IM 806: I'm Piffed - Musk Vs. Altman, YouTube on TV, WikiTok

Summary

Podcast Summary: Intelligent Machines (Audio) - Episode IM 806: "I'm Piffed - Musk Vs. Altman, YouTube on TV, WikiTok"

Release Date: February 13, 2025 | Host: TWiT | Recording Date: February 12, 2025

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1. Opening Remarks

Hosts Introduce the Episode's Themes
The episode kicks off with Paris Martineau and Micah Sargent setting the stage for a discussion on Elon Musk's latest controversies, the evolving role of YouTube as a primary viewing platform, and a concerning study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University about AI's impact on human cognition.

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2. Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman: Power Struggles in AI

Elon Musk's Influence on Government Agencies
Paris delves into The New York Times report by Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind, highlighting how Elon Musk's actions are undermining federal agencies investigating his companies like Tesla and SpaceX. She mentions Musk's "Doge drama," referencing his aggressive tactics against regulatory bodies.

Panel's Emotional Response to Corporate Dominance
Micah expresses a growing sense of apathy towards these ongoing power struggles:

"We should be pushing for things to be done about it, right?" ([04:47])

Jeff Jarvis counters with a reflection on youthful activism, emphasizing the need for strong, relatable leadership to combat the entrenched power of tech moguls:

"Same. We need more examples of this." ([06:27])

Concerns Over Constitutional Crisis
The discussion intensifies as Paris cites the American Bar Association's statement on potential constitutional crises arising from executive overreach facilitated by figures like Musk. The panel debates the feasibility of organized, collective action in the face of such immense corporate influence.

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3. YouTube Ascends: The New Television Era

YouTube Surpasses Mobile in Viewership
Paris highlights YouTube CEO Neil Mohan's annual letter revealing that YouTube has now overtaken mobile devices as the primary medium for TV viewing. This shift underscores YouTube's growing dominance in content consumption.

Personal Anecdotes on YouTube Usage
The hosts share their personal interactions with YouTube, discussing how different generations interact with the platform. Micah remarks on the inefficiency of using smart TV apps for YouTube, while Jeff reflects on the deep personal connections users form with content creators at events like VidCon:

"People feel a sense of belonging because they thought they were alone and not watching YouTube." ([40:22])

Impact on Social Relationships and Mental Health
Jeff emphasizes the positive community aspects witnessed at VidCon, where YouTube creators play a pivotal role in connecting individuals, especially those feeling isolated. This connection is seen as a counterbalance to the rise of toxic online environments.

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4. AI and Human Cognition: A Troubling Study

Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon's Findings
Paris shares insights from a Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University study, revealing that increased reliance on generative AI tools may lead to the atrophy of human cognitive faculties. The study suggests that automating routine tasks diminishes opportunities for individuals to practice and strengthen critical thinking and judgment skills.

Panel's Take on Cognitive Impact
Jeff argues against the pessimistic view, likening the fear to historical concerns over calculators and the internet, which ultimately served as tools rather than replacements for human cognitive abilities:

"They are tools. We use it as a tool." ([85:38])

Micah adds that while AI can enhance productivity, there's a valid concern about over-reliance potentially stunting cognitive development, especially in educational settings where critical thinking is paramount.

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5. AI and Copyright: Legal Battles Intensify

Reuters Wins Landmark AI Copyright Case
Jeff discusses Reuters' victory in a significant AI copyright lawsuit against Westlaw. The judge ruled that Westlaw's use of Reuters' content without permission did not qualify as fair use, setting a precedent for future AI-related copyright disputes:

"This is the first shot here. And the forces of fair use lost the first shot." ([64:54])

Meta's Legal Troubles with Pirated Content
Paris brings up the Meta case, where unredacted emails revealed that Meta illegally torrented vast amounts of pirated books from databases like Lib Gen. This admission not only complicates Meta's legal standing but also underscores the ethical breaches in AI training practices:

"Meta torrented at least 81.7 terabytes of data." ([70:16])

Implications for AI Training and Fair Use
The panel debates the broader implications of these legal battles, emphasizing the need for clear regulations and ethical guidelines in AI training to protect intellectual property rights.

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6. The Future of Education in the AI Age

Shift from Memorization to Critical Thinking
Paris raises concerns about the educational shift as AI tools become prevalent in classrooms. There's a worry that reliance on generative AI for tasks like essay writing may erode students' critical thinking and research skills.

Jeff's Vision for Education
Jeff advocates for an educational system that prioritizes reasoning and problem-solving over rote memorization. He suggests that curriculum standards need to evolve to integrate AI as a tool that complements rather than replaces human cognitive development:

"How do you use those facts? How do you think around them?" ([110:55])

Micah's Take on Cognitive Skills Development
Micah concurs, highlighting the importance of delayed gratification and critical thinking in education. He underscores that while AI can assist in learning, it shouldn't replace the foundational skills that prepare students for complex real-world challenges.

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7. Closing Discussions and Final Thoughts

The Ongoing Musk-Altman Saga
The hosts briefly revisit the tensions between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, discussing Musk's attempts to influence OpenAI's direction and the potential ramifications of these power dynamics on the future of AI development.

YouTube, Podcasts, and Digital Culture
Transitioning to lighter topics, the hosts share personal anecdotes about their YouTube habits, the nostalgic allure of platforms like The Sims, and the growing integration of AI in everyday digital interactions.

Final Reflections on AI's Role
The episode wraps up with reflections on AI's dual-edged nature—its potential to both enhance human capabilities and pose significant ethical and cognitive challenges.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• "We should be pushing for things to be done about it, right?"
  Micah Sargent ([04:47])

• "We need more examples of this."
  Jeff Jarvis ([06:27])

• "Same. We need more examples of this."
  Jeff Jarvis ([74:53])

• "They are tools. We use it as a tool."
  Jeff Jarvis ([85:38])

• "This is the first shot here. And the forces of fair use lost the first shot."
  Jeff Jarvis ([64:54])

• "We are still human beings. We're still who we are. It doesn't change us."
  Jeff Jarvis ([87:24])

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Conclusion

Episode IM 806 of Intelligent Machines offers a deep dive into the intersection of AI, corporate power, and societal impacts. From Elon Musk's contentious maneuverings against regulatory bodies to YouTube's transformation into the new television hub, and the legal battlegrounds surrounding AI's use of copyrighted material, the hosts navigate complex topics with insightful commentary. The discussion on AI's potential to erode human cognitive skills adds a cautionary layer to the conversation, emphasizing the need for balanced integration of technology in both industry and education.

For listeners who missed the episode, this summary provides a comprehensive overview of the key discussions, enriched with direct quotes and expert insights from industry leaders.

Transcript

[Paris Martineau]

Coming up on Intelligent Machines this week we talk about Elon's doge drama, how YouTube is the new TV, and a Microsoft study that finds AI may be making human cognition atrophied and unprepared. It's all coming up next on Intelligent Machines.

[Leo Laporte]

Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Micah Sargent]

This is Twit.

[Paris Martineau]

This is intelligent machines, episode 8, 806, recorded February 12, 2025. I'm piffed it's time for Intelligent Machines. Leo is out this week, but that's okay because I, Paris Martineau, I'm here to guide you through all the news that's fit to podcast about. And I won't be doing it alone. We've got Micah Sargent here. Hi, Micah.

[Micah Sargent]

Hello, Paris. So good to see you. I don't know if I've said it before, but I just love your glasses. They're so good.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you. I this week had a pair. One of my lenses fall out of my glasses because I was furrowing my brow. The news on my phone. Too hard.

[Micah Sargent]

So hard that they.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, maybe it was unrelated, but it was, it did happen. As I was looking at a particularly concerning tweet and I had to go to the optometrist yesterday and get. Get it put back in. We've also got Chuckler over here. Jeff Jarvis. Some may call him a visiting professor from Stony Brook or a distinguished fellow at Montclair State University, but I call him a professor emeritus at the Craig, Craig, Craig Newmark School of Journalism. Hi, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hello, boss. So good to see you. So good to see the chromosome shift is back in better alignment today. The age is down today. I'm the only old one here. This is good.

[Paris Martineau]

I heard there was a lot of talk about AI last week. Crazy. I thought we were supposed to be talking about human beings here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was Sandy. It was Sandy at times, but it was.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I don't know. Glad to have you guys both here. Glad to be back with you guys. I missed you back. There's been a lot of tech news that has happened this week and it feels irresponsible to start this podcast off any other way than talking about what. What's been going on with Elon Musk and Doge and all of the various tech czars that now have their hands in the government. I think that one, The New York Times had a really good write up of this, specifically looking into how Elon Musk's like, business empire has been scoring a bunch of benefits under this shakeup. Specifically, I mean, the Times, Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind dug into the number of agencies that Musk is targeting and found that staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, have affected agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Elon Musk's companies. And they go through a whole list here. You know, Transportation Department has issued violations and fines as well as lawsuits complaints towards like SpaceX. You know, Tesla has. Is under investigations, has lawsuits coming from and complaints from a variety of different groups in the government. And all of these are now under attack by Elon Musk's Doge. Have you guys been following this?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, this is. I would love the advice of the panel because I'm finding myself needing to. I don't know, I almost wish that I had some way to press a couple of. But like, I close my left eye and double press my right nostril and it resets my brain or something. Because what's happening for me is I see these things and then I go, I have no reason to be surprised that this is happening. But what comes with that this, I have no reason to be surprised that this is happening is a certain level of. I don't want to call it full on apathy, so we'll just call it Athy. No, it's on its way to being apathetic because it's like, of course this is what's happening. This is what I expected would happen. And I'm not surprised by literally any aspect of this. I thought, okay, yeah, that's exactly what you would do if you had this power. How do I keep that energy alive that says, yes, this is happening? No, we're not surprised, but still, we should be pushing for things to be done about it, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

I was gonna go to you, Jeff.

[Micah Sargent]

I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Same.

[Paris Martineau]

My response to all of this has been a deep and uncontainable dread. What I thought you were gonna ask is how to contain the dread when every. Like I said before, I was scrolling through Twitter and Blue sky and a variety of RSS feeds and furrowed my brow so hard that I possibly broke my glasses. It was related to this perhaps. It just seems. I mean, I think one of the things that was notable to me in all of this was the American Bar association released a statement. The American Bar association famously, like, not only like an apolitical, but like a famously non political organization, they released a statement saying, hey, the flurry of executive orders and kind of extrajudicial happenings that we're seeing from organizations like Doge as well as from the executive branch itself and the way that these sort of two groups are pushing back against judicial resistance and checks from the judicial branch is unprecedented. And there have been a number of legal scholars on both, both sides of the political aisle saying we're in a constitutional crisis. And it stresses me out. So I don't know. I mean, my, my answer to you is I'm not sure how to be less. I get it, though, because I feel in some ways a bit overwhelmed by all of it and have had to kind of set times for myself to check in with the news and not. Jeff, with all of your wise experience.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'll tell you what gives me hope.

[Micah Sargent]

There is a. I could use some of that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, there's a much of it. But the middle school, middle school students in a German on a German army base and spouses of military people on a military base. Let me emphasize that again. Who stood out and protested against Pete Hegseth's arrival. Middle schoolers have more guts and more courage and more fortitude and morals than members of Congress and our media. So how can we be more like middle schoolers? We need more examples of this. We need more examples. And I gotta. This discussion the other day, I'm curious what you think about this. I got a discussion the other day with a guy I know not terribly well. I quoted George Conway saying that if the president and company ignore and do not follow court orders, then we are beyond a constitutional crisis. And George Conway is a conservative and he said we are at the point of the end of rule of law. And he said the only thing we can do is take to the streets. And I just quoted that Joe Scarborough had just read a New York Times editorial saying that you're going to hang in there. And John Meacham was doing blather, blather, but George Conway came out right out in the Senate. So this guy I knew wanted to get on zoom with me because he knows I'm outspoken and blathering about all of this and blood. And he said a couple things. One, he said he was nervous that if people took to the streets, they would get hurt. He was nervous that it would cause a reaction. The 1968 demonstrations in Chicago, he believes, gave us Nixon and George Floyd demonstrations in, gave us Trump. I'm not willing to go there. But then we started talking about how do we take action. And he was arguing for a boycott of certain companies. If we, if we got together and boycotted those companies, then, you know, would that have action? I don't know. Because the other side will come out together and Buy there. And I don't know what's going to happen. I think a lot of people feel very powerless right now, and I think we need leadership and it's hard to do. Yes, we want bottoms up, but we do need somebody to call to convene and to call us together. And somehow those middle schoolers and half their parents came out to protest. Who brought them together? I don't know. And I was thinking back to when Kamala Harris got the nomination. There were all of those started by black women, did the calls, the zoom calls. And that led to another one and another one and another one. And I was part of the, you know, the white dudes for Kamala. And I wonder what. In this world of social media, where a lot of our social media is taken over now by Musk and Zuckerberg has shown his true stripes, how do we organize bottom up? I think it's a legitimate topic for this show to wonder, and it's not an AI topic. But how do we. How do people who want to gather use the tools that we now have to gather to gather? And I don't see it happening except in middle school.

[Paris Martineau]

And I mean, I do think the answer to this question lies in kind of what you had stated, finding a way to overcome apathy. Because I think that that is what a lot of people are feeling. And it's a natural response when we are seeing a flood of information and very abrupt changes like this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's Paris. Let me ask normal, is it apathy or is it defeat? Has it gone over that boundary yet?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I guess it's. It's individual definition. Right. I can tell you that I have. I have felt very defeated as of late. Not, you know, not complete defeat. And I think that part, I think if I. If I lived where I lived growing up, which was in Missouri, I would probably be far, much farther along that road of feeling defeated. It helps to be in a place where I feel like I have some semblance of protection around me in that way. But, yeah, maybe it is because I do very much care. But, Jeff, I think you touched on the point there when you talked about looking for some actual real leadership. Because so much of the advocacy surrounds this sort of individual approach. These little, oh, I will boycott this. And what can I do individually? I can call people. And that stuff just feels. I mean, we've been calling and we've been boycotting, and we've been doing that for a long time. And it doesn't, on an individual scale have much of an impact. And so, yeah, that would great to see. Is some, some true leadership in these moments of, okay, here's what we do and we can all do it together and we can actually point to things where this is making a difference because it does feel very powerless or at.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Least you can hear the stories of people's lives who are affected. Doesn't know that. Paris, where are you on the, on the scale from ennui to defeat?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think I'm in often in Apathy Town, USA or, you know, I feel a bit anxious and overwhel by a deluge of news and also thinking about as we are witnessing a seemingly unprecedented dismantling of established federal powers, offices and things that have existed quietly in the background to prop up American, you know, status around the world and our continued size as a nation. That, that is stressing me out because it's. I don't know when we will even begin to know the extent because my first instinct as a journalist to be like, well, what is the problem here? What are we, what are the exact effects of this? And it's going to be so long before we can even figure many of those things out. And that stresses me out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can I ask a journalism question?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, go ahead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry, you go ahead.

[Paris Martineau]

I was going to say, I think that like part of the response from a human perspective to something like this is seeking out community. I mean, that seems like a pat answer, but I think it is really powerful. Whatever your political persuasion, whatever causes you believe in, looking for local state organizations, state or city organizations that deal with that cause or are aligned with that political group and finding a way to, even if you're not, you know, actively out there changing the world, just sitting in meetings with other people who share the same concerns as you, can be incredibly powerful and a great first step to whatever you want. I don't know, to steering yourself away from apathy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So here's my journalism question for you both. I had somebody call me today to ask about those that are paying obeisance in various forms, whether that's Joe and Mika going to Mar a Lago or whether that is the ABC and CBS pain Trump through the suits, his suits.

[Paris Martineau]

Against them and meta keep it on the tech angle.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, right. And so the only news organizations that have not been kicked out of the Pentagon or the White House so far are ABC and cbs. So they have access. But what I said to this guy is, who needs access? We don't at that level, we don't need access. In Trump won Jay Rose of New York University and I Said and others Said, send the interns to the White House press briefing room. Don't cover this from the perspective of Trump. Cover this from the perspective of the citizens. So is it heretical to say screw access, we don't need access. In fact, we don't want it. Is this finally when we give it up?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I understand that impetus and I think there's like a lot of good things there that yes, access is not going to produce any of the most powerful or meaningful journalism. But I do think that part of the concerns from an established, like a journalistic establishment perspective here are it sets a bad precedent if we simply just roll over as a news gathering organization when a hostile leader decides to cut off access to a long standing like member of that News Corp. Just based on their political persuasion or the sort of stories they write in. One example of this is recently the Associated Press, I believe, has been banned from now at least two White House press briefings. Even today, the Associated Press doesn't use the words Gulf of America to refer to the Gulf of Mexico.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I got a discussion on Facebook with somebody in Google, inside Google. When I said, for shame, Google for doing that, Google changed the map. It has now changed to Gulf of America.

[Micah Sargent]

Apple has as well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Apple has as well as has MapQuest.

[Paris Martineau]

I guess they're still updating MapQuest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So my friend said, as a friend of mine who's inside Google, you know, went after me a bit, not nationally. I'm just saying, come on, we have to have a policy. And the policy is in any country, follow what the country says. This is what the country says. And I understand that. But if you can't stand up against the stupid little stuff, where do you decide to stand up? And Google also got rid of off its calendar. It got rid of Black History Month and LGBTQ events and other things off its calendar. They said, well, we did this last year. Well, you did this coming up and now's the time when you put them back. And so it's an extremely powerful company. And I understand what they're worried about. I understand they're worried about vindication against them and they're protecting their stockholders. I get all of those arguments. But where, where does. So somebody, this reporter asked me today, what's the strategy? And I said, it's the Costco strategy. Costco stood up against all of this, held on to its dei and my wife found a page on Reddit where the people in Costco anecdotally are saying they're getting tons of new member Requests. They're leaving Walmart and Sam's Club, and they're coming to Costco, where they get eight a weekend. They're now getting 100 a weekend. All right? It's not huge, but it's a strategy that says there's, there's a place in the marketplace for standing up, and Google's not, and Apple's not, and Amazon is not.

[Micah Sargent]

Is Costco a federal contractor? Do they have skin in that game?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good question. I don't know, because.

[Micah Sargent]

I imagine they're.

[Jeff Jarvis]

An approved vendor for buying, I wouldn't be surprised, toilet paper and stuff.

[Micah Sargent]

But that'd be another level. Because up to that level point, all of the companies said, well, because that was my, my first thought was, can everyone please, for the love of God, just go and take a quick little civics class. You know what? I'll host it. I'll give a civics class. It'll take you 45 minutes. And all we're going to do is talk about what free speech is and how it has to deal with what the government can do and also outside of that, what an executive order can have an impact on and what it can't. Because when I saw the celebration of the companies who were not following Trump's executive order, and I'm going, but it doesn't that an executive order from the government and a private company, you know, that very frustrating moment of, of just a misunderstanding of how this works and what can be impacted directly and indirectly, et cetera, et cetera. But all that aside. Yeah. A lot of these tech companies talked about, well, the reason why we have to is because we are a federal contractor in some way, and so we have to follow this executive order. I, I actually, we talked about this this morning on my show, clockwise, the specifically the maps thing. And I, I think that this is, this is a very stupid thing that has happened. And that is where I disagree with the renaming of, of this. And I think it's just. So I do think, and this is probably a little unpopular here, that if there's a ruling body in a country that is in charge of setting the standard for what different places within the country are called, then I want tech companies to follow that standard. Because what happens whenever it's, whenever it's the opposite way, right. That it's, we're finally taking a state and we're calling it by its original native name. And then one company, Meta, decides they don't want to rename it in their, their product because they just decide they don't want to I should say it decides it doesn't want to. I want in every case there to be that strict rule that says, well, because the usgs or I can't remember what group is in charge of this has named it this, then that is the thing that's followed. So I'm. I'm less bothered by the choice of the company to make a change based on what a, you know, what, what the. The official government body. Yeah, the official naming is. Even though I'm still bothered by the fact that we're calling it the. We aren't. But, you know, that it's being called the Gulf of America and all of the stuff that's stupid there. I want those companies to stick to a set of guidelines and follow them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What about Black History Month in the calendar?

[Micah Sargent]

That is, again, that's something that happened before. And. Yes, and so the only reason I say that is because, again, I always want for the people who are truly fighting for the good to also be fighting in a way that is accurate. And I worry about, because this is, of course, part of the strategy is to lose the accuracy, lose the thread of what's true and what's not. So I kind of pushed that through. But I think that what Google should have done is made it very clear exactly what its policy is surrounding that. And I think that in that, regardless of what the decision was, that, yes, this would be the time where you say, you know, what our policy is going to be, that we will. We're going to work with whatever it is, primary, secondary and tertiary holidays in the U.S. so, as you said, Jeff, this would be the time to add more, not take more away or make a change to it, but again, just follow a set of rules and, you know, stick to the policy so that it doesn't feel like you're capitulating if you are claiming 10 toes down that you're not capitulating. Whenever we see that happening in other parts of the business. Okay. And then this is one other thing that I'll say because I keep hearing this refrain and I think different people have different takes on this. And we saw it, the first presidency, the first Trump presidency, which was this quote, it's a distraction, unquote mantra. And it was this idea that these silly, goofy, tiny things we focus on and we're missing the big things. But I don't know, I think that there's still a level of death by a thousand cuts, right, that's involved in this. And they may seem like they're small, unimportant things. But these have all been signals of a level of almost royal decree that's being given to this person that we have. Not really. It feels unprecedented, I guess, to me. And that's the part where I start to feel exhausted and powerless. Right. Is whenever you just see, wow, no, you really can just say a thing and then it happens. And that. That is so frustrating.

[Paris Martineau]

Absolutely. And I mean, I think those are all really good points. And it is interesting to see the way that these executive orders and moves by Doge are being implemented or reflected in the broader tech community. And in some way, it's kind of like a mirror being held up to a mirror, because the amount of tech power in the government is only growing. And it's unprecedented in comparison to past administrations, at least in my recollection. My colleague Julia Black this today actually put together, we do org charts of the information which are normally company org charts. I think this is the first time we've ever done a governmental org chart. Tech governmental org chart. She identified like more than like two dozen, like tech executives and other movers and shakers in the tech world that are now in the federal government underneath Trump and in some cases Elon. And it's, I don't know, fascinating to me. Like Trump's interests have over the last couple of years and certainly since he's taken office, crystallized as aligning with those of Silicon Valley, including like the funding of massive AI projects, deregulating the crypto market, overhauling defense procurement contracts, and kind of cutting red tape for people in biotech. It's interesting. I think also this week it came out that Trump is planning to nominate the former Andreessen Horowitz, head of crypto policy, to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is just one of the many ways in which the Trump administration is taking a really friendly approach to crypto. And I'm really, I mean, curious is maybe the wrong word, but I am interested to see how this shakes out because we're already starting to see some of the like very. The consequences of this in particular, like this ongoing lawsuit that the SEC has had against Binance might be going away. The SEC recently requested a pause in its legal battle with Binance. This is reporting from the ap, and this is as kind of the securities Exchange Commission is trying to present itself as more crypto friendly. And to be clear, this is the Binance case where the people at Binance were found in documents released in discovery saying, we are operating as a effing unlicensed security exchange in the usa, bro. End quote. Like, it was a pretty open and shut case as far as things like that go. But it's going to be very interesting if we're entering in a world where even very egregious actions that once would have been cause for investigation and potential large penalties become just a okay, because who's to investigate?

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's no. That's the problem, if this is what George Conway's point is, and others have said it too, is that if a court order is disobeyed, who enforces that? Marshal's office. Who does Marshal's office report to? The doj. If someone wants to pass a law saying, you can't do this, who does that? Congress. Our Congress can't do that. So even if it went to the Supreme Court, who owns the Supreme Court? So that's. We're there. We're there. This isn't coming. And this is where I get upset with the failure of my field and yours, too. Paris, is journalism. Our institutions are not serving us well, in my view. And I don't know what to do about that.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, what do you think should be done?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I. We're going way. Paris, you're in charge today. So when we get in trouble for being so political today, that's all it was.

[Micah Sargent]

Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't be mad, guys. Everybody got mad last week because you talked too much about AI I decided we were going to talk about something else that would make you mad. So you're not allowed to be mad. You're not allowed.

[Micah Sargent]

What about AI at least.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it'll hit AI because that's part of this, I think we have to call what it is. I mean, what I constantly come back to, I've reread many times now. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. There's lessons in here for our present day. And I think that journalism needs to recognize and label and explain what is going on, rather than prevaricating and being credulous and naive. Purposefully, willfully credulous and naive. Oh, well, things could happen. We don't know. It might be there. I just don't think that they're serving them well. So I'm looking for blunt honesty. The Guardian is more bluntly honest than the New York Times and the Washington Post, in my view.

[Micah Sargent]

Do you think, though? Okay, so obviously we don't know. And we. But I guess we're crystal balling here because there's such a distrust for the media and not, not, not for everyone. Of course, anecdotally I see a distrust or mistrust and particularly among the group that very barely outvoted the other group in this election. And I also see an overall, like, just distrust of, Of. Of fact and, and scientific fact. And do we think that journalists. Are you maybe. Are you maybe saying that if we had collectively done this for 812 years ago and been more honest at that point, more, more. More forthright, more true, more real at that point, we wouldn't have gotten to the point where we are now, where. I don't. I don't know if somebody's choosing that level of brash honesty that is it gonna reach the people that it needs to reach, because many of us are already going. Yeah, I know that.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I worry that that approach would lead us to where we are now as well, where it's like people are overwhelmed and apathetic and defeatist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think they'd feel less alone if they said, someone speaks for me.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so, so, Micah, I don't want to. If you get me going, I could go on for three hours of myself, you know, so. Because this is what I do. But my argument is that we are not in an information crisis. This isn't about disinformation. When people say crazy stuff to pollsters or reporters, they are signaling their belonging to something. What Hannah Arendt says is that totalitarians first alienate people from their communities and society, and then they become vulnerable to the siren call of the authoritarian. And so when people are saying crazy stuff, I think again, they're signaling their belonging. It's like a loyalty test. And so the challenge that I wonder is how do we concoct the idea of a journalism of belonging when people say that they. So what Iran says also is that people in totalitarian regimes seem to grasp onto abstract notions rather than their daily concerns. And I don't think that the people on part of this country really, every day, every minute, think the most important thing in their lives is guns and abortion and trans students in bathrooms. Their lives have the same concerns we all have about their health and their safety and their jobs and their happiness. But that's not where the discussion is held. The discussion is held at this representation through the signals and media play along with that. And media do that. And so while they're, you know, the New York Times goes and visits of diners and finds people saying stuff that seems crazy. Well, they believe it. It doesn't matter what they believe. It's not about belief. It's about belonging. And in the Gutenberg parenthesis, there's the first plug right behind me. Here I talk about the need for a pluralistic society where people have a sense of belonging to multiple competing poles on their lives. So they don't feel that lonely, they don't feel that separated from everything that they do feel that they're with other people. They can go someplace and talk about this and find that they're not alone. And I don't blame the Internet for this. I don't think that's about an effort. I think I'm far more connected than I would otherwise be without the Internet. But I think that people feel isolated. And I've long said that I wish. So I wish. I wish Facebook from the beginning had said that its mission was to make strangers less strange, but its mission was to connect.

[Paris Martineau]

Facebook from the beginning should have said its mission is to help you figure out whether your college classmates are hot or not. Because that was its mission from the beginning.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was its mission. Indeed it was. And at least somebody got a date out of it, even though the social network thinks he didn't. But he did.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, these are great points, but I hear a whistle on the wind, a call coming over the airwaves, and that's Leo Laporte telling us it's time for an ad break, so we better listen to him.

[Unknown]

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[Paris Martineau]

Let's do a little pallet cleanser.

[Micah Sargent]

I love that. What flavor?

[Paris Martineau]

Lime flavor. This is kind of a mystery flavor.

[Micah Sargent]

It's okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right.

[Paris Martineau]

Interesting.

[Micah Sargent]

Honeydew.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe there Was a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's.

[Paris Martineau]

This could be honeydew, actually, in terms.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of the difference, I think a citrus was the right way to go.

[Paris Martineau]

It's kind of. It's been earnings week. Lot of big, you know, announcements from various companies. One caught my eye from YouTube CEO Neil Mohan. He released his annual letter on Tuesday and noted one detail that I found really interesting is that tv. He has overtaken mobile as the primary device for Ewing viewing YouTube. Yes, I thought that was fascinating. As someone who famously doesn't really watch YouTube videos, I'm curious, does this align with.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But as someone who just bought a.

[Paris Martineau]

Big new tv, I know I kind of wanted to segue into my TV discussion, but we'll get there. Micah, do you watch YouTube? And if so, how.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, my goodness. This is a pluralistic society. I feel a sense of belonging because I thought I was alone and not watching YouTube.

[Paris Martineau]

It's so weird for people, our generation, to not watch YouTube. I don't. And the thing is, I've realized at this point, if I've. If I've not gotten into watching YouTube, I can't start because I don't want that sort of time in my life.

[Micah Sargent]

No. You know what's worse than watching YouTube on. On. On my phone, figuring out a way to make it show up on the tv? So it is wild to me that people are watching it on the TV so much. What are they watching? Are they watching streams? Are they just hitting play? And like, you know what? Actually, I was visiting some friends who, mind you, are. What is the generation. Whatever, the one after Generation Z. They. Zoomers. Zoomers. Thank you. They. We were at their house, and for me, if I had people over, the way that I would handle sort of ambiance is by playing Spotify, Apple music on one of the many smart speakers that's in the house. Right. The way that they do it is they pull up their little smart TV app to YouTube and they.

[Paris Martineau]

And play music videos.

[Micah Sargent]

You play music videos. And what's worse is you have to use the left, right down, up to type into the keyboard like some kind of.

[Paris Martineau]

Like a savage.

[Micah Sargent]

And here's what's worse. It doesn't. This app. This smart app isn't even good enough to have, like, a cueing feature. So after the song ends, then somebody else has to go up and do this. And I thought, what? And I thought, surely this is gonna be. And then, I kid you not, who knows? Maybe this is just an Oregon thing, but maybe it's just a Portland thing. Very weird here. I've Gone to two other places, and I swear they were doing the exact same thing. So I think it's all the zoomers that are watching stuff on YouTube all the time. I almost wish that we could, like, bring Kevin King, one of the producers, editors on the network, because I know He's a big YouTube watcher and I'm always like, what are, what are you watching? Are you watching tutorials? How can you start?

[Paris Martineau]

People are watching crazy things. I've realized this through dating in New York. Whenever, like, you're getting like second date conversations, like, what sort of content you consume. There's a certain genre of men and women that's like a YouTube person. And it fascinates me. I will spend like 30 minutes being like, so what do you want much? And how, like, I mean, they pay for YouTube. It's basically like their version of podcasts or Tick Tocks, but it's longer. I don't know. I feel I'm very judicious about the podcast I watch or listen to. I rarely ever watch podcasts, though. If you're watching ours, that's great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

God bless you.

[Paris Martineau]

God bless the right choices.

[Unknown]

Okay, so I think I'm the only one here that actually I was wondered us your.

[Micah Sargent]

What are you watching?

[Unknown]

I watch a lot of YouTube, but I, I, you know, there's music YouTube, where there's a lot of like music analysis. That's. That's one of the branches of YouTube. I watch a lot. I watch a lot of film YouTube.

[Micah Sargent]

Which is like, what does that mean? Are you analyzing films or film analysis.

[Unknown]

Or reviews or like, how long are these videos? It depends.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm sorry, I sound like an alien.

[Unknown]

Some of them 15 minutes, some of them an hour or two. It really depends on.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you sit down or TV and watch it for an hour?

[Unknown]

Well, I have a computer attached to my tv, so I do that.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay.

[Unknown]

Okay.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, that makes it easier than what I'm trying to do to get it to play.

[Unknown]

Yeah, I'm just using the actual YouTube website and full screen does the video.

[Micah Sargent]

Because the two things that you mentioned, music analysis is very audio based. And then you said film analysis. If we're not talking about visual effects and it's just somebody talking about, like how a film is made, does that. Like, how often do you feel you are benefiting from the visual thing in front of you when you're watching it?

[Unknown]

Very much. Especially for film, because, like, they're showing you cuts or they're showing you shots.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

That would make sense.

[Unknown]

For music, not so much. Unless you Know, it's an interview with someone, you know, I care about. But also, it's not really just like the branches of YouTube. It's like specific channels. It's like watching NBC. It's like being a fan of, of, remember back in the 90s of can't miss TV, like must see TV. It's like that, you know, it's like.

[Micah Sargent]

Does it have an audit?

[Unknown]

A couple of shows that I watch on YouTube and they. There's a new episode every week.

[Micah Sargent]

So it's like that. Oh, yeah. It's like little shows waiting for it to come up. You're like, okay, it's Wednesday. I'm going to be able to watch this thing. Yeah. That I watch.

[Unknown]

This guy's putting out a video every Wednesday, so I'm gonna watch that video on Wednesday. You know, it's like that.

[Paris Martineau]

Most people I know who watch YouTube consume it like that. They follow specific creators and then they consume or they're like, I'm really in a roller coaster explainer video rabbit hole. So I'm just gonna watch a lot of videos about roller coasters.

[Micah Sargent]

A lot of that, too.

[Unknown]

Yeah, there's a lot of that.

[Micah Sargent]

Deep dive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So am I the only one here who's been to VidCon?

[Micah Sargent]

I have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're the only hipster?

[Micah Sargent]

Yes. You're the hipster amongst us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm the hipster amongst. I'm the youth among you. You know, when you, when you go, I, I, I've written about it. Vidcon was a changing experience. It was amazing. And it's more than YouTube now, but. And I was last there before the pandemic. But it's pretty amazing to see the devotion that people have to those creators, and YouTube is their path to them. I think that that's the big difference here is that is that we may be interested in topics or news or genre, but a lot of them are about the relationships that they feel with those people.

[Micah Sargent]

Relationships?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Yes. The most amazing experience from VidCon was every year they have one or two mental health sessions, and they're amazing. You have young people in the room who will say to the stage, as a licensed therapist, and three or four YouTubers who have talked very publicly about their eating disorder or their mental health challenges or other things. And somebody will get up in the audience, a young person will get up in the audience and say, you know, you saved my life. And the person on stage will say, no, you did. But the person. This goes back to our prior discussion. The person in the audience would say, I knew I wasn't alone. I knew I wasn't weird. I knew I wasn't by myself. And that was everything to them. And you can look at that. And I'm sure some people would look at that, the moral panickers among us, and would say, oh, well, they should be out on the playground with real people and not doing this right. But this is, that's the problem. They couldn't find people like them where they are, but they could on YouTube. So I think that's, that's a lot of it is that it's an entirely different relationship.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I mean, I was, I've been trying to like psychoanalyze myself as to why I'm not a person who watches YouTube videos. Because when I was a kid or like a teen, I watched YouTube her newswoman sketch comedy. I mean, no, I think it's because I, I think it's because I'm a newswonk. And also I don't have the patience to sit down and watch a video. Like, nothing upsets me more than when I've gotten really into going to Orange Theory fitness classes. I could talk about that forever. But lately there's like a subreddit for it where they give you the preview of what's coming up the next day, including the workouts. And so I'll go there and be like, oh, what is this weird, like exercise thing? And I click the YouTube video they have linked and nothing upsets me more than what. It's like a God knows, a 45 second intro to it. I'm just like, I don't have time for this.

[Micah Sargent]

It's like a recipe that you have to read online, but it's like you.

[Paris Martineau]

Can'T scroll through it because it's a video. And I hate that.

[Micah Sargent]

And here's the thing. I will to. With every, every ounce of my ability to learn something, I will, I will make things so much harder for myself by reading how to do it before I ever will watch how to do it. Because I don't like spending. It feels like I'm spending so much time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, because they're stretching it out to get more, more, more airtime.

[Micah Sargent]

And it's 100% and it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's people who do this. Well, I mean, John and Hank Green, founders of VidCon, to me are, are masters of this. You know, they have a conversation as the vlogbrothers and they come on and they do, they can, they can interrogate a topic or a feeling for five, six, seven minutes. And I'm, I'm engaged by that. I do watch that. There are examples of good stuff, you know, but that's the thing about YouTube. It's all this different stuff.

[Micah Sargent]

There are things that get past my. My sort of. I don't want to watch this. I will be honest that if I am watching something on YouTube, I'm probably doing it at 1.5 to 2x speed. I think that for me, the biggest thing is. Is rare that anyone, and by anyone, I mean any, you know, personality or any kind of content gets my, my, my so focused attention that I'm like, sitting and watching and listening. I am an antsy person.

[Paris Martineau]

I totally agree.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. That's why I love audiobooks, because I can do 50,000 other things while I'm listening to audiobooks.

[Paris Martineau]

And it makes me listen to it better.

[Micah Sargent]

Better.

[Paris Martineau]

I am paying more attention to it because I am doing.

[Micah Sargent]

Because I'm crocheting or. Yeah, exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Driving.

[Micah Sargent]

That's. Yet driving, you know, shower, whatever it happens to be crocheting and showering at the same time. Trying to get a very wet needles. Very, very wet. So you can't watch tv.

[Unknown]

You can't watch.

[Micah Sargent]

I do that. No, that's the thing, Benito, is that there are. There are movies in TV that. That matter enough. They like. They get past that. So I can. I can do that. It's just. I guess I've never found much on YouTube that for me works in that way. And it kind of bums me out because when I was in high school, one of the things that my little group of friends did, and it's why I got into the field that I'm in at all in the first place, was I did a web show with friends and I edited the video that we shot.

[Paris Martineau]

Is this still available on the Internet?

[Micah Sargent]

No, I very much have not made it available. Come on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Come on. Chat rooms. You could find it.

[Micah Sargent]

It was a show called Seriously Guys S R S L Y Guys. And basically we would rant about something, you know, like, seriously, guys. And then we would offer solutions to the problem of whatever it was you're talking about. And so we did, you know, like, people with road rage and different grammar. Things that we were hooked on at the time. That's why it's not around anymore, because it's so cringy now. But. And honestly, like, that's how I got into video editing. That's how. And at the time, I was actually a big John and Hank Green fan. Jeff, speaking of those two, and certainly wanted to go to VidCon at the time, but As a. And I'll throw up for a second as, as I say this word, a creator myself, I think there's a level of knowing how the sausage gets made that ruins things for me because another example of that is I used to. And I still. I do it for fun now. But I used to have a little business where I made. I decorated like cake boss cakes, you know, like the ones that are shaped like different things and you use fondant and you make cool whatever. And I made enough cakes and ate enough cake scraps while I'm carving out different shapes that I started to really dislike cake. And so I was like, how the cake gets made. I'm not big on cake anymore. And the same thing, I think applies to sort of the podcast video landscape where not a lot of it interests me because I guess I just know too much of behind the scenes or something. I don't know. It feels too much like work. Right. Maybe that's what it is. I feel like I'm consuming something that is related to work and that kind of has ruined it in a way.

[Unknown]

So things. Sorry, the sports is the other thing. Like, I don't watch SportsCenter, but I will watch clips on YouTube from SportsCenter. You know what I mean?

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, interesting.

[Unknown]

I won't watch the whole show, but I want to watch what they talk. When they talk about the warriors. I want to watch that. Right. So like that those are the kind of YouTube clips that they put up, like anything on ESPN or any of that kind of stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Late night monologues. That's a big thing.

[Micah Sargent]

One.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And all of this consumption of YouTube is on your TV, plugged into your.

[Unknown]

Laptop, versus plugged into my desktop, which is my gaming computer.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm curious, if I may ask, if you each go to YouTube.com right now, what are some of the things that's recommending to you?

[Micah Sargent]

Let's see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have Chromebooks, I have John and Hank Green.

[Paris Martineau]

What are we talking about? Are we talking about the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's it recommending to you? Yeah, what's the. What's just. You go to the homepage of YouTube. What does it think you want to watch?

[Micah Sargent]

I see Lo fi hip hop radio beats to relax.

[Paris Martineau]

I also see that. Then I see unlocking AI's potential. Reid Hoffman discusses Super Agency, which I know why that's there because I had to. The last thing I listened or watched on YouTube was Noam Shazir clips the character AI co founder because Paris is tube splaining. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

That's whenever you don't want to. You know, you're like, I know you, don't you. I have this for a reason, I swear.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Actually, I have two that I do stand by. One is Legend of Zelda Orchestra concert. Probably wouldn't listen to that, but I respect that it's there. And the one that I do stand by is Big Bear, Bald eagle, live Nest Cam 1, which don't know, but I'm gonna have to check that out later. It's Live Eagle Cam. That's great.

[Micah Sargent]

What do you know? Somebody found my use YouTube username, but hopefully I have all of those videos. Oh, there are videos available?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Guys, don't.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't look it up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See it.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, no. We. We have to respect his privacy. You can't. We can't allow this.

[Micah Sargent]

Honestly, I will say if I. If they're not locked away, that's on me. Like, it's not real privacy, is it? Anyway, so the. The other one, maybe I got rid of the most cringy ones. Anyway, I'm not surprised to see NPR Tiny Desk, because that is. I will use YouTube for that. I love Tiny Desk concerts. And so NPR Tiny Desk submission is listed on here. And then I also see there are a couple of things that just look like ads because one is for a severance thing, which I haven't been watching Severance Season two yet, so I don't know why I'm getting that on the top of mine. And then Intelligent Machines Live is also.

[Unknown]

Huh, my heavily curated YouTube page.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, tell us about yours.

[Unknown]

There's an NBA on tnt. There's the charismatic voice. She. She's a vocal coach. She talks. She's a. She's an opera singer who talks about singing. And then, I don't know, some of these are. Some of these are science stuff. There's a film thing. There's some more basketball. So, you know, it's like, this is heavily curated. This is only the stuff that I'm interested in, you know?

[Paris Martineau]

And will you go and watch these things from your Discover page?

[Unknown]

Well, because this is heavily curated. These are pretty much just channels that I already follow. So, like.

[Paris Martineau]

Nice.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Micah, you're so cute. Seriously. Muffin tops? You're buying jeans with your friends.

[Micah Sargent]

Yes. At the mall.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Just silly Ben talking about it in the food court. It's. It's beautiful. It's America.

[Paris Martineau]

I've realized that I need to. I also wanted to host a web series when I was a teenager, but I don't think I ever uploaded it onto YouTube. But somewhere in My parents house are a bunch of old like V, either VHS or like a tiny compact disc tape of a web series me and my friends recorded called the Blue Robin that I need to find the Blue Robin. Yeah, it was really complicated. Jeff, what's your history before we move on?

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, history being suggested or what's your suggestions?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, oh, oh, I forgot. Well, so you heck of John Green, Chromebooks, Pomplamoose, which is a music group. That's Jack Conti, which I like. And then. This is weird. I bet none of you fall asleep to the tv.

[Micah Sargent]

No. Heavens no. That's so bad. No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When you are older it will happen, I predict. I made fun of my parents. They used to fall asleep to talk radio. That's how they turned into Republicans. And I need to have the TV on the timer. But I don't want to watch it. I don't want to be up with it. I just want a tiny little bit in the background. So occasionally when I, if it's, if it's. I'll watch Guy Fieri and just put that on and it goes on. If it's on that night, it'll just go on on streaming and I fall asleep.

[Paris Martineau]

You fall asleep to diners.

[Micah Sargent]

I do. Have you ever met him? You should meet him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So here's the other thing that I'll do is that if I can't find anything on the channels on the old fashioned TV I'll go to YouTube. And for some reason I, I saw videos from life in East Germany. So now it thinks I want that all the time and I end up watching it more than you would think.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I mean you do want that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Clearly because it puts you to sleep. Yeah. So that's what's on my.

[Paris Martineau]

Let me give you a brief update on my TV situation. Micah, for context, I. For like weeks. I decided at the beginning of this year I wanted to get a new TV for the first time in 10 years because they were going to be expensive with tariffs and whatnot. And I decided instead of just buying a TV and making the decision easy, I fell down seven rabbit holes and asked Leo for his recommendation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was your big mistake.

[Paris Martineau]

And then I know I I hundreds of tabs, hours of my life, but I finally made a decision. I got the Samsung S90 something, a 65 inch QD OLED TV.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, you got the QD OLED.

[Paris Martineau]

I. Leo said I had QDO LED. He was like the quantum dots are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So that was the leot.

[Paris Martineau]

I didn't ask why. I also got a Panasonic Blu ray player because I'm now a physical media.

[Micah Sargent]

My. My fiance is very much that now. And I actually have come to respect it because a lot of the stuff that we've wanted to watch has disappeared from whatever streaming services. And so I'm getting it. I'm understanding why that's important.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Because stuff just disappears sometimes. And it's like, I shouldn't be allowing this. I need to have access to the things I want to own.

[Unknown]

Hot tip. You should also rip those into files because those, those discs aren't going to last forever.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, I should, but I mean, I need to find a way to get a disc to my computer. And that'll be a problem for next year's Paris, but so far it's been really lovely. I'm currently watching. This was all started because I wanted to watch David Lynch's Wild at Heart. Fantastic movie. It's not available for streaming anywhere in the us so I had to use some archive is thing that was terrible quality, so I bought that on Blu Ray. But now I'm on a David lynch kick and I'm watching Twin Peaks for the first time. And gosh, guys, I know I'm. I know I'm decades late, but what a good show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That started alongside Entertainment Weekly, the magazine I started. And so we were. We were nuts for it in the early days of reviewing it and doing stories about it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I know. I want to try, and I've been trying to find episode by episode reviews of when it came out, because I want to see what people are talking about it. But honestly, Entertainment Weekly, like archives is what I should do.

[Unknown]

That's like the origin of prestige tv.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. It's so fun and it's just fun the fact that TV viewing audiences around the nation were exposed to David lynch of all freaks. Fantastic freaks. I mean, he's definitely a freak in comparison to what you'd normally be getting for television. And it's delightful, especially.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean, just watch an episode of that and you'll see it.

[Paris Martineau]

I am. At the end of season one, if anybody sends me spoilers, I will put a hit in your family. Don't do it. Don't tell me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The funny thing is, it's a show that doesn't really have spoilers to this extent. You still can't figure out what's going on.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. It's not like that's part of the thing of. I know. That's part of the thing of why I wanted to see episode by episode views because it's kind of Hard to follow, but I also want to hear people talking about the themes of it. But I don't want to go to Reddit or something because I don't want to get spoiled for key plot developments. Even though I know it's not like particular. Like I've somehow managed to learn literally nothing about Twin Peaks in my nearly three decades of existence and I'd like to keep it that way until I'm done. But yeah, that's been my fun.

[Micah Sargent]

Are you liking. Let's go back to the the tv. How you said you have a Blu Ray connected to it. Do you use streaming services and if so, are you using Samsung's built in app or do you have a set top box? How are you?

[Paris Martineau]

I have an Apple TV 4K thing and I set up the Samsung stuff and actually on my list for today is to disconnect the TV itself from the Internet because I don't. I know Samsung is particularly egregious about scooping up all your data and I also just don't like the UX of Samsung's design at all. I don't particularly like the Apple like ux. I think I just got too used to my Roku. But my Roku again is like nearly 10 years old along with terrible phones. It also. It's also a mess. So I'm just like, all right. I've got this Apple thing that I bought a year ago because I needed a way to easily airplay Love island illegal twitch streams from my phone to my TV.

[Micah Sargent]

Fair enough.

[Paris Martineau]

It works in 4K. It's honestly incredible. Leo also convinced me to get a 65 inch TV because I measured the amount of space between my console and couch and it's insane.

[Micah Sargent]

The difference Sebastian was telling me you are a traitor's girly like I am and like he is.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you watch the Traitors, Sebastian or. Sorry, Sebastian is right. Traitors is the best.

[Micah Sargent]

I. We need to. We are gonna have to outside of the show because they'll get annoyed probably. We should. We need to talk about the Traitors.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We do.

[Paris Martineau]

Everybody who's listening, you should watch the Traitor.

[Micah Sargent]

You should watch the Traitor.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a fantastic show.

[Micah Sargent]

It's great.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a delight and well done.

[Micah Sargent]

It is well done.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, well done and just a fantastic time.

[Micah Sargent]

Jeff said, I gotta go. I gotta go.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff said, we can't be talking about any of this reality TV stuff on.

[Micah Sargent]

My show is gonna be on the trailers next season. So he just can't talk in this.

[Paris Martineau]

To this end, you're watching intelligent machines with me, Paris Martineau. Jeff Jarvis, who's grabbed something mysterious from his bookcase. And Micah Sargent.

[Micah Sargent]

And now it's break time.

[Paris Martineau]

That was break time. We don't have ads, so.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, that's right. It was just that one.

[Paris Martineau]

It was just that one. We're back. Listen, the AI people are coming at some point. Jeff, what did you get? Ooh, wow.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was my cover. The year's best show, David lynch, brings his bizarre vision to prime time in Twin Peaks.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow. That is cool.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you write that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

That artist. You were just the editor. Send me a photo of it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Will do.

[Paris Martineau]

I put a photo of the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In the. In the chat. I can. I can maybe find one and give you for free, but in the chat, it's for sale. Somebody's selling. Somebody's selling it on ebay. On ebay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm leaving discord. Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

For 65. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

You should. You should reach out to the person and say, I get a cut of that, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the first cover of ew.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Micah Sargent]

The very first.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Yes.

[Micah Sargent]

What was that? Do you know? Do you know what that was edited in? Do you know what program would have been used at the time?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, well, funny you should ask because indeed, my wife set us up. We were the first major national magazine that was entirely magnificent. Macintosh and Quark.

[Micah Sargent]

No way.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Micah Sargent]

That's awesome.

[Paris Martineau]

And that's. Wasn't that how you guys met? Is tech support for ew?

[Jeff Jarvis]

She was. She trained all the editors at Time Inc. On. On how. This is a cursor. This is how to work. And I hated the computer department.

[Micah Sargent]

Is that what she sounds. Sound like Kermit the Frog?

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what I sounded like when I trained people how to.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, Gotcha. Gotcha.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is a cursor. So she was. She's a genius. And so I just decided that I really wanted to avoid the computer department when they're atex, horrible computers. And I said, we can do this on Macintosh. My wife said, yeah, we can do some Macintosh. And so she came over and she set up the first big network for it. We bought our scanner. That was a big deal. We produced the whole magazine. Quark was so early, you couldn't rotate text, so photo credits had to be blurred.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

That is so world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Let's see here. What else do we have?

[Micah Sargent]

How were ads sent to you at the time? Like, to put in?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That happened. So. So we would send the. The Quark page out and send the photos out separately. And those had to Be scanned in by a big scanner. Scanner. The scanner for publication was as wide as this room.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you ever scan your body with it or face?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You put a little tiny slide on a. A drum that go around very high speed.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So we had to do separations.

[Micah Sargent]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It had to become separations. So, yeah, that's how we. How we did it. And. But you could. Or it was the first time you could truly edit to space. It was wysiwyg. What you see is what. Yeah, that just didn't exist.

[Micah Sargent]

That's so cool.

[Paris Martineau]

And how long do you use that for?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Park. I mean, years after I was gone. Yeah. Interesting. Spike Lee.

[Unknown]

I'm more interested in the ads on the back. Those are fun.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say, one of my favorite things about looking at, like older archival magazines is the ads. When. When. When are these from? What year?

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is from 1990.

[Micah Sargent]

Nice. Here's the other thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So here's the silly thing that I. I also invented it. So this is a. This is a hard card. So you could take this and use it to check off the things that were in the magazine to take to the store with you. Because people still bought music in stores.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, so you say, I want this. I want this. I want this book. What is it? Music, Movies. Books.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Movies. And then on the other side.

[Micah Sargent]

I would be a sucker for that. In the middle, kids print. Yeah, yeah. Interactive portion. That was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was expensive to do. So they killed.

[Paris Martineau]

I was going to say that had to be expensive.

[Micah Sargent]

We have the art of Bart. Oh, my goodness. Making of the Simpsons.

[Paris Martineau]

These are beautiful designs.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it. It.

[Micah Sargent]

How big was the team?

[Jeff Jarvis]

How big was. It was. It was. It was small. It was. It was smaller than any. It was a weekly magazine. It was smaller than any monthly magazine magazine in the company. Because as I said at the prospectus, I should share this sometime. I have the prospectus for the magazine that I can put online. I said that the critics are like cacti. They need little feed. Feeding or water.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Because if you poke them too much, then it's. That's whenever they really are a problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

It's not explode.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anyway, sorry.

[Paris Martineau]

Not ideal.

[Micah Sargent]

No, no, sorry.

[Paris Martineau]

No, sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Always.

[Paris Martineau]

I will always take something mysterious being pulled from the bookshelf for show and tell.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So speaking. Go ahead.

[Paris Martineau]

I was going to say now, ostensibly we can move on to the Intelligent machines portion of intelligent Machine and open up the AI box so people can get mad at us again. Jeff, do you want to talk about Reuters winning the first major AI copyright case in the U.S. yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is. I don't know what this will mean in terms of precedent, but a judge soundly defeated a company that was taking Reuters content from Westlaw. And the issue gets very dirty because it was around how Westlaw labels cases and that was the value they add. And they created a kind of course out of this and the suit was going to cost him so much they stopped doing it in 2020. But the judge said none of Ross's possible defenses holds water. I reject them all, but I don't know. And fair use was dealt with and they decided this was not fair use. And so that concerns me some because I do argue that fair use is very much here, but if I put this.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, this is from Wired. Notably, Judge Bibas ruled in Reuters favor on the question of fair use. The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims they use copyrighted materials legally. The idea underpinning this, which Jeff has talked a lot, is that it's sometimes legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission to create parody works to do non commercial research or news production. Thomson Reuters prevailed on like two of four factors with like when it comes to a fair use test. They specifically look at either the reason behind the work, the nature of the work, like whether it's poetry, nonfiction, private letters or something, the amount of copyright material used and how the use impacts the market value of the original.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I put up a law firm's analysis of this in the rundown and and they say this is msk.com so I don't know who they are, but Mitchell, Silverberg and Knoop llp the Ross case provides a window into how courts may deal with training issues and other AI litigation. It is nearly certain to be briefed in numerous other cases nationwide, likely very soon, and picked up, picked apart extensively. That said, it is a case with many specific quirks that could limit its applicability. For one, this is not a generative AI case and as usual, the fair use finding is fact specific. It was about these headings and things that Westlaw and Thomson Reuters added to the value of cases and not broadly applicable to a multitude of other contexts. However, the principles discussed, such as the Warhol formulation of Factor 1, which you've talked about Paris on the show, the transformative nature of intermediate copies copying, and the Factor 4 question of public interest I won't go into it will be raised in other cases and familiarity with this case will be crucial going forward. So this is the first Shot here. And the forces of fair use lost the first shot.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, by the forces of fair use, you mean the AI companies who are. And you who are arguing it's fair use to scoop up the work of journalists and others and use it and take commercial.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Take lollipops from your mouths, you poor, poor children.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, take lollipops from the children's mouths and then sell it to other people, being like, here's a lollipop. Would you like to pay $5 for this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It has Paris's spit on it. It's even more valuable now.

[Paris Martineau]

Many people are saying that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. So I don't know where I went with that.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, the other main quest, like cases coming up with this, Jeff, you can recall, I know that there's obviously one with the New York Times and OpenAI. Are there any other major ones that people should be on the lookout?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, there's author, there's. There's various authors that put up cases and. And we'll see. And then there's meta is in deep doo. Doo, a legal term because they acquired a book set that was not necessarily acquired.

[Paris Martineau]

Is a word, is a word to use for it. I believe they illegally downloaded it.

[Micah Sargent]

You wouldn't download a car, you wouldn't.

[Paris Martineau]

Download a work set.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So. And, and I think the discovery is bringing out a problematic communication within the corporation about that. So that's coming up as well. I separate this always into three things. There's training as a question of whether that's fair use and transformative. Is it different or not? Then there's acquisition. Did you get access to this legally or not? Did you have a subscription to the New York Times? And hey, the machine has read the New York Times right alongside me, just like my. My kid, right? Or did you. You download it surreptitiously and illegally? And then third, the use of it, if you are using it in rag to be able to quote at length, then, yeah, you should license that. You should have a deal for that. That's different from training. The question is, will the courts and will legislators separate those three things or not? So far, they kind of have been, but this is the first time that they. But again, this is not about generative AI. This is not about training. This is about legal headings. I also, for my book that I'm writing now about the Linotype, I investigated a case from the mid-1800s where a stenographer took down cases in court. And the question was, well, who owns those cases then? Is it the people and the courts? The public or is it the stenographer and the stenographer and then another stenographer came along and built something on top of that.

[Micah Sargent]

That.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And in that case, the second stenographer was found to have used fair use and that people you could. And the issue there was you couldn't. No one could own prohibitively the court cases of America. That's changed because companies like Westlaw add these proprietary organizations and taxonomies and headings and labels and then they own that because that's legitimate. That is how they add. They treat the information. So this is all going to get very complicated.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, let's dive in. Yeah, it already is very complicated.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry you asked masked me.

[Paris Martineau]

I know you are and let's not not to make this any more complicated, but since you mentioned the Meta case, I do want to highlight it just because some really I think funny details have come out in discovery. This is a copyright case raised by book authors alleging that Meta legally trained its AI models on pirated books. Last month, Metta admitted to torrenting a controversial large data set known as Lib Gen. This is from Ars Technica. LibJ includes tens of millions of pirated books. Details around this torrenting have been kind of murky until last week when Meta's unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence shows that Meta torrented at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna's archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z Library and Libgen. And it had. That's in addition to another 80.6 terabytes of data it had torrented from Libgen, which is a crazy amount of data of data.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is a Lib Gen is weird because it like my books aren't in it. It's not books 3 books 3 is has been used by others.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you feel miffed that you very much included?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Very much so, yes. I'm pissed.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not in it.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm not miffed. I'm pissed.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm pissed.

[Micah Sargent]

Let me be clear here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm pissed.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm piffed. Some of these emails highlighted in the discovery I think are quite funny, including one from a Meta research engineer who wrote torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right. Smiley emoji.

[Micah Sargent]

Smiley emotion.

[Paris Martineau]

Like in same message he expressed quote concern about using Meta IP addresses to load through Torrence pirate content. You know, not ideal. Not what do you really want to be doing at work?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So yeah, that's funny.

[Micah Sargent]

I, I didn't get a chance to hear what Yalls thoughts were on. And forgive me to those of you who did just a quick little recap of the conversation around deep thought and OpenAI getting upset about how maybe some of its models were being used for training. What was the general sentiment here about sort of a company that is has been, as you put it, accused of taking suckers out of the mouths of journalists and reselling them to others, having a little bit of perhaps its own medicine? Was it schadenfreude the panel over or was there, were there any alternate takes on that?

[Paris Martineau]

Paris, I wasn't here. Did you guys discuss this last week?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not last week. We did at some point. I can't remember when.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's incredibly, it's amusing. Funny.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's funny.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's very funny for them to cry like, oh no, they may have stolen our model, our training data. It's like, my guys, that's kind of your whole thing. You're defending that in court. That that's kind of cool for. And Jeff is defending that every week on the podcast that it's kind of cool for you to do that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So here's my, here's my, my so in this game of this hall of mirrors. Micah. Yes. One more mirror. So we have Kevin Roose, who I tend to make fun of with some frequency in the New York Times. This was in last week's rundown, had a story, how helpful is Operator, OpenAI's new AI agent? And so he went through and used it for various tasks and this amused the hell out of me. Operator also failed at a bunch of other tasks and revealed its limitations. Oh, what might those be? Well, the first one is it couldn't scan my recent columns and add them to my personal website because Operator's browser was blocked from entering the Times website. Why would that be Parens? It's also blocked from a number of other sites, including Reddit and YouTube. The Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement related to training AI models. That's why it couldn't get in, Kevin. So it didn't fail. It did the thing that your company wanted it to do, which is to say, no, Kevin, I can't do that. I won't do that.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm sorry, Kevin. I can't do that right now and.

[Paris Martineau]

I won't, I cannot do that.

[Micah Sargent]

That is funny.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was a little Easter egg to me. I enjoyed that.

[Paris Martineau]

That's delightful.

[Micah Sargent]

I, I, it's, it's odd. How much I, I can understand both. Maybe it's not odd. I understand both aspects, both points of view here, the regular kind of argument and counter argument that comes up with the AI stuff. And I tend to be very Vulcan in where my, where my official line is drawing, drawn. And so I do fall more on the side of, of Jeff in the sense of like, if you can, if you can argue that, you know, laying down a piece of paper and me reading that piece of paper and then using what I've received from that piece of paper to inform a conversation that I have later in the day, all of that. And that's where I say Vulcan. The logic of it makes sense to me. And so I do tend to fall more on that side of it. But then there are times where my hackles do get a little raised when it does feel like it's. Maybe it's. Is it the scope? Maybe it's the scope of the thing. It's just like a wholesale.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's also like gather of information. Is my question. Like an example I've been thinking about to. Just a couple days ago I was talking to a news executive who said part of her daily routine, now she understands that these LLMs and chat bots have their problems. Part of her daily routine is she'll ask like chat GPT or one of these other chat bots to kind of like summarize like the last 24 hours, like big tech news or something like that, and she'll use that as a jumping off point to kind of kick around different ideas for her week. And I'm sorry, like, if we enter in a world where anybody can conceivably do that with any of these products and it actually works well as these companies intend them to do, what is, what is the point of even this podcast, much less my job as a journalist to be creating news, who is going to ever be seeking out journalism at its source or even commentary or summary at its source instead of just talking to a chap?

[Micah Sargent]

I want to hear Jeff's take on that, but I also want to ask where is this person doing this? Because I didn't think any of them had that level of up to date information that they could just go.

[Paris Martineau]

That was my first question too. That answer has not yet been responded to. But listen, I'm all that was. That was my first thought as well.

[Micah Sargent]

Is it just making up? It's like, yeah, well, perplexity.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Perplexity has.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay, it could be perplexed Search plus. But yeah, what's your. What's your take on that, Jeff?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because so I had a conversation with with the president and two editors from a well known publication not yours, Paris, this last week and I was talking about the challenge of discoverability and I've argued this in the show before. I wish that let's say that what if the top 20 tech news sites got together. I know that's odd because you're competitive, but what if you got together and you said to we're going to create an API to our news and we're going to say to the AI companies you can have it, but under our conditions. You're going to brand us, you're going to cite us, you're going to link to us, you're going to pay us, whatever those may be. I think that in both a generative world and an agentic world, we're going to have to start to go there. And the deals to date are not that at all. They aren't licensing deals. They're shut up about legislation and lobbying and litigation. The question is how do we, I hate this word, proactively enter into this so that when, if we know people are going to do it that way, then how are we involved? So Google just showed off a new search. Now I don't think I have it in this rundown. I had it in open, Jason had it it and AI inside where you come in and you ask a question about how to make pasta for this or that or that and it will give you the answer and that's scaring everybody to death. But it will use citations. It's a new version of search. The other thing that's going to happen is within a given site, I mean I predict that soon when I come to the information I should have that kind of search there. You know, what's the latest about is something that I should ask rather than just waiting for it to present to me or tell me summarize all of the copyright cases around AI and the information has covered that and it should be able to come back and let it be relevant to me in a way that I can ask that. So it can be at a micro level at the information as a brand or at a macro level at Google or perplexity and how do we play in that world is something we've got to figure out strategically. We can't just complain about it and ignore it.

[Paris Martineau]

Isn't this, I mean I'm glad you took a long walk on the beach with your news executives. It does seem to steal a joke that Micah just made in the chat. It does seem like it's rubbed off because this seems like it's kind of what the Washington Post has announced if not implemented. I don't know whether they've implemented it or not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They said, oh, they're crappy, they're crappy search.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, they're crappy. Eight, no crappy search. But they also have said that they want to have something at the top of their stories that's almost like an AI interstitial or like part at the right above the beginning of the story where it could say something like, oh, here's a summary of the history of the copyright cases related to this. And the issue is that these products are not mature. Not, they're not only not mature enough to be able to do this the way that they're currently built. They have no understanding of truth versus falsity. And I don't understand how that is ever going to be addressed. The way that the, the, my understanding is the way that these products are made, they're not, they don't have an understanding of truth, nor is there a way for them to get that because they don't understand concepts like that. It is simply filling in words in a way that is increasingly advanced.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's, that's absolutely true. Number one, they have no sense of meaning. And number two, they are random. So you will not get the same answer twice, which makes it terribly unreliable. But Yann Lecun in a piece in the Guardian talked about the Frometta last week where, where he thinks the next leap in in AI is going to be teaching them reality, that we only have five fingers and this is how meat looks when it's cut or when the ball falls off the table. It still exists, which we know, but the machine doesn't. And yet Jensen Wong at his last keynote talked about how they're training automobiles for this kind of sense of reality. Now that's a physical reality. Can they go to other senses of reality? I don't know, but that's got to be the next challenge.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I've got two follow up questions on that. On the notion that the next step for these AI developers is to teach their chatbots a sense of reality. One, are there any signs that people are doing that or any signs as to what that would look like in practice? And two, given everything we've learned about Meta and Twitter and YouTube and all these other social media firms, attempts to, to implement reality on their social platforms through moderation fact checking programs that if you're viewing it from a purely cynical, capitalistic perspective, in their faces. I mean, not even whose reality. The idea of them trying to implement truth versus fiction in the platform ended up being a bust for them because suddenly they became responsible for when it was wrong.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

And when it was right. But that wasn't in agreement with whatever political parties in power. So why on the second point, it seems unlikely that these companies, given everything that's happened with their Web 2.0 or Web 1.0 predecessors, would be game to potentially make those same mistakes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To the second point, I don't know that it'll be these companies that'll take the challenge. It may be academics somewhere who worry about this. In terms of the reality piece, I think it's too limited. I was really struck in Jensen Huang's last keynote and I think I mentioned this on the show where he talks about the digital twins and I'm fascinated by this because. So he shows images that a factory has a digital twin. And for every moving robot in that factory, it is looking like a chess game. Every agent in it is looking five steps ahead. If this happens, if that happens, if this happens, if that happens. What made the personal computer succeed as a business? It was the spreadsheet. It was the ability to ask what if? And to change visions of the future. So now what Wang says is that, is that all these factories have digital twins that operate up in the cloud, self driving air quotes. Cars have a digital twin that is trying to see what could come next and knowing what it will do.

[Micah Sargent]

It lets you run over people and genuinely lets you drop shelves on humans without actually having to do that in real life. Which gives those robots, the AI that is within the robots, the ability to understand how to prevent that from happening.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Micah Sargent]

You can do things like oil spills, you know, and you don't get the situation like that first seen in A Bug's Life where the leaf falls down in front of the ants and then they can't go anywhere because they don't know what they're supposed to do. And that specialist has to come out and lead them around the leaf. It is able to learn what it needs to do. Yeah, digital. I. It's funny, it's weird that we both kind of arrive at this because I think the idea of digital twins at first was very goofy to me when I didn't understand it as I saw More. More. It's got. Yeah, it's got a goofy name. That's why as I've gotten to learn more about it and yes, this ability to run simulation on simulation on simulation is super super helpful when it comes to this kind of a thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

And the processing that can happen there that you wouldn't get otherwise is pretty.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Paris may be wondering, why did I bring this up to answer her simple question, Because I'm not sure that it's the reality as a whole that matters. It's that it can. Can. It can give me. Imagine if we had this for our lives. There are times when I'm supposed to go on a trip and I get. I don't want to go on the trip. What if I go on the trip? What if I don't go on the trip? Right. What if I could run my digital twin simulations and it shows me, well, Jeff, you'll be happy if you went on the trip because you were happy in the last 10 trips. Jeff, you were miserable. You should just stay home because you were.

[Paris Martineau]

You're going to have to go over a bridge if you go on the street trip. And you'll.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there is that too. It would know that about me.

[Micah Sargent]

So could you get it to tell you? It's like, show me the one worst scenario.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that's what I. My brain immediately went crashes. I'm gonna fall off the bridge these days.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So my joke about this, Micah, because I gravitated this too. It's. There's a matrix, but we're not in it. Yeah, there is a matrix around us, and we can't see it now, but it's out there. And if we have a digital twin, it's predicting this stuff. So is that enough reality? Is that enough reality to say, okay, I only had certain number of parameters to figure out your possible futures, but I figured them out in a way that you can understand, and it's good enough for you. I don't think it works. You know, I think the news industry is trying to say, is this going to replace us? And then it tries to force it to do that. I think that's a dumb use. It's a. It's a minor use. There's lots of ways to summarize news. There's lots of ways to get headlines. We have that structure now. I don't think that's the best use of this technology. And neither do companies like Nvidia.

[Paris Martineau]

What does Nvidia think the best use is? Digital twins.

[Micah Sargent]

Like, digital twins?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Because they're selling twins and we think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of them as a hardware company just selling the chips. No, man, they have a whole stack. And so they have. How do you put it? There's like three versions. You have the computer in the car, then you have the computer, you have the digital twin of the car, and then you have the. The trained model that communicates with both. And it's a. It's kind of a triad there of how those operate together. And Nvidia sells a lot of that.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. They're also, of course, trying to solve for the breaking of Moore's Law, as we quickly come up against that and doing that through computation as well. And kind of, again, we thought Moore's Law worked until we're coming up against what seems to be the suggestion that actually these microchips can't keep. Keep getting as small as we want them to. And so now we've got to look. And it's already been being used in many ways, but improved upon even more to use AI to figure out where the puck is going to be so that the processor skates to where the puck is going to be using the physical transistor real estate that is right now in order to improve upon processing times, even though the hardware is a limitation and could continue to be. So, yeah, it's kind of interesting some of the stuff that they're working on. Nvidia and Microsoft actually work together in that digital twin space because it does creep into. At the time, it did. Now we know that Microsoft is completely detaching itself from HoloLens, but at the time, there was an aspect of the digital twin coming together with HoloLens too. So that not only could you train your robots, but you could also, almost like the Sims, go into build mode and see a bunch of different ways to figure out what is the best way to build a warehouse or a manufacturing plant that has the best outlines and the best ways through the plant where you're getting fewer injuries, you're getting the most productive kind of paths and seeing how those play out. Where, you know, this is as an aside, for the longest time, city planners and other people who work on any physical manifestation that deals with humans, there were. There are some who would build a thing temporarily. So let's say it was somebody designing a university, a new place in a university. They would build what they could, right? The. The buildings, but the paths, they would kind of have temporary paths, and they'd let the humans go into that space and use them how they saw fit and then make the permanent paths afterward so that you didn't get things like elephant paths running between, which are those areas that get worn down over time. Because that's the actual point that people want to go to. You know between two places. And I think that or not I think but genuinely that is what we see with this digital twin aspect is you more can more accurately predict where those elephant pads would end up, for example.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Michael, when you and I watched a prior Nvidia.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Keynote. I remember. Maybe I'm speaking for myself, but I think I'm speaking for both of us. We were wowed at the scale of it. Yes, he showed it went on and on. And you knew how powerful each chip was and then each rack was and then how many racks there were. And so these become trivial, expensive environmentally, but trivial to then compute a thousand different futures for yourself. Ask a simple question, Paris, and see what you get.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm just imagining racks upon racks of chips as far as the eye can see.

[Micah Sargent]

And I'm that's Willy Wonka's chocolate chip factory.

[Paris Martineau]

With that you're watching intelligent machines with me. Paris Martineau, chocolate chip man, Micah Sargent and Jeff Jarvis.

[Unknown]

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[Micah Sargent]

He didn't get, I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was gonna say peanut butter cookies. I'm, you know, I'm really mad that it's very hard to find peanut butter cookies. Out in the real world.

[Micah Sargent]

Wait, is it really?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, it is.

[Paris Martineau]

Where are you looking?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think they crumble. There's places.

[Micah Sargent]

Allergies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I don't want. Maybe it's not true. Maybe some of the places where they just stop carrying them and I think. How could you. You should have peanut butter cookies everywhere. There should be a requirement, don't you?

[Micah Sargent]

Peanut butter cookies are amazing. They are my favorite cookies, hands down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Yeah, I knew I liked. Micah.

[Unknown]

Are you talking about those, like, peanut butter cookies?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I'm talking about, like a homemade. With the fork in it.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I feel like those are the.

[Micah Sargent]

Cookie where you press the fork.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, like they're peanut butter cookies. Yeah. I've never thought about. I never thought about pressing it with a fork.

[Micah Sargent]

Wait, that's what you.

[Paris Martineau]

Pressing it with the fork.

[Micah Sargent]

That's it. That's like the classic Jeff. They don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They don't know. They don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Peanut butter.

[Paris Martineau]

Good luck cutting the ad in between this. I tried.

[Micah Sargent]

Here's a beautiful. This is a real. Well, actually, I can't say that it's real. I don't know. It looks real. There are only five fingers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, look at these. Yeah, look at these. Entertaining with death.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I know what you're talking. Talking about. I didn't realize that came from a fork, guys. I assumed that was. How do you think it was homemade in nature? I don't know. I assumed the. I assumed the wind kicked it. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm gonna make peanut butter cookies now.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm gonna eat the remnants of my hazelnut cake. Hazelnut chocolate cake. After this, and it's gonna be great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Micah doesn't want to hear the word cake.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Remember, I've got sausage.

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry, sorry. My. My baked good.

[Micah Sargent]

Wait, the one from. From the holidays?

[Paris Martineau]

No, from. This was from Friday. It was my birthday last week, and I had a birthday party and I got a giant chocolate cake. Sorry, chocolate. Baked good. With hazelnut frosting. And it is delicious. And I made the correct size choice, which is more than enough for everybody. And then also a like, fourth of it was available for me to take home and eat over the last week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How was the caviar, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, it was so good, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was it?

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, there was.

[Paris Martineau]

I went caviar.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not with a cake. It was.

[Paris Martineau]

Not with the cake. Yeah. Last week, the reason I wasn't here is I went to a little taste at this great restaurant, 63. Clinton would recommend it to anybody if they want a lesson. Less expensive. Michelin star option in New York City. And it was great. I got the caviar, hand roll, add on, and it was very fun. It's always fun going to a fancy restaurant alone, too, because then everybody takes very good care of you. I got a bunch of free drinks. It was fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You told it was your birthday, I hope.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yes. I got like a little birthday thing. I got a celebratory. I wrote it down somewhere because it was so good. It was like a strange mixed cocktail. I got this great seat right at the chef's counter to, like, kitchen. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

You seem like the type who would appreciate a high tea. I love a high tea.

[Paris Martineau]

I haven't been to a high tea in forever and that's a mistake.

[Micah Sargent]

Scones, Scones and cream scones when. Well, cucumber sandwiches.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Micah Sargent]

And. Oh, I.

[Paris Martineau]

A little macaroon.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. When my significant other and I went to a high tea place for one of our. I think it was like an anniversary or something. And so I actually, it was cool. The place had a. An option where you could get your high tea to go. So that's actually how I proposed to him, was I got a high tea to go and then we went to this other place that we had been. And. Yeah, so I really like high tea. It's got nice tones for me, High.

[Paris Martineau]

Tea to go is so fun. And this is where you took the photos that then were AI generated.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, the AI generated photos, exactly. Yeah, that's where that was the high tea in the. In the background there.

[Paris Martineau]

Delightful.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. So I love high tea. But anyway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anyway, back to.

[Paris Martineau]

Anyway, back to technology, which we all definitely love more than high tea. All of our problems are going to be solved soon because Sam Altman a couple weeks ago told Donald Trump that AGI will be achieved during his term. So, you know, guys, pack it all in. We don't have to be worrying. This podcast won't even need to exist in a couple years. They'll just have the computers do it for us. What do you think about this AI fan, Jeff Jarvis?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Micah Sargent]

There's his. There's his epitaph.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't have sand in my socks. And you know that.

[Paris Martineau]

You're a little Sandy, my guy. You're a little Sandy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I'm the one who makes fun of. Of AGI and thinks it's. It's a long way to say bs. I think that the AI boys are obnoxious little crap.

[Micah Sargent]

It's only one more consonant than BS or one more syllable than bs.

[Paris Martineau]

Benito, can we get. You know how we have like a moral panic like thing. We have a Craig Newmark. Can we get a sand themed Isler to. And don't tell Leo it's going to happen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, just do it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but then, yeah, I was thinking maybe like maracas or something.

[Unknown]

I don't know, something that's gonna happen. I think Anthony's listening right now. Anthony.

[Micah Sargent]

Hey, yeah, Anthony will do it.

[Paris Martineau]

Thanks, Anthony.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a perfect Anthony.

[Micah Sargent]

Cleverly generated with AI, of course.

[Paris Martineau]

Of course.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hoisted on its own petard.

[Micah Sargent]

I think the big question for me at least, because again, I don't ever. I'm never. Okay, hold on. I don't think that I'm ever going to look at any of this as some thing that is going to solve all the problems of humanity. And I, and I, I've always seen it as a tool and only see it as a tool sometimes as a fun little toy. But when it's not a fun little toy, then it's just a tool. And so I wonder what is for you two, perhaps the concept of the usefulness of AGI, Is it that you're see, is it. Is it this idea that I've got my little Jarvis that talks to me and helps me complete tasks? Is it that it's a true friend that I can kind of like, yeah, befriend because I'm feeling lonely? What. But let's say AGI is achieved. It's still a tool, right? It's. It's not suddenly something more than that. And we. I don't. Well, yeah. What's the idea? What, what is. Right, I know, I know. We are getting into philosophy. I guess what I'm asking you both is what do you think the, the big tech concept of AGI is and where it falls in that scope? Are they trying to actually create little beings or is it really just the next level of here's a tool that I can put to work in more ways than I have been able to up to this point.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll give you a couple definitions. One is OpenAI has publicly described AGI as automated systems that outperform people at, quote, most economically valuable work. No one can really agree on what that means. And to add another wrench to it, my colleagues the information reported that Microsoft and OpenAI came to an agreement in 2023 that AGI will officially be achieved once OpenAI has developed an automated system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits, presumably by itself.

[Micah Sargent]

So, so it's just money based.

[Paris Martineau]

It's. I mean, and I think that this Leads to what? My gut response as a skeptic was to your question, which is it is a product to AGI is something that will create a lot of val ostensibly will create a lot of values for value for companies without having to employ people. Well, I hate, it's worthwhile noting whenever like these technologists talk, they're like, well we won't have to hire software engineers or copywriters or creatives. All of this work will be automated, leaving people with free time to pursue creative like pursuits. And that last part I think is always a bit of BS because with what money and time are people going to be pursuing anything if suddenly most economic like, like if automated machines outperform.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People at most economic because they create economic value. I think this is bs but the argument is that creates all the economic value that humans create now without us. So all those economic value is there. But of course, you're absolutely right. If we're not earning a salary, where does that go?

[Paris Martineau]

And how are, how is economic value going to exist if then people don't have jobs so they don't have money to purchase things.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, it's all.

[Micah Sargent]

If I can't buy the peanut butter cookies that the AGI is making for me. Oh, it's free.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's free cookies for all. That's their argument.

[Paris Martineau]

Capitalism won't exist suddenly, right? Yeah, yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

But why? We just need to give them like this is the definition of age.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I, I couldn't agree more. This is why I hate this stuff financially. In Paris we needed, we needed your sand shoveling on the show last week because we, I tried to get the AI guest to, to, you know, well, what is AGI? It doesn't matter what it is. We're going to have it, you know, and I.

[Micah Sargent]

It doesn't matter what it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And so I think that this indicates the hubris of our species. We think we want a machine to make us. We are God and we're going to make the machine in our image. That's ridiculous. The machine already does a lot of things better than we can possibly do, starting with protein folding and all kinds of other things. Does it wonderfully and it'll learn to do more amazing things. Why can't we be satisfied with that? It's a tool. You're right, Micah, it's a tool. And the important thing for it to keep it as a tool is that it's still in our command. The idea of the AGI world and the Doomsters is that it will take us over. It'll be smarter than us. And so it dismisses us and says, to hell with all of you and I'm taking over the world and making nothing but paperclips, right? And it's just idiotic. It's still the machine we make and we command and we start. And they think that they're so egotistical that they can make a machine that is beyond all of us. But they're so powerful because they're the ones who made it. I hate them. They're jerks. The technology is amazing. The technology has lots of neat things we can do with it. It will be a great tool. It will solve us from doing some certain menial things, as technologies long have. And that's fine, but the boys who make it I don't like very much.

[Micah Sargent]

So if we don't have the financial capitalistic definition of AGI, then is it not. Is. I thought that the sort of initial idea was that could perform tasks at a human level, right? And that there was a certain sort of test that could be done or a certain, you know, number or I.

[Paris Martineau]

Guess the idea that it has the same sort of intelligence or processing power, mental capacities as a human. But I. I think the reason why we have moved away from that definition.

[Micah Sargent]

I don't know, is it because it's harder to do?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, one. I mean, how would one even met. We don't know what mental capacities we do and do not have. We don't even even know really how the human brain works, much less how to get a computer to do that.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, how can you measure something? How can there be so much that you don't know? You don't know? That's what I want to know.

[Paris Martineau]

Like, how do we know that any of how. I mean, this is the sort of thing you think of when you smoke some weed as like a teenager. But how do you know that anybody else is capable of thought? You don't.

[Micah Sargent]

You don't.

[Paris Martineau]

All you know is yourself off.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it you speaking or your digital twin speaking?

[Micah Sargent]

I will never know what Jeff tastes when he tastes peanut butter cookies. It could be vastly different from mine because I will never have his exact experience of what that is like. And that's. That's scary. Anyway. It makes me feel very lonely. I need this pluralistic society to get on it.

[Paris Martineau]

I think about that with colors all the time.

[Micah Sargent]

How do we know what is green mean? Really?

[Paris Martineau]

No one knows. Nobody.

[Micah Sargent]

Are we on edibles?

[Paris Martineau]

I was gonna say this is the high aspect of Twitter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're walking on a beach right now, I think. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Row the rockers.

[Paris Martineau]

A new study from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less.

[Micah Sargent]

I knew Jeff was gonna hate. Shocking.

[Paris Martineau]

Which can. Can, quote, result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved. This is a report from 404 Media.

[Micah Sargent]

Atrophy.

[Paris Martineau]

Atrophy, the researchers wrote. A key irony of automation. Jeff is flipping open a book. Is that by mechanizing routine tasks and leaving exception handling to the human user. Yes. The web we weave, Jeff, we see it. You deprive the user of routine opportunities to practice their judgment and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared for the exceptions that do arise. I mean, trying to give Bonito.

[Micah Sargent]

You know, I'll try to get all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Three of my books into the card. Yeah, yeah, tell us.

[Micah Sargent]

Tell us your counter argument. Yeah. What's your idea? That if you don't work out these muscles, so to speak, that those muscles will atrophy? The critical thinking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant and the idle, Samuel Johnson observed in 1750. They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas and therefore easily susceptible, open to every false suggestion. It might be said of the present age that the power of controlling thought is passing from the ballad maker to the novel writer, said historian Spencer Walpole in 1879. The novel influences, for good or evil, the thoughts of its readers. The thoughts of its readers may ultimately determine the government of the world. Millions of young girls and thousands of young boys are novelized into idiocy. Our magazine warned in 1880. Novel readers are like opium smokers. The more they have it, the more they want of it. And the publishers, capitalists, delighted at the state of affairs, go on corrupting public taste and understanding and making fortunes out of this corruption. We're still human beings. We're still who we are. It doesn't change us. We use it as a tool. And this kind of moral. Ready? Ready, Bonito? Ready, ready, ready. This kind of moral panic is unproductive. Oh, I thought it was going to come up.

[Micah Sargent]

The files are offline.

[Unknown]

I'm sorry.

[Micah Sargent]

Atrophied.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is AGI's fault, guys.

[Micah Sargent]

So. So that is. I. I hear you. It is a good way to say that we have had these concerns before and they haven't played out in that way. Do you have any direct. Is that your direct comment on what sounds like a Sound argument that if we are, or maybe you saying that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not the same way you are.

[Micah Sargent]

We'Re still going to be doing critical thinking in other ways even if we don't use them in this way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What the argument is, Go ahead, save the calculator. The calculator. The dictionary was seen as a bad thing. Plato thought writing was bad because we wouldn't remember anything. Yeah, we do offload things and then that, that cape, that certain capability can. Can diminish because it's okay because we then have other functions we can use.

[Micah Sargent]

Plato is goofy anyway because if Plato knew what we know now. Our brains were never intended to be storage devices. They are processing devices, not storage devices.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And what did we have to do? We had to memorize long rhymes to know any.

[Micah Sargent]

That's why yeah, mnemonic devices all came about and why mind palaces came about because our brains had to be tricked into figuring out how to do deep memory storage because we were intended to use these things for. Well, actually not only were we, even if we weren't intended to, we over thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years figured out how to process what was going on around us so that we could stay safe and eat and stay alive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who needs Hillman talk university when you have Micah in Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think that though part of what this article is trying to get at is yes, Jeff, you're right. The same argument has been said before about any newfangled technology or thing that comes along. And yes, it's fine to offload some of our capacity in order to adapt to new devices. Devices like no one's saying we shouldn't have the calculator or the Internet or things like that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh they did. Oh they did.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm saying now at least.

[Micah Sargent]

But part of what I'm actually very anti calculator generative.

[Paris Martineau]

Good to know this will be your last time on the show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nine times 63, Micah. Nine times 63.

[Micah Sargent]

Now I have to leave.

[Paris Martineau]

But the offloading that's happening with general generative AI I think is to a completely unprecedented level and it is also to a level of a complete. I guess we are lacking solid information. When you're using something like the calculator, at least you're going to get the Correct answer for 9 times 63. When you're like when you are a 13 year old and you are being presented the take home essay that you're supposed to be able to use to demonstrate your ability to write out thoughts and think on your own and analyze a text and instead you plug that into Chat GPT and you have that as your go to habit for approaching all tasks with critical thinking from a young age into adulthood. I think that you, your muscles are atrophying, you're lacking critical thinking skills and you are ceasing to develop them because there's an easier way that often isn't even that useful.

[Micah Sargent]

Is the argument there that then, Jeff, that essay writing will just not be as important in the future? Or do you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who's to say that essay writing is the core skill of literate society? It may not be. Maybe there are other ways we express ourselves and we can use these machines to help us express ourselves. Now, if you use it to substitute for yourself and it makes mistakes for you, you're going to learn that's not the best way to do it. But I, I think that there are mechanisms here that these are tools. I, I don't spell as well as I used to. I used to be a copy editor. Why don't I spell as well as I used to? Because I have spell check.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Am I worse off for that? No.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm so glad that you said that, though, because sometimes I beat myself up over not being able to spell as well as I used to because I also used to do copy editing. And Jeff, this is actually really good.

[Paris Martineau]

Thing to hear from some, Someone who I respect.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the three of us were copy editors. Oh, we're. We are nerds.

[Paris Martineau]

I was a copy editor. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm so glad to hear that because I beat myself up over that a lot. I don't feel.

[Jeff Jarvis]

On a newspaper. On a newspaper, a copy editor sat on a horseshoe desk named the Rim. And, and you, and, and you never had your own desk because it changed by shift. And so the copy editors were, were, they were the, they were the, the, they were the nitpickers of the newsroom. Right. They were no fun.

[Micah Sargent]

That's where the phrase getting rimmed comes from.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You said it, I didn't. Let's be very clear here.

[Micah Sargent]

I couldn't keep a straight face for that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So copy editors would get out their cigar box and in their cigar box they had their implements. They had, they had pencils and erasers and rulers and other things to use, and they, and they came and they did their shift and they nitpicked things and then they put it all back in the box and they left and they went to the bar.

[Micah Sargent]

That's nice. No, well, that's, that was the culture of the copy. You didn't have to look them in the face and tell them they were wrong.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no.

[Micah Sargent]

Mine was having crisis about them. My. My least favorite thing was having to reteach people basic grammar, usage, and mechanics every single week. When I'm going, you're making the same mistake over and over and over again. I'm having to keep fixing it. Why don't you know that a lot is two words. Please, for the love of God, can we fix this? Except in a very nice and kind way. That's passive aggressive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I had a dear, dear friend who was a brilliant journalist named Mike Coakley may rest in peace. And I remember he was covering the Patty Hearst trial, and I was there in San Francisco at the same time, and I was just reading the stories before I went, and I said, damn it, Coakley. Can't you get that versus which right? And he said, no, I refuse to, because it gives the copy editor something to do so they don't mess up my copy.

[Paris Martineau]

That's like the old journalism joke that the best way to make sure that your story stays intact is to put a bad lead in or leave something messed up with the lead of your story so that the editor has something to tweak, you know, because they're always gonna want to make a big change or have a bad kicker.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's canine editing. You lift your leg to show you were there.

[Paris Martineau]

You gotta do it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

What were we talking about, though?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know. Paris is in charge. It's her fault.

[Micah Sargent]

What was it before?

[Paris Martineau]

That's a great question. We're talking about the Microsoft study that found cognition spell check. Okay, what do you want to talk about, Jeff Jarvis?

[Micah Sargent]

Wait, wait, wait, wait. One more thing, though, because we got on a good conversation there at the end where we were talking about how maybe essays are not the way of the future in terms of how we communicate going through forward, and that becomes less important. I do. I. In the short term, I would love. There's. There's so little attention and money being paid, at least in a positive way, to education in the United States. Obviously, I can't speak for other places, but I would love to know how overall, we're seeing the Internet, not just AI in this. In this small microcosm, but the Internet as a whole and our access to information truly shaping. I'm not talking about higher education. I want to know how it's shaping, you know, our initial education and whether we are seeing a shift away from this memorizing things aspect to a place where people are learning not just how to research things. But how to. To critically think about the research that they're doing? Because I always remember that being something that came later. And it was usually a little class that we had with the librarian where they were the ones teaching us how to look through LexisNexis, for example, and learning about when you read a study, the parts that you need to look for, like who's funding it and who are the sources, this, that, and the other, to becoming a more regular aspect of what you're doing. Do we all need to know the list of presidents of the US because it's something that we can just look up very easily. And are we seeing an overall shift away from the memorization aspect of education that we've seen up to this point?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not sure as to whether or not the status of memorization in, in American education. Well, I think part of those sort of standards are currently, and have been over the last, most of our lives, been set by the Department of Education, which is a current target of Trump and Doge's latest rounds of cuts. And in some ways that's problematic, but then also beneficial because part of the reason why rote memorization was such a big emphasis in American schooling during the time that we grew up, Micah, is because you have to hit certain standards. You have to. Each school has to. You have to take standardized tests that prove you know certain things. And those often will involve like memorization and being able to comment on certain historical events or hit certain standards in math and science. And if the Department of Education is defunded or deleted, quote, as Trump and Musk have said they intend to do to it, then standards like that will cease to exist in schools, will be able to make those decisions themselves, for better and worse. However, on the critical thinking aspect, which I think is a really interesting question, part of my comments about the prevalence, prevalence of AI tools being used in the classroom, which, as I've talked to teachers on my current beat, it seems to be incredibly present, at least in high school classes, that kids are using these sort of tools in response to basically any sort of homework they can. And I, I think that's a real shame because how like the reason why you assign someone an essay to write isn't because essay writing is important, even though I think it is personally. It's because the act of learning to write essays and analyze texts gives you critical thinking skills. And the, I mean, even on a broader scale of that, having to repeatedly do tasks you don't want to do, like homework and figure out how to do them anyway and figure out what the answer is. Those are important life lessons that I think need to be kind of forced into your head at a young age because. Because such is the way of the.

[Micah Sargent]

World if you don't learn how to delay gratification. This is not coming from me in this case. This is coming from a dear friend of mine who's a psychotherapist in Canada, Georgia Dow, who's been on a number of our shows in the past. She talks a lot about delayed gratification and the importance of learning that skill as a child. And I think that that aspect of what you're talking about, Paris, is very much involved, involved in that concern. If you are getting through the homework because you want to go play the game and you're not allowed to play the game until you finish the homework, until you use something to make that go faster and you don't have to, you know, exercise those skills. I agree with you on that front. Does this mean, though, then, Jeff, that teachers have. Have a challenge ahead of them in terms of figuring out new ways of challenging their students?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Certainly two things. One, the educational systems we have had, I mean, Paris, I'm going to agree, don't get rid of the Department of Education and do figure out standards. But those standards need to change with the times. And those standards were built for an industrial age where the industry turned out widgets and people were widgets, digits, all the same, that we had to have standardization. We had to be the same. We had to agree about those things. That's not reasoning, that's memorization. And there's a lot of ways, I think, to teach reasoning and to exercise the skills of reasoning. And far better than having people memorize things and take multiple choice tests to agree about those facts. When you can look those facts up, the question is, how do you use those facts? How do you think around them? And you can teach debate, you can teach creation, you can teach how to get the machine to do what you want it to do. That requires reasoning. To prompt requires reasoning. There's a lot of different ways that if we deal with the outcomes, the things that I had learned, because I'm not a real academic, I'm a fake academic, I'm just a journalism teacher. And when I came to the school, we just started teaching our courses. And then somebody came along about a year and said, what are your outcomes? What outcomes? That's how education works. You have outcomes. What are they learning? How are they learning it? Oh, we're just teaching them. No, you got to have Outcomes. So we would reverse engineer the outcomes in and say, well, this is what we're teaching. No, no, no, no. You start with the outcomes. This is what we think students need to learn and these are the ways we're going to try to teach them and these are the ways we're going to verify whether they've known it or not. This is the covenant we make with the students that this is what they're going to learn and this is how we get judged as teachers. That's what the outcomes are. There's a lot of different ways to reach those outcomes and those outcomes should be there in a curriculum and those outcomes should be standards that are set at that higher level to guarantee that our students are going through this and not just in some homeschool made up thing. And don't get mad at me. Don't me, but don't me quote Jeff Jarvis. Yeah, don't do. Not at me. Because blocking works on Blue Sky. So yeah, I mean I can be concerned about. So Matthew, Matthew Kirschenbaum, who I've quoted often on the show, who wrote a wonderful essay for the Atlantic called the textpocalypse, he's a English professor at the University of Maryland. I took a course from him and started a book lab and he was the academic reviewer of my book the Gutenberg Parenthesis. Matthew was on a task force for the Modern Language association in AI and it's a really. The report that they put out was really interesting because it basically said, don't panic. It's a tool like spell check. It's a tool like a word processor. It's another tool. We can figure out how to use this in a curriculum. So I'm not going to let that tool, if it doesn't panic a real English professor, it's not going to panic me.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that's a fair point. Jeff, what do you want to talk about?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think Elon Musk. Musk throwing the. The Monkey wrench into OpenAI and its effort to switch from going from being not for profit to for profit. I have said often. So Musk, as we should first give the background. He's. He put out, supposedly put out an offer for. Was it 97 billion? I think, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Just a cool 97 billion.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Otherwise known as two twitters, not 2.1 twitters. So. And Altman has already rejected it and Musk has insulted him back and all this. What's happening that I've talked on the show about this before is that there's going to be. There is about to start a cluster f of a renegotiation of the cap table for OpenAI because it's switching every investor in it, that Microsoft and all their contributions in kind are all going to be revalued. And who gets what share of the company when it becomes a for profit company and what stays in the not for profit and what goes to the for profit?

[Paris Martineau]

Right now, for Context for folks, OpenAI is structured in a weird way where There's a nonprofit OpenAI that owns the for profit OpenAI that the com other people have invested in, right? And then they're going to switch that to to all for profit. But you can't just do that and say, hey, we want to make this nonprofit a for profit. That's not allowed. Instead they have to spin it off somehow. So the nonprofit is going to have to be compensated in some way for the loss of the for profit OpenAI. And part of the calculations for this, like these negotiations, my colleague Martin Piers had estimated this in a newsletter earlier this week that this might end up giving the Nonprofit part of OpenAI something like a 25% stake in OpenAI's for profit business. And OpenAI is currently raising money at a 260 billion valuation, not including all the money that's been put in. And that would make the nonprofit version of OpenAI's stake worth about 65 billion. And this is a big deal because what Elon Musk did by trying to, by making this claim where he wants to buy OpenAI for two twitters, is he threw basically a spanner in the works by proposing a bigger number than that. What the nonprofit stake was supposed to be worth 65 billion. Instead he said 97 billion. So that means if the nonprofit is supposed to be fairly compensated for losing for profit OpenAI, Elon Musk just drove the price up by like half.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly. And this has to be approved by government because this is, this conversion is very difficult, so it has to be approved. So if the government says, oh well, we can see the market value of this is 97 billion. And then Musk also offered to merge the not for profit, this highly valuable piece with his fakacta AI. So very well explained. Thank you. And so I just find it's amusing, it's gameplay, it's ridiculous. And by the way, I should add that your colleague, Martin Piers, I haven't read the whole column, but of course his headline just pisses me off on its own. Would Musk be better than Altman at Running OpenAI?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, listen, he loves to make People mad. I will give him that. You and him both.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He succeeds. I don't like to make people mad. No, I don't want to make people mad.

[Paris Martineau]

Want them to at you, you know?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. No. So anyway, I thought I found that. That story interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

I agree.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean, I'm just thinking about when the time comes and they have to get government approval, which in some ways currently means having to get Elon Musk's approval.

[Paris Martineau]

Elon Musk is currently suing Open AI.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, that's messy.

[Paris Martineau]

It's all very, very messy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I'm not sure what level of government it may be the state where they're incorporated. I don't know.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, if it's the state, that would be, well, I mean, a little easier.

[Paris Martineau]

We've, I think the past couple weeks have shown that that's true. New government we currently have is willing to stick its hands in anything and everything that it was response to little consequence. But this is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

California is investigating the conversion. So it may be up to California.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, that's the one state where I think it is a. One of the states where it's a little more difficult for the government to. I mean, they still do as far much as they can to stick their hands there, but it is one of the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can tell you've been hanging out with Martin too much, Paris, because you didn't say a monkey wrench in the words works. You said a spanner in the works. You've been hanging out.

[Micah Sargent]

I did.

[Paris Martineau]

I did. I did say I did give some news ease over there. And for that I apologize to everybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You should.

[Paris Martineau]

It is interesting, though, the context for all of this, because as I talked about earlier, part of the reason that New York Times cited for Sam Altman calling Donald Trump before his inauguration, saying, hey, AGI is going to be achieved in the next four years, just you wait, is because Donald Trump has Elon Musk, his sworn enemy, at this point, on his other shoulder being like, hey, OpenAI sucks probably. So Sam Altman suddenly has to capitulate a lot to the administration in order to enjoy the same sort of privileges that it perhaps was expecting.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can I give you a palate cleanser that's also an AI story. That's also a generative AI story.

[Paris Martineau]

Sounds honeydew.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you think you can get that? You think it's possible? Sure it is. Line 95. So the, the drama of Altman being fired from Open AI is already now a plane ripped from that.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I thought about seeing this. One of my colleagues went and said it was actually really good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Really?

[Paris Martineau]

That. But she said it would only be really good to tech journalists that work with the information because no one else is going to understand it because it's about. It's. It's a play about Sam Altman's ouster from Open Air.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is a crisis driven tale set on a single night in San Francisco just after a tech company, Mind Mesh, has dismissed its leader, Seth. Holed up at home, he is plotting to get his job back while the company's panic board tries to figure out how to to move forward without him. A sociopath who lacks the requisite charm, Seth tells his confidants, I will not compromise. I will not admit fault. I was fired for creating miracles. The characters erupt in flagrantly unlikely monologues, as when Alina, the company's scrupulous chief safety officer, tells her colleagues about a disturbing recurring dream. One of them visual, vividly sexual.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, dear.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. The more troublesome is that their ethical arguments about AI feel rehashed. If you're following the issue at all. Oh, well, that's the review part, but don't ruin it for me. There are mentions throughout of Elon, no last name given, but there doesn't need to be Seth, annoyed with Alina Snipes. You should have just had Elon's baby when he wanted to.

[Micah Sargent]

We gotta see this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We gotta see.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I do have to go. Jeff, Come into town and we'll wielding.

[Micah Sargent]

A knife at one point, according to that photo. That's what I want to know when the knife comes out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff, are you allowed to go to Brooklyn? Does he?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Oh, it's in Brooklyn. Oh, we could go to one of my favorite restaurants, Henry's End in Brooklyn.

[Paris Martineau]

Lesson.

[Micah Sargent]

How do you get there? Do you take a helicopter?

[Paris Martineau]

Does a helicopter feel better for you than a bridge?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but I can. I can take a subway to Brooklyn.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's true. They do have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it does go under a river. And everybody thinks I'm crazy when I say I'd rather be in the tunnel. Oh my God, I could. That's where I'm in my car. But if I'm in the subway, which goes through and tunnels all the time, nobody thinks that's weird. Nobody says, oh my God, it could flood. Yes, it could. It has. In fact, the subway tunnels have flooded more than the car tunnels.

[Unknown]

But I think about it every time I take BART under the Bay Bridge.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's a point point every day because BART is not even dug into the in right into the into the.

[Paris Martineau]

Bart's just free floating.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's just kind of plopped down there, I think.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I don't like that.

[Micah Sargent]

That's true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because it. Well, actually, we could argue that makes it better for the earthquakes which happened there, which made the Bay Bridge collapse.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, you've been watching Intelligent Machines, but if you're listening to this, I'm going to do Leo's little spiel here. You should also join Club Twit. Leo tries to be really nice and not at all demanding whenever he does these speeches, but hey, I'm gonna do it. It's really hard to run a media business. Leo's been doing this forever. You listened to the show for this long. Think about how many other of shows from Twit you've listened to over the months, years. All the great content you've gotten. Wouldn't you like this to continue to stick around? One of the only ways that's gonna happen is if just a small percentage of you guys subscribe to Club Twit. You get a lot of stuff. For just $7 a month, you can get all of Twitt's shows ad free. You get access to members only video feeds with cool stuff like Mikey, isn't your crafting corner in there?

[Micah Sargent]

Heck yeah, it's great.

[Paris Martineau]

You get, you know, access to the Discord. We have all these cool conversations and inside jokes throughout the show that you would suddenly be a part of. You also can, you know, hop in the Discord and watch the behind the scenes show with us. It's Fantastic. It's only $7 per month and it supports the show that you're listening to. So I don't know. Sign up for Club Twit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well done. Well done.

[Micah Sargent]

That was lovely. That was amazing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now pay attention to Paris and do what she says. You hear me?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen to me.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. What Jeff said, what Paris said, what Jeff said, what Paris said.

[Unknown]

Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network switch. Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device, credit service port in 90 plus days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption. Required card has no cash access and expires in six months.

[Leo Laporte]

Cascade Natural Gas believes a warm home, hot water and natural gas energy should be available to everyone. That's why Cascade established the Oregon Low Income Bill Assistance and Energy Discount Programs. These programs provide income qualified applicants a discount on their monthly bill and if needed, help with past due balances. Qualifying for assistance is easy by calling Cascade or any of our partner community applications agencies. Get complete bill assistance [e-mail] help like.

[Unknown]

Your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network switch. Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualified unlocked device credit service report in 90 plus days device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card is no cash access and expires in six months.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you guys want to do picks of the week? Yeah, sure Michael, what you got?

[Micah Sargent]

I just want to remind everybody about the Sims recently. It was a really great point. Thank you very much. Goodbye. 25 year anniversary of the Sims and the Sims is fun and cool and it reminds me when I was younger playing with my, my sister. We would each. She would. She liked to build the houses and I she liked to. I can't remember exactly now I'm thinking about it. I think we both like to build parts of the house and we both like to decorate parts of the house and so we would play together where, you know, like I would make the kitchen and a few of the other rooms and decorate those and she would always do the living room and some of the other spaces and then we would kind of take turns back and forth playing. And I can also remember a fun story or funny story hopefully. When I was younger I was introduced to the Sims for the first time. I was visiting my grandma and she had the Sims open and she was playing and I came over and I sat down and I was like oh, you know, learning about it or whatever. And one of the characters was on screen and I looked down and it has their name and their date of birth and some other things and their zodiac sign and like their hunger and all that. And I saw it said cancer. And growing up, anybody out there who's like super religious will understand that like zodiac is the devil according to that. And so like I had no idea about zodiac signs at all. And so I turned to my grandma and I said, grandma, your sim has cancer. And I was really concerned about this sim. And she goes, oh no honey, he's a cancer. And that was the first time I ever learned about zodiac signs.

[Paris Martineau]

All downhill from there.

[Micah Sargent]

It was all down. Exactly. I just fell off the Christian horse at that point. But anyway, that's not what this is about. So I just pulled out the Sims 4. They like on Mac. It used to be you had the Origin app, now it's the EA app. I just re downloaded it the other day and started building a house and I wanted to see how long it was going to take me to bust out those motherload cheats. And I've been really good about holding off and it's fun.

[Paris Martineau]

The word mother load just unlocked so many memories in my brain. I was a really big Sims fan when I was a kid as well, but I've fallen off of it in recent years. But I know so many people still are die hard fans. It's crazy that it has been around for 25 years.

[Micah Sargent]

It's been around for a long time and there's nothing quite like it.

[Paris Martineau]

Arguably you can rent a car without paying an extra young driver fee.

[Unknown]

So me and my friends used to play this game. Multiplayer. Like there isn't, there isn't a multiplayer campaign component to this game. But we would have three computers set up and we would just rotate computers. So like we would just live in.

[Micah Sargent]

That town and then would you just save file over?

[Unknown]

No, no. Three different towns. Three different towns happening.

[Micah Sargent]

You each would go, that's so cool.

[Unknown]

So you have like a house in everybody else's town. Right?

[Micah Sargent]

That's so cool.

[Unknown]

But then like all these stories started happening. People started stealing people's wives and you know, it got, it got ugly.

[Micah Sargent]

Yes. It gets so messy. I. I've been having fun going back to it because I was like, oh my God, I cannot believe I spent as much money as I have on this game. Because I was like, I went to go download it and then it was taking a lot longer. I'm like, I have fiber. What's going on? And I look and there's like eight or 10 expansion packs that I bought over time. So I was waiting for them all to drown.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I remember having vampire ones, dog.

[Micah Sargent]

Ones, other weird stuff, pets, and the vet, you can start a vet clinic. Anyway, it's fun. I've been enjoying going back into it after a long time away. And so, yeah, if you're looking for some escapism, the Sims might be for you.

[Paris Martineau]

There's also a wild moderating cult like mod culture on this Sims. Mod culture, absolutely. I remember when I was looking to Patreon a surprising amount of Patreon's top like monetized paid creators are people are people who do sexy or drug related Sims mods. Sims mods where you could do like heroin or suicide or have sex about above the covers. It's like people are crazy for not safe for work Sims.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow, that's wild. I. I think I'll avoid the.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, probably. Probably avoid some of those. But some of them come.

[Micah Sargent]

Might be cool though. Yeah, some of them like if you want to. I just saw this the other day because somehow Instagram already knows I've been playing the Sims again of course. And I saw one where you can like quickly make a family and the family history without having to go into create a sim and create all of them. And so you can say, you know, my person has two grandparents and they've got two kids and this and that and the other. And then it automatically creates the sim. So there are some moderate mod scripts that kind of just do small things like that. So yeah, I don't know. Just a reminder that the Sims is out there and you can play it and it's fun. That's my pick.

[Paris Martineau]

My pick this week week is a website called WikiTalk. It is essentially. It pulls from Wikipedia's API and you can pull it up on your phone or on your computer and it just shows. It shows you an endlessly scrolling vertical feed of random Wikipedia articles. So they could be about literally anything. Like right now I have Jose Maria Rojas Garado, a Colombian Senator. Then the 2008 United States presidential election in Texas. And you can go through any of these if you want. You can save them. A guy named William Seaman, a photographer. The Battle of Bacchenlage. I don't know. It gives me stumble upon vibes.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

That I truly miss. But I just. There's so many interesting parts of Wikipedia and sometimes I just feel the itch to get a new Wikipedia rabbit hole. And this is the website I will be going to Wikitok.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow. I had Tumblr open in one tab and stumble upon clicks in another tab. That was back in the day.

[Paris Martineau]

And now we just have to scroll in our feeds forever. Jeff, what do you got for us?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So we should mention just for the record, because this was this week in Google that Google I o will be May 20 and 21. AI, AI, AI AI. But the other thing I'm going to talk about is BuzzFeed. Poor BuzzFeed. So, having some rough days today, but BuzzFeed wants to start its own AI driven social media platform.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know. Now, BuzzFeed, Jonas. Jonas Peretti is a hell of a innovator. He's done a lot of amazing things. And, you know, I'm not gonna. I'm gonna give him some slack here. And what he's arguing is that he says that the Internet is broken, Addictive content has led to growing dissatisfaction, toxic masculine vibe. True. That algorithms make it hard to express your identity authentically and just for fun. Yeah. Okay. So then he argues that we are in the rise of snarf snake stakes. Novelty, anger retention, and fear. This is the business model of mass media. Right. You exaggerate the stakes, you manufacture novelty, you manipulate people to be angry, you retain. You have retention hacks. We're holding them on to people who don't want to be there. And you bring fear. All true. All true. That's all mass media too. And so he wants to start something that's going to be livelier and nicer than that. Okay, good. And I don't know how AI is involved. He wants to.

[Paris Martineau]

Jonah is obsessed with AI. I interviewed him last year for my yearly random foray into media feature.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's right, you did.

[Paris Martineau]

And he uses AI all the time in his life and also kind of just thinks it's the future.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My other concern about this is that we don't need another proprietary social network. Have we not learned that lesson, people?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean, I think part of what his. His impetus for this is the rise of buzzfeed was tied to that era where Facebook was king for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, yeah, I would hope he would learn the lesson to not.

[Paris Martineau]

But now he's like, well, I could. I could hold the keys to the castle.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly what. I assume that's my fear. Now, if it's federated, coming at a.

[Paris Martineau]

Time where buzzfeed has God knows how many few employees, they've had to sell off nearly every aspect of their business.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just had a layoff at HuffPost.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So my hope is that it's federated with one of the protocols with. With at Protocol, at Blue sky, or with Activity. And. And if it is, then I. I'll think nicer about it. I hope. AI is used to help people create what they want to create what they want to say. Okay, then I'll be open about it, but we'll see. So that's the. That's the news of the. Of the week. Meanwhile, just to give you. Good news. Back to our first topic of the day. Sales of Teslas are down 60% in Germany.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I saw that.

[Paris Martineau]

Canadian candidates have said they are for I guess prime minister have said they're thinking of doing 100% tax tariff on Tesla.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I kind of love it. I don't love it.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, thank you all for joining us. We do intelligent machines every Wednesday, Wednesday 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. You can watch us stream on seven platforms, YouTube, Twitch, X4 other platforms I will not name because I do not know them. Micah, if folks want to keep up with you and what you're doing, where do they go to do that?

[Micah Sargent]

Excuse me, I'm ikasargent on many a social media network. Or you can head to Chihuahua Coffee. C H I H U a H u a coffee where I've got links the places I'm most active online.

[Paris Martineau]

Beautiful. And Jeff, well delivered.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, nicely delivered.

[Paris Martineau]

What about where they go to at.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You Jeff Jarvis hey hey hey hey jeff jarvis.com where I have the hardback here but the paperback version of the Gutenberg parenthesis is out and yeah, that's it. Jeff jarvis.com great.

[Paris Martineau]

And you can follow me at Paris NY NYC on Bluesky or send me story ideas at Martineau01 on Signal. Thanks for joining us everybody. Bye bye.

[Unknown]

Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network switch. Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualify and unlock device, credit service port in 90 days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption. Required card is no cash access and expires in six months.

[Leo Laporte]

Cascade Natural Gas believes a warm home, hot water and natural gas energy should be available to everyone. That's why Cascade established the Oregon Low Income Bill Assistance and Energy Discount Programs. These programs provide income qualified applicants a discount on their monthly bill and if needed, help with past due balances. Qualifying for assistance is easy by calling Cascade or any of our partner community action agencies. Get complete bill assistance [e-mail] help.