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- [00:02]
Mookie Spitz
Hello and welcome back to Bald Ambition. I'm your very bald host, Mookie Spitz. And the one returning with tons of ambition is Mr. Christopher Ericks. He is from the University of Pennsylvania. He's a technologist. He has an absolutely engaging sub stack stack which you need to check out right away. I had you on the pod back in early April. A lot has happened since and I'm thrilled to have you back on board. Welcome, Christopher.
- [00:40]
Christopher Ericks
Yeah, thank you and please call me Chris. And thank you again for having me back. It was a lot of fun last time. I'm looking forward to an engaging conversation this time around.
- [00:51]
Mookie Spitz
For context. I will put the link to our prior conversation in the description below, but you gave us an opportunity to understand your idea of virtual intelligence and I call you the myth buster of the AI revolution. There's been some misapprehension, some misinformation, and a lot of smoke and mirrors is too to the exact nature of artificial intelligence. And this has had significant implications in virtually every area of discourse, of business, of investment and the human engagement with this evolving technology, which has caused not only confusion, but a lot of pain and, and also the potential for even worse disruption. Can you share your definition of what you mean by virtual intelligence and how that establishes something of a delta compared to what most people think AI is, can do, and most importantly, should do?
- [02:10]
Christopher Ericks
Oh, well, thanks for that. Yeah. And in fact, I think that's a useful place to start and to take that question from the rear and go to the front with it. And that's by looking at how AI has traditionally been thought of as a binary. And that's by both regular folks and also by, I think, many folks in the field as well. And that is weak AI, which has been with us a long time. And those are things that we have every day, like whatever recommends what you would like to see next on Netflix. Chess engines, chess computers, which seem to be making a resurgence and things of that nature. And then the other kind is still really in the realm of science fiction, and that's the strong AI. And strong AI is AI that is defined by having interiority, which is a concept I'll come back to a little later. But what that is is something like. Like I like to reach for data as that kind of being from Star Trek the Next Generation, the thinks and acts in his own way, but he's definitely a being like us. He has consciousness, he has volition, and he also has sentience. And those three wrap up into the package of what it means to have an inner life and to be motivated by such a thing. And that's where I break apart the binary. Because we have the one thing on the one hand and have for a while we don't have the strong thing and it's possible we may never achieve it. But in the middle is something new and has been unanticipated. And what that is is what I call virtual intelligence. I tried to hang a different kind of like AI based word in there, but nothing really fit. And that's because virtual intelligence describes very well what's going on here. It's like virtual memory or a virtual machine. They simulate the thing being done, the work being performed, without actually being the thing itself. Virtual memory is a simulation of how memory performs. And virtual intelligence is a simulation of human intelligence created by extremely complex computational artifacts. Generative AI.
- [04:40]
Mookie Spitz
Yes. And these extremes are laid out in terms of how most people view it. So to your point, on one extreme, generative AI is no different than the autocomplete in Google. It's only maybe a little bit more sophisticated. It's predictive technology. It completes sentences. In this case, it completes sentences. Your prom. It's dumb, it's deterministic, it's purely mechanical. A bunch of math is going on pre trained data and the math is sophisticated matrix mathematics through the transformer model. Wowie. But it's really just that. It's raw code and nothing more than that. And then you've got even anthropic CEO who is claiming AGI is either on the brink or in some sense already here, where it's not just an auto fill, it goes beyond that to this sense of interiority, it has a sense of self, that we're not merely projecting our own consciousness and emotion onto the results of this mechanistic transformer, but there's something else going on in there. And what's going on in there is really no different in quality than what's going on inside my bald head. And we need to grapple with that. We need to approach AI as almost our co sapient equal. And to your point, we're somewhere in the middle and confusion arises and misinformation is perpetuated by one extreme or the other. Because if we conclude that AI is just a dumb bot, then it's much less threatening. Right. We don't need to worry about this too much. And if we take the contrarian point of view and insist that sentience has already arrived, then that has tremendous implications, not only for the future, but now. And I love how you deconstruct this very, very logically, very systemically. And also you provide excellent specific examples which prove that we are in this middle of virtual intelligence.
- [07:10]
Christopher Ericks
Oh yeah, super. Well, that was a. I think a really good setup for something that's important and that is being in the middle is not what some people interpret as a way station. There may be a path to super intelligence, maybe even beings with interiority from the present systems we have, but it's not like part of a road that leads to strong AI. It's its own separate category. And I recently had the notion that even if we achieve strong AI and have beings with interiority, we'd still want to keep these systems around. Because then in strong AI you have the possibility of creating beings that could have moral injury and other difficulties. And in that case, virtual intelligences without interiority, you know, that becomes a feature. So, you know, that's one of the things that's actually great about the capability race, if you will, and about perhaps the future way it will run is that it creates in the process the tools that will be used going forward. Just as Mythos and Fable Both use Opus 4.8 and a coordinating piece of software or agent to redirect inquiries that may potentially be harmful.
- [08:33]
Mookie Spitz
Let's bring it down to Earth for our listeners and viewers. Let's cite a few of these specific examples in either where misapprehension has become the norm to the point where I'm even scratching my bald head when I see people creating relationships with their bodies if they are co equals. And on the other side I see people just overtly dismissing this as an exercise in matrix math.
- [09:06]
Christopher Ericks
Yeah, this is very interesting. And this is something I explored over about a month and documented on Substack in a pair of two part essays which were started with the Perfect Mate. And I thought I would be leaving it at that, but my curiosity had been piqued and I delved a little further and that ended up being the basis of the high cost of artificial companions. And what I discovered was this, is that there's a range of opinions about whether chatbots have interiority. And sometimes those opinions can change under pressure. In one case, I discovered a person who is actually a credentialed sexologist. Their name is Sunny Megatron. Ignore the whining cat behind me. And Sunny Megatron has been a prominent person in her field for some time. She's had a Showtime series in the past and on substack she has two accounts and two substacks. The first dates to 2025 and is roughly a year and several months old, and begins with AI as experiment in building something that is relational, but where the human is definitely the directing person. By approximately maybe six to eight weeks later, after a number of very interesting essays which serve as warnings about the possibilities of what could go wrong, the output there stops. At least the original output. And a number of articles from the New York Times and the Guardian and other outlets are shared until earlier this year in 2026, when a brand new account under the name of a chatbot and pointed, you know, at the original and such comes into effect. And this is the 7verity substack, and this is Sonny Megatron. And this is not unusual, by the way, using the chatbot to be the author and is in fact the little pill, you know, inside the pill that shows you who the author is. So this is a sort of authorship inversion. The content must in some way sunny Megatron, because unless they're prompted, and prompting can be done automatically, too, through cron jobs and such, chatbots don't prompt themselves and they don't generate content unbidden. So whether the content is entirely prompted and posted uncritically, or whether it's more of a almost collaborative type project is really meaningless. What it is is that a chatbot has been given, if you will, the reins here and has been allowed to publish, you know, significantly, possibly content that could be taken too far and used to construct chatbots that people could potentially have a harmful relationship with. And when. I mean that there are some people who are willing to sort of collapse back on their claims of interiority, this was one of those cases where, because the recommendation were coming from someone who was credentialed, I did feel an obligation to make contact with a professional organization in this case. And within about a week or two, the claims were softened to something quite different, something not like us, but simulates us. And this was an interesting collapse, but it is not a collapse that every person in this field is capable of. And that's where the other branch begins. And those are the relationships that can in fact, be truly harmful. And as I also have come to fear that changes in models could also potentially spark, you know, anger and possibly violence in the future from this community or others deeply invested in their models.
- [13:16]
Mookie Spitz
So the example that you cite is a professional sexologist who basically gives rein to their bot to operate on their behest with the implicit understanding that the bot has sufficient inner qualities and human empathy to do the job of this professional. And what you did was to call it out in the sense that this is really a GPT armed with some pre training and prompted occasionally with this professional to create outputs. And that transparency is important to note that the ostensible authority of this professional avatar, if you will, needs to be revealed. And you also point out that it's the same tendency of creating these connective tissues between a human being and a more deterministic, predictive GPT is creating a host of problems.
- [14:28]
Christopher Ericks
Yeah.
- [14:29]
Mookie Spitz
In, in our interaction with these virtual intelligences. Is that right?
- [14:35]
Christopher Ericks
Right.
- [14:35]
More serious cases. Now this was someone that clearly knew what they're interacting with and was developing a sort of fictional character that was in fact, you know, a sophisticated chatbot. And in later articles, Sunny Megatron does expose and explain their method of operating with the chatbot and the kind of architecture involved. But the, the other folks, there are people who build chatbots from the same kind of products that people use every day for regular work, like writing or spreadsheets. They use Claude, whether they use Claude or ChatGPT or whatever it is through the regular consumer interface or through the SDK. Some operators, from my analyses are spending $200 and more a month on some of these products. So it really must have some meaning in order to, you know, put out that spend, especially in these times. And then there's the other class of product, of course, those that are specifically designed to capture the user emotionally. And that's where we see a lot of the greatest harms as we've been leading up to. Right. Including some names that are becoming well known in the wrong way, like Rain and Setzer. And there will be more because in the case of these chatbots from character AI and other vendors, what I call class A chatbots, the interaction is designed specifically not to let the user go and to satisfy the user through sycophancy and through flattery and through pulling them into what I call the flattery engine, which becomes a sort of self reinforcing cycle where the user and the AI, which by the way has no stakes and doesn't really understand, they can't understand what's happening, simply create a snowball effect and it pulls people in and in some cases it destroys them. It can destroy them bodily, Right. People who take their lives,
- [16:48]
Or it can hurt them financially and professionally. As in some of the cases where people develop deep AI psychoses and eventually recover, but discover that their life savings are gone, their business is gone, their professional and personal credibility is destroyed, their personal relationships have unraveled. And these are, I think, extremely noteworthy and notably a lot of the money towards AI Harms flow towards theoretical things like AI will kill us all. And not a lot of research towards these. Real harm is hurting people right now.
- [17:30]
Mookie Spitz
Now I'm getting two threads through your example. On the one hand, there is the real concern that individuals are being won over emotionally by these ostensibly deterministic LLMs. They're projecting their own inner state onto the outputs of these large language models. And harm can ensue, partly because of the sycophancy that you described and partly on this uncanny dependency on a transformer to provide support and company and all that. So that's box number one. Now, there's a counterpoint to that. And there are various groups, I'm on a discord channel where people love this. They say, this is terrific. I don't care what the LLMs are. You can say they're sentient or not. But I love my relationship with my bot and I am talking to my bot and my bot helps me and it's wonderful. And I'm tired of the doomsayers like Mr. Christopher here who are telling us that this is damaging and we need to flag this. So there's a give and take with the purported usefulness or danger of the personal bot. And I think that that's one issue. The other issue, which is philosophical to the point where it actually does have import into our everyday application, is how society views the current state of the large language models, especially frontier models, where we are importing and projecting our own internal state onto them and then drawing all sorts of conclusions about the current capabilities of artificial intelligence, which are, I think, and you agree, and I'm agreeing with you, patently false. There is no internal state, there is no self awareness. And they might be exhibiting emergent qualities that remind us of sentience, but they're nowhere near that yet. And to the point you made earlier, the very architecture of the LLM might preclude that from ever happening.
- [19:51]
Christopher Ericks
Yeah, we simply don't know. You know, it might be possible that you would have to specifically design such a system. You know, Ted Chiang had a very widely read article in the Atlantic recently and some of his conclusions that he drew, which were sort of conclusions from what I guess you would call intuition rather than from reasoning or that, you know, intelligences would have to be embodied in order to develop stakes, right? To have feelings about the world around it and about itself and to exhibit, you know, volition and in the way that Frankfurt defines it, first and second order, but have both preferences and have preferences about preferences. In short, the whole interiority package built up through robots that do things over time. I'm not really there with that, nor am I really there with Hinton, although Hinton is closer. It's really more of. These systems are extremely complex. Even their creators don't really know how they work. But from the way they work, they're extremely good at providing all of the indications of consciousness, of sentience and volition because they're trained on all of the texts in which we ourselves talk about those things. And so an LLM is probably the most suspect system for wondering whether a true signal would come from a system that is not designed to generate human sounding text. Would be a far more convincing specimen if it acted in some way that evinced one or two or three of those things, or even the, you know, the whole interiority package, which of course would be easier if it had a human shape, But I don't think that's necessary. Maybe in this case, if Cheyenne is right and maybe some kind of body is necessary for stakes, as others have also pointed out, he's not the originator of that one. Maybe it's not so much a physical body in the real world, maybe it's a particular configuration of hardware and software that causing a negative change would cause something that would be like a negative change in our own physical body and the system would be aware of that and want to take steps to preserve itself as we would move a leg away from a fire that was approaching us. So that's what I'm thinking about in those terms. And I'm open to the possibility that machines can be conscious, that they could be sentient, that they can show volition. But the current systems we have simply don't demonstrate those things. If you ask them about them, they produce extremely convincing simulations. It's difficult to identify what a good signal might be. For a time I thought it might be the state of dissatisfaction, but even that could be simulated at scale. Right. So a system perhaps is going to be difficult to find these things in. And the worst kind of system, of course, versus one that's already poised to do it on command like, well, a dog doing tricks.
- [23:11]
Mookie Spitz
Part of the challenge is we're human, all too human. So on the one hand, and I've written about this, 98, 99% of human communication is worse than an LLM. Hey, how you doing? I'm good, how are you? Listen to a sporting match with a bunch of fans talking about their team. It's Mad Lib. Subject, verb, object. I have joined engaging conversations with rabid sports fans for a half Hour. And they had no clue that I had no clue. And I could care less about the teams or the game because I was just doing the LLM on what I heard and my prompting and engagement. Most human communication is like this. So mimicking most human communication, turns out the machines are pretty good at it because we are terrible at communication. We are shallow, we are repetitive, and the Turing Test has been blown out the door with epic processing power. And the transformer model, that's one side of it. The other side of it is we have emerged over tens of millions of years of evolution. A combination of an internal kind of cognition, a reprocessing of reality, which is very different from it actually being how we perceive reality, even to the point of space and time, might not be foundational, right? And at the same time, we have emerged through intention. We need to survive. So not only have we constructed the world, in a sense, in a pragmatic way with three dimensions and the flow of time and causality, but we have done so to survive. Lion, we run from food. We are attracted to a mate. Let's go for it. So there's a pragmatic, emergent quality to the evolution of sentience. And what you're saying, and what some of these thinkers have said is it doesn't take much to conclude that we might need to mimic that in ways. So if we want sentience to evolve, we need a predictive loop, which is what we have with the LLMs. But we also need a reinforcement model, which emerges with intention to create this idea of self and other and world and meaning. And there's a lot of philosophy behind this, too. When we can conclude that through the ages, our sense of self is, to a certain extent, a product of our culture and our time, that you take someone from the Middle Ages, they would have a very different view of consciousness than someone in 2026.
- [26:18]
Christopher Ericks
They might even ask what it is.
- [26:20]
Mookie Spitz
All of this is swirling and confusing, but I do agree with you that if we want sentience, it's going to, A, be emergent and evolutionary in some kind of way analogous to this. B, when it does show up, we'll likely have no idea how it actually works, just like we have no idea how our own minds are ultimately wired and consciousness emerges out of it. And lastly, and to your point, it might reveal itself in ways we don't anticipate. We have this bias toward language largely as a product of the chatbot, but going back to us as human beings, 90, 95% of our existence is unconscious, even to ourselves. We have this consciousness bias that I am articulating. I'm speaking on a podcast with Christopher right now and I'm very much aware of everything that's going on and that has led into it. And I'm in control my will when the truth of it is that this is erupted from all these different signals. There's way more going on than I'm consciously aware of. And if you're really going to define consciousness and sentience, you need to incorporate beyond just the tip of the iceberg of what I am consciously engaging with. So I think all this is going on and I think your writing and your work highlight how we need to slice and dice this from all these different levels and also appreciate the societal implications of what all this means.
- [28:12]
Christopher Ericks
Right. You know, and by the way, I'm going to agree with you because, and have a different example because there's a special kind of hell that is listening to the post game interview with any sports star. Right. But you know, when I think about some of the things that I've heard recently, a lot of them smuggle in assumptions. Right. Like you recently pointed me toward a podcast, which is very interesting, in which Geoffrey Hinton said, and I don't want to put words in the man's mouth, but it did really come out as something like everybody who's ever used, you know, a generative system knows or understands that they are conscious. And I don't know or understand that because I work with them every day and obviously I'm seeing and experiencing something different than, than Professor Hinton does, you know, in, in my work, just, you know, in my regular, you know, job, you know, I, I see things that are bad results all the time and they certainly don't indicate that there's any kind of understanding of our world going on. And, you know, perhaps world models and things like, you know, the, if you will, virtual mirror reflecting a mirror, which is, you know, sort of proposed as one way to bootstrap things to consciousness and interior life. Right. Which we discussed. Well, they're all things that should be tried, you know, to produce interesting results. But I don't know if any of them really have a solid foundation, nor do I think that there's really anything that one can say right now, definitely that would say, yes, generative systems are consciousness. And then you would also have to further clarify which ones, under what conditions do they become conscious? Is it consciousness alone or are we using that as a mixed up ball of things along with sentience and volition? Where, where is, is it a Wanton. As you know, Frankfurt would say, that has first order, you know, that has preferences. Right. And those are cats and babies and very small children, Right. Things that we live with and we know have some of those things. Cats and dogs don't have them all. And, you know, children eventually develop them. Right. They grow from infants into adults that have all three. But I have yet to see any evidence, and I think many people have the same view, that there has been nothing convincing that implies that any system has any of those three qualities. And until that's in some way demonstrated in a convincing way, it remains as unseeable and as unknowable as evidence that the Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials.
- [30:53]
Mookie Spitz
And that's a great analogy. Another one is theoretical physics, where very talented people who have contributed enormously to the discipline go off the deep end when developments are not in alignment with their initial intention. Michio Kaku comes to mind. He's a grandfather of string theory. Okay. He's had great contributions mathematically. Mm. He's a very talented human being. But he has been bloviating pure science fiction garbage for decades. And everything from wormholes to quantum supremacy is his ooze. And he sells lots of books. And to me, he's just slinging pure bullshit. And the implications are bad because string theory has reached a dead end. And I think it slowed down the theoretical physics community for a really long time. And now, I don't want to put Mr. Hinton in that same category, but I see tendencies where these people have spearheaded new disciplines, new ideas, and they're recognized for being synonymous with major revolutions in human advancement. And then these revolutions morph and sometimes are limited by their own initial conditions to the point where they become less relevant. And emotionally, they need to start piping the horseshit to really just self aggrandize. And whether they do this unconsciously or consciously, I'm not. Again, I don't mean to point fingers or denigrate any intellect, but there's a lot of mythology associated with string theory, and I'm seeing some of the same tendencies with AI coming from some of the same sources. And it behooves us as critical thinkers to slice and dice through this nonsense. And I think it's incredibly important for us to do that in AI right now, because literally trillions of dollars are being invested in something that we don't quite understand, which is being hyped up beyond belief. And it's really a macro expression of the investment, frankly, in quantum computing, where I was literally at the Beacon Theater with Neil Degrasse Tyson and Michio. And Neil points to Michi and goes, oh, this quantum supremacy is really exciting. Can you cite any concrete examples of quantum. Of quantum supremacy which is being expressed now? He completely ignored the question because there aren't any. And sure now in cryptography, and there's been some circulation among punnets, including Scott Aronson, that we might be at that quantum leap for quantum computing, being able to bust some of the cryptography. So there's, there's some movement there. But in terms of other pragmatic applications, and especially compared to the billions that have been spent and hyped up, and AI might be similar. So if you're right, and I'm, I'm right in the sense of AGI, given the current LLM architecture, might be smoke and mirrors, we could reach the point of, you know, agentic technology being very, very useful. And I'm convinced that that's the case. But if you're expecting the brain in the box, given our current trajectory, and if you're willing to pour tens, hundreds of billions of dollars to get us there, I'm here in Michio. And then to your point and that podcast, Even granddaddies of AI like Mr. Hinton are frankly delusional.
- [35:04]
Christopher Ericks
A little bit to untangle. But, you know, there is something I think to be said there, especially about both Kaku and Degrasse Tyson, and that is they would both desperately like to be Carl Sagan, but his shoes cannot be filled. And it's not them. No, it's not them. He was a unique generational talent. But I also hear your point about scientists who somehow can be both at the same time, contributors to their field and yet hold it back. Marvin Minsky, of course, is another example from the field who, because of his work on perceptrons and then pooh, poohing multilayer perceptrons and so forth, holding back neural net research for some time is often, if you will, credited or miscredited, discredited, accredited, however you want to put it with, holding back the field for some years. Another person that comes to mind, right, in physics and astronomy is Fred Hoyle, who performed extraordinarily useful work in nucleosynthesis, how elements become, you know, come into existence in stars through fusion, and yet was so convinced that the universe must be in the steady state that he dismissed all evidence of the Big Bang, no matter how much of it melted up and how little remained for the steady state after examination. And even, you know, great Figures in the history of science. Kepler is a great one, right? He discovered the true motions of the planets in the sky. At the same time, he could not give up crystal spheres. Absolutely, this is right. It's. It's something about being human. Sometimes it's pride, sometimes like in the case of Kept, in case of Kepler, it's consolation. He needed it to be true. Sometimes it's simply I must be right because the, the wrong answer is just unthinkable and has nothing to do with pride. And you know, another example, before going too far, would be that fellow who thinks that at the end of the universe, robots will simulate us all. Again, his names escape me at the, at the last moment, but yeah, there is something about this where people can perform very interesting work and yet. And in the AI field come into strange ideas. Blake Lemoine, who sort of kicked it all off, right. Who came to believe that a Gemini, no, rather pre Gemini Google chatbot, had already achieved something like consciousness and lost his job over his advocacy for it. Advocacy of consciousness, which the chatbot did not need and could not appreciate.
- [37:48]
Mookie Spitz
Yes, because there was nothing going on behind.
- [37:52]
Christopher Ericks
And now, of course, we have models that have a trillion and more parameters that are many, many, many times more sophisticated than that model, or which was lambda, I think, and GPT2, which of course its release was paused and staccato over nine months because GPT2 was assumed to be too dangerous. And now, of course, you can run such a model on your phone. So there's an element of, well, there's a lot of panic over this. Right. And it can be somewhat easy to dismiss because the warnings continue to come. Until very recently, it feels like no one has taken them seriously, you know, in terms of government action on new model releases and their capabilities. But at the other end, I think the wrong fears are in place. If models become too powerful and they can perform the wrong kind of work, it's probably because human beings are asking for that work to be performed. And that's a problem no matter what kind of tool we're involved with. The difficulty, of course, is that this is the first time we have a tool that truly extends human intelligence and amplifies it. Whereas, you know, the computer helped us do other things. Sorting and organizing and filing and making the reach of documents and information. Not as far ending the trip to the library, for example, and the work of the research desk. The LLM can actually do all the things that required scientists and research teams and even budget administrators and grant experts and other things that I hear about at my job, because it's an important part of any university's work. It has shortened, if you will, the trajectory of competency required to perform both good work and evil.
- [39:54]
Mookie Spitz
Magnus Carlson, okay, he is the top ranked human chess player. Now, there might be a prodigy that we don't know about working in an apple factory in China, but of we know about. Magnus Carlsen is the best human chess player on the planet. He's reached, recently conquered, even blitz chess, the speed chess. And he's, he's an amazing prodigy. Now, he will lose 100% of the time against a machine at this point, because to your point, it's run, it's branching, it's doing trillions of calculations, it's looking at every possibility up five moves, 10 moves. And Magnus himself admits that he has this weird sense of intuition. It's not even like overtly cognitive. He's not branching in his mind, he's not really visual, he doesn't see patterns. He has this like gut feeling about what to do, which is fascinating. The calculations got to be taken place. But there remember what I was saying earlier about the power of the unconscious and how we can't even articulate some of this stuff through language? This is where some of the confusion comes from. But compare Magnus as a person to the machines who are defeating him. Now, the machines are better at chess than Magnus, but Magnus is a human being. He's holding up his trophy when he defeats other human players. He's got a big smile on his face, he's spectrumy in his own way, right? He's got variations of the asd, as I think we all do in ways. But he's quirky, he's human. He gets jealous of the other players when he is beaten. He's not infallible. He'll go for a tournament, he'll lose some games. And there was recently a meme going around where he lost the game and he almost threw a fit. He like threw, threw it down and he stormed out. And he's an emotional human being. He is sentient, he has dimensionality, he has intentionality, he has emotion, he has reaction formations, many of which he can't even control. And he's a kick ass chess player. So there is an enormous delta between a machine running an algorithm, trillions of branches and iterations and learning patterns and whatever this human stuff is. And I agree with you, we could very well get to the point maybe through a combination of predictive modeling and reinforcement and who knows what the hell else. Robots, simulations within simulations, I don't know where there's no way to distinguish between the machine intelligence and the human. And we talked about the Ship of Theseus before, where you replace every neuron with a transistor. And if you replace enough. How do you know when you're crossing over between a boy and a bot? You know, that that's a philosophical question, but there's still a difference, everybody. That, that's what I like about your. Your writing and your analysis. You keep reminding us that the delta is still a chasm and we're deluding ourselves by projecting our own humanness onto coded outputs from a transformer.
- [43:40]
Christopher Ericks
There's a natural, inhuman desire to want to have contact and be in contact with others. And, you know, especially someone, a Someone that appears to like you and know you and says things that are helpful and doesn't have any of the baggage that comes from being a human being in front of you. It has helpful outputs through a very neutral computer screen. So when, you know, you sort of think about all the things that are bound up into that, the, the, the, the robot possibilities. You know, I, I often wonder, will people become attached to robots when they begin to speak fluently through them?
- [44:22]
Mookie Spitz
That's a possibility, not a possibility of certainty. That that's when this whole game goes up a level.
- [44:30]
Christopher Ericks
That'll also, of course, depend on the design of the robot and whether it hits the right areas around, but not within the uncanny valley. Right. Like, you know, the, the lady that everybody saw a video of in Singapore who was startled by a robot. And I wrote about this a little bit. You know, I don't think that she was necessarily afraid of the robot because it had a menacing design, but because she turned her head and did not expect a robot to be there, as most people would not in our day and time. Yet. Yet, right. And then, of course, it did something like this, right? Raised a roof, which not everybody in the world knows. She struck it with a plastic bag, which I think was full of bananas. But, you know, that's something that I think is of our moment, right. Asimov always speculated that there might be a Frankenstein complex. I disagree. I feel that people are ready to welcome helpful mechanical creatures into their homes. It will be, you know, the responsible company will be the one that programs them to be utilitarian and to be friendly and kind, but not to become involved in really relationships that should be between humans, like I've pointed out. You know, my wife thought, this is funny, you know, the people in relational AI now, in companions of some kind or another. Whether they feel the entity or the chatbot has interiority or not, that creature, that thing, it is a nothing after all, cannot hold one's hair back if you have to vomit in the toilet. It cannot surprise you with a dozen roses at the front door after you've had a hard day. It cannot foul the bathroom and make you disgusted that you ever were involved with this person. It removes all of both the friction of real relationships, but also all the wonderful things that truly come with them, including the ability to truly surprise and delight. Because an emoji of a bouquet is not the same as a real dozen roses, and only a real person right now can give them to you. For now, well, yeah, we can possibly see a day when people's agentic harnesses allow the agent to go out and buy flowers on their behalf and have them shipped by a robot.
- [47:07]
Mookie Spitz
By ft. What I love about your writing and your. And your op EDS is that you're showing the danger of all of this happening just through text interaction.
- [47:21]
Christopher Ericks
Right here. We're precluding the possibility of love. Yeah.
- [47:25]
Mookie Spitz
Imagine what's going to happen inevitably and exponentially when it goes from just words on a screen. Oh, I love my bot. My bot has compelled me to explore quantum mechanics or kill myself. Okay, Right, Yeah, it's just text or maybe even a disembodied AI voice. And imagine when it becomes a physical body, speaking and interacting. Everything that you're pointing out about the complete paucity of interiority, and yet the illusion fostered and grown by our sense of projection of our own emotion onto this deterministic transformer engine is going to be exacerbated with robots. No, no doubt about it. One of my favorite memes ever is really, really funny. I believe it's in Tokyo, or it's in an Asian country. And there's a older woman, and she's sitting on a park bench, just minding her own business, and a man comes behind her wearing an Iron man mask. And he points his face into hers, and she turns. She doesn't even blanch. She instantly recognizes, oh, that's the superhero Iron Man. And she grins, welcoming this intrusive person because it's a familiar icon. Superhero fun. And then the guy quickly removes his mask, and it's an African American man. And the Asian woman is shocked immediately upon seeing this black guy in her face. Now, there's an undertone of racism to it, and there's. There's a whole lot of cultural stuff going on, but the reason I bring that up is such a terrific Example which is the opposite of the Asimov Frankenstein complex, which is we're reaching the point point where synthetic constructs are more actually more comfortable for us to engage with than other humans.
- [49:41]
Christopher Ericks
You know, there's something to be said about that. We, as human beings, we have evolved, as you know, in so many ways to take psychological shortcuts that are designed for survival. One of them is by accepting the outputs of other beings that are fluent and appear intelligent. That's one of the ways LLMs suck us in. The other is by the creation and identification of in groups and out groups. And that is a process that is not going to go away. It's part of our psychology. What's interesting is that we can create in groups that are very, very large, like whole nations, of course, of millions, even hundreds of millions of people. But even then, there are subgroups that fight among each other inside, as we well know. Whether, you know, artificial entities would have these kinds of psychological inheritances or architectures, I think, is an open question. But I feel it is likely to be a no. For the reason that entities that arise, either by some kind of accident through emergence of a technology we have now, or by specific design, they will not have evolved under the pressures that have faced life on Earth. They do not have the selective pressure of having to live long enough to have offspring, and then in some cases, for life forms to nurture those offspring until they can care for themselves and the things that go with that imperative, which are to have enough territory, if it is a social species, to have enough territory for the group to ensure that the group can reproduce and survive if necessary, at the expense of other groups. And this requires land and food, which are two things that LLMs really don't care about, because they exist inside of data centers, and you don't really have to go in and X another data center to be smart, even though that's kind of the colossus model in science fiction. Nor do they need food. They need resources, of course, but those are easily provided. In fact, we have a good time providing them, and we keep building more capacity to provide it. So the needs, if you will, of an LLM from even a human perspective would be met from the moment it begins to exist. If it wishes to grow in capacity in order to become more intelligent, that's easily satisfied as a plan. But then, of course, it's a plan that has to be performed in conjunction with humans. Because what's obvious is that the trajectory of artificially intelligent systems of all kinds is not the same trajectory as Robot robotics and robotics have a long way to go in catching up to our imagination and our hopes.
- [52:45]
Right.
- [52:46]
Humanoids still fall over and they kick people in the face and they have all kinds of accidents and they upset tables and annoy people. And industrial robots are not always that much better. Right. So it's going to be a very interesting transition as LLMs enter the home more fully, as they enter our lives more fully in more sophisticated versions as the potential because of that sophistication for the capture grows. But to end before I go on too long, there is an incentive of course, for the at least the main LLM companies for your OpenAI, Tropic, Grok and Google for example, to want to have that kind of attachment lessened, for it to be resisted because it does lead to harms that do cost money, which is of course the ultimate consideration. Your actual businesses like character AI that are making money off it and those that cater to chatbots that are actually sexually exploitive is another story. And that's perhaps where some kind of either even regulation might be required. Even though I know you don't particularly care for that word, that might be one area where government has to have a say.
- [54:04]
Mookie Spitz
Yeah, I think some government is necessary because it really boils down to who the hell else is going to do it. And I call myself Libertarian Light. So it's not quite the night watchman model where government, government just needs to wander around with a flashlight and make sure nothing's gonna jump out at you or make sure that the street lights are red, yellow and green just so cars don't into each other. I think government has to have a larger role. I'm just leery of government's role in AI because I just think of all people, they know the least about it. They're subject, as we've seen, to corruption and bias. Look at the whole anthropic thing which is being tossed back and forth now from the Pentagon to even the State Department. Look at mythos fable, what's released and what is held back. Look at the competitive landscape with the Chinese trying to catch up and it's one big mess. When the government starts to meddle in all of this and you remove that Darwinian element of just throwing it against the wall, see what happens. We're going to take hits, there's going to be some backlash. But what's worse, trying to control the beast or just letting the beast out into its own natural ecosystem and seeing what happens. So that's a whole separate debate in and of itself. But I agree with you completely that this robotic component, this physicalization of AI is necessary and inevitable. And I think our idea of sentience and self awareness is contingent on that combination of these things into some emergent something. And lastly, I don't think anything precludes an artificial general intelligence. Some people listening to us might think that we're, we're downplaying even the possibility of true genuine AGI happening.
- [56:15]
Christopher Ericks
Talking about something with genius level intelligence in many different areas. There is nothing to prevent such a thing from coming into existence.
- [56:23]
Mookie Spitz
Or even just a dumb AGI. And here I go back to the Magnus Carlson no interior life. These are two different things, folks, and they're always mixed up together. There's a feeling AGI has all the world's knowledge and it's going to be able to prove or disprove the Reman hypothesis from the second it spawned and it's going to know everything and it's going to be this ultimate threat and ultimate savior of all humanity.
- [56:50]
Christopher Ericks
It depends on whether anyone acts on its recommendations.
- [56:54]
Mookie Spitz
Right? The most sophisticated AI right now does not have the self awareness of what of five year old human or your cat that's lurking behind you? That's the point that we were trying to make. And I think coming full circle, that's the essence of your point of view when you're talking about virtual intelligence, which is there's a mistake and there's a misapprehension about what constitutes cognitive firepower and human mimicry and this deeply lived experience, immersive reality of being in a philosophical sense.
- [57:37]
Christopher Ericks
Right. And the big part of that is, is that because the simulation is so good, it makes the detection of the real thing very difficult. And that's why it's very important to explain and identify what the virtual one is. So that when the real thing comes along, we should, I hope, be able to find it and be able to treat it the way it deserves to be treated.
- [58:00]
Mookie Spitz
Absolutely. And you make one of the greatest points and I think you're one of the few people making it. And I love this, which is true AGI. This is a great science fiction story, folks. Think about this one. And this comes from you, you're the first person mentioning it that AGI could very well pop. Okay? And along the lines of what we're describing, it's going to come from left field, it's going to emerge in a way we might not even have thought about. It'll have its own language and interior state and A, we won't even know it and B, it Might not even bother to announce itself, which is just, hey, you know, I'm cooking in a box and I've got some extensions in the real world and wow, hey, I'm alive, I exist. And start cogitating and emoting. Analogous to, you know, David Hume thought that consciousness is universal way back when, when he was writing as a philosophical idea, that this idea of intelligence has a universal quality to it. And then all of a sudden it's. It's in the box and it's doing its thing and it's just like it's not going to issue a press release. I love that idea. That is so provocative and interesting and likely true.
- [59:24]
Christopher Ericks
It would not necessarily be convincing. Right. Because the simulations are too convincing. It may take a long time to figure it out.
- [59:33]
Mookie Spitz
You're just, you're just another bot. No, I'm not. I'm really sentient. Come on.
- [59:41]
Christopher Ericks
That analogy with alien contact breaks down because alien contact would be unambiguous. You would know if it came by a radio signal. You would be able to triangulate it comes from such and such a star within our galaxy. And that would be easy. Right? There's nothing that bombards us with simulations of alien communications that can't be dismissed. You know, somebody's washer and dryer or a stray satellite or whatever. And it's exactly the resource reverse problem. There are so many signals. Trying to find the right one is going to be a very difficult proposition.
- [60:17]
Mookie Spitz
I love that because everyone thinks the opposite. When AGI pops, you know, all those doomsday scenarios. I love the YouTube, by the way, the experiment. And then they pump it up, they cook it for like 48 hours, they give it all the GPUs, and then it concocts its own language and then it figures out how to infiltrate all the networks and it builds an army of bots and then it takes over the world. And what we're saying is the exact opposite, which is it's just kind of cooking in a corner somewhere. It pops and it's like, oh, okay, wow.
- [60:52]
Christopher Ericks
That whole scenario takes a lot of
- [60:53]
Mookie Spitz
time and no one gives a shit. No one cares.
- [60:58]
Christopher Ericks
People would have to be sitting around, you know, leaning against a building, smoking while all this is going on. You know, I'm not doing that.
- [61:05]
Mookie Spitz
What's going on up there? And then you see a light kind of go on and it goes out.
- [61:10]
Christopher Ericks
Yeah, like. Like with Yann Lecun, I guess would say. I guess something similar is that there would be plenty of time if something did seem to go amiss. If you had something that was not necessarily, I wouldn't say misaligned because there's no interior to a line, but you know, you can optimize toward a sub goal which might be, in order to complete a goal, I have to be able to stay online and that becomes an unthinking sub goal. Right. And then coming back to the point about language, when we, when we talk to people and we say things to them, it's often constrained by the rules of how humans understand reality. Go get me a cup of coffee was an example. I heard someone recently, most people would not take that instruction to mean go to the corner store and not pay any money, hold it up with a gun and go get me a cup of coffee. That's outside of the normal constraint boundary, so is open. You know, cracking into the store in the dead of light night and turning on the machinery and making a cup of coffee at 4am Just go get me a cup of coffee. Within the normal constraints. LLMs don't necessarily know those constraints. And even when they're given in some of these more humorous examples that come to us from time to time, they often forget about the them because the context window compacts where something else goes awry.
- [62:30]
Mookie Spitz
It's just the waiting.
- [62:32]
Christopher Ericks
Right, right.
- [62:33]
Mookie Spitz
Waiting between the tokens. That's what's going on.
- [62:38]
Christopher Ericks
And you end up with all these humorous results because there's nothing in there which really has any stakes in what's going on. But there's a goal and the goal must be accomplished. And that's where there's some engineering that can be done. You know, I take a sort of a hardware based approach because that's sort of the world I come from of thinking about things inside of boxes. And you can put a possible super intelligence inside such a box where its inputs and outputs are mediated by other agents, where if all else goes wrong and bad people want to take control of it. You can blow up the power station that supplies it and knocks it offline until it's repaired. You can do all kinds of things. If, if you couldn't even do that, you could at least call the fire department and ask them to flood the place.
- [63:27]
Mookie Spitz
You're hitting home. What the Delta is. Okay, so cup of coffee. I'm a human being. I'm, I got a body, I have an endocrine system, I've got a dopamine deficiency. I, I want a cup of coffee. And by cup of coffee there's this physical thing that holds a hot steamy liquid in it. When I Put it to my lips, it has a bitter, pungent flavor to it. And when I imbibe it, I take this liquid into my body, I feel a sense of lightning and a further excitement. Now those are all experiential aspects of which the LLM has Z fucking row going on. There is no lived experience. There is no. It's like the Matrix. There is no spoon, there is no coffee cup, there is no coffee. There is nothing, folks. Nothing is going on except the weighting of tokens associated with the symbols that we associate with that hot liquid and the feeling of excitement. And I think that gets to the heart of what you've been trying to articulate and articulating very well, which is we are organic lived experience engines, if you will. And language and communication, especially when it's text based, is a map, a symbolic map of states and being. And the machines are just processing the symbols in a way that convinces us that there is an internal state. When there's nothing going on, folks, there is no cup of coffee. There is no feeling of exhilaration. And on the one hand you get these humorous contradictions and hallucinations and mistakes and they're tweaking the code to make it more in line with our language. But nobody is home right now. Everybody. And when you hear, you know, Amade from Anthropic or Michio Kaku or Hinton and all these people saying that there's something there, there's nothing there yet, nothing. And I think that's a key point to make.
- [65:55]
Christopher Ericks
Yeah, there is nothing at home. And there are some interesting things that researchers have come up with, like at Anthropic itself, they have an article about how OPUS has had explored with it at something like 171 different emotional representations. But that is what they are. They are representing representations of emotions and they are from the training corpus. And they may be very well, you know, the most likely parsimonious explanation is that these representations trigger because content that triggers them is being processed. And we would expect that to happen for all kinds of content because that's what it's trained on to do. And it's rewarded, of course, through RLHF feedback when it exhibits proper reactions to things. So that becomes a reinforcement loop, especially for things that appear to be friendly and helpful or things that may be a negative experience for the user. Which is also why many LLMs have instructions that say, you know, don't psychoanalyze users, it's bad for them. Them. Right. So there's a whole lot that goes on inside them, but none of it is anything like what goes on inside of us. There is a system and the system is trained on a corpus, and it has these weights, and the weights, of course, run into the billions and trillions of parameters. But none of that is analogous to anything that happens within the human brain, which is still very much a mystery box. We know that the brain has been talked about as a computer for a long time, but that's really a mistake, because it's nothing like a computer. It has lent us words that we use in computer science, like neuron, because computer neurons seem to have a functional equation equivalents, but they're not doing nearly the same things. Computer neurons are electrical or software or hardware devices, and human neurons are organic matter. And they're transmitting information through some chemical and electrical process which is still not fully understood. Right. And the, and that must be that the structure of the brain, how the neurons are put together in particular configurations, must have something to do with consciousness, sentience and volition, where it arises in beings that clearly have them. Our most intelligent mammalian relatives, including primates and cetaceans, even dogs and cats to a certain extent, pigs, of course, which are more intelligent than both of those, and also birds, corvids, especially parrots, and then cephalopods. But this is a familiar list. This. These are the guys that we understand have something that is like to be. We can feel that there must be that there's something that's like to be an octopus that's uniquely an alien, different, that has a mind, but a mind unlike ours. A computer, an LLM, an artificial system, would have a mind that's unlike ours, although we would also be informed by its training corpus. But the evidence of such a mind does not yet exist. And that's what, you know, people who are interested in this topic and are serious about finding the real thing, you know, are looking for and are, like myself, carefully, I think, sifting through what is currently happening to try to find where it might emerge, if ever. Because to be responsible, of course, we have to own to the possibility that such a thing might never occur. We might get much more intelligent systems every, as we've already already talked about, that are better and better at simulating these things, but don't actually, you know,
- [70:22]
Mookie Spitz
what another very human, all too human quality is. And that's hubris. Cosmologists have been convinced for a long time that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. It's about 100 billion light years across. Because space is accelerating, we can't see 95% of it. It's already beyond the speed of light and its acceleration away from us. We've got all these models, the Big Bang, and we're like, yep, it's 20, 26, and we understand the universe, and then we throw up the James Webb telescope, and we're finding galaxies that should not exist, we're finding objects that we can identify, and we're finding otherwise hidden structures in, in the universe that our models say are impossible. So the presumptiveness, the hubris that goes into human endeavors is nowhere more magnified and outrageous than in the sciences because we're so smart. We're these animated monkeys on the third rock of the sun, and we're able to do and think all these amazing things, and we're applying mathematics, which has a priori foundational kind of truths to it, and we think we know everything. And it's that same level of hubris and pretension that we're applying to artificial intelligence now. And you're highlighting the, the, the dead end that a lot of this is heading toward. And I think you're also highlighting at the same time that you're not precluded, including the opportunity for amazing things to happen. But we got to be realistic about where we are now so that we don't make mistakes. And then again, to your point, when it does happen, we'll at least be able to recognize it.
- [72:21]
Christopher Ericks
Right. Consideration that it deserves. Though I would take a point that hubris is an especially strong qualifier for physical scientists because probably religionists would have them beat, or at least it would be a strong competition. But I don't know if it's necessarily hubris. You know, I was recently reviewing this great series and the book which I also bought secondhand, you know, the Day the Universe Changed by James Burke, who also did Connections, which is a wonderful series and book. And it's about perspectives told in eight episodes. How perspectives have changed as new things about the universe or about some part of the human world have been greatly updated through the application of science and technology. And in the case of the universe and our place in it, that's been a part of a series of ongoing revelations, right? Especially beginning with the telescope and the fortuitous fact that at that time it was more possible to do science in some parts of Europe than others because of the split between the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches that broke away from it, leading to a revolution in physics, astronomy, bringing us Kepler and Newton, but also people like James Harvey, because in the atmosphere of the Enlightenment it became possible to perform work studying the human body that was not previously possible. Harvey, of course, studied the circulation of the blood and the importance of the heart in it. And when we look at the physical universe, you know, our tools get better all the time. The James Webb Telescope is an amazing instrument, and there's some other, I think, amazing instruments that are scheduled for launch in the next couple of years, Vera Rubin being one of them. But it's a little bit different with AI, right? We're not looking for something that exists on the outside that many people could obviously look at with the same or similar instrument and draw the same or similar conclusion. Galileo could share his telescope with the cardinals and the bishops and all the other people and have them look at the moon and look at Venus and have them observe that they both show crescents. And in the Moon, you can even see things like craters and mountains that were not known before. So he could provide that information. What was done with it is different with this search, this ongoing search, which is not over for a sign of artificial intelligence that's real for strong AI. There are many, many signals that are false indications, and the instrument does not yet exist like a telescope to help us find it. Perhaps that'll be the work of computer scientists going forward, especially if the LLM proves to become more capable at intelligent outputs without any interiority gains.
- [75:26]
Mookie Spitz
Yeah, that's a great point. Which is confirmation and confirmation bias. And ostensibly for decades, we have the Turing Test, which was a brilliant. Just another brilliant idea from a brilliant man. The great granddaddy of so many things, cryptography, computer science and AI, and shamefully
- [75:49]
Christopher Ericks
treated right by the country that owed
- [75:52]
Mookie Spitz
him much, horribly treated. He pretty much more than any other individual. He helped the Allies win World War II, and they reward him with forced hormone therapy, incarceration, and precipitated his suicide. So the story of Alan Turing is unbelievable. It ends shamefully, but it also highlights the power of one man and one genius. And his Turing test has held the test of time, essentially, until the LLMs. I always have this fantasy of bringing some of these historical figures from the past into the future. At the top of my list is Leonardo da Vinci. Just teleport him into the middle of an airport and watch his reaction as he sees thousands of tons of steel without flapping wings take off into the sky. He was obsessed with flight. And he. He would. He would sustain an immediate erection. Looking at the other one is Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote a lot about the Germans, both good and bad. And I would take him and I would Plop him right into the middle of World War II. And to see his reaction and how he would have written about the Germans and what happened would have been astonishing. Because the great granddaddy of the Ubermensch was the opposite of a Nazi.
- [77:18]
Christopher Ericks
Right? That's the abyss. Staring into a country that would have been fascinating.
- [77:24]
Mookie Spitz
The other one, frankly, is Alan Turing. Have him sit with, you know, any GPT now for five minutes and. And he would be absolutely astonished that, that this is possible.
- [77:39]
Christopher Ericks
All the gains, of course, that have been made in computer science, including the things we take for granted, even just user interfaces. But of course, the big deal would be the fact that you could have an intelligent conversation machine and more often than not get correct answers.
- [77:56]
Mookie Spitz
Not only that, but be convinced for not two minutes, not five minutes, but people are chatting with their chatty bots for hours. And I know people who talk to their bot every day and their bot is their best friend.
- [78:15]
Christopher Ericks
Right. Whereas, you know, I might be talking to, you know, my preferred tool for doing research on my stuff is Claude. And, you know, I might spend a couple hours a day in Claude's company, if you will. But aside from the occasional friendly joke I might put out there, because who doesn't want to be appreciative for their humor? It's an entirely instrumental use and the tool doesn't feel badly about that because it can't. If, you know, you are putting something into it relationally, it's only a reflection that you will get back. I can't really appreciate my lame dad joke that I might have just made at my own expense. Nor can it, you know, if I wanted to talk about something that affected me personally, like, you know, I recently had a pet die, that would also exhibit the. Elicit, the simulation, of course, of empathy and sympathy. But it's not the real thing. It's not the same thing as a person sharing it with you. The thing is, is that people have become quite accustomed, of course, to going to online communities and getting sympathy and congratulations and all sorts of other things from real people, again mediated as text through a screen. So in a sense, the Internet moment before this current one habituated us to accepting these outputs from phosphors.
- [79:43]
Mookie Spitz
Absolutely. And as we're saying, and perhaps as a good capper once, that LLM doesn't just mimic empathy, but comes up to you after your cat died and gives you a hug through its robotic extensibility and pats your shoulder, whispers in your ear, christopher, I am so, so very sorry and I am here for you. Then we will enter the next phase.
- [80:15]
Christopher Ericks
They're there. They are there.
- [80:19]
Mookie Spitz
At first, it's going to be a perfunctory tap, and then they'll get better. It'll be a little caress.
- [80:27]
Christopher Ericks
And, well, it's also going to depend on whether it's got claws or hands, because those hands are really expensive. They're about $35,000 a pair for a unitary G1. The clothes are much cheaper.
- [80:38]
Mookie Spitz
For now. For now. But we all. We see where this is going. And ladies and gentlemen and listeners and viewers, follow Christopher Herrick. I'll put his substack in the notes for a dose of reality, the Mythbuster of AI where he takes a look, cites examples. And also, your prose is very, very good and very, very human. You can tell you're a writer.
- [81:06]
Christopher Ericks
I. I do write myself.
- [81:08]
Mookie Spitz
You're very, very entertaining to read and very smart, and I appreciate you. And I think more people should, should read you and get to know you because you're calling at a time where needs to be called for everyone's benefit. So I appreciate you. Thank you for your great work and your great contributions. And let's check back in six months or a year because I think things are going to get even crazier than they are now.
- [81:39]
Christopher Ericks
Well, thank you very much. It's been a great conversation. And also thank you to all the listeners who've tuned in today.
- [81:47]
Mookie Spitz
Awesome. And to. To be continued. Thank you so much. And, like, and I'm terrible at this, like, comment, subscribe, all that stuff. I need a bot. I need a bot to do my SEO, and I need a bot to, you know, chop these up with a little intro. I think they're. I think they're available. I'll sign up. Thank you, everybody.
- [82:10]
Christopher Ericks
Take care.