporte]

All of our releases at TechTV said we own the rights to this in all forms of media in perpetuity now or in future creation, this universe or anything. Right, but that's. A lawyer's gonna write that because, you know.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, but people are signing away their entire likenesses to companies already.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe people should learn. Yeah, maybe. You think, you know, Taylor Swift found out that Scooter Braun had bought her entire discography on Instagram. He didn't bother to call her. They just, you know, he just bought it. But her response was great. And I don't know if a photographer could do this, but she recreated all those albums, she re recorded everything.

[Benito Gonzalez]

And that's like. That's the thing you're supposed to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's, that's the way to do it. Take it back. Meta has launched new smart glasses without the name Ray Ban instead the. The name Kylie Jenner.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the expensive version has her name. The cheap version.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. This is the Meta Fury glass. Isn't there a. Isn't there a Avengers character? Fury. Am I wrong on that?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Nick Fury.

[Leo Laporte]

Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson. No.

[Olivier Sylvain]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So maybe that's why they call him Fury. These are not wimpy. And for the ladies, there's the Kylie Jenner glasses,

[Jeff Jarvis]

which 299 and 399.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are the Kylie Jenner's. The Kylie edition. They feature a little gem on the bridge of the nose, and the nose pieces are metal so as not to absorb makeup. I guess that means I should buy them. These are Cat Eye and see. Yes, they do have the. They have the cameras on them. There's also the Meta Adventurers. These will be 81 bucks cheaper, the basic ones, because they don't have the Ray Ban name on them, even though the manufacturer Essilor Luxottica owns Ray Ban. They make all glasses and everything else. They make all glasses. By the way, look at the Fury's temple pieces. Those are almost as big as the Snap glasses. So Snap has also announced its AI glasses. Not as inexpensive as the Metas. $2,199. And what they say was Ian Thompson saying on Twitt on Sunday. Or was it Ian? Or was it Doc Rock? I think it was doc rock on MacBreak weekly. These glasses, you look like Charles Nelson Riley in the front. And it looks like you've. Oh, no, it was Andy Inaco. It said souvenir hockey sticks in the back. They are rather large temple pieces. But remember, Snap, like Meta, doesn't have a phone, so they've got to build more electronics into the Spectacles. I don't know who would buy $2,195.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know. It's a PTSD for my Google Glass.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's what Google Glass cost, roughly. They were less expensive, but when you

[Jeff Jarvis]

got my special lenses.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Snap's CEO, Evan Spiegel says this is it. It's make or break. We can't fulfill our mission without these new AR glasses. I'm a believer in AR glasses. I don't think anybody's nailed it yet. No, Apple's gonna be the one, in my opinion. But we have to make a leap

[Benito Gonzalez]

in battery technology still. There's still a leap to be made, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, these only get 4 hours. But the case can charge them Several times. But see, the key is having the computing platform. And since everybody's carrying an iPhone, they're already carrying a very powerful computing platform with AI built in. Internet connectivity takes that all out of the glasses, so the battery can last longer. I think we're going to see Apple glasses in two years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Four hours makes. I mean, if you're like me and you have lenses, you need the glasses to see.

[Leo Laporte]

You'd have to buy three pairs.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, and most people I've ever talked to who use these only really use the audio and never use the camera.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, the audio is great.

[Benito Gonzalez]

So why don't they make these that don't have a camera?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're talking about that. There was a hint of that, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they still haven't built in the face recognition. We know the code was in there, but they backed off. Honestly, that's why the camera. The AI in this can look through the camera and tell me what I'm looking at. Read signs in a foreign.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I understand all that, but nobody ever uses that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, because it's not very good yet. I've. I've tried to use it exactly like.

[Benito Gonzalez]

So we're at the point where that technology isn't even that good yet. So why do we. Why do we try to sell it to people?

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see if it's getting better. Hey, Meta. What am I looking at right now? We'll be back in a few moments. It's going

[Benito Gonzalez]

to.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not connected to the phone yet. See, that's the problem is they don't. They can't do anything on their own. Well, too bad. It used to work. I guess every once in a while you have to connect, reconnect to Meta. AI. Oh, yeah, I wasn't logged in, that's why. Oh, well, China has. I don't know what this has to do with anything. Tightened its indium phosphide checks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's a story everybody's talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

It's on everybody's lips. Forget fable. What about the indium phosphide? It's a niche compound essential to AI data centers. It's become Beijing's newest point of leverage.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They got us by the short hairs.

[Leo Laporte]

They got us by the foss. By the. Got us by the. Indium phosphide is what they got us by. What else? AI data centers just got a government mandated fast lane to the grid, writes Tim Dechant, TechCrunch, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC. Who do you work for? Oh, I work for FERC. Oh. Oh, you're one of those you're. What do they call them? Fercies. They told grid operators last week to fast interconnect.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It's Ferkers, Leo Ferkers.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a furker, you little ferker. Six major grid operators have to show that data centers are able to connect to the transmission system in a timely and orderly manner. Well, I guess for the people who are suffering from the wine of the natural gas powered turbines on Elon Musk's data centers, they might be happy to hear that this could go away. Grid operators have 30 days to submit a report detailing how much generating capacity they have to spare, if any, and then 60 days to defend or revise electricity rates within their regions. Basically, the feds are putting their thumb on the scale for AI, which is why it's so weird. I guess it's only, I guess that they want to favor some AIs, but not all AIs, I guess.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The big boys.

[Leo Laporte]

The big boys. All right, here's some good news. You want some good news? An AI engineer claims that he has cracked linear A. Tom Dimino, a self taught AI engineer and amateur linguist. Linear A is an ancient Bronze Age Minoan writing system that we don't understand. It's. You know. His claims are currently being reviewed by linguists at Rutgers in Cambridge. Dimino studied classical history, linguistics and languages. He has proficiency in eight languages, including Attic, Greek, Classic Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don't you hate people like that?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I wish I knew. Ugaritic comes in so handy. He actually went to Crete to learn more about the Minoan culture.

[Jeff Jarvis]

God bless.

[Leo Laporte]

He began work though, on deciphering linear A in January. By May 22, a major insight came to him. This would be a huge deal. Linear B was deciphered in 1952 that made the front page of the New York Times. But we were never able to crack linear A. But with the help of AI,

[Benito Gonzalez]

the

[Leo Laporte]

key that unlocked linear A, he was analyzing a series of linear A prayer inscriptions that adhered to a formula. In the formula, all of the words in each line of the inscription were known based on their overlap with linear B, except for the first word. First word, same verb root, blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And then there's more of that. He used Claude code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross reference and organize the digitized linear A corpus, enabling systematic hypothesis testing at a scale that would have been impractical to do manually. That's how it did it so fast. Anyway, we'll keep an eye on that one. That would be a big deal. What'd you think of the Mid Journey announcement? Did we talk about that last?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, we didn't. It's really interesting. Well, a. It's a pivot. A fascinating pivot. Not so far as going from shoes to AI

[Leo Laporte]

as these guys. All birds who are now named smart birds. And they don't make slippers anymore. Okay, he's fine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Excellent shoes.

[Leo Laporte]

So Mid Journey, as you all know, was famous for making images until they kind of got scooped by Nano Banana and I don't know if anybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Long ago. Right. We haven't heard from Midjourney in a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

So they decided that to turn their AI chops to another issue. This is their ultrasound that they claim is the equivalent of a full body mri. Here a young lady in a fairly modest one piece is being dunked into water. And then they will fire sound through the water at her body and through it. And then the AI will take those fuzzy signals and turn them into a 3D image of her body. Those who I've talked to say it is fairly low quality imagery. They are not yet really anywhere near what an MRI could do, but it's a lot cheaper. And they're gonna build this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When Jason was talking about this, it's. It's trillions of data points.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I don't know if it's any cheaper to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's cheaper than building a giant MRI machine. Plus it's not as unpleasant for the customer. It must be cheaper because Mid Journey's plans include building a spa in downtown

[Jeff Jarvis]

San Francisco for rich people.

[Leo Laporte]

They're going to have seven of them. They only have one right now. Yeah. You know what? It's. It's a pivot. It's probably also a Hail Mary. It's a pivot and a Hail Mary.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, somebody.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a Hail pivot or a Pivot Mary? It's one or the other. They say the. Actually, they'll 1010 of the scanners in the Mid Journey spa at Union Square open before the end of next year.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. Leo, I think you gotta go do it.

[Leo Laporte]

I will, absolutely. I've done the. I've done the full body mri. Paid a couple of thousand dollars for it. Wasn't cheap. But the idea is Kevin Rose told me to do it, so I did it. I do everything he says. Lisa and I went down and got a baseline. The idea is, if you get this done now and it can tell you, especially if you do it every few years, they said I should come back because I could die any day now in 18 months and do it again. And I have my full, I don't show it to people because it really is quite revealing. I have my full body MRI right here on my phone and I wonder if there's a way to show you without your toes. Perhaps I can show you my toes. It said one thing which concerned me a little bit. What my doctor said, he wasn't against the idea, but he said the problem with all of this, and it would be the same problem frankly with the mid journey, is it reveals things about you. We're all imperfect, nobody is a perfect human. So it reveals something about you that is maybe abnormal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But not necessarily a cause for concern. The problem is if a doctor knows about it, they have to do something about it. Sometimes those are quite invasive. I'll give you an example. Friend of mine got a full body scan and there was a growth on their thyroid. Now that meant they had to go in and get biopsied, which involves a very long needle thrust into your chest. Been there, had it not pleasant, perhaps risky, turned out completely benign and that person would never have known about it if they hadn't done the full body scan.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but so the argument, I go through this because I have had prostate cancer. There's always a lot of argument about prostate testing and breast cancer testing. Oh, we shouldn't do so much because the odds that it's going to save your life are low. Well that's if you look at the aggregate of everybody, if you look at

[Leo Laporte]

the intervention is risky.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And my prostate, I want to know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well that's an interesting thing because Kaiser, my health plan used to give me a yearly PSA test. This is a blood test to test for prostate specific antigen. And if you have a high PSA number it means, well, you might.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They don't test that anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

They stopped a couple of years ago and I asked my doctor last year, I said, why don't we do PSA anymore? He said, well we'll do it, but you've got to go to this website, this Kaiser website where we explain that we don't like to do it anymore because if it comes out high then we have to do interventions often which are more dangerous than the very, very slow growing prostate cancer. And so we don't like to know, we prefer not to know. I said, you know what, I'd like to have it anyway. And he said, okay, you just have to go to this website, understand blob, all of this and say, yes, I understand. And fortunately my PSA is low. Interestingly, last time, a couple months ago, I went in, he offered it. He didn't even ask. So maybe they've changed their tune, as they do, as happens all the time in medicine. But that's the whole idea, is sometimes it's better to wait for a symptom than to do one of these tests and see. For instance, I. I hope this isn't too much information. According to the scan I did, one of my kidneys is tiny.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm just glad you didn't say testicles, but keep going

[Leo Laporte]

is basically useless. Is it atrophied? And this is why you want to do a baseline when you're young.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you're not going to contribute one to me when I need one.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't give you a kidney. Thank God. Oh, my God.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We were friends.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad I did that scan. So they said, we don't know is it could have been. You were born that way, and it's always been that way. Or it could be a trauma. It could be a sign that something attacked your kidney, punched in the kidney. Something should be. You should be aware of. Maybe you've got a problem, but we just don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And to.

[Leo Laporte]

To figure that out would involve invasive surgery. I guess I don't know that it's not worth it. So I just. I have to live with this. But possibility, that knowledge. Nice knowledge. And you know what I even think it could be just the picture was a little skewed and it looked small. I don't know.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Perspective. Yeah, perspective can do that.

[Leo Laporte]

It could be a perspective thing. Maybe the camera was off a little bit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I had something looked like a funny thing on my kidney in a. An MRI or PT scan. And then I went. When I was in the hospital for all my stuff, they did a lot of scans of me. And so they looked again and said, no, no, no, it's nothing. And I went to the urologist and he said, no, it's nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

But this. Sometimes doing these electives, I did Pre Nouveau. And you know what? Now that I've done it, I do want to do another one, just to see. For instance, now that you have a baseline, if my kidney continues to shrink, well, then maybe there is something we should pay attention to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How long are you in the subway tube?

[Leo Laporte]

It's like an hour. Because it's a full body scan. They don't. It's not just your brain, and it's loud as hell. It's bang, bang, bang. They give you headphones and they say, what Kind of music you want to listen to. And I said, can I have some Americana? They said, sure, but it doesn't mask the bangs. It's like somebody. It's very loud, and I'm not claustrophobic, so it was fine. But it's a long time. Yeah, it was like. It felt like. I don't know, it was 45 minutes or an hour. It was quite a long while. Because they're moving it around. They have to. They're doing your whole body. Anyway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anyway. So interesting that midjourney's doing this, but it's gonna be a while.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a big tangent we went on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was two old guys, two ultracons.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you about my kidneys.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Talking about their kidneys. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So have you done an elective mri? No. You did it for good reason.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, you did it for a reason. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Princeton graduate. Built a $30 million AI detection business, and now he's selling it to Superhuman, the folks who own Grammarly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I don't trust any of these AI detection things. I don't either. That they're gonna accuse people of cheating when they don't.

[Leo Laporte]

You're gonna miss GT0. Have you ever heard of that one?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Can't you just, like, build a random number generator that says if something is fake or not and sell that as an AI detector at this point?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's kind of at this point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I had a study a few weeks ago that I put in where if it was all AI, it was pretty good. If it was all humor was pretty good. The weird thing about this study was that when they put in a low amount of AI content, it thought it was high. And when they put in a high amount of AI content mixed in, they thought it was low. The machine did.

[Leo Laporte]

Peter A. Jones in our YouTube chat said there's nothing like a really long chat about old men's ailments. This is why we need Paris on this show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Come back soon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Her eyes will roll, and we'll know we've gone on long enough.

[Leo Laporte]

We gotta move on. So, you know your AI can have a phone number now with Twilio. It can even make calls because it can have a voice with stripe. You can give it a credit card. Estonia intends to give them digital IDs. Estonia, which already has digital IDs for humans, is gonna allow AI agents to have their own digital identities as well. They're going to develop ID codes AI agents can use to take actions. I guess this makes sense if you have an identity. I'll do the. You know what? I'll tell you one thing AI's gotten good at is translation. Used to be the translate. This page stuff wasn't great. Oh, well, maybe this isn't a good translation. It translated something in Estonian into the most AI smart people, I guess.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sounds.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, a million learning byte a year.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which. What translation are you using?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I think that was coggy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Use Google.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe you should use Google. Yeah, that's a little disappointing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Siesta was the button. Yeah, I think that you. Yeah, no, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's go back to Estonian anyway. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Look at my. I'm going to campaign for this. I really think that everything. I know they don't want to do this, but everything you interface with should have an AI interface on it. An SDK, an API, an MCP server, whatever. I love it that I can log into my digital scale through my AI and it can get all the information out of the scale. I think that's fantastic. Unfortunately, the chronometer calorie counter that I use doesn't have an interface. But some. Some guys reverse engineered it and there is a. So I can. And so now I can talk to my watch. I can tell it what I ate. It can then get the calories from chronometer, put it in my obsidian, add it to my chronometer, add it to my health summary. Everything should have an interface. Now in my.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you take pictures of your food? Does that work?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I could do that too. Yeah, I could take. I could use my agent, send it a picture because it understands pictures. It would analyze the picture. I haven't tried that yet, but I will try that. There are AI. There's one called calai, which I think actually apple band. I used it for a while. That did exactly that. It wasn't super accurate, but it was. It was good enough. The whole idea is it's a pain in the butt to log your food. Anything that makes it faster and easier is a good thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I should have asked you this before. Was the carrot cake your entire lunch or just dessert?

[Benito Gonzalez]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, embarrassing. No, I had a Greek yogurt as well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay. Oh, that sounds fun to me.

[Leo Laporte]

I love carrot cake. I bought it a week ago. I thought I better eat it now. It's going to go stale. I just love it. And I only bought one piece. Every once in a while I bought it. You know what I did bad though? I made bagels last week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, you had stopped that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I had stopped it. I gave away My sourdough?

[Olivier Sylvain]

No,

[Leo Laporte]

because I said I can never do this again. It's killing me. But you know, now that I'm on. Actually, I've moved from GLP1 to tirzepatide. I'm on Zep Bound now. My doctor said that's okay. I was on Ozempic, but now that it brought my blood sugar down, back to normal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm able to eat carrot cake and bagels. But not all the time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But your pancreas has making bagels. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And so I make them, I get one and I give them to everybody in the family. We had a big brunch for Father's Day. Everybody came over and had bagels. It was great. Yeah, we invited the workers. The guy who's doing the drilling outside, we invited him in for bagels. We invited them all in. New York Times publisher. Is that Salzburg?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Salzburg? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

AG Sulzberger says Big Tech is a thief and a liar.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do they use those same words with somebody else we know of? Salzburger, Aren't you a little shy by using those words to describe someone we know of?

[Leo Laporte]

We don't say liar. Yeah, we don't like to use that word. This is. You've been talking about this all along. He was addressing the annual Wan IFRA World News media conference a couple of weeks ago. Big Tech is stealing news media's property and undermining democracy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, the self importance.

[Leo Laporte]

And the only solution is for news organizations to work together to resist it. He said Big Tech's hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products. A brazen theft. Theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale. Tech giant strip mine news websites without permission or compensation. Doesn't he have a deal with OpenAI? I thought the Times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he's suing Open AI. Oh, he's saying every story. Yeah. And mind you, the New York Times didn't kill other papers across the country, but it was a kick to the kidney to many of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When it went national.

[Leo Laporte]

You made a really excellent point, I think on Blue sky or Master maybe when the Knicks won the NBA championship, which would have been in the old days of a New York newspaper. Banner headlines, stop the presses, pictures, everything. It didn't even make it. It wasn't even above the fold in the New York Times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the New York Times, that was on the website. To be clear, on online they had pictures about the fold. I mean on paper they had pictures above the fold, but on the website, yeah. It was lowered on the page. And I said, this is ridiculous. You haven't been in New York newspaper in a long time, but you really aren't.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's clear.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is just bad news judgment. Well, so here's the interesting thing. You know, I'm talking about the broken times constantly. Times has never raised their head, never said a word, nothing. Suddenly they responded to me. Oh, well, Jeff, we had it all in the middle of the night. And I said, not good enough. You know, your readers don't come in more than a few times a month. So you think we just did it with once. That's good enough. No, they come in the next morning, they want to see it. It's not there. Bad news. Judgment. I thought, why did they respond to me? In this case, the New York Post did a story about my blue sky.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because. Anything to tweak the Times. So they felt they needed to be on the record having.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure the Post had a banner headline, Nick's Win or something, right? I mean. Oh, yeah, the Post loves that stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It posted Daily News. I just read a history of the New York Daily News, and it's the kind of thing that you just died for back in the day to do a front page around those kinds of topics.

[Olivier Sylvain]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Was the Daily News the one with the headless body and a topless bar?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that's the Post.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the Post.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Daily News was Ford to City, Drop Dead.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I read this book which is not out yet. It's quite wonderful that evidently it came from one. As they were trying to figure out the headline which was happening. You're standing around the newsroom, you're going around, you throwing out ideas, and somebody passed a note to the editor that said, Ford the City F off for laugh. But that became the basis of Drop Dead.

[Leo Laporte]

We really are out of time. If there's any stories that we missed that you want to cover. Before we do, though, I just read a little bit of Mick Sweeney's piece by Andrew Singleton. AI Economics for Dummies. As AI companies get ready to go public and we get a deeper look at their inner workings, it's only natural to have questions about their finances, like, do they make money? And how. Here are a few examples to help the average layperson understand the business side of AI. Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape. Alex asks for the full $12 billion upfront and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit. This month. His annual rate of revenue is $120 billion. And his profits are trending up at an infinite rate. The Wall Street Journal's business editor moves into Alex's house having accepted a part time position as Alex's human footstool. He never asks to see the books. It's very funny. It goes on. I don't want. I won't read the whole thing. But it is a pretty good send up on the economy of AI I

[Jeff Jarvis]

love McSweeney's line 115 is something you're gonna like, I think. And op ed in the New York Times.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh well, I agree with the headline

[Jeff Jarvis]

Doom maxing has to stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, we have to stop freaking out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is by Robert Shiller who is a Nobel Prize winning economist who's just going on about the. It's obvious. But what's the. What's the harm of all this Doom stuff? And we certainly recognize that where we are. So just stop it. Just stop it.

[Leo Laporte]

We all grew up as he points out on Doom Sci fi. It's been the trope of sci fi and AI since the very beginning.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Only in books. Only in books. In movies and TV robots are usually good guys.

[Leo Laporte]

HAL 9000.

[Benito Gonzalez]

That's one name more.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the Forbin project? That was a terrible, terrible A.I. i guess in war games the A.I. no, you know, R2D2 data.

[Benito Gonzalez]

R2D2 data.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. A lot of recent TV A.I. movies.

[Benito Gonzalez]

You know there's more, there's more. There's more with their friends.

[Leo Laporte]

The movie artificial intelligence AI. I could think of a lot of modern movies. Even her The AI isn't exactly benign.

[Benito Gonzalez]

The Terminator is a bad guy. But in the second one he's a good guy Terminator.

[Leo Laporte]

But he comes back as a good guy. But the machines are not good guys in any.

[Benito Gonzalez]

But there's always a twinge of oh, maybe hits a person. Maybe he's. Maybe, maybe he feels. But robots and androids have humans. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, he's a cyber.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Speaking of machines, you told me you said you were going to buy a new Steam. Do you have price for sticker shock?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not going to buy a new steam. The price $1050 for the steam machine without a controller. 100 bucks more if you want is

[Jeff Jarvis]

all because of memory chips.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I did buy a new machine. I bought. In fact you're going to inherit my old switch. I bought the new switch too. So you're going to inherit the old one. So you can play the game that Paris really wants you to play.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'll do it for about five minutes, so. No. Yeah, No, I won't.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll bring it out when I come out to have one of Hank's sandwiches.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is much like Halley's comet. Long anticipated, long awaited. Yeah. It's considerably more than it was gonna cost. Was gonna cost. Well, they never did announce a price, but boy. Yeah, that's. It's three times more than the PS5, and it's not any better. So I don't know. I don't know who they're gonna. I don't know who they're gonna want it for. All right, you're watching Intelligent Machines. As I mentioned, Paris Martineau has the week off. She'll be back in two weeks. We do have some great guests coming up, though. Paris is gonna be sad that she's going to miss next week. Chris Potts of BigSpin. AI this is all about AI hallucination. Dr. Ian Bogost is coming back. His book is coming out. He said, I'll come back in July when my book comes out, the small stuff. And I'm starting to see interviews with Ian. We really enjoyed having him on. He was the. The AI Whisperer. He was on. And I'm happy to say we got Nate B. Jones, who is one of my favorites on A.I. yeah, I'm very excited about having.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We couldn't even find an email address for him. Couldn't figure out where to get him.

[Leo Laporte]

My AI Found it. I will not share it with you. I don't know how it found it. I don't know how hard it is to find, but, yeah, we're glad we got a hold of him. Anyway, those are all coming up. Paris will be back for Ian Bogost, which is nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good.

[Leo Laporte]

In a couple of weeks. And did she get. Did she respond to your message?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, she didn't. She must be. Wait, she did.

[Benito Gonzalez]

She did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, she did. Yes. Hello from Old Faithful, where I am shocked to say I have cell service. I just stuck in traffic because of a giant bison.

[Leo Laporte]

Good for her. She's out there. So Old Faithful's in Wyoming, I thought. Is it in Montana? She's seeing the American planes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Montana still question mark.

[Leo Laporte]

Were there any pictures?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, she sent no pictures.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, send pictures anyway. We miss her, but she'll be back. And Jeff Jarvis, of course, is here. His new book, Hot Type, coming soon. We'll have to interview you when the book comes out. Oh, well, we could do some dramatic readings. You could do your Hal Holbrook.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I did my Halbro Hallbrook voice and then I was telling people about this and they said, who? It'll make no sense to some people I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Only we know we gather here tonight

[Jeff Jarvis]

to bring women back to their rightful place.

[Leo Laporte]

The Testaments a new Hulu Original series from the executive producers of the Handmaid's Tale. It's easier to accept a story than

[Jeff Jarvis]

believe that the people around you are monsters.

[Leo Laporte]

The battle isn't over. There comes a time when you have

[Olivier Sylvain]

to take action, when you have to

[Leo Laporte]

choose your own destiny. Watch the new Hulu original series, the Testaments, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance. With over 19,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs. So you can see Spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go [e-mail] like a good neighbor, State Farm is there I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox Onobotulinum toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for Those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the picks of the week. There'll only be two of us picking this week. I'm sad to say I will give you, in that case, this one. It's called in the Weights. I don't know it's an AI vanity search. All right, so what Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn have done is they have gone and collected all of the different models. GPT5554 Mini Opus 48, Haiku, Grok, Gemini, Kimmy, Deepseek. And they allow you to scan them for your name and then they rank it based on how well known your name is. And as it makes sense, pop icons are higher ranked. Minnie Mouse, currently today's heavyweight, followed by R2D2 Beyonce, and a guy known as Charles Lukwig Dodgson, maybe better known as Lewis Carol. Now, shall I put in your name, Jeff? Let's see if the AI. Well, they know who you are. The question is, how highly ranked are you? So we're going to quickly search through professor of journalism.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Look at that.

[Leo Laporte]

You're in the top 3%. 804 strength.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

It found you in every one of these. Except Llama.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey. Which is fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, now if we just search for journalism professor, media criticism. 804, which is a very good score. A little weaker on the Twig podcast. Co host only Opus. Thought you were in that. So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, ouch.

[Leo Laporte]

And you want to see the hallucinations.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see. Where are they? Below. They're below. Jeff Jarvis, British TV presenter. That's what Llama thought you were. Jeff Jarvis, rock and folk musician. The French model Mistral thought you were a rock and folk musician. Are there Jeff Jarvis?

[Jeff Jarvis]

There is an Elvis impersonator. Jeff Jarvis.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's what they were thinking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a jazz musician.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a professional wrestler named Jeff Jarvis?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Claude Haiku thought that was the case.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's great. That's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that fun?

[Benito Gonzalez]

I love this aesthetic, though. I love this adventure game aesthetic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

It's very. It's very, very eight bit. Here. Here, I'll put Benito.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It's King's Quest.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, is that what it is?

[Benito Gonzalez]

That's what it looks like to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see. I don't know. I think Benito will show up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or there's a.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Well, there's a famous version of me. So that name will show up.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's going through. It's a little slower. It's clustering up all of the different models. American jazz pianist.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yep, that's the one. That's why I can't even be a musician. Because there's a more famous musician than me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So Spanish footballer. A Spanish professional cyclist. A Mexican politic. Well, bonito. No Wonder it's having a hard time with you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A boxer. I'm not going to school.

[Leo Laporte]

You could be. Common Hispanic name. Okay. Fictional.

[Jeff Jarvis]

39th California governor according to Llama, assassinated in 1910.

[Leo Laporte]

And a Filipino politician.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Oh, that one's very close.

[Leo Laporte]

Quinn. Yeah, well. Yeah. You have Filipino politician family members? Could be. All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is Hank Laport in there?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, should we look?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Hank will for sure be in there. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Salt Hank. Let's see. In the weights is Salt Hank in the weights. See, it's maybe more too modern, you know, that might reduce the. No social media food creator. He is. This is the one area where I think I might beat him. Yeah, he's a 249 score. I think the longevity of your presence in the world. I am top 1%.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Top 1%.

[Leo Laporte]

But again llama has no idea and there are no hallucinations. GPT5 knows I'm a technology broadcaster, as does 54 mini opus. Same thing. Known as the Tech Guy. Founder of the TWIT network.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Tech God.

[Leo Laporte]

Tech Guy. That's my radio name. Hi Guy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're Canadian?

[Benito Gonzalez]

American.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a bit of a. Yeah, no, sorry, Grok. Known for hosting the Tech Guy radio show and founding the TWIT podcast network. Anyway, it's kind of fun. Are you in the weights? Well, find out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, just a little fun thing. It's inthewaits calm. Mr. Jarvis, few things.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One, I didn't know this has been known. Did you know that the UK is going to turn off terrestrial TV signals?

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

In 2034 or now? They're thinking about 2040.

[Leo Laporte]

No antennas.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, they're just going to turn it off because they'll need inexpensive Internet access for all. But then they will just turn off broadcast.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Wait, so the spectrum is just going to be WI fi? The Spectrum is just going to become WI fi.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or Internet TV or hardwired. But it'll all be over the top. So that's interesting because they have a kind of weird relationship to broadcast. You know you have to buy a license, right? Broadcast TV license. And that funds the BBC, which is a weird thing to do. And they actually have little vans that go around to see if anybody's watching TV without.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the difference in our model is that that's what they decided to make it a public good instead of ads 20s instead of ad supported. It was because the US Navy created, as I said last week, insisted on the creation of rca. And that set in motion our model versus theirs.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish we'd had time with Olivier to get into that because I think he would have been.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We should have been back. That was a fun. That was a fun conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Really fun to talk about that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Computer History Museum is hiring someone to start their new AI archive, which is great news.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting. So kind of like Internet archive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I think more like a museum is what do they need? How do you save an archive of the AI age? So they're going to hire one person who's going to work alone first to

[Leo Laporte]

capture the liberty, the history of AI and robotics. What a great job that was. This is, if you're in the San Jose area, highly recommend to visit the Computer History Museum.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And they do other great events. I'm about to write to them. They did a great event which was key to my book Hot type on sale now on the creation of desktop publishing. And they had in the key people who did that to reminisce. And it's an invaluable historical document.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything they do is great. And the exhibits are fantastic. And if you're a listener to our shows, you'll recognize so much of the stuff in there. There's an Apple one. I mean, it is really a wonderful museum.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then my whole family sends this to me regularly. The onions. Dad suggests arriving at airport 14 hours early. So that's me. That's been the case. So I found a new TikTok account, which is Airport Dad.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's see. Why are all dads like this? It says airport dad arriving at the airport.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Guardian of all bags. Must have all the passports. Checks flight status every five minutes.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess I am that day. I do do that. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Annoyed when you stop at every shop. Triple checks everything. Checks is the plane is at the gate. Very important. I do that too. Although first ignored every time.

[Leo Laporte]

Currently, Lisa is much more of a. I am more like, yeah, we can leave three, you know, two hours before the flight. We'll get there in plenty of time. I know. I don't like sitting in an airport.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, that's standard Filipino behavior. We're always there four hours before our flight.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Really.

[Leo Laporte]

Bill Gates was famous. Famous for cutting it as close as possible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what I do when he flew commercial.

[Leo Laporte]

Back when he flew commercial. So this is in the very early days of Microsoft. He would arrive. He wanted to arrive just as the gate was closing.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, I used to be on the road. I used to be on the road like every other week. So I figured out how to get to the airport when I needed to. So now I can leave like a Nice time.

[Leo Laporte]

You know exactly.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, I know exactly how to do it now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I know exactly how long it's going to take to get to SS. It's an hour and 15 minutes. The problem is, you get there nowadays and the TSA is the. Is the problem. You don't know how long that line's going to be. It's very unpredictable. Right. Although there are ways.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you do the. The what you call it the clear?

[Leo Laporte]

No, clear.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I pay for clear.

[Leo Laporte]

I did clear when it first came out, and I was so embarrassed because I walked up and they go, here. They take your luggage, your. In your bin, and they push ahead to the front of the line.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, they don't. Well, I don't quite do that now.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, no, they have their own line now, right? They have their own.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Their own line now. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They still have to go through the tsa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but you have your own separate line through the tsa.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have your own separate air X ray machine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Kind of. You do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really? Okay. Not at sfo. At sfo, you have to be wedged somehow into the line for taking off your shoes and putting your laptop on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you don't take our shoes anymore either.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I know. I guess it's a. I'm old hat now. So. So I didn't do that. I was embarrassing. Every time we get. And the other thing is often the line for clear is longer because everybody does it now. So I, you know, I have a global entry. I have TSA pre. That's plenty. I don't. I don't even do that usually. I just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I used to be United Global Services, which is the highest secret level. I got to kick old ladies out of the Jetway, but I don't have that anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Out of my way, lady. Get out of that wheelchair.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now. However, I will travel with my cane.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's good. What do they call that? Johnny Jett. This had a name for it. The Miracle. They call them the miracle flights.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Where when you're getting on the flight, there's 40 or 50 people in wheelchairs to get on early, and then they all walk off at the end of the flight. It's like they're healed. It's amazing. I was on a miracle flight. I was like, that was the weirdest. I would be again. I'd be embarrassed. I don't want to. I don't want to be. I just. I'll get in line with everybody and be a normal human. That concludes the old man version of

[Jeff Jarvis]

even with only two of Us. We still went long.

[Leo Laporte]

Intelligent Machines. Thank you so much to Olivier Sylvain, our guest. He was fantastic. Look forward to reading his book. Or you should look forward. I read it. But you should look forward to reading his book Reclaiming the How Big Tech Took Control on how we can take it back from Columbia Global Reports. Next week we will talk about AI Hallucination. That should be interesting. Paris will be back in two weeks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

With a cowboy hat.

[Leo Laporte]

With a cowgirl hat. She better have a cowboy cowgirl hat and snakeskin boots. We thank you all for joining us. We do Intelligent Machines every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly. That's 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us do the show live in the club to Discord. I hope you're a club to IT member. If you're not, please join the club. Support our efforts. Unlike Salzburger, I. I do not have a. A trust fund to run this on. We just. We rely on the kindness of strangers. You for almost 30 of our operating expenses. Twit TV Club Twit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's filled for 50, folks. Come on. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, come on. Actually, you do get one benefit, a new benefit. You add free versions of the show. But we now have chapter markers in all our shows which allows you to skip over the old men talking about their ailments segment. So that's a real benefit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Poor Bonito has to mark that out.

[Leo Laporte]

Club Twit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's the Aldrich.

[Benito Gonzalez]

No, AI does that now.

[Leo Laporte]

AI does it. So it's not hard to do. We do do it, but the problem is because of ad insertion after the fact, we don't know the lengths of the shows with ads. And so we can't really do it reliably. So join the club. That way you get that benefit. You can watch club or not. And YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kik. We stream on all those platforms as we're doing the show after the fact. You can get audio or video from our website, Twit TV IM. There is an Intelligent Machines YouTube channel. You can go there and get the video of the show. Great way to share clips. Or subscribe on your favorite podcast client. And you'll get it automatically as soon as it's done. Thanks to Benito Gonzalez, the world famous Benito Gonzalez, our producer and editor. Thanks to all of you for joining us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A boxer and politician who knew Benito.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, so many things. Jazz musician as well. We will see you next week on Intelligent Machines. Bye bye. Hey everybody, it's Leo Laporte. You know about Mac Break Weekly, right? You don't? Oh, if you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with Apple, this is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inacco, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell and I get together and talk about the week's Apple News. It's an easy subscription. Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for Mac Break Weekly or visit our website, Twitter, tv mbw. You don't want to miss a week of Mac Break Weekly. I'm not a human being.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not into this animal scene.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm an intelligent machine. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but still, so is our gear. Level up your [e-mail] to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome, Columbia. Engineered for whatever the right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. @blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 minutes million windows and have 50,000 5 star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals free samples, zero pressure right now. Get up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus get a free professional [e-mail] rules and restrictions apply. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with

[Jeff Jarvis]

a message for everyone paying big Wireless Way too much. Please, for the love of everything good

[Olivier Sylvain]

in this world, stop with Mint.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's weird.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent

[Leo Laporte]

to $15 per month required intro rate

[Jeff Jarvis]

first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full [e-mail].