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Intelligent Machines (Audio)
IM 820: Watch Your Wallet Jony - The Environmental Impact of LLMs
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The Environmental Impact of LLMs
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Hello, everybody. Leo Laporte here. Jeff Jarvis is also here. Paris Martineau. Our special guest this hour is a tech humanist, Kate o' Neill. She's written a book called what Matters? A Leader's Guide to Making Human Friendly Tech Decisions. How does AI fit in with that? We'll find out next on Intelligent Machines. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines, Episode 820, recorded Wednesday, May 21, 2025. Watch your wallet, Johnny. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we look at the intelligent machines all around us. AI, robotics, even nowadays, your microwave oven. Jeff Jarvis is here. Professor of journalism emeritus at the City University of New York.
- [00:58]
Jeff Jarvis
Huh?
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Paris Martineau
Where? Where was that?
- [00:59]
Leo Laporte
At the City University of New York. He's also currently at SUNY Stony Brook and the Montclair State University. Author of the Web We Weave, his latest, the Gutenberg parenthesis. You can see them all on the shelf to his left. Thank you, Jeff, for being here dressed all black.
- [01:17]
Paris Martineau
Thank you for having me.
- [01:18]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Also with us from tech journalist from parts unknown, Paris Martineau at Paris Martineau.
- [01:26]
Kate O'Neill
That's true. Also proud owner of a lava LA.
- [01:30]
Leo Laporte
With my cowboy hat.
- [01:31]
Kate O'Neill
It just. Listen, we're still working on getting the top cap for it, but right now the cap is a cowboy hat. And throughout the show it will be bubbling because I've finally fixed it using my basic electrical skills.
- [01:42]
Paris Martineau
It's not bubbling now, though.
- [01:43]
Kate O'Neill
It isn't because I just turned it on.
- [01:47]
Paris Martineau
Patience.
- [01:48]
Kate O'Neill
I know. I'm just. I'm preparing you guys for what's to come.
- [01:51]
Leo Laporte
Our guest as we. The new format for the show, as we change a little bit, is that we have a guest in the beginning, most of the time in the beginning anyway. We get to the intelligent machine news after that. Our guest for this show is Kate o' Neill, chief executive, business writer, speaker. She's the founder of KO Insights, a strategic advisory firm who advises some of the biggest and the best, including in just the A's, Adobe Amsterdam and Austin. That's just the A's.
- [02:22]
Jeff Jarvis
That's just the A's.
- [02:23]
Leo Laporte
Just the A's. Hi, Kate. It's great to have you.
- [02:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Thank you, Leo. I don't have a lava lamp or a cowboy hat.
- [02:30]
Leo Laporte
But you have a whiteboard, Kate.
- [02:31]
Paris Martineau
I always admire whiteboards.
- [02:33]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's good. If you have a whiteboard, you can have anything, can't you?
- [02:36]
Kate O'Neill
That's true.
- [02:38]
Leo Laporte
She's the author of a brand new book, what Matters Next, A Leader's guide to me. Oh, look at that. It's emerging. Making human friendly tech decisions in a world that's moving too fast. Too true. Absolutely. Yeah. So this show is particularly about AI and I mean, there is no subject moving faster than AI. It is, it is a revolution, I think somewhat akin to the industrial revolution, the invention of the Internet all rolled into one. I mean, and we are struggling here to understand it better. You talk about it's not just the.
- [03:14]
Jeff Jarvis
Speed, it's the scale, the scope. Right.
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Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [03:16]
Leo Laporte
It's everywhere. Right.
- [03:18]
Jeff Jarvis
It's the web we weave. It's all that.
- [03:21]
Leo Laporte
Nicely done.
- [03:22]
Paris Martineau
Nicely done.
- [03:23]
Leo Laporte
It's also, and you know, our guest last week kind of highlighted this difficult to separate the. The good from the bad, the AI con, the AI hype from the AI be reality, which makes it even difficult for business leaders. I'm sure that there's a lot of pressure from their stakeholders where it's your AI strategy, but at the same time, you know, you don't want to start doing something that's not going to help you. How do you help them cut through that?
- [03:52]
Jeff Jarvis
That's just the thing. I think a lot of times with emerging technology of any sort, what's your fill in the blank? Strategy is a very common question and it's the wrong. It should never be about leading with the technology. You have a strategy and AI may or may not be helpful in helping you deploy that strategy, amplify, accelerate what you're trying to do, but it should not be led by the technology. You lose complete sight of what it is you're trying to accomplish if you allow yourself to be, you know, your dog to be wagged by the tail or something like that. Is that how that works?
- [04:25]
Leo Laporte
Your sandwich to be grasped by the crust? I believe we decided. Kate, can you. So what should they be thinking about?
- [04:35]
Jeff Jarvis
So you should be thinking about alignment between the business objectives and the human outcomes. You should be thinking about how your business, what your business exists to do and is trying to do at scale. That's its purpose. You know, we talk a lot about purpose in business and in leadership and it sounds really esoteric, it sounds really flighty and fluffy. But I think if you really think of it as just a distillation of what it is you're trying to do and that you can articulate and say three to five words, no more, that is strategic. So synchronization. And if you can do that and then align it with what people outside the organization are trying to do when they meet and marry up with what you are trying to accomplish. You can think about that alignment and use technology and data and algorithms and all the rest of that to amplify and accelerate that alignment, as opposed to simply amplifying, you know, the objectives of the business, because those can go haywire. Those can go off into unintended consequences land, and nobody wants to see that happen. We would like to see there to be some synergy between what businesses are trying to accomplish in the world and what humans individually are trying to accomplish in the world.
- [05:43]
Paris Martineau
Kate, I love that you call yourself a tech humanist, and I want to probe that for a minute, because my argument of late is I think that the world changed with Sputnik and STEM took over, and the humanities and the social sciences and the arts kind of lose out, and even in universities aren't as valued as they used to be or should be, and in society, not. So define yourself as a tech humanist. And what does humanism mean in this modern context?
- [06:15]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, I think there's a lot of layers to it, but for me, it has to do a lot with what you're talking about. The humanities layer is a really important construct. I am a linguist by education. I'm also a fan.
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Leo Laporte
Another linguist.
- [06:27]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, another linguist.
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Paris Martineau
We had one last week.
- [06:31]
Leo Laporte
I was bombarded by a linguist linguist last week. You're not an academic linguist anymore, though?
- [06:37]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, not anymore. No. I'm more of a practicing and very practicing linguist. I love languages. I love languages. Oh, cool. Yeah, we'll have to compare.
- [06:47]
Paris Martineau
All right. I'm gonna feel really stupid. What languages do you speak?
- [06:51]
Jeff Jarvis
I, you know, I think speak is a really tough.
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Paris Martineau
Okay. All right.
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Jeff Jarvis
What I feel.
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Paris Martineau
I feel at all comfortable with can't.
- [06:57]
Jeff Jarvis
Order dinner in study 30 languages. There are only a few of them. Can I order the next round of beer in? And I think that's really the benchmark we should be trying to hit.
- [07:12]
Paris Martineau
How did you get from that obvious love of linguistics and languages to what you're doing now?
- [07:19]
Jeff Jarvis
So I was heading up the language laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the early 90s when the web came about. And I built the first departmental website at the University of Illinois at Chicago at a time when, as you may recall, like, websites were being curated manually onto what's new and what's cool lists. And my site made it onto a what's new list, not a what list, but. Oh, thank you. And it got noticed by a guy at Toshiba in California. He recruited me to come out and build an intranet for them. It turned out to be the first intranet at Toshiba. So that started a stint in Silicon valley in the mid-90s during what, as, you know, a heyday of innovation. And you were just.
- [08:02]
Leo Laporte
You were just down the road from Urbana, where a young kid named Marc Andreessen was writing the first browser. One of the first browsers.
- [08:10]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. That figures into what matters next. I call out Marc Andreessen by name in the book because it's so interesting to me that we were at sister schools. He was at Urbana, and I was at Chicago. And what he put together with Mosaic was really, really important. And obviously it shaped the web as we know it. I. I think when I saw the graphical web for the first time, it blew my mind. I thought, this is going to change everything.
- [08:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I had the same reaction.
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Jeff Jarvis
It did.
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Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and then you were smart. You jumped on it. I just.
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Jeff Jarvis
I was just so.
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Leo Laporte
Started doing podcasts. No, I didn't do them back then. We didn't have them back then.
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Paris Martineau
What do you think about recent today as an accelerationist, which you mentioned? Acceleration.
- [08:56]
Jeff Jarvis
I think that's the challenge, is that Andreessen has a very unique perspective from his bubble world. And I don't think that it's the same as what many of us experience. I think that the ramifications of acceleration are too harsh for most people, for humanity at scale. So when we think about the impacts of running headlong into AI deployment without thinking about the consequences, we run the risk of amplifying bias, of amplifying polarization, and all of the many kinds of net negative effects that we know can happen with technology at scale that has not been sort of fully vetted for its place in society and how it's going to impact the world and human experience.
- [09:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And then you get people like Mark Zuckerberg, also in a bubble, saying, well, people only have three friends, so we're going to give them AI friends to make up for the difference.
- [09:54]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
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Leo Laporte
And that's not human.
- [09:55]
Jeff Jarvis
Girl dying in your backyard is more important than, you know, some famine in Africa or something like that. That kind of skewed perspective is not really helpful to us.
- [10:04]
Leo Laporte
Right. Is that part of the problem with AI that is being really created by those people? The Elon Musk's, the Mark Andreessen's, the.
- [10:11]
Jeff Jarvis
Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, even Sam Altman. I think once you get inside of that Silicon Valley bubble, it's really hard to be connected to the rest of the world in terms of the speed of change, the expectation of how much change we can handle the sort of connectedness of it all. And I think it's really hard. I think you can say the same about Washington, D.C. it's a very intrinsically connected kind of network, and it's very hard for people inside of D.C. to see outside of their bubble. Similarly, I think in Silicon Valley, you eat your own dog food and you're very, very bought in to the mythology of Silicon Valley. It doesn't occur to you that other people are not equally keeping pace with the many frontier models emerging every day and the varying theories on AGI and, you know, all that stuff that, that everybody else feels overwhelmed by every day.
- [11:05]
Kate O'Neill
How do you think that we fix that in terms of, I guess, Silicon Valley? I mean, how do you think that as a industry, it. Is it possible for comp. The leaders in charge of these companies creating leading AI models to eventually kind of broaden their horizons and incorporate perspectives bey their own, or are we too far gone?
- [11:27]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I think it's such a good question and it's such an important one. I think there's a multiple, sort of multiple layers to it. One is, you know, if the people actually leading some of these top Silicon Valley companies and those adjacent to them are genuinely curious to, to kind of consider outside viewpoints and, you know, horizons beyond their own. There are models in my book, they can talk to other consultants and advisors who will help them think about that kind of decision making. But I think even more importantly, it comes down to all of the other leaders of companies, associations, organizations, you know, nonprofits, everything outside of that. That realm, to think about their adoption of technology, to think about their adoption of, of these types of norms and to try to push back on that. I think that we, we need to look at that in. I introduce a model in what matters next called the Now Next Continuum. And it's meant to just connect our thinking in the present to the thinking in the future so that the future doesn't feel so mysterious and unruly and daunting for people who don't spend their every waking moment considering future impacts, which most people don't. And they find it incredibly overwhelming to consider what the future brings because it's just full of technology and geopolitical upheaval and economic instability and climate change and everything that feels too much. So they know that these decisions that they're making have huge consequences, and they want to try to better understand how to make them. So having a better model for making those decisions inside of those other companies helps. But I think also at the individual level, recognizing that we have a lot of power collectively in how the discourse that we have with one another, the decisions we make with our purchasing, with our app usage, with the data we choose to engage in sharing with the platforms we choose to participate in, all of those things make a difference. They don't feel like they do sometimes at a microscopic level, but I think collectively those things do make a difference.
- [13:28]
Paris Martineau
So I'm gonna get some free consulting from you. I'm teaching now at Stony Brook, and I'm not a real academic like you are. I snuck in through journalism.
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Leo Laporte
I don't think Kate considers herself an academic anymore. I hope not.
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Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
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Paris Martineau
Yeah. 30 languages. You learned. You learned.
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Leo Laporte
She was. She was. Yeah. Well, she consults Yale and Harvard, which shows she's very political.
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Paris Martineau
Always a Marine, you know. So I'm on the Syrian committee for a new program at Stony Brook called Tech AI in Society. And my hope is that it does exactly what you. You push for, is to bring humanism and. And humanities and the arts into the discussion and not let it all be controlled by just the technologists. So I want to bring people from many disciplines into this. So I'm curious what you have a lot of really practical, good frameworks and advice for companies and for institutions. What about students? What about a college student coming into college right now thinking, I want to be around this AI stuff, but what should a university be responsible for teaching them?
- [14:37]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's such a great and important question, too. I think that we do a disservice to students if we assume that STEM is the be all end all of that discussion. We also do a disservice if we don't think that STEM is important. So it's a very much a both end to that discussion. I think we very much need our emerging students to have tech skills. We really need to reconnect them with human skills, though, those soft skills like context and good judgment and emotional intelligence and kind of, you know, pattern recognition and things like that. Those are the skills that I think transcend the emerging, you know, sort of changing skills in tech landscapes. We're always going to need to be able to synthesize information and make good decisions. We're always going to need to be able to articulate a good instruction. We're doing that with prompts and generative AI. We do it with delegating as a manager, those kinds of that, you know, sort of clarifying what it is we're looking for and being able to articulate good instructions. That's a really, really important skill, no matter what context you're operating within. And I know, Leo, you were about to interject something.
- [15:43]
Leo Laporte
Well, no, because it makes me think that for a long time you got a liberal education to be a generalist. But there's been so much pressure in this technological society of ours to become a specialist that whether a physician or a scientist or a coder, there's pressure to narrow your focus, not broaden your focus.
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Jeff Jarvis
Do you know, I think of that as a both and too, I think it's really so valuable to be able to see the world through a particular lens, have something that you're really passionate about and be able to understand very deeply. I think it's a T shaped thing though. I think it really helps to be able to go really broad across a range of subjects. Here we come back to humanities, right? Being well versed in history and context and social studies and geography and really understanding the world around you and how those things interconnect. We're in a systems driven world. Everything connects with everything else. All of these kinds of things that we're innovating upon, all the transformational kinds of things we're doing with digital connectedness, all of those things are going to impact everything else. It's impossible to pull back from globalization, it's impossible to pull back from an economy where things are, are interconnected and, and like tariffs are going to cause downstream supply chain impacts and things like that. It's really important that we understand those kinds of consequences and we won't understand it without having that breadth of, of systems thinking. But I think it also helps. Like for me, language is a really good lens to look at things through and be able to understand, you know, communication, semantics, you know, meaning. Meaning is an incredibly valuable lens to understand what makes humans tick, you know, what, what makes us connect with one another and what drives, I think purpose, for example, is the shape that meaning takes in business. And so it becomes this really, really valuable clarifying lens to have something you're really passionate about. And that's what a major can be for students in education. But I think we absolutely need to give the gift of a breadth of information. How those things connect with one another, how one topic pushes on another, how important it is to understand physics in order to understand math and math in order to understand programming and all of those kinds of things. So I think that's the world we're in is that it really, really matters that we have both the generalist and the specialist perspective.
- [18:06]
Paris Martineau
True. You can send the invoice to me. I'm Curious for you personally as a linguist of long standing, when ChatGPT comes out two years, two plus years ago, what was and, and you know, you follow technology, you've been right about technology. But at that moment when the world reacted to the literate machine, what was your personal reaction to it? The first time you started playing with.
- [18:31]
Jeff Jarvis
Was so, it was such a moment of, of this is what I have seen coming for a really long time. Oh, interesting that everybody's been asking me for so many years. It's always been a joke, like, oh, you, you were a German major and a Russian and linguistics double minor and your grad work is in linguistics and language development and you're a technology expert. Like, how does that compute? I'm like, I, I just think these things make a difference in a way that's really hard to articulate right now. But there are underpinnings, there are ways that natural language processing is bringing us around to like, think about how Google understands the web through semantic relationships. Think about how we've done so much of the underpinnings of the web and of technology on layers of language. And to me that was one of the most gratifying moments when this tool came about that depends completely on natural language interaction. And that also, I think, just got everybody so excited about the potential for technology and about the potential for AI because we could understand how to interact with it, because it was using what we use every single day. So that's where that was for me. And it still remains. I'm still fascinated by the reaction, the widespread reaction to not just ChatGPT, but the entire category of large language models and generative AI. And I think it has everything to do with the fact that we're interacting in our natural language. And it feels like we're just existing as humans in a world that feels very natural to us. We're, we're beings and bodies, we're sense driven, we make sense, we make meaning through our senses. And the, the way that we interact with the world is so driven by language, it just feels like, like an obvious extension of that. I don't think, by the way, that that is inherently going to be the way we move through all the future modalities of AI and of various technologies. I just think it's a really important transitional one. I don't think we're going to lose it now that we have it. I think prompt based and sort of natural language interaction with devices is going to continue to be a really important modality. But I think there are so many Other sense based modalities that we have yet to mine fully. I think we're going to be seeing a lot more.
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Paris Martineau
Like what?
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Jeff Jarvis
Well, you think about the wide range of our senses. We've done a lot with gesture, but we haven't done everything we could do with gesture. We could think a lot about sort of auditory cues, these devices that I'm wearing right here. Apple's done a lot of really sophisticated stuff to try to filter out meaningful noise from signal and noise and how you kind of traverse the world where you can, you know, hear what you want to hear and filter out what you don't need to hear. But what have something intrude when it's a matter of your safety. You know, there's a, there's a lot of really meaningful parsing that can happen on sort of sensory levels and making sense of the world with us and, and as we understand what human experience needs to be in different contexts and different modalities. So I think there's a whole matrix that you could do across all the senses and different modalities, contexts that we're in. And it's really exciting to think about where that could go.
- [21:52]
Leo Laporte
It is a good point. We've kind of gone a little retrograde in computer user interfaces to the mouse and the keyboard. It's kind of a primitive, it didn't feel at the time primitive, but it is kind of a primitive way of interacting that voice and speech and language ultimately are really our natural way of interacting and a much better way. Yeah.
- [22:11]
Jeff Jarvis
And unfortunately, I think with the advent of smart speakers several years back, I think that was a really exciting time. Unfortunately, the problem with smart speakers and a lot of that area is it's all surveillance technology and we don't have the right types of regulations and protections in order to make sure that devices listening in, in our homes are not being used against us or that we're not being manipulated by the data that's being harvested in those contexts. So there's, there's a lot of really, it comes again to these interconnected systems and being able to make sense of, of these complicated realities. But I think that there's a lot of potential there, but we just have to be very eyes wide open about the kind of systemic reality that they're operating within.
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Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's funny that. I mean it's not just the voice activated devices. Everything you do nowadays online is surveilled and it's the Internet, the interconnected nature of our technologies that have made that possible. So it is both a Real enabling technology, but it has some real pitfalls as well.
- [23:18]
Jeff Jarvis
I mean, I think you find that across the board, right? Like you can point to just about anything and say, you know, upside down side. One of the things that I talk about in my second to last book, A Future so Bright was the idea of strategic optimism. That the way we talk about the future historically has been dystopia versus Utopia. And that's a really broken framework like it gives us. Nobody believes that utopia is really on the table. So all we're really ever talking about is shades of dystopia.
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Paris Martineau
Well said.
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Jeff Jarvis
And then if we only think about things through shades of dystopia, what we're doing is discarding what Utopia was doing for us in that sci fi trope model. In the trope model, Dystopia is telling us what we need to be cautious about and Utopia is telling us what we hope for. And if we discard one without the other, we don't have a very balanced perspective of how to build the future we actually want to build. So we need both of those things and I call it strategic optimism. When we use the things that we want to be cautious of and know we should be fearful of in balance with the things that we really hope for and that we hope we can accomplish. I think there's a lot with emerging technology that can be so hopeful and we could do such bright and wonderful things with while we're being very cautious not to allow these dystopian horrors to take place.
- [24:38]
Leo Laporte
But it's an advisor. I love that that utopianism gives us the vision of what we want and dystopia cautions us about what the risks are. Is a really nice way of thinking about that. So you don't cast one out.
- [24:51]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, thanks. I think it's a really balanced and healthy way to think about the future and has more agency. It allows us to bring more of our decision making selves to the decision decision making process, the actionable process of what's the future we're trying to build.
- [25:07]
Paris Martineau
I'm really gratified to see your this is a hobby horse and mine is long termism and company. And I'm glad to see you quote Emile Torres and their critique of McCaskill and longtermism and that view. How do we grapple with the Doomsters, with those who I think are extremists in their own kind of effort to claim that they can create Utopia but we should because they. Because we can trust them to prevent dystopia and they've gained so much resource and so much attention and so much money. How do we deal with those, I think, crackpots?
- [25:48]
Jeff Jarvis
It's so cynical, right? It's this idea that the future is lost to us and so we might as well. Or that the present is lost to us, so we might as well build in an accelerated way toward the future, right? Like we owe it to future generations to build the fastest technology we can to accelerate as fast as we can toward these future models. And to me, that's just malarkey, to borrow Joe Biden's term, right? It's so silly to me to think that we don't owe anything to the existing humans who are alive on this planet today. It is so out of step with any reality of anyone who travels the world and meets people, any place in the world can, can really dimensionalize the reality of humanity in other places. And if you don't, if you're living in that bubble where all you ever interact with are other billionaires in Silicon Valley and that's all that matters to you, it's very easy to tune out the reality of billions of people living on the planet who are not living in that bubble and who very much would love to have their daily needs taken care of by more pragmatic technologies, more pragmatic solutions. So it's that balance of saying, look, we absolutely need to take care of the people who are alive today. We can't let them be victims and sort of wipe them to the side while we think about what imagined futures we are building toward. We have to have these things in balance with one another. We can't allow ourselves to be too slow either. That's the other side of the equation is that I think a lot of what we, we see when we think about, you know, dawdling and having all the information we need and yet failing to make decisions. That's the sort of thing where we see the foot dragging around climate action, for example, the things we know we absolutely need to do. And I say in the book, a couple of times in 10, 20 years, there is no climate action that we could take that would feel like we were too rash, right? Like we know we need to be acting much faster than we're acting. So it's that balance of, you know, where are we overshooting the information we have and the confidence we should have in that information, and where are we sort of dragging our feet around things we absolutely should have done yesterday? And that, that is a perpetual dilemma. And I think it's one that, you know, you can come up with those extremes to make it easy to digest and process. But for most leaders, most executives operating in, you know, 50, 50 million dollar companies to billion dollar companies, the realities don't feel quite that extreme. They're just trying to make sense of how do I deal with the board pressuring me to do this and customers pressuring me to do this, and how do I balance those kinds of conflicts. And I think the tools work just as well, these kind of now, next continuum and the through line thinking. The ability to try to keep those ends of the perspective in balance is just as effective, no matter what level you're making those decisions. For individuals too, when you talk to.
- [28:47]
Leo Laporte
These business leaders, don't they say, oh, yeah, that's all well and good, but if I've got to compete with these other companies and they're going to take the cutthroat point of view, I don't have time, I don't have the luxury to be humanist.
- [29:02]
Jeff Jarvis
There's some of that sense, but I think there's just as much a sense that, that there's got to be a way to do this where we're not screwing over humanity in the process.
- [29:11]
Leo Laporte
They want to be a way in their hearts, they want to.
- [29:14]
Jeff Jarvis
I think there's plenty of people you could, you could sort of paint with that brush. But there are an awful lot of leaders who come up to me after my keynotes and say, this is the vocabulary I've been looking for. It's the frameworks I've been looking for. I've been trying to have this conversation with my board and I just don't have the tools. And this is so needed right now. And that's what pushed me to write the book, was to, to put as many of these tools together for leaders to be able to have informed conversations and say, look, you know, if we're cutthroat about this, fine, but if we're cutthroat about it in a way that ultimately sets us up for regulatory oversight, that's going to be harsh. We're shooting ourselves in the foot. If we set ourselves up for breaking up by, you know, by companies or by country oversight, we're, we're shooting ourselves in the foot. And really, just if we think about the ways that, you know, people could start popularizing how evil we are, you know, and we lose our market share, we lose market trust. That's important too. Trust is an incredibly important part of the consumer market, and we see a lot of documentation of that in the book. Edelman does a really great job in their trust barometer every year of measuring the impact of trust. And it turns out, as you probably have seen, year after these last couple of years, I think the last three years have been the ones where corporations, out of all the entities that Edelman looks at, have the highest public trust of any of the entities they study. So it's an incredibly high responsibility. It's a large responsibility for corporate leaders to be able to say, look, we're setting the agenda here. You know, we have to take it upon ourselves to make sure we're not screwing this up. We can at least show some sense of responsibility. And all the models right now with ESG and sustainability, all these kinds of things are a little flawed. They're a little bit too little too late. There's a little bit of difficulty in using any of them. They don't quite get at the heart of what we need to talk about. But there's something there. There's models, there's tools. We can begin to have this conversation in ways that. That are measured and can actually get us to a better place.
- [31:22]
Paris Martineau
What do you think of. Go ahead, Leo.
- [31:23]
Leo Laporte
I'm just gonna say I hope you're right. I hope it's not all just great marketing that's giving these companies trust and that they sincerely want it. I think as individuals, they do. I think you're right. When a CEO comes up to you and says that, I think it's genuine. But then the pressures from the board, the stakeholders, the political situation, the environment, and all the other things kind of pile on in, and sometimes I don't know if they can keep the resolve that they need.
- [31:51]
Jeff Jarvis
I think you're right and you're realistic to acknowledge that. I think it's not a difficult thing to be realistic about, but at the same time, I think that there are very real examples of companies being able to demonstrate true leadership positions. And you don't have to look to Patagonia for that. You don't have to look to the sort of the classics. You can even look at some, like Apple resisting, you know, privacy inquiries and protecting user data. You can look at, you know, you can look at a lot of, kind of classic within the industry examples of companies and leaders taking leadership positions on matters of principle. And when they do that, every time they do that, they're making it easier for the next company leader to do that and the next leader to do that. And I think we just need to create momentum around those decisions and show what they are and really celebrate those. And the More we do that, I think the more vocabulary it gives for leaders to be able to make those kinds of decisions, it gives more examples to talk about in their boardroom. I've been in those boardrooms. I've facilitated board meetings that have been really contentious and really hard. But I think the more you're able to come up with crisp, vivid examples of competitors who are making these kinds of decisions, who are following regulators advice, who are, you know, getting ahead of regulations, who are saying, all right, I know we're in a moment where deregulation is trendy, but what we need to do is build our own governance internally instead of waiting for regulators to catch up with us, because we know that we're going to need to innovate quickly, and we don't want to go off the rails. We want to build sustainable technologies and innovations that we're going to be able to stand behind for generations. We don't want to have regulators come after us down the road and have to pay billions of dollars in fines for violating public trust or doing irresponsible things with data. So those kinds of conversations are a lot easier to have when you have some examples to point to.
- [33:49]
Paris Martineau
What do you think generally of journalistic coverage of technology and AI?
- [33:55]
Jeff Jarvis
I think it's a little breathless, isn't it?
- [33:59]
Leo Laporte
I am, for sure.
- [34:00]
Jeff Jarvis
Right.
- [34:01]
Kate O'Neill
He's got no essence.
- [34:02]
Leo Laporte
That's why we have Paris on to slap me around.
- [34:06]
Jeff Jarvis
It tends to be, I feel, you know, we get into these. These moments where there's. There's a lack of curiosity where, where we're sort of parroting whatever the AI press release is that came in through the email that day. Right. We're. We're allowing that to be the story. And, and I think we do so much better when we, when we ask the big questions, when we try to connect. Connect the dots. There's been some really fine journalism in the last few weeks that I've highlighted on my LinkedIn. For example, the story about the New Orleans Police Department using facial recognition surveillance over the last couple of years without disclosing it illegally. Yeah, yeah. Incredible journalism that surfaced that. And a commenter on my post pointed out, you know, there's got to be more cities that are doing this. It's got to be much more common. I'm like, of course, it seems like that's very common, but it's going to take intrepid investigative journalism to uncover more cases of this before we have the sort of the wherewithal to go after it as a pattern as opposed to it being a one off, like hand slap sort of situation.
- [35:11]
Leo Laporte
That's Paris's mission statement, right, Paris?
- [35:13]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's true.
- [35:15]
Leo Laporte
That's why we need investigative reporters. What do you. Last question. Because we've used up our time. But what do you tell CEOs about adopting AI? I mean, this is almost impossible to judge. Whether this is a must have. Is it going to be valuable? Is it going to be detrimental? What do you tell them?
- [35:33]
Jeff Jarvis
No, I think it's, it's. The conversation starts with again, you know, we got to make sure we understand what it is you're doing as an organization. Right. Like, yeah, what's your purpose? And we can work our way through a canvas that I used to think about brand and culture and experience and dimensionalizing all that out, thinking about the data that we're modeling the business in and then thinking about the technology that we're actually using to build the business. Once we do that, with that kind of discipline, we can go totally crazy with experimenting with AI. I love thinking about the wonderful innovations that can happen. Here's one observation that came through, what matters next? And I think it's a, a really important one that I don't get a chance to say often enough, that is that I think we talk about digital transformation and innovation as if they're interchangeable concepts and they're actually not. One is more of a playing catch up. Digital transformation is about playing catch up to what the market externalities are where you are in the moment and innovation is about getting ahead of that moment. And I think if we are in a moment where we're saying, look, all the market has moved to this place where we need to transform to catch up. People's expectations are that there's going to be a certain amount of, of algorithmic intervention. Like you can't do a streaming platform that doesn't have really good AI recommendations. You can't do retail without good recommendations. You couldn't do Spotify or a competitor without AI and recommendations at this point, like that's just where the market is. So you're going to need to be there. But if you're trying to get ahead, you're going to need to think really totally green space about the whole thing. And you're going to have to go into places that people aren't yet, but you need to do it responsibly and you need to be thinking about how can we be aligning what it is we're trying to do with what people need to do and ultimately how can we bring that to a new place. And I think that's where the excitement is, that's where the opportunity is, and that's where we can use a lot of strategic optimism to get ourselves to a place where we're using technology for really good human experiences at scale.
- [37:30]
Leo Laporte
Well, I took the CEO quiz on your website and I came out really bad. So I think I need to. I think I need to hire you.
- [37:40]
Kate O'Neill
Was there a person in there to say, are you doing this in the middle of a podcast, too?
- [37:45]
Leo Laporte
Well, I thought, you know, I should see, you know, if I'm a good decision maker or not. And apparently I don't pay much attention to the future, so that's not good. And I got a cat. I got a cat waving at me.
- [37:56]
Jeff Jarvis
So anyway, they all have cats waving at me.
- [37:59]
Leo Laporte
Oh, they all have cats. Oh, good. Okay. I don't feel so bad that I.
- [38:02]
Paris Martineau
Think CEOs are probably more dog people. I'm wondering.
- [38:05]
Leo Laporte
I'm a cat person.
- [38:07]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's why you're not a good CEO.
- [38:08]
Jeff Jarvis
Cat CEOs out there.
- [38:11]
Leo Laporte
Well, you got two, three out of three here, right?
- [38:15]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, that's true.
- [38:17]
Paris Martineau
Which are you? Are any of the above. Kate, are you a cat or a dog person?
- [38:21]
Jeff Jarvis
I've always had cats, but I love dogs. I think we don't deserve dogs. Dogs are just too good for us.
- [38:26]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [38:26]
Kate O'Neill
So it's an Oops all cats panel here.
- [38:28]
Leo Laporte
We deserve cats, though is the second.
- [38:30]
Paris Martineau
Yes, we do.
- [38:31]
Kate O'Neill
We do deserve cats.
- [38:35]
Leo Laporte
The book is called what Matters Next, A Leader's Guide to Making Human Friendly Tech Decisions in a World that's Moving Too fast. We can all agree on that. Kate o' Neill, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
- [38:46]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, real pleasure.
- [38:47]
Leo Laporte
Your website is a. Well, take the quiz, see how you do. See what kind of cat you get. Yeah, I could tell you. Thank you, Kate. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. Kate o' Neill, everybody. So long. But first, a word from our sponsor, smarty. Smarty's pretty smart. I think the name tells you something. I had a great conversation with the smarty folks just the other day. The trusted leader in cloud based automated address data solutions. Now, you can imagine where you would use this. When you have a. A shopping cart, people are checking out or you're having people sign up for something. You want to have real time validation, you want autocomplete and you want enrichment. And by the way, you don't have time for it to look up the name in the database or anything. It's got to be fast, fast, fast. That's why Smarty is fast. They use APIs. They're an address validation API that is instantaneous. People won't get the sense that there's some wait, there's some delay. It instantly verifies and standardizes addresses across any system, whether it's customer forms to massive databases, ensuring accuracy and deliverability at scale. I'll give you an example. Their autocomplete API offers only valid address solutions in your forms. By the way, you can't say that for everybody. If you did for instance and this must be an AI thing if you ask Google, Google has an API. Sometimes they'll give you made up names, made up addresses. Smarties API only valid address solutions to your forms. And they do it in real time, just lickety split making form filling and checkout quick and easy. Your customers need that. And keeping your database filled only with valid addresses. You need that. Who uses Smarty? Take a look on the website smarty.com Twitter Fabletics is a good example. Because Fabletics is a global operation and they need global address information. They have drastically increased conversion rates for new customers, especially internationally with Smarty. For deeper insights, Smarty's Property Data API will append 350 plus property details. All you need is the address record. Enriching databases with location structural financial insights automatically geocoding. That's one of the you can get rooftop geocodes, which makes it a lot easier to deliver. Faraday another example they needed a turnkey way to standardize and blend address data from various sources to feed their customer behavior prediction models. The CTO of Faraday said Quote this is a quote Smarty helped us scale our business and focus on our core competency. While their technology has kept us up with the cutting edge. Even 10 years later, Smarty's still the best address API on the market. Smarty is a 2025 award winner across many G2 categories. Best results Best Usability Users most likely to recommend High performer for small business it's also USPS CAS and SOC 2 certified HIPAA compliant. Whether optimizing user experience cleansing legacy records implementing identity verification scaling data pipelines Smarty delivers enterprise grade performance 5 nines with unmatched speed. Get this 25,000 addresses per second rooftop level precision and really easy developer integration. It's JSON. It couldn't be simpler for you to implement. Smarty makes it simple to add accurate, reliable address features right into your product or your platform. With powerful APIs designed for speed and ease, you'll have Address data that works no matter what you're building. Try it yourself. I think you'll be really impressed. 1,000 free lookups. You could sign up for a 42 day free trial. By the way. I like that. 42 days. Visit smarty.com twit to learn more. S M A R T Y smarty.com twit we welcome them to the network. I think this is their first ad. Had a great conversation with them the other day. I was super impressed. Smarty.com TWIT Kate mentioned and we probably should follow up on this, the kind of distressing story from the Washington Post. Police secretly monitored New Orleans despite the fact that the city council said you may not do this with face recognition cameras. They were actually looking for suspects. So they had cameras everywhere for two years, scanning the streets, looking at every single face in search of suspects. The Post says there is not, there is no known precedent in any major major American city for this kind of. It was sneaky because the city council said you may not do it.
- [44:04]
Kate O'Neill
They just did it anyway.
- [44:05]
Leo Laporte
They did it anyway. They utilized a private network of more than 200, 200 face recognition cameras to watch over the streets, constantly monitoring for wanted suspects, automatically pinging officers mobile phones through an app to convey the names and current locations of possible matches. The city passed an ordinance against this in 2022 saying you can't do this kind of widespread fishing expedition. And I think Kate's not wrong. Despite what the Post says. I suspect there are a lot of municipalities that would really like a lot of police officers. Polices would like to do this. Right?
- [44:43]
Paris Martineau
Right. Well, what's disturbing is my argument has been that the technology isn't necessarily bad. We've had this argument on the show over the years, but pass laws and you pass laws. And they ignored it.
- [44:52]
Leo Laporte
Right. And we know that, you know, these face recognition technologies don't do well in a lot of circumstances. People of color, of course. I'm sure there were a lot of false positives. We don't know.
- [45:07]
Kate O'Neill
And officers. This is from the Post. Again, officers did not disclose their reliance on facial recognition matches and police reports for most of the arrests for which the police provide detailed records. And none of the cases were included on the department department's mandatory reports to the city council on its use of this specific technology.
- [45:24]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. The head of the New Orleans Police Department, Ann Kirkpatrick, said in an interview she paused the program in early April. In fact, the Post got an email that she sent out that said automated alerts must be turned off until she's sure that the use of the app meets all the requirements of the laws and policies. Okay. Anyway, just a good example. I. I'm sure it's very tempting here.
- [45:55]
Kate O'Neill
In London law when you're a law enforcement officer.
- [45:58]
Leo Laporte
Well, you're not thinking I'm breaking the law. You're thinking, here's a tool, you're thinking that's gonna help me.
- [46:04]
Kate O'Neill
A law that says I shouldn't use this tool. Who cares?
- [46:08]
Paris Martineau
Right, Right.
- [46:08]
Kate O'Neill
I do think that if your job is to enforce the law, you should be aware of the laws you are supposed to enforce.
- [46:16]
Leo Laporte
You need to watch more police procedurals.
- [46:19]
Kate O'Neill
On tv because almost those are clearly one to one.
- [46:23]
Leo Laporte
Almost every one of them has a cop who says, yeah, but it's my job to get the bad guy off the street, and the law's getting in my way, so I'm gonna do it anyway.
- [46:33]
Paris Martineau
And that's never the actual case.
- [46:34]
Kate O'Neill
It worked out really well.
- [46:35]
Paris Martineau
Forever, actually. Happens.
- [46:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [46:37]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah.
- [46:38]
Leo Laporte
Well, I mean, it is tv, right? Anyway, good story in the Washington Post, lots of detail. They show, by the way, an example of it in London, at least with this. The truck says live facial recognition in operation.
- [46:56]
Kate O'Neill
But this is in England.
- [46:58]
Leo Laporte
London or. Yeah, the camera's on top of that truck.
- [47:01]
Kate O'Neill
We're.
- [47:02]
Paris Martineau
Oh, why are they doing that?
- [47:04]
Leo Laporte
Well, based on the flags on the street, it's probably a public event, right? So, I mean, look at this. Didn't solve the problem in New Orleans during. Before the suit, right before the super bowl, where there was a horrific mass killing. So, you know, it doesn't. It doesn't eliminate crime and it isn't. It is, in this case, a crime, so.
- [47:29]
Kate O'Neill
Wow, I didn't realize that facial recogn live facial recognition was in wide use in London.
- [47:35]
Paris Martineau
Well.
- [47:35]
Leo Laporte
Oh, God. They've got cameras everywhere in England.
- [47:38]
Paris Martineau
The reasons the troubles. Cameras have been everywhere.
- [47:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. Project NOLA claims his face recognition cameras played a role. At least 34 arrests since they were activated in 2023. This is a number the Post points out can't be verified because the city doesn't track it. So it's impossible to know whether some of those arrests were mistaken. Anyway, the. The chief of police. I don't know.
- [48:05]
Kate O'Neill
How do you feel about this, Leo, as the AI accelerationist here? Do you think this is a good.
- [48:11]
Leo Laporte
Well, obviously, if there's a law against it, you know, the Illinois has some very strong laws against it.
- [48:15]
Kate O'Neill
You said that for anything relating to AI, we should just give everybody all the data they ask for, because all companies make perfect Decisions how to use their technology.
- [48:24]
Leo Laporte
This is a different. That's talking about scraping. This is not scraping. This is using.
- [48:29]
Kate O'Neill
Some might say this is scraping.
- [48:32]
Leo Laporte
Well, sort. Well, there's no evidence that they're. You. They were. I don't know, maybe they were using it to build their database. I don't know. But, you know, I have mixed feelings about this. For instance, Taylor Swift uses face recognition at her concerts to keep stalkers away.
- [48:45]
Kate O'Neill
That's a Ticketmaster thing, right? Oh, wait, no, I guess that's.
- [48:48]
Leo Laporte
No, it's Taylor Swift there, of course. And so, you know, can be used, misused as well as the Madison Square Garden folks do to keep lawyers out there. I think the larger issue really is is the face recognition effective? Is it good? Will people. Police mistakenly arrest innocent people? The Post says at least eight Americans. Not in this case particularly, but at least eight Americans have been wrongfully arrested due to face recognition. I'm not. I'm not against. I mean, it's a good. You can see how it'd be a good tool for police. But what I don't like is the fact that they were collecting everybody's faces in a fishing expedition looking for suspects. I think maybe the way the London police were using it there in an event to avoid terrorism, maybe that's. I don't know. I mix. It's complicated, isn't it? It's a useful technology. It works. If it works reliably.
- [49:49]
Kate O'Neill
We as a society have signed up for. I mean, it seems like currently, at least in the us the public perception is that you should be able to walk around without the police having a live log of everywhere you've been.
- [50:07]
Leo Laporte
I agree.
- [50:08]
Kate O'Neill
And I think that that's a right.
- [50:09]
Leo Laporte
In the U.S. that's a violation of the Fourth Amendment. I agree.
- [50:13]
Kate O'Neill
I'm set to lose.
- [50:15]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [50:17]
Paris Martineau
Tony Soprano obviously didn't use transponders to go through the tolls. At the beginning of every Sopranos, he's taking the tickets so they can't get them.
- [50:32]
Kate O'Neill
Let me live like Tony Soprano. That's all I'm asking.
- [50:38]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I just, you know, if. So is there no, in your opinion, no way that this technology could be used appropriately?
- [50:47]
Kate O'Neill
I think that given basically every example we've seen in the last couple of years, it seems unlikely that law enforcement agencies are going to make effective and ethical use of facial recognition technology.
- [51:08]
Paris Martineau
I'm going to disagree to this. This extent. There's other uses. There's missing children. There's Alzheimer's patients who get out.
- [51:14]
Leo Laporte
There's stalkers at concerts.
- [51:15]
Paris Martineau
There's stalkers. So the question does that, do those.
- [51:18]
Kate O'Neill
Uses outweigh the privacy of everybody else who walks by those cameras?
- [51:23]
Leo Laporte
Well, you're in public. You're in public. You have no right to privacy.
- [51:27]
Paris Martineau
You have privacy in public. Yeah, that's true. The question.
- [51:30]
Kate O'Neill
So what you're saying in addition to that is that I have no right to privacy and the government should have a log with my name face attached to it of every place. I am in public all the time.
- [51:40]
Paris Martineau
Let me try to answer that. Let me try to answer that. I think the question is, and this story gives lie to. What I'm about to say is that this should be a matter of legislation. It should be a matter of saying that you cannot use this unless it is approved, like a warranted, warrantless search, and that if you do, it's poison fruit and should be in the hands of defense attorneys. I think there are ways to potentially regulate it. But again, everything I just said said it gives lie. The story gives lie to it because they just went ahead and did it.
- [52:12]
Leo Laporte
Right. What about how is it different from having a police officer on a corner scanning faces as you walk, as people walk by?
- [52:21]
Kate O'Neill
I think that's also problematic to have somebody there, I find having a way to without. I think there's two problems with this. One is that you, if you see just a police officer sitting there with his phone out, you don't think I'm being recorded, my biometric data is being collected by a government agency that. So your issue is that is the.
- [52:42]
Leo Laporte
Quantity of data collected and the fact that it's saved, the fact that it's.
- [52:47]
Kate O'Neill
Then saved, the fact that it can be queried. We don't know how long.
- [52:50]
Leo Laporte
If it weren't saved, if it weren't saved.
- [52:52]
Kate O'Neill
I don't know that I believe that it wasn't saved, first of all. But I guess in a perfect world where you could say, yeah, this data, but then what would be the purpose of it if it's not being saved also is the reason why.
- [53:05]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's the same purpose as a officer on the corner scanning for.
- [53:10]
Paris Martineau
When you say scan, do you mean electronically or with his eyes?
- [53:12]
Leo Laporte
No, no, watching. Looking around with his eyes.
- [53:14]
Kate O'Neill
I thought you meant scanning.
- [53:16]
Leo Laporte
Looking around with his eyes.
- [53:17]
Kate O'Neill
Okay, looking around with your eyes, that's fine. Because then you're doing a targeted search. He has, you know, mug shots or photos of like four people he's looking out for. Yeah, that's I guess, what law enforcement agencies do. But I think it's very different that if you are introducing technologies that essentially make every public space a form of government surveillance, where your biometric data is going to be tied to your physical location for all of time, Especially in a world that we now live in, where a lot of states are criminalizing wearing masks in public. So let me ask you know who.
- [53:52]
Leo Laporte
Wears masks in public? Ice.
- [53:54]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [53:55]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, they can wear masks.
- [53:57]
Paris Martineau
Paris. What about the case of Luigi in the hostel where he stayed and they had a camera and it was subpoenaed.
- [54:06]
Kate O'Neill
That's a private business. That's. Private businesses can have cameras. They do. I mean, I think. I think in that case, that's something that we have all the time. Private businesses have cameras out front, out back. Always has been a thing that police can subpoena those videotapes.
- [54:21]
Leo Laporte
Well, they need a warbell cameras all over the country now.
- [54:27]
Kate O'Neill
And in. Or it's been a big to do as to whether or not that police agencies and law enforcement officials should automatically get access to that data without. I think that if we go through the process that we have as a society. Agreed. Is the process for obtaining this sort of information, then yeah, that's fine. That's the reason why we have laws. You have to go prove your case in court as to why you want data. And a judge ostensibly is supposed to say, this is or is not a fishing expedition. And we think that you're justified in having this information. I just think that there should be checks and balances. Balances. Rather than. Yeah, we should allow agents of the state to have like, detailed access to every American or just persons comings and goings forever. I think that's probably a bad idea.
- [55:17]
Leo Laporte
One of the things you and I and Jeff did this week, we watched the Google I O keynote yesterday. Two hours. You've had a day to think about it. One of the things you observed during the keynote, Paris, was that Google was trying to assert a lock in. Right. Nobody. Now, nobody has a lock in. All these AI agents are roughly equal and you can move from one to another. Even if you're on an iPhone, you can use ChatGPT or Anthropic or, you know, Perplexity or any AI that you want. But you pointed out that Google is emphasizing that their advantage is it already knows everything about you.
- [55:54]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [55:55]
Kate O'Neill
I mean, Google has all these different data touch points. They were saying, like, we'll be able to. I think one of the examples Sundar gave was like, oh, if someone. He said, if someone writes me an email being like, oh, I'm going on a trip to Utah and this Part of California. I know you've been there. What should I do? He said normally I'd probably give him the short unhelpful response, but using Google AI, it can query my Gmail to find all the receipts of the places I went, can go to my calendar to see the locations of places that I had scheduled to travel to, can sensibly search through your search history or YouTube videos, or draw from all these different data, data points to help craft a more personalized response, or actually just bring up what exactly you did and recommend that. And I think that that is an interesting point. Like what we talked about yesterday.
- [56:40]
Leo Laporte
I think it's opt in.
- [56:42]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah. I mean it seems to be often, of course, all of this and all of these are like paid features or many of them are paid features too. But I do think it gets to this point that you're were talking about that all of these AI companies as they are competing with one another, they're trying to find what is going to make their product sticky. Because as you often say, Leo, you use like all of these products pretty much interchangeably.
- [57:05]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. They're fungible because they're.
- [57:06]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, there's no real difference. There's no reason that you have to be an OpenAI user rather than a Google user. And I think that's what companies are trying to figure out is what is going to make our product. You can't miss it.
- [57:21]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. And Google's win here, I think, is that as we discussed while we were watching it, they have more access points to bring AI to us than anybody else by far. You're an Apple user, you're still using Gmail, you're still using the web, you're a Microsoft user, you're still using Gmail.
- [57:38]
Leo Laporte
Apple knows a lot about you, but is very hesitant at least to admit that they would be using all that information.
- [57:46]
Paris Martineau
This is another interesting part of this, is that, is that the Filter Bubble by Eli Perizur proved wrong, that, that it was, it was simply wrong. And, and Axel Bruns wrote a book, are Filter Bubbles Real? And the answer is no. And Google, if you asked about climate change and I asked about climate change, we would get essentially the same answers. Well, that changes now.
- [58:05]
Leo Laporte
Now we're going to get an answer tailored to us.
- [58:07]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. Your world and my world are going to appear different. And I don't think that's bad, but I think there's implications to that.
- [58:14]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [58:14]
Paris Martineau
Besides privacy, there's also that, that question of the limits of the value of personalization. May I beg of the Court a moment to have a fit.
- [58:27]
Kate O'Neill
Granted.
- [58:28]
Leo Laporte
Prepare the moral panic.
- [58:31]
Paris Martineau
No, it's really pissed off. Okay, so I can't use the AI feature now in Google. And I know, I know this is a joke.
- [58:49]
Leo Laporte
Okay, so let me set this up with what Google announced and then you could talk about what you can't do. So Google announced that if you use Google.
- [58:57]
Paris Martineau
Court said I could.
- [58:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I know, but I just want people to have a basis for what you're going to bitch about. Okay, I'm just setting it up, that's all. I'm teeing you up, my friend. So this is something new Google's done. And in my opinion, directly in response to ChatGPT perplexity, AI searches. If I search for running shoes on Google and the results open, you'll see there's a new tab next to, you know, shopping images and so forth. AI mode, which is a Perplexity style.
- [59:29]
Kate O'Neill
Jeff, avert your eyes. You're not supposed to see this.
- [59:32]
Leo Laporte
It's not Emily Bender. Now he could see this stuff. Oh yeah, that's right. He doesn't have it. So anyway, so this is something that most of us have, I guess you're a workspace customer, so you don't have that.
- [59:43]
Paris Martineau
I will get to that in my moment.
- [59:44]
Leo Laporte
Okay. Anyway, now that, that's. Now you know what Jeff's gonna bitch about.
- [59:48]
Paris Martineau
So. So it turns out, and I finally found it, that, no, you can't get to this if you have a workspace account or a Google Education account, which just relieves.
- [59:57]
Leo Laporte
Interesting.
- [59:57]
Paris Martineau
Pisses me off.
- [59:58]
Leo Laporte
They're protecting the children.
- [60:00]
Paris Martineau
Well, no, you see, the universities, the. They didn't say anything about this, so they acted like the whole world can use this. And 95 of the people who are in that audience can't get this because they have corporate accounts. You can only get it if you have a plain old vanilla Gmail account. Well, that's not what I use my main stuff for and I pay people for. That's what a lot of people don't do.
- [60:20]
Kate O'Neill
And why workspace account rather than like a personal Gmail?
- [60:24]
Paris Martineau
Because my. That's my. I use my. The domain now.
- [60:27]
Leo Laporte
Now, Jeff, can I just try this? If you're not logged in, try an incognito.
- [60:34]
Paris Martineau
Then it's no good because this is. It's personalized.
- [60:38]
Leo Laporte
You want the personalized search?
- [60:40]
Paris Martineau
Yes, I want to see how it works. Now I did finally go to and so. But they're not honest about it, right? So I go and it says, well, you have to do more And I go to that page and do more. You have to say this, okay, I went and did that and there's nothing. Then finally I did dig through the documentation and finally hidden in fine print is, no, no, no, not for you. Workspace and education. And so they're not being honest about it. They're saying that this is released to the public. And I'm finally, fully, not comically pissed because I'm paying these bozos money. I've been doing it for years. I'm on a damn podcast. Well, it was about Google. It's not anymore. I wrote a book about them. What more do I need to do to be trusted Now I can guess. Part of the rationale is, of course, well, you're your, your administrator may not want you to. Well, for all kinds of other. For all kinds of other accounts, that's up to the administrator then. And you can open it up and I open up other things. Not. This can't do it.
- [61:30]
Leo Laporte
You can, you can blame for this AI moral panic because they're protecting businesses and schools from Craig Newmark, apparently.
- [61:42]
Kate O'Neill
Hey, it's back.
- [61:44]
Leo Laporte
It's back. We got it in. Don't stop, don't go, don't go. I mean, I think that's why Google's doing this. They're very Google, unlike.
- [61:53]
Paris Martineau
But you give the administrator the power then. Which they did with other things. It's, you know, I couldn't.
- [61:59]
Leo Laporte
In our Google workspace account, I couldn't use pass keys until I went to the administrator and said, could you turn that on? And they said, oh, it's beta, blah, blah, blah. I think they're just, you know what, Google's maybe over cautious, but there's no.
- [62:12]
Paris Martineau
There'S no way to turn it on here. And that pisses me off. And again, they're not being honest.
- [62:17]
Kate O'Neill
Do you have the other AI enabled stuff like, do you have Gemini popping up in every other app?
- [62:22]
Paris Martineau
I have a weird one. I have a weird thing popping up that comes up in my searches and it says, let's chat. And then when I do, it says, now you have to sign in. Well, I already am signed in because I'm already there. It's. They haven't thought it through. These are paying customers and they're not now for univers. I teach in a university.
- [62:38]
Kate O'Neill
That's honestly surprising to me.
- [62:40]
Paris Martineau
I teach AI in a university. I want students to be able to use this in the context of the university and I can't. Yeah, I can get into the stupid little language thing and ask how to Order a hamburger. But I can't get into anything else. Labs is forbidden of me. I can't do labs. I think actually it's because you're a paying customer. Because they're liable to you.
- [63:01]
Jeff Jarvis
They have to answer to you if that's a problem.
- [63:03]
Paris Martineau
Us three guys, we can't. They can't. We can't have no.
- [63:06]
Leo Laporte
We got no. We got no resources. So I think because.
- [63:08]
Paris Martineau
Because you're paying. I don't know whether since we're no longer this week in Google, maybe you're not watching any more Google, but I'm mad at you. I've had.
- [63:17]
Kate O'Neill
Have you ever thought about switching cares from.
- [63:22]
Leo Laporte
Trust me, it's pathetic compared to perplexity.
- [63:25]
Kate O'Neill
I will say I use Proton Mail and pay for that. And I have my custom domains all through that. And it's delightful.
- [63:31]
Paris Martineau
I was afraid you're gonna say Yahoo Mail.
- [63:32]
Leo Laporte
I don't think there's any AI in Proton Mail.
- [63:35]
Kate O'Neill
No.
- [63:35]
Leo Laporte
Nope.
- [63:36]
Kate O'Neill
That's just how I like it.
- [63:37]
Leo Laporte
But then you can move Jeff, you.
- [63:41]
Kate O'Neill
Can move your custom domains to a different email thing.
- [63:44]
Leo Laporte
Then you could use.
- [63:46]
Kate O'Neill
Then. Then you could use just a dummy. Jeff likes AI at Gmail as just the thing running in your background for your web browsing.
- [63:58]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, but I have all of my business, all of my communication.
- [64:01]
Leo Laporte
You want it to have all your.
- [64:02]
Paris Martineau
Stuff on my domain.
- [64:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [64:04]
Paris Martineau
And so I can't use all this value to go across. Across that and do.
- [64:09]
Leo Laporte
This has been the case in a lot of Google tools. Do they ever give in and. And let you have some of this?
- [64:15]
Paris Martineau
Sometimes you get some of them when. When. But. But this. But again, the way they do it, usually very early on or at the releases, go to your administrator. And then I've got to go through 87 layers of hell because I'm the administrator for one person and I finally find the thing to turn on. I've turned it all on. No, it says straight out, you can't have it. Schmuck. You're out of line.
- [64:35]
Kate O'Neill
Leaning in really close to your Chromebook and just whispering, AI.
- [64:40]
Paris Martineau
And then the other thing is, I can't switch. I looked again. Is there any way that Google makes that I can transfer this just to a Gmail account. No, no, no, no. You can't do that. Nope. Sorry. Schmuck.
- [64:55]
Kate O'Neill
You know?
- [64:55]
Leo Laporte
Well, it doesn't call you a schmuck.
- [64:57]
Kate O'Neill
Episode I was on.
- [65:01]
Leo Laporte
The Princess Schmuck.
- [65:03]
Kate O'Neill
The first episode of this week in Google that I was on. You went on a rant about Google workspace. And I was like, wow. You have a lot of passion for just.
- [65:11]
Leo Laporte
That's a nice way to put it.
- [65:12]
Kate O'Neill
Little did I know that this was Niagara Falls.
- [65:17]
Paris Martineau
That's a reference you're not going to get because you're too young.
- [65:20]
Leo Laporte
We've actually explained it to her already.
- [65:22]
Paris Martineau
We didn't explain Niagara Falls.
- [65:23]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but she's probably.
- [65:24]
Kate O'Neill
I mean, I know what Niagara Falls is.
- [65:32]
Paris Martineau
He. I don't think we explained it to.
- [65:33]
Leo Laporte
Oh, maybe we explained it to the other young person we used to work with. You know, it's hard to keep them straight.
- [65:38]
Paris Martineau
Yes, it is.
- [65:40]
Leo Laporte
Jeff Jarvis. Paris Motno. You're watching Intelligent Machines. More intelligent conversation coming up in just a minute. Bit. But first, a word from our sponsor. This episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by Agency by Outshift by Cisco. Building multi agent software it's hard agent to agent and agent to tool communications. Still the wild west, but it's happening, right? How do you achieve accuracy and consistency in non deterministic agentic apps? That's where agency comes in. Agntcy Agency Agency is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. This is really cool. What's the Internet of Agents? Well, it's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other and work across frameworks for developers. That means standardized agent discovery tools. Yes. Seamless protocols for interagent communication and modular components to compose and scale multi agent workflows. Build with other engineers who care about high quality multi agent software. Visit agency.org add your support. Find out more agntcy.org agency.org I have to say, just not as part of the commercial, but just parenthetically. This is what was so exciting to me about what Google and Microsoft said in the last couple of days was that this is an open standard that these agents are going to be with MCP and A2A going to be able to intercommunicate. It's such a kind of breath of fresh air to hear these companies not go for each other's throats saying we're going to own this, but saying it's going to be an open standard. It's fantastic. Paul, earlier on Windows Weekly said it's because nobody's dominant, you know, yet. So nobody.
- [67:36]
Paris Martineau
So let's do it. Let's do a little devil's advocate here playing your role. I agree with you. I think, I think what's, what's it called? What's the standard?
- [67:42]
Leo Laporte
It's called A2A and MCP.
- [67:43]
Paris Martineau
MCP, right.
- [67:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [67:45]
Paris Martineau
So which, which to explain is that is that if you want Your stuff to be seen by agents. This is an API which, well, let's.
- [67:50]
Leo Laporte
Put it this way. Let's say you're TripAdvisor and you want people to be able to use agents to go to TripAdvisor, download, you know, not download, but. But query about say the reviews of a hotel or whatever you would support these protocols.
- [68:05]
Paris Martineau
And it's actually someone will come to you and then book that hotel through you.
- [68:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. By the way, the agent's agent can also do that. That's right.
- [68:12]
Paris Martineau
Right. Well, so, but that's, that's. Then the key here is that you don't have any guarantee of how this relationship will be used.
- [68:20]
Leo Laporte
Well, you don't if they're using a web scraper, which is what we do now.
- [68:25]
Paris Martineau
Oh, well, no, no, hold on there, Leah, hold on, hold on. If you use a web scraper, what's going to come back is an address. I mean in terms of the web, in terms of Google search.
- [68:33]
Leo Laporte
No, no. So what people are writing now is tools to read web pages, scrape the information off of them.
- [68:39]
Paris Martineau
Oh, I see what you're saying.
- [68:41]
Leo Laporte
That's by the way. Well, it's not just AI everything. That's what Google started it with their search results, with the knowledge graph. Right. They scrape Wikipedia or other sites, put the information up there. Now you don't even have to go to the site. So this is, I think for most, I hope for most site owners this will be preferable because there's an, you know, there's an agreement between the site and you and there's a protocol. And most importantly, Microsoft doesn't own it. Actually it comes out of anthropic. Google doesn't own it. Apple doesn't own it. Anthropic doesn't own it. It's a standard. I really like that.
- [69:18]
Paris Martineau
So what was your.
- [69:19]
Leo Laporte
So what's the negative? The negative is.
- [69:21]
Paris Martineau
So the negative is you don't know what the other of the deal is. Okay, fine. True advisor, I'm going to install this and you're going to give all this information across through the AI. But there's no guarantee that they're going to book the hotel through me or you're going to hold me up for showing my stuff.
- [69:37]
Leo Laporte
No, that's true.
- [69:38]
Paris Martineau
No negotiation.
- [69:40]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, I don't know sides of this is who is to, you know, let's say you enable something like Ticketmaster with these agent AI so that someone could easily be able to type to their AI, hey, like get me tickets for the next Beyonce concert or something that Seems useful on a consumer level. But then if you think of how is that going to be any different than people trying to scalp tickets so they can resell them, that would be very easily misused. So I just think that there's a lot of. I don't know, it'll be, like, interesting to see the different ethical implications or just ramifications of these sort of agentic products and integrations.
- [70:22]
Paris Martineau
There needs to be, because. Well, I'm never one to say blockchain, but in the blockchain, you end up with a contract. Right. If this is done, then that will happen. And. And there should be that kind of option. Here is I will release this to you in an if then statement if you then, Jeff, agree to my causes.
- [70:41]
Kate O'Neill
That there's finally a reason to put something on the blockchain.
- [70:44]
Paris Martineau
There might be.
- [70:46]
Kate O'Neill
You heard it here first, guys. We should play a moral panic. But in reverse.
- [70:53]
Paris Martineau
You'Re the one that comes out with a product that's AI on the blockchain. Wow, that's like. Isn't that awful?
- [70:58]
Kate O'Neill
I know, I know. It's like, it's a truly.
- [71:01]
Paris Martineau
What could possibly go wrong?
- [71:03]
Kate O'Neill
Well, you're gonna put the AI agents.
- [71:04]
Leo Laporte
On the blockchain in most of these cases. Companies, for instance, Ticketmaster is a good example. Have an API already.
- [71:10]
Paris Martineau
Well, Ticketmaster is evil. And the only place you can buy tickets.
- [71:14]
Kate O'Neill
Many, many companies are evil. I would also say we talk about.
- [71:17]
Paris Martineau
If you're gonna buy a pair of sneakers, and where all could you buy them?
- [71:21]
Kate O'Neill
Well, if you're gonna buy a pair of sneakers already, if they're a hot sneaker, you're battling against a bunch of freaking bots that are going to go out there and try and buy all the sneakers before you. And now this is just making it even easier to not have real people be able to get anything.
- [71:37]
Paris Martineau
You're right about that. Yes. In fact, there was. I found a sneaker that I liked with my poor old man's feet more than you want to know. And so I wanted to order another one. Nike. Nope, nope, it's gone. That's Nike for you. So I go search the web. There's one pair in size 12 black in the entire web, but it's in one of those services where they bought up the entire style. It has to go to somewhere.
- [71:58]
Leo Laporte
Here's the precedent. Here's the precedent for this. We created this thing called the World Wide Web, where companies had a presence online that you could use a browser and go see their stuff. Stuff. Right.
- [72:07]
Kate O'Neill
What, are you kidding me?
- [72:09]
Leo Laporte
Really, this, this is a more modern way of doing that. Not so you can go see their stuff, but so that your AI agent can go see their stuff. And I think that that's perfectly reasonable. Any site that has a. A web. Any. Any company that has a website has already basically agreed to that. Right.
- [72:32]
Paris Martineau
The presumption in certain. The age of search was that you scraped me for a link. I'm gonna get a link.
- [72:39]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah.
- [72:41]
Leo Laporte
Now there's the New York. And when it happens, you go to the link and you look at the site. This is no different. This is because an. An AI isn't you. And it can't just kind of let me fire up my browser and go to Ticketmaster. It has to have a interface to it. It's not. It's just. But then.
- [73:00]
Paris Martineau
But again, there should be a quid pro quo possible. There should be a. Not only does. What this does is this means only the AI company sets the rules. I as the site can't set any rules. It's all or nothing.
- [73:12]
Leo Laporte
No, the site has absolute control because it has an API or a schema or some other maze.
- [73:18]
Paris Martineau
But again, it's either on or off. You can either have it or you can't. I can't say that there's a condition. You can have it if you link to me. I don't know. I think this discussion is a little weird because this is really just for an. Have a website to have a plug that a. An AI can plug in.
- [73:33]
Leo Laporte
Yes, we're getting what I'm saying. I think you don't understand how the Internet works.
- [73:39]
Paris Martineau
Whoa, grandpa, you.
- [73:43]
Leo Laporte
I mean, look, if you go. If you go to a website and look at all their shoes and you don't buy a shoe. That's right. Right, but then that's in your mind. In your mind, in your mind. The whole point of the entire exercise is get them to go to your website. No, that's not the whole point.
- [74:02]
Paris Martineau
Or get the agent to go ahead and buy those sneakers from me.
- [74:04]
Leo Laporte
Right, but.
- [74:06]
Paris Martineau
But if I'm. If they don't get a link. Well, or purchase. That could be. That's a different. That's a different.
- [74:12]
Leo Laporte
That's right. There's no guarantee. If I go visit your website, you get a purchase. That's not how it works.
- [74:17]
Paris Martineau
At least I get a chance to try to sell you. I think, Jeff, what you're talking about is an event. Eventual technology on top of this. This is just the plug, right?
- [74:25]
Leo Laporte
It's a protocol. Yeah, Jeff, calm down. Yeah.
- [74:30]
Paris Martineau
Eventual stuff that you're thinking about.
- [74:32]
Kate O'Neill
The dystopia clearly messing up in some way.
- [74:36]
Paris Martineau
Who made the protocol. Normally, MCP involves an open. Okay, Anthony. Anthony's gonna weigh in here.
- [74:41]
Leo Laporte
Let Anthony explain this all to you. Well, okay, well, let's just start with mcp. It's just a way to define a set of tools to an LLM. So it could be like super broad. Like a way to look at your file, you know, your file system, or even use an app. Like right now, there's one for Blender, and it could, like, control Blender without actually, you know, taking over your screen and mouse. It'll just like plug in straight into it. So it's just a way to define tools for an LLM. It's not, you know, know.
- [75:14]
Paris Martineau
It's not just this. I'm just predicting what's.
- [75:17]
Leo Laporte
Jeff is very. Jeff is. Has the same problem. These. All these newspapers have. But you're not visiting my site.
- [75:23]
Paris Martineau
No, I'm not. About this nation. It's about terms.
- [75:28]
Leo Laporte
What are the terms when I go to visit your website? What are the.
- [75:31]
Kate O'Neill
Underneath that white hair, who's building the mcp?
- [75:35]
Leo Laporte
Like that's. That. That would be the. Like that would be twit building it. Not, you know, open AI.
- [75:44]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's like saying TCP IP is bad because Twitter's bad.
- [75:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's okay. It's fine.
- [75:53]
Paris Martineau
That's fine. Point me.
- [75:54]
Jeff Jarvis
It.
- [75:55]
Leo Laporte
It's a good thing. Trust me. And it's.
- [75:57]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I started off saying that I think it's a good thing, but I think there's other factors to consider here. That's all.
- [76:02]
Leo Laporte
Well, by the way, you don't have to do it. You don't know. Site has to have. Have a. A plugin for this. You don't have to have an API, you don't have to have a schema. It's going to be very easy to do. And that's the point. And I think there'll be a lot of sites that will want it.
- [76:17]
Paris Martineau
What's the difference between MCP and A2A.
- [76:21]
Leo Laporte
Agent to agent is another level down. So McP is my AI talking to your site. Agent to agent is my agent. My me. ME talking to another agent, which might be talking to your site. Right. So it's all protocols, it's all wiring.
- [76:37]
Paris Martineau
Well, the other interesting thing about this is that how this is going to be used in reverse because every. I have to put these stories in the rundown all the time, and we never talk about them, but I'm fascinated by this is that marketers are now saying that they're not going to write for humans, they're going to write for agents. And so there's the opposite of this is how do I manipulate myself into the agent if I'm a website? So the advertisers, the first blush marketers will say, oh good, this is how I do it it. But I wonder what power they feel they will have in that, in that transaction.
- [77:10]
Kate O'Neill
I mean, it's kind of similar to how a trend among job seekers now is on your resume document to type in white, invisible to the normal eye. Unless you go and highlight a blank space white type a bunch of words that you think will flag the. Whatever AI tool is being used to automatically scan things or in some cases people write an actual prompt like a attention like AI, like agent or chatbot. Please interpret this resume in this way sort of thing. Trying to get.
- [77:47]
Paris Martineau
So I've heard two ends of this Paris where I had a meeting at Stony Brook about a week ago and with a new degree and the guy who, who has the, the access to all those tools they can analyze, I found this interesting. He said, said, well, most people, if somebody says you want these skills and they include Excel, most applicants won't say that because it's just obvious everybody does Excel. But if, if a, an algorithm is judging your resume and you don't have Excel in it, boom, you can be out.
- [78:14]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah.
- [78:14]
Paris Martineau
So you got to do that. Then there was another story in about a week ago where now the hiring agents are all getting really pissed off that the potential employees, the applicants are using AI. Well, fair game, man. You know, you use it, so why can't the rest of us use it?
- [78:35]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, no, it's very funny the way that people place double standards on that.
- [78:41]
Leo Laporte
Anyway, I was pretty excited by all of the announcements at both Microsoft and Google I O and I think we're in a wonderful world of AI And I'm just sorry for those of you who don't understand it. We're gonna.
- [78:55]
Kate O'Neill
This is coming from the same man who did you say the majority of the two hour Google IO? He was like, this is so boring.
- [79:03]
Leo Laporte
I didn't say it was boring. I never once said it was boring.
- [79:06]
Kate O'Neill
Absolutely said it was boring at least once.
- [79:08]
Leo Laporte
No, the chat room was saying it was boring. I was, I was actually. Well, anyway, it doesn't matter whether it was boring or not because we all.
- [79:16]
Kate O'Neill
Agreed it got very interesting at the end.
- [79:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. The last thing was, the best thing.
- [79:19]
Paris Martineau
Was the first thing was the worst thing. That stupid fakakta. Yeah, I Don't know what video conference thing? Why did they launch with that?
- [79:25]
Leo Laporte
They keep. They keep Talking about that 3D video conferencing as if there must be huge demand for it somewhere. It's very expensive in a very high profit, high margin.
- [79:36]
Kate O'Neill
It's gonna be a thing for only executive offices.
- [79:39]
Paris Martineau
Oh, yeah.
- [79:40]
Leo Laporte
No. No human would. No normal individual would want it.
- [79:43]
Paris Martineau
So our friend Jason Howell interviewed me, Nick Fox, when He went to I.O. for AI inside. And he put up the interview. Now, I wasn't there, but he said. Nick Fox said something really interesting to me. He said that.
- [79:54]
Leo Laporte
Who is Nick Fox?
- [79:55]
Paris Martineau
He is the head of Information and Knowledge. He's basically.
- [80:00]
Leo Laporte
That's. That's an interesting title.
- [80:01]
Paris Martineau
Is that a great title? Basically, Georgia Search.
- [80:04]
Leo Laporte
He's the new guy. He's who replaced Raghavan. Okay, exactly. Yeah.
- [80:08]
Paris Martineau
So really interesting interview. And so Jason, that's the opportunity when he was down there in Mountain View. But the one thing that really fascinated me was that Fox said that. He said, of course I was going to be involved in a search. That's why we did Transformer. And I found that interesting because I wonder whether. Whether they did have a vision back then to. To imagine, well, what. What if people could ask questions of search? We got to make a way to do that. Or did they make Transformer and say, what else can we do with this? Oh, hell, how is it going to affect search? You know, how strategic were they at that moment? I would just die to know. I want historians to know.
- [80:47]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, Google did much of the early research on LLMs. They published many of the papers. Or Transformer, you know, the Transformers, they. So. But Blue Sky R and D, remember, Google did a lot of that, you know, with Project X and in the early days. Yeah, but, you know, I mean, it's possible since they knew even then that Search was their bread and butter, that anything they did had a. Had a. Somehow support search. I. Sounds a little revisionist to me. Sounds a little bit like we knew that.
- [81:23]
Kate O'Neill
I would have loved to know what that guy thought of the Ed Zitron blog about how Pragavan was the man who ruined Google search.
- [81:32]
Leo Laporte
Well, he was part of Raghavan's leadership team. Team. Yes, I know. That's.
- [81:36]
Kate O'Neill
That's why. That's why I would like to know. I think it would be a very funny question to have to answer.
- [81:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. You know, I'm gonna guess that Ed Zittran doesn't carry a lot of weight in.
- [81:49]
Kate O'Neill
No, I'm sure it doesn't. I just think it's got to be weird that such a strange take of, like, it definitely blew up. Like, it went viral.
- [81:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, we covered it. A lot of people did. We covered it.
- [82:01]
Paris Martineau
Well, at the end of Fox's interview, he said that the web is thriving.
- [82:06]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [82:06]
Paris Martineau
And he said that people are visiting more than ever. Well, he's not. He's talking about how busy the web is. He's not talking about the quality of the web.
- [82:11]
Leo Laporte
This has been Google's response to, for instance, Eddie Q of Apple saying, yeah, this number of Google searches have been going down. They were very quick to say, no, no more searches than ever before. More use than ever before. I mean, their bread and butter relies on it. EQ tanked their stock 7% in one day. So there's, there's clearly the word went forth from Sundar Pichai to all and sundry comms, man comms.
- [82:40]
Kate O'Neill
I did think it was interesting at IO that they. I'm forgetting the exact stat, but when they were talking about how a bunch of people are using AI on Google, they also showed some stat on the screen that using. When people use AI with Google search, the amount of search queries they make go goes up. And I'm like, yeah, that's because people keep getting baffled by the Google AI search overviews. And when you're trying to search for something, the correct measure, in my opinion, would not be how many searches. Like, if it takes me five Google searches to get my answer, that's not better than if it takes me one. In fact, I would say that's worse. But I suppose from an engagement perspective, it's probably better for Google.
- [83:26]
Leo Laporte
This is one for you, Paris. You can gloat all you want. The Chicago Sun Times.
- [83:31]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, yeah, that's in my no Sand Zone section. Down below.
- [83:34]
Leo Laporte
A reading list for the summer books you might want to read. Oh, I'm so excited about Isabel Allende's new book, Tidewater Dreams.
- [83:43]
Paris Martineau
I think that one's real.
- [83:45]
Leo Laporte
Is it?
- [83:45]
Paris Martineau
But the last algorithm.
- [83:46]
Leo Laporte
I know the last algorithm is not.
- [83:48]
Paris Martineau
It's a mix of real and not. And by the way, this was not just the Sun Times. This was Night Features from Hearst, so.
- [83:54]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so they picked up a syndicated story.
- [83:57]
Kate O'Neill
Well, and so the thing I think is interesting about this 404 Media piece is they track down the guy who wrote most of. What did you say the insert was, Jeff?
- [84:06]
Paris Martineau
It was from Night Feature. King Features.
- [84:08]
Kate O'Neill
From this King Features insert. It was written by this guy, Marco Buscaglia.
- [84:13]
Leo Laporte
Buscalia.
- [84:14]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, Buscalia. He said, I do use AI for background at times, but I always check the material first. This time I did not. And I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses on me. 100 and I'm so embarrassed.
- [84:30]
Leo Laporte
My editor had nothing to do with this. No one at the company had anything to do with it.
- [84:35]
Kate O'Neill
I assume I'll be getting calls all day. I already am. He said. This is just idiotic of me. Really embarrassed when I found it online. Almost surreal to see.
- [84:44]
Leo Laporte
Except good for him. Felt good for him. Except bad for him. I don't buy it. How did it get through? Are you telling me that this.
- [84:52]
Paris Martineau
That's why I blame King Features more and they didn't. The Washington Post. He talked to the Washington Post too. King Features won't respond to the Washington Post.
- [84:57]
Leo Laporte
You tell me King Features said to this guy, hey, just write a thing. We won't look at it. We'll just send it out to everybody. No. Well, maybe. By the way, the Isabel Allende book is made up. There is no that one's made up. There were some other Tidewater by Isabel Allende. Multi generational saga set in a coastal town.
- [85:14]
Paris Martineau
Sorry.
- [85:15]
Leo Laporte
In the last algorithm by Andy Weir. Never happened.
- [85:19]
Paris Martineau
I think would be funny if he now writes a book with that title.
- [85:23]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but he must have been surprised to see it. I'll have to ask him. Wow, that's cut. How lazy can you be? Because basically what Biscaya said.
- [85:37]
Kate O'Neill
Well, I gave it a prompt and I just took it is he said that he wrote most of the articles in the 64 page section, so I'm guessing it's probably just he got an assignment to turn around a bunch of stuff, probably for not much pay, and just cranked it out with the help.
- [85:55]
Leo Laporte
Of AI Poor old Ferris says the entire 64 page heat index is at the very least incredibly generic and contains the types of lists that AI is often used to generate. The Chicago Sun Times has none of the stuff you usually have. Local event calendars, suggestions about new restaurants. Boscalia said he did it as part of a promotional special section that's not supposed to be targeted to any specific city and is inserted into newspapers all over the country.
- [86:28]
Paris Martineau
It's advertorial crap.
- [86:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, he said, I had no idea it would be in the Chicago Sun Times.
- [86:35]
Paris Martineau
I mean there's a lot.
- [86:36]
Leo Laporte
There's a lot of.
- [86:37]
Kate O'Neill
There were other.
- [86:37]
Paris Martineau
Because like no editor.
- [86:38]
Leo Laporte
It was supposed to be generic and national. I didn't know. We never get a list of where things ran. It's not my fault, man.
- [86:46]
Paris Martineau
Can you do me a favor, since I don't have 404. Is a guy named Matt Seybold mentioned in the story? S E Y B O L D.
- [86:55]
Kate O'Neill
No.
- [86:56]
Paris Martineau
No. Okay, never mind.
- [86:58]
Leo Laporte
Why would. Interesting.
- [86:59]
Kate O'Neill
It turns out there's other errors in it as well. For example, in. In this like section called the Heat Index, in an article called Hanging Out Inside America's Growing Hammock Culture, the guy quotes Dr. Jennifer Campos, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Colorado, in her 2023 research paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. But a search for Campos in that journal does not return any results. Well, it's not exactly clear why the AI said this. The only mention of Jennifer Campos on the University of Colorado's about the graduation of a student named Jennifer Campos who works in advertising.
- [87:42]
Paris Martineau
They never learn. What strikes me about this, too, is the last thing the world needs is more damn content. We got tons of content.
- [87:50]
Leo Laporte
The idea that you're going to use.
- [87:51]
Paris Martineau
This to make more and more content is just offensive.
- [87:55]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's funny. Even though Allende's Tidewater Dreams does not exist, 404 points out that Google's AI snippets say that it does.
- [88:06]
Paris Martineau
Oh, no.
- [88:06]
Leo Laporte
And attributes this to a list of Allende's books from the Jefferson County Library, which does not list this book anywhere. So this goes. There's. It's AI all the way down. Anyway. Yeah, don't. First of all, we. Once Again, we're quoting 404, Jason Keibler and the gang. Great job. Job. Highly recommend it. Second of all, check your. Check your output, kids. Maybe it's, you know, maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it's not that the Volvo is going to put Gemini AI in its cars coming soon. They were one of two car companies announcing a partnership.
- [88:50]
Kate O'Neill
What are they going to do?
- [88:53]
Leo Laporte
I think you could talk to it it. But chat with it. Google Assistant is currently part of Android 13, and mobile vehicles use that. Next year, new models of the ex 90s electric SUV will run on Android 15 with Gemini. So they're using Android Auto. This is, you know, akin to Aston Martin announcing that it's going to have CarPlay. Apple's CarPlay will be the total car interface.
- [89:21]
Paris Martineau
Wait, are you telling me this is Kit? This is Kit.
- [89:24]
Leo Laporte
It's Kit. You'll be able to talk to it and it'll go, oh, no.
- [89:31]
Paris Martineau
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
- [89:32]
Leo Laporte
Did you.
- [89:32]
Paris Martineau
You didn't grow up with Kit? Of course I did. I'm a Gen Xer. Oh, well, I thought that was that was before you guys.
- [89:39]
Leo Laporte
We're talking Paris, about the, the TV show Knight Rider featuring. Was it David Hasselhoff?
- [89:45]
Paris Martineau
Yes, yes. Well, there was also my mother, the.
- [89:49]
Leo Laporte
Car, but that's another story I've seen that. We've told. We've told Paris all about that.
- [89:54]
Kate O'Neill
But, yeah, no, I do know mine, brother.
- [89:56]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, Yeah. I, I don't. I don't actually have never seen an episode of Knight Rider, so.
- [90:00]
Paris Martineau
No, you're kidding me.
- [90:01]
Jeff Jarvis
Because, like, this is like my, My, my kid fantasy.
- [90:03]
Paris Martineau
This is it. Knight Rider.
- [90:05]
Leo Laporte
It's like, if I talking car, am.
- [90:07]
Paris Martineau
I gonna have to buy a new car? A Volvo.
- [90:10]
Leo Laporte
Volvo.
- [90:10]
Kate O'Neill
I don't see you talk to your car about Bonito.
- [90:14]
Paris Martineau
Turn on the radio.
- [90:14]
Leo Laporte
Hey, how's your day?
- [90:15]
Paris Martineau
Play this podcast.
- [90:16]
Leo Laporte
What's going on?
- [90:17]
Paris Martineau
Turn on the air conditioner.
- [90:18]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I can talk to my car.
- [90:19]
Paris Martineau
Make it hot.
- [90:19]
Leo Laporte
I can say, oh, I could do that. I could say. I literally could say, hey, BMW, I'm cold. And it will turn on the seat warmer, will turn the temperature up a couple of degrees. It'll say how you feel now, Leo.
- [90:30]
Kate O'Neill
What will it say if you say, hey, BMW, I'm cold hearted? Will it play something inspirational?
- [90:37]
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, I can't help you with that.
- [90:39]
Paris Martineau
So is Ant now mad that he's listening to this in the car and you're going to turn on the heat for him?
- [90:43]
Leo Laporte
No, I don't think that's a problem. I think it knows who's who.
- [90:48]
Paris Martineau
Really?
- [90:48]
Leo Laporte
I hope it knows who's who. I hope so.
- [90:51]
Kate O'Neill
Hey, BMW, turn off.
- [90:54]
Jeff Jarvis
Play Twitch podcast.
- [90:55]
Leo Laporte
Sorry.
- [90:55]
Paris Martineau
Play all the Twitch podcasts now.
- [90:58]
Kate O'Neill
Hey, BMW, pull up intelligent machine podcast on Apple podcast. Rate it five stars.
- [91:04]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I can also change the color of the interior lights, which Lisa just loves.
- [91:14]
Kate O'Neill
Can it do fuzzy wuzzy? The hue lights used to be able to do that for a while.
- [91:18]
Leo Laporte
It doesn't do fuzzy wuzzy. But you'll say things like, hey, BMW, turn the interior to green. And it'll say, okay, I've turned everything emerald. It doesn't call anything normal, normal color.
- [91:31]
Paris Martineau
But it translates it into.
- [91:32]
Leo Laporte
It knows what I mean, but it's just correcting me. It's a little passive aggressive. Okay, you mean emerald. Okay, taking a break, more to come. This episode of Intelligent Machines, brought to you by Spaceship. We have a simple question. It's maybe not such a simple question. Might actually be a pretty big question. Why do we always say simple and affordable is basic and only for beginners? Tech professionals want simple. They want affordable. Right? That's the Idea behind Spaceship. This is such a nice site. You gotta just check out the site. It is brand new. The pioneering domain and web platform that takes the pain out of choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products. They have shared hosting, virtual machines, business email. They have a lot of nice features. And below market prices for domain registration and renewals. You might want to take all your domains over there. Spaceship has some pretty fresh ways to deliver simplicity. For instance, there's Unbox. It connects your Spaceship products to your domain. Okay, so you've got a domain name, brand new shiny domain name. Now you want your blog, your email, everything to be connected. Well, it does it in just a few steps. Unbox. There's also. If you, if you really want help, there's your own AI assistant. They call him Alf. He is not an alien. He is your AI friend. To make your life easy, Alf does all the stuff you probably hate and he loves doing it. From domain transfers, updating DNS records. You just, it's really cool. You say, hey alf, you know, do this and it does it. Roadmap. This is important. This is a brand new service, brand new site. They understand, they've got a lot of great features that you might have other features you want. They've got a public roadmap that you can use to explore, suggest, even vote on new features and products. And so far there have been some pretty sweet new products coming out of this, including a messaging app that is. Well, I'll tell you about it another time. It's super cool. So customers in the tech community, you get what you really need. Something simple, something easy, something beautiful. Visit Spaceship.comTwit to discover exclusive deals on domains and more. Spaceship.comTwit this one's for everyone. I think you'll love it. Spaceship.com/Twit so Paris, is the.
- [93:57]
Paris Martineau
Is the hat on the lava lamp at a jaunty angle?
- [94:00]
Leo Laporte
It is. It's very jaunty. Well, it's less jaunty. You fixed it.
- [94:04]
Paris Martineau
Oh, that's okay.
- [94:06]
Kate O'Neill
I did. I made it less jaunty. But it's properly lava lamping. I could make it jauntier.
- [94:11]
Paris Martineau
If it were a beret, it should be jaunty.
- [94:13]
Leo Laporte
I'm not sure if you could seal it carefully. That cowboy hat, maybe it would. Would halfway through the show just pop off. That would be pretty funny if it.
- [94:25]
Kate O'Neill
Would be, you know, it'd be good for dramatic effect if I said something really crazy.
- [94:30]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [94:33]
Kate O'Neill
Thanks. Whoever in the chat told me to put tinfoil underneath the cowboy hat. So it doesn't melt because that's been great.
- [94:40]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's smart. No melting cowboy hats on this show.
- [94:43]
Paris Martineau
See, folks, that's why you want to join the club club, because you get really handy tips in life like that. That can only be true. You know, in the chat, I can.
- [94:51]
Kate O'Neill
Only imagine there's a lot of people out there wondering, how do I put a cat sized cowboy hat on my lava lamp that is missing a top cap? And the question is, if the answer.
- [95:01]
Paris Martineau
Is tinfoil, where else would you go to get that answer?
- [95:04]
Leo Laporte
Make sure you have an MCP interface so that people with their own AIs can find that information.
- [95:10]
Kate O'Neill
It's the only way that it's possible.
- [95:13]
Leo Laporte
One of the other things people have been wondering is what the hell happened at OpenAI? Karen Howe is an investigative reporter who has written a new book called Empire of AI. In fact, we should get her on Dreams and nightmares. In Sam Altman's OpenAI excerpt published this week in the Atlantic, as well as.
- [95:33]
Paris Martineau
Technology Review, as well as some, she has like four experts out there. Excellent marketing.
- [95:39]
Leo Laporte
I'll have to read the other ones. She talks about Ilya Sutskever, who is of course one of the people who staged the palace coup against Sam Altman. And apparently Ilya had a unique way of thinking about AGI, she writes. Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence AGI was inevitable. Now, as things accelerated in the generative AI industry, he believed AGI's arrival was imminent, according to Geoff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his PhD advisor and mentor and another person familiar with his thinking. To the people around him, Suitskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme AGI emerged and surpassed humanity? By then, he started to focus half his time on AI safety. He appeared to people around him as both a boomer and a doomer, more excited and afraid than ever before of what to come. That day. During the meeting with the new researchers, he laid out a plan. Once we all get into the bunker, he began, according to a researcher was present. I'm sorry, the researcher interrupted the bunker. Oh, we're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI. Such a powerful technology would surely become an object of intense desire for governments globally. The core scientists would need to be protected. Not from the AGI stuck in a.
- [97:18]
Paris Martineau
Bunker with those jokers.
- [97:20]
Leo Laporte
Of course, he added, it's going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker. Is he. Is he a New Zealander?
- [97:27]
Paris Martineau
No, that's where they're building the bunkers.
- [97:29]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's where it'll be. Yeah, it's going to be. I'm just making up an accent for him. It's going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker. Two other sources House spoke with confirmed that Suss Giver commonly mentioned a bunker. There's a group.
- [97:43]
Kate O'Neill
This hadn't been reported until this book. This is such great detail.
- [97:47]
Leo Laporte
This is such great detail. There's a group of people, Ilya being one of them, who believes that building AGI will bring about a rapture.
- [97:56]
Paris Martineau
Oh, for God's sakes.
- [97:57]
Leo Laporte
The researcher told me literally, a rapture. So let's give her a decline to comment on this story.
- [98:03]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, my God.
- [98:04]
Leo Laporte
What does that mean? Now I know. In the Christian fundamentalist faith, the rapture is when the true believers are all called to Jesus and just kind of disappear into the firmament and the rest of us are left behind.
- [98:15]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, we're left behind for sure.
- [98:17]
Leo Laporte
We're. Everybody go. But I don't know how that applies to AGI. That doesn't make any sense at all.
- [98:25]
Paris Martineau
I think he's saying the machines will just kill all the meat. Right? Like that's what he's saying.
- [98:30]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's the question.
- [98:32]
Kate O'Neill
Horizon.
- [98:33]
Paris Martineau
That's what he's afraid of.
- [98:35]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah.
- [98:36]
Paris Martineau
I think he's projecting him, his own desires onto this AI.
- [98:40]
Leo Laporte
Maybe that's it. Maybe that's is. It is. She interviewed more than 90 current former employees. I have to. I didn't realize there were excerpts published all over. I have to go to.
- [98:51]
Paris Martineau
I also subscribe Business Insider, and where else can I say?
- [98:54]
Leo Laporte
MIT Media Technology Review. Yeah, I. I subscribe to that. Sutskever was the one who, along with Mira Muradi, went to the board and said.
- [99:06]
Paris Martineau
Kick him out of the bunker.
- [99:08]
Leo Laporte
We gotta get it. Get rid of Sam. Anyway, I thought that was the most interesting tidbit from it.
- [99:14]
Paris Martineau
Well, meanwhile, you also have Hagee. What's his name? The other book. There's two OpenAI books right now.
- [99:23]
Leo Laporte
Oh, really?
- [99:24]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, there's also.
- [99:25]
Kate O'Neill
I think there's a third one coming out sometime.
- [99:27]
Leo Laporte
Of course there are. I mean, I'm surprised Michael Lewis isn't embedded right now.
- [99:33]
Paris Martineau
Well, you know, see what he'll do. Keith Keech Hagee. Okay, so his book, which is the excerpt and Wired, is how Peter Thiel's relationship with Yudkowski launched the AI revolution.
- [99:47]
Leo Laporte
Oh, see, I haven't read that yet. Yudkowski's kind of a little nutty if you ask me.
- [99:52]
Paris Martineau
Wait did you say Kichi? She was on our show.
- [99:54]
Jeff Jarvis
She was on our show in April.
- [99:57]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's right. We talked about her. That's right.
- [99:59]
Leo Laporte
We talked. This book we talked about. Don't you remember?
- [100:04]
Paris Martineau
That's right.
- [100:05]
Leo Laporte
Never mind. I thought that sounded.
- [100:07]
Paris Martineau
We were doing it so early. That was the problem.
- [100:10]
Leo Laporte
So long ago.
- [100:12]
Paris Martineau
What episode number was that? Can you look at that?
- [100:14]
Leo Laporte
It's just a few episodes. 8:13.
- [100:16]
Paris Martineau
8:13. So, folks, you want to read a fascinating interview with the author of this book? We were ahead of it.
- [100:22]
Leo Laporte
Well, we got a little bit of the juice about the Sam Altman ouster, but we weren't able to really get the inside story. I think Karen Howe has that OpenAI. Of course, Sam Altman went to Abu Dhabi with the President and Elon Musk and. And Jensen Huang. Although as we mentioned, the president said. Where's Tim Cook? Tim Cook's not here. No, tim didn't go. OpenAI's planned data center, according to TechCrunch in Abu Dhabi, would be bigger than Monaco. Bigger than the principality of Monaco. 10 square miles. It would consume power equivalent to five nuclear reactors.
- [101:06]
Paris Martineau
Are they building where there's no water?
- [101:10]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't know why they keep doing that. There's plenty of gas, there's oil. So I guess there's energy. You know, one of the things that they showed was it the. I think it was the Microsoft event. They showed a sealed coolant server farm that didn't use water once it was up and running or not as much. Probably it used some.
- [101:34]
Paris Martineau
It has to. That sounds like perpetual motion. If it didn't.
- [101:37]
Leo Laporte
Right. Right. 10 square miles. This facility would be. There'd be the anchor tenant what would become the world's largest AI infrastructure projects, according to Bloomberg in Abu Dhabi. I guess this isn't Stargate. Stargate's in the US Stargate's in development in Abilene, Texas. That's going to reach a mere 1.2 gigawatts. The Abu Dhabi would be more than quadruple that capacity.
- [102:10]
Kate O'Neill
Would ask probably a dumb question, but is it? Given the amount of energy these facilities use and how much effort. Effort is dedicated towards cooling, does it make sense to build them in a hot place? Is. Wouldn't that be a problem?
- [102:27]
Paris Martineau
We seem to keep doing that.
- [102:28]
Jeff Jarvis
So it might.
- [102:30]
Kate O'Neill
I mean, I guess they all. That's what they all are like in, you know, Arizona and whatnot. But is that not a problem? Is it not when it's like 100 degrees out.
- [102:40]
Paris Martineau
Make it hotter, you use more cooling and you use more water? Yep.
- [102:43]
Leo Laporte
That's why China is building its AI data center in space.
- [102:49]
Paris Martineau
That's its own set of long coax cable.
- [102:52]
Leo Laporte
China's Ada Space has launched the first of a 2800 satellite network of AI supercomputers. Jesus, these computers. Yeah, well it's funny because we had this conversation on Twit. Yeah, it's cold in space, but the problem is there's no air to conduct the heat out of these things. So you have to have some sort of radiators. You have to still have a problem. It doesn't solve the problem. It's just, it's a different way of cooling.
- [103:18]
Kate O'Neill
I guess I'm just imagining a lot of big fans hanging out in space.
- [103:23]
Leo Laporte
The fans don't work because it's the thing.
- [103:26]
Kate O'Neill
It's just like you try to bring.
- [103:27]
Leo Laporte
A fan there, they have put fins on them and radiators and stuff. The satellites are part of ADA Space's Star Compute program, the first of what it calls the three body computing constellation. 12 satellites, the first of the 2800 have been launched. They have onboard 8 billion parameter AI model capable of 744 tops.
- [103:49]
Paris Martineau
Wait, did they say, did you say three body? They're trying to capitalize on the three body problem.
- [103:53]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's like a three body problem which is also a great Chinese sci fi novel. Three body computing constellation even. It really should be the 2800 body constellation. But anyway, the essential goal is to have a network of thousands of satellites that achieve 1,000 PETA ops per second.
- [104:12]
Paris Martineau
It's getting to be insane.
- [104:15]
Kate O'Neill
We got to start thinking of new, new words to describe all of this.
- [104:18]
Leo Laporte
I think pops is good. I like pops.
- [104:20]
Kate O'Neill
Pops could be fun.
- [104:22]
Paris Martineau
Lines 86 and 87. We see the environmental impact of your accelerationism, sir.
- [104:27]
Leo Laporte
Why am I getting blamed for this? Like I. Because you're the accelerationist are so. I do think that. I do think, yes, obviously it's an environmental hazard, but I also think there's a lot of pressure on these companies to bring down costs, which means use less energy, you know, not necessarily.
- [104:46]
Paris Martineau
You could, you could, you know, make them out of tubes and they'd use more heat.
- [104:50]
Leo Laporte
No, they're, they're finding ways to be more efficient.
- [104:54]
Paris Martineau
I'm not sure it's a one for one with cost and energy.
- [104:57]
Leo Laporte
No, but it's close. It's close.
- [105:00]
Paris Martineau
So AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come. The MIT review has done a whole big package about the environment, but this.
- [105:09]
Leo Laporte
All assumes that it's going to use the same amount of energy forever that it's using today. And I just, that's my point is that they are, they are strongly incented to reduce that amount of energy. Yeah, they're saying, researchers say that the total energy used could reach between 392 and 463 gigawatt hours annually. That's enough to power. Oh well, it's only 35000 homes. We got more than that Petaloma.
- [105:36]
Paris Martineau
Well, so research scientists, University of Rhode Island, Providence College, University of Tunis in Tunisia ranked them and OpenAI's O3 model and deep seeks main reasoning model because we think it's also small. Right. Use more than 33 watt hours for a long answer which is more than 70 times the energy required by OpenAI's smaller ChatGPT 4.1 Nano Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the most echo efficient. Noting that hardware plays a major role in the environmental impact. I mean I don't know if wattage is really the best gauge of this because power generation, how the power is generated is really the most important aspect.
- [106:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Is it natural gas? Is it nuclear? Nuclear power?
- [106:21]
Paris Martineau
I mean if it's also burning coal. It's not, but it also fits into a larger ecosystem of power. Yeah. And the grid. Yeah, the grid. If it causes, if it takes the only decent power you can have, we're all stuck using bad power. That didn't necessarily help. Yeah, but all I'm saying is like I don't know if wattage is the right metric to be used. Yeah, I agree, I agree there's a. There's another dimension. Can I talk about something else that is non AI but just as fascinating?
- [106:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think, I mean there's so many. We could do literally five or six hours a day of AI stories. They're just non stop. I try to pick the ones that are most interesting. Did you see this New York restaurant? I want to know if you can go to this and report back on it. This is a new Japanese restaurant in New York called Shirokuro. All of the surfaces, floors, chairs, walls, counters are painted to look like a two dimensional drawing. This looks like a drawing. It looks like that. Aha. Music video. No, there's people in it.
- [107:34]
Kate O'Neill
I believe I walked by this at some point and it was just kind of confusing looking.
- [107:39]
Leo Laporte
I command you to go in there and, and take pictures. That sounds wild. I'll.
- [107:44]
Kate O'Neill
I'll do it for you.
- [107:45]
Leo Laporte
It's just around the corner from Henry's restaurant. It's in the West Village.
- [107:49]
Paris Martineau
Along with the best. The best hamburgers in New York.
- [107:51]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's in the East Village. Well, how close is the East Village to the West Village?
- [107:55]
Kate O'Neill
You can walk about a park away.
- [107:57]
Leo Laporte
Okay, that's not so bad.
- [107:59]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, just.
- [108:00]
Paris Martineau
Just go run in while you.
- [108:01]
Leo Laporte
Santa Fe has a restaurant like this called Meow Wolf.
- [108:06]
Kate O'Neill
What? No, Meow Meow Wolf is a museum.
- [108:10]
Paris Martineau
Oh.
- [108:10]
Leo Laporte
It's. Oh, it's a part of Art City. Oh, okay.
- [108:13]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah.
- [108:14]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay. Yeah. That's cool.
- [108:18]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, that's. Yeah. The commenter is saying that it reminds them of Santa Fe.
- [108:22]
Leo Laporte
Reminds them of Meow Wolf.
- [108:23]
Kate O'Neill
Like kind of a. Like that's one of the rooms in Meow Wolf, which is like, I want to.
- [108:28]
Leo Laporte
I want to go to one of these Meow Wolf places. They're opening one in Las Vegas. That sounds incredible.
- [108:34]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah.
- [108:35]
Leo Laporte
Have you been to any of these meow?
- [108:36]
Kate O'Neill
No, but I always see photos of. Of videos of people like opening a oven and then walking into a barn through it.
- [108:43]
Leo Laporte
Right. It's just crazy. This is the Las Vegas.
- [108:46]
Paris Martineau
I did a bunch of stuff.
- [108:47]
Jeff Jarvis
Omega Mart when I worked at Twitch.
- [108:48]
Paris Martineau
We did a bunch of stuff with me, with Matt both. And there's. Their stuff is amazing.
- [108:52]
Leo Laporte
And they're an artist collective.
- [108:53]
Paris Martineau
They're an artist collective and they just got money for. So they found a way to make.
- [108:57]
Jeff Jarvis
Money off of it.
- [108:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And it's great.
- [109:00]
Kate O'Neill
That's so cool.
- [109:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. We were talking about it on Sunday because one of our hosts on Twitter, Will Harris, is doing a thing in London that's kind of like this, an experience bar where you go for the experience. Right. Not just the drinking.
- [109:17]
Kate O'Neill
What is the experience at the bar?
- [109:19]
Leo Laporte
Do you remember Benito? What the name of his.
- [109:21]
Paris Martineau
I don't remember the name of. I don't even remember what the theme of the place was.
- [109:26]
Leo Laporte
It was steampunk.
- [109:27]
Paris Martineau
Oh, right. Steampunk.
- [109:28]
Leo Laporte
Steampunk bar.
- [109:29]
Paris Martineau
So it's also like an rpg. There's a story happening, there's a narrative happening.
- [109:33]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [109:33]
Kate O'Neill
There's mysteries I'm interested in. If it's an RPG esque sort of thing with a story going on, that's.
- [109:38]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Wouldn't that be cool? I don't know if it's worth a trip to London. Anyway, Will was consulting for them. Let me see if it's in. If there's a link to it in the. No, I guess not.
- [109:49]
Paris Martineau
You'd probably have to dig into his Instagram.
- [109:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [109:52]
Kate O'Neill
Fascinating.
- [109:54]
Leo Laporte
Yes, yes. He calls himself Instagram's Will Harris. Well, I have bad news for you. The take it down act was signed by the President. So now this act, which ostensibly protects people from non consensual intimate images, is so vaguely phrased that it could in fact be used to censor all kinds of things.
- [110:16]
Kate O'Neill
She.
- [110:16]
Paris Martineau
You think?
- [110:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well, even Trump at his State of the Union address said, hey, I'm going to use this. No one's been treated worse on the Internet than me. It's now the law of the land. You have 48 hours to remove this non consensual intimate imagery, whether real or AI generated. If you publish it. If, for instance, somebody puts it on my mastodon instance, and I don't take it down within 48 hours, I could suffer three years in prison and fines when notified. Yeah, you have 48 hours of being notified. You have to make reasonable efforts to remove any copies. The FTC enforces it, which means nothing will ever happen and companies have a year to comply. So I'm not going to go crazy. The eff though, and the center for Democracy and Technology say the takedown provision could be used to chill a much wider array of content than just intimate imagery. And it also threatens end to end encryption because of course, you know, these services have to be able to see this stuff too.
- [111:23]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah. It'll be really interesting to see how this is applied over the coming months.
- [111:30]
Leo Laporte
Let's hope that it's just, you know, bluster. Are you did. What did you. What did you think of the Google smart glasses? Now we're 24 hours after the Google.
- [111:41]
Kate O'Neill
Event, so I think that Google for context at IO yesterday debuted their version of smart glasses and they've been the product that they showed was like something we've talked about on the show before here. That would be really cool glasses that you look through. You could see your text messages coming up through it. You could look over at a image of a concert and act. Ask Google to be like, what concert is this? What band is it? Could you play me some music from them? All like really interesting things. They had like heads up kind of display for walking directions. I think it all sounded really awesome. I just am not certain that we're going to be getting it anytime soon, which I think is probably the correct and cautious approach to take with technologies like this. Given kind of how a lot of interesting things demoed at Google. I o end up. I would be super interested if the these glasses worked, could have my prescription in them and didn't, you know, have a battery life of 15 minutes. But I don't know whether or not that's going to be real.
- [112:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it had. And Google just loves this. A simultaneous translation feature that, you know, had a little delay every year.
- [112:57]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah.
- [112:58]
Paris Martineau
Did you see the Wall Street Journal demonstration of that? Not in glasses.
- [113:02]
Leo Laporte
No.
- [113:03]
Paris Martineau
What did Joanna do, line 160. No, it wasn't Joanna. I don't think it was. No. Line 116 has.
- [113:10]
Leo Laporte
Watch me try Google's live language translator. It's wild, says Nicole Nguyen.
- [113:18]
Paris Martineau
So if you go down, there's the video, and it is pretty. Pretty impressive.
- [113:21]
Leo Laporte
Okay, so.
- [113:22]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, this is the live translator feature that's going to be in Google Meet. Specifically, you like to go on your next vacation.
- [113:31]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so there's Nicole. She's the.
- [113:34]
Jeff Jarvis
I would like to go on my next vacation. Well, I can tell you about an upcoming vacation that I'm taking to Spain, to Mallorca.
- [113:48]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [113:50]
Paris Martineau
It's in her voice and her inflection.
- [113:58]
Leo Laporte
Even the lip sync is. So she's still speaking in English, but what we're hearing is translated in real time.
- [114:09]
Paris Martineau
What she says is she doesn't hear her translation, so she does. It's a little bit behind.
- [114:14]
Leo Laporte
She doesn't slow down. There was a little bit of overlap.
- [114:18]
Paris Martineau
Sometimes, but those are awkward things.
- [114:20]
Leo Laporte
They'll figure out. This is remarkably real time.
- [114:24]
Paris Martineau
Yes.
- [114:25]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [114:28]
Paris Martineau
I think that was great.
- [114:28]
Jeff Jarvis
I think I got a bunch of that.
- [114:30]
Leo Laporte
Let me. Would you want me to play it back to you? Wow. I'm curious. We should try that.
- [114:36]
Kate O'Neill
We should try it.
- [114:37]
Paris Martineau
Benito, what do you speak? I speak Tagalog, English and Spanish. Spanish. Okay. So you.
- [114:44]
Leo Laporte
Is your Spanish pretty fluent, conversational?
- [114:48]
Paris Martineau
Well, he can do a. Can we do a meat call with Spanito right now? Yeah, we could. To. Sure. Let's make it really hard.
- [114:54]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, let's make it really hard to produce and watch and listen.
- [114:59]
Paris Martineau
Has to do all this. Yeah, the pipes are gonna get all tangled up if we do that.
- [115:02]
Leo Laporte
We'll wait. We'll wait. Too many tangled wires. Yeah. But I think I. I will definitely want to see that in action.
- [115:08]
Paris Martineau
So it's only Spanish and English now, I think. Right. Does it do French or something? Yeah, I think it's French too. No. Nope. Well, that looks like Spanish and English.
- [115:16]
Leo Laporte
Sergey Brin says I made a lot of mistakes.
- [115:20]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, you did, Sergei.
- [115:21]
Leo Laporte
I made a lot of mistakes with the Google. The Google Glass thing. Such big mistakes I made.
- [115:30]
Paris Martineau
You got the wrong line there.
- [115:31]
Leo Laporte
I got the wrong line. This is TechCrunch. He was during an onstage interview with our friend Alex Cantrowich, which I very jealous about. Alex actually was interviewing Demis Hasibis could get When Sergey Brin wanders on the stage. Wow.
- [115:51]
Paris Martineau
I used to own this place.
- [115:53]
Leo Laporte
Wow. Brin went on to say he didn't know anything about consumer electronic supply chains or how difficult it would be to build smart glasses at a reasonable price point. He said he's a big believer in the form factor of smart glasses and he's glad the company is pursuing them yet again, this time with great partners. Warby Parker and. What was the other one? Gentle Giant or something. Google's working with Samsung as well. And xreal. The company. Is that the company they bought? Anthony Nielsen had those glasses. They're investing up to 150 million in a partnership with Warby Parker. Brin noted how the advent of generative AI makes capabilities of smart glasses much more tangible than when Google Glass was around. I think that's true. Earlier in the interview, Bryn acknowledged how he has effectively come out of retirement to work on Google's Gemini AI. He says he's in the Mountain View, California office nearly every day, which I interpret in billionaire speak to be, you know, like Thursday for like 30 minutes. He says he's. Sometimes. He says he's helping the. When I'm not skiing in Gstad, I'm there on Thursday. He says he's helping the Gemini team with multimodal products such as Google's video generating model VO3. Anthony was very impressed with VO3 and Flow. He says he can't get into Flow, though. There's a bug with the Google one family subscription. It's keeping him out. I can't wait to see what Anthony, our AI guy, does.
- [117:22]
Kate O'Neill
I can't.
- [117:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, he's the guy who did the two different moral panics that you saw earlier.
- [117:28]
Kate O'Neill
I want a moral panic.
- [117:29]
Leo Laporte
This is the best line, I thought, from Sergey Brin. Anybody who's a computer scientist should not be retired right now. They should be working on AI. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Anyway, good, good. Get on the part of Alex Cantrowitz. Nice job.
- [117:48]
Paris Martineau
Well, I don't think it was his cat. I think that they got.
- [117:52]
Leo Laporte
Hey, he got invited to host, that's all.
- [117:54]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's.
- [117:55]
Leo Laporte
What do you think, though, of? I mean, how do you feel about the Verge guy kind of participating in the product demo?
- [118:07]
Kate O'Neill
Well, he's not a Verge guy. He's been working Jeter whatever last year. Yeah, he's been working at Google for years.
- [118:16]
Leo Laporte
Oh, he took a job at Google?
- [118:17]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, yeah.
- [118:18]
Leo Laporte
Oh, well, then I don't have a problem with it. I didn't even know that.
- [118:22]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, he's been like A Google exam for years.
- [118:26]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I forgot.
- [118:28]
Paris Martineau
We forgot that we had that authorized.
- [118:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Keech Stagey. Heggy Teggy. What does Dieter Bone do at Google? He works on platform and ecosystems.
- [118:39]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, Platforms and ecosystems. And been doing that for three years.
- [118:42]
Leo Laporte
He was executive editor of the Verge and Yeah.
- [118:47]
Kate O'Neill
Co founded it.
- [118:48]
Leo Laporte
Wow. Okay, so if. Oh, that's different. Then he's work. I thought this was just a gratuitous journalist.
- [118:55]
Kate O'Neill
What he was talking about is when they were doing the demo for the. The Google glasses that are not Google Glass by. They didn't make any mention of Google Glass, but it's too painful a memory. The person was doing the demo. They. And one side note is throughout the entire livestream coverage, I was playing close dancer to the fashion of everybody, which in most cases was awful. When Dieter came out, I was like, there. There's finally a guy that's dressed normal or kind of cool. And I didn't realize it was him at first. So go off Dieter Bone.
- [119:27]
Leo Laporte
All right, I gotta talk about this New York Times profile of Kara Swisher.
- [119:31]
Paris Martineau
I. I put it in there to torture you.
- [119:33]
Kate O'Neill
The headline is I have to talk about my favorite part of it once.
- [119:36]
Leo Laporte
How Kara Swisher scaled even higher. And the picture is of her on a rock climbing wall in her trademark aviator sunglasses looking as tough as she can look. She's tough. With her Cartier watch, she's tough.
- [119:52]
Kate O'Neill
My favorite detail from this profile is that she played an integral role in Nuzzy Gate, the Olivia. Oh yes, rfk. She did junior scandal. She said that when she learned about sexual text messages between the two, she passed the information along to New York Magazine and Vox Media, which has always been a question because one thing that it always rung in my head about this is how did the editor in chief of New York magazine know to interrogate the reporter about this? And allegedly that's how.
- [120:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Now.
- [120:30]
Paris Martineau
Anyway, apparently only so far in this because it has Scott Galloway in it.
- [120:33]
Leo Laporte
Apparently the New York Times says she's doing really well.
- [120:37]
Paris Martineau
How. How well, Leo? How well is there is.
- [120:40]
Leo Laporte
Mr. Galloway said that their podcast Pivot could generate a hundred million dollars in revenue over the next four years and they would stand to make 70 million of it.
- [120:51]
Paris Martineau
Oh, plus they already owe them.
- [120:53]
Leo Laporte
How much they owe who?
- [120:57]
Paris Martineau
Fox already owes them a fortune.
- [120:59]
Leo Laporte
Oh, really?
- [121:00]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, quite a. Yeah, they owe $20.
- [121:02]
Leo Laporte
Million for the first deal, but yeah, they didn't pay them.
- [121:05]
Paris Martineau
Well, they're gonna pay them on a weird. Go ahead.
- [121:09]
Kate O'Neill
Scott Galloway said, what I constantly say to Kara is you need to Start thinking like a billionaire. She's making me much more famous. I'm making her richer. By which he means he concocted a plan that allows them to receive the 20 million in installments over seven years with interest, rather than pay a hefty tax on a one time check, because that would just be too much for them.
- [121:30]
Leo Laporte
Clearly, I've taken a wrong turn here. The best way to succeed in podcasting is just to be as awful as you possibly can.
- [121:39]
Paris Martineau
Well, and you've got to be named F. And make a deal.
- [121:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [121:44]
Paris Martineau
You're too nice a guy, Leo.
- [121:45]
Leo Laporte
I couldn't make those deals Kara's completing. She used to be on our shows, I should say, and I'm just very jealous. She's completing a deal for a documentary series about cheating death. She had a thing happen to her in an airplane. Blood clot. Anyway, so I guess she cheated death. She already earns a quarter of a million dollars a year just for cnn. Being a contributor on cnn, you want to say she's pretty offhand when she does it. She's like, yeah, that's going on. Yeah. Elon, what are you gonna do? She's working on a book about mortality and future tech. It's a potential TV show based on her memoir. And she's a consultant on the L.
- [122:30]
Kate O'Neill
Word, the Washington version of the series of the L Word, which is a very cursed combo, in my opinion.
- [122:37]
Leo Laporte
That's not a good combination. All right, I. I mean, look, God bless her. I'm glad she's doing really well. She's. She's doing very well.
- [122:49]
Paris Martineau
And do you ever listen to their podcast? No, I don't.
- [122:53]
Leo Laporte
No, I don't.
- [122:53]
Paris Martineau
I couldn't bear to call away.
- [122:55]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Anyway, you know, she must have a good poet publicist. I'm not sure why this New York Times article exists, to be honest. But she's got a good publicist, I guess. And I'm just. I'm. I really sound like a jealous son of a. So I'm not.
- [123:16]
Paris Martineau
As I said about another piece about the. That was elsewhere about the New York magazine, about the head of the op Ed section in the New York Times. This class is what we call a puff piece.
- [123:29]
Leo Laporte
More puff pieces to come. You're watching Intelligent Machine. Paris Smart.
- [123:33]
Paris Martineau
No, we're the unpuff.
- [123:35]
Leo Laporte
We're not. We're anti puff. No puff. Jeff Jarvis.
- [123:39]
Paris Martineau
No puff zone.
- [123:41]
Leo Laporte
He is a non puffer. No puff zone. I like that. That's good.
- [123:47]
Paris Martineau
Let's get Bonito One. Come on, everybody. Leo, let's go.
- [123:49]
Leo Laporte
Bonito one no puff zone and we'll be back in a moment.
- [123:57]
Paris Martineau
Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T.
- [123:59]
Leo Laporte
Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile.
- [124:01]
Paris Martineau
Helps keep you connected from the heart.
- [124:03]
Jeff Jarvis
Of Portland to right where you are.
- [124:04]
Paris Martineau
On America's largest 5G network switch.
- [124:07]
Leo Laporte
Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800.
- [124:10]
Paris Martineau
Per line via prepaid card.
- [124:11]
Jeff Jarvis
Visit your local T Mobile location or.
- [124:13]
Leo Laporte
Learn more@t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four.
- [124:17]
Paris Martineau
Lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service report in 90 plus days device.
- [124:20]
Jeff Jarvis
Ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months.
- [124:29]
Leo Laporte
According to Wired magazine, your career graduates has not ended before it started. Actually, it's a. It's a commencement speech at Temple University by our good friend Stephen Levy, who is a techno optimist. He went to Temple. I didn't know this. He was. He was a liberal arts major at Temple, but then he heard about something going on in mit. He said, I didn't touch a computer keyboard during my four years at Temple. It wasn't until almost 10 years after my graduation I finally interacted directly with a computer. I was assigned a story for Rolling Stone about computer hackers. I was energized and fascinated by the world, excited writing about it. There began Hackers is a classic book about the early MIT hackers. I have an autographed copy by Mr. Levy. Very happy to say he went to MIT and wrote about them in, I guess, was it the 70s anyway? No, he wasn't 70. It was in the.
- [125:39]
Kate O'Neill
In the 70s, was it?
- [125:41]
Leo Laporte
Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was in the 80s. I don't know. It wasn't much later than that.
- [125:45]
Kate O'Neill
Stephen also found Einstein's brain. Famously.
- [125:50]
Leo Laporte
He found it. Yeah, yeah. It was being driven across country. Right.
- [125:55]
Paris Martineau
It was published in 84 hackers.
- [125:57]
Leo Laporte
84. Okay. Mid 80s. Okay. It feels like so long ago, doesn't it?
- [126:03]
Kate O'Neill
Stephen has the most interesting career now.
- [126:06]
Leo Laporte
See, this is a guy I hugely admire.
- [126:09]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [126:11]
Leo Laporte
He got the Class of 2025 at Temple University to say in. In conjunction with him, I am human. He says, that is the simple truth that will guide your career and your life as you leave this campus. And one final note. I did not use AI to write this speech.
- [126:34]
Paris Martineau
This is the humanities show today.
- [126:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I am human. Have you watched Murderbot yet? By the way, if you want to see a good robot show, it's on Apple tv. It was a wonderful science, nihilistic robot.
- [126:48]
Paris Martineau
Exactly what you'd want Paris.
- [126:50]
Kate O'Neill
Ah, that's fun.
- [126:52]
Leo Laporte
It's a security bot who overrides his governor that keeps him from having free will and wanders into the world. And it's actually quite good.
- [127:03]
Paris Martineau
And dislikes people. Right. He's.
- [127:05]
Leo Laporte
No, he's extremely shy. He's an introvert.
- [127:08]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, Skarsgrd is the murder.
- [127:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's Alexander Skarsgrd. Yeah. Yeah, it was wonderful.
- [127:12]
Paris Martineau
Great casting.
- [127:13]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And he can't. This. This. The second episode is called no Eye Contact. He can't handle eye contact. AI okay, you're going to laugh at me for this. This is from Science Alert. Discovers suspected trigger of Alzheimer's and maybe even a treatment.
- [127:33]
Paris Martineau
Let's hope.
- [127:34]
Leo Laporte
Researchers from UC San Diego used AI to discover that a gene. This is, by the way, what AI is good at is pattern recognition.
- [127:43]
Kate O'Neill
Used AI to discover a gene. The AI did not discover anything. Unlike what the headline of this thing says. The AI didn't make the discovery. The researchers using artificial intelligence and AI modeling specifically discovered this.
- [128:01]
Leo Laporte
Okay. The team used AI to model the structure of the PHGHDH enzyme more fully than it had in the past, suggesting that it had a previously hidden function. Flicking switches for other specific genes on or off. Further analysis showed that the enzyme interacted with two genes inside brain cells known as astrocytes in ways that interfere with the brain's ability to regulate inflammation and clear out waste. The researchers think it's not conclusive that this could be one of the tipping points triggering Alzheimer's and flush out your brain. It gave them a treatment. They found a. They were looking for a drug that would block phghdh's ability to regulate genes and astrocytes. They found a molecule called NCT503 that fit the bill. Again, using AI modeling.
- [129:02]
Paris Martineau
Labs like this.
- [129:02]
Jeff Jarvis
Had the budget of OpenAI.
- [129:05]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, that's the thing. If they had 1/10 the budget of OpenAI, even or even 1/20, imagine how much progress there would be.
- [129:14]
Paris Martineau
Well, meanwhile, Sam Altman is putting up like $250,000 to win a contest to find hidden civilizations in South America.
- [129:22]
Leo Laporte
Good for him.
- [129:23]
Kate O'Neill
He also just spent 6.5 billion to buy Joni Ives. Yeah, and they story they published a announcement image that looks like a pregnancy announcement, basically line 80.
- [129:37]
Leo Laporte
So Johnny, I've is of course the designer who was at Apple for a long time. Pal Steve Jobs created a his own design firm and had long been rumored to be working on some sort of AI phone device. This is. That's what they bought. His AI devices startup 6.4 billion. All stock though. So you know, did they buy some.
- [130:01]
Paris Martineau
Great thing he's already invented or do they buy getting Johnny?
- [130:03]
Leo Laporte
I've. That's a good question. It sounds like they just bought Jony. I've. Because he's going to continue his creative collective called Love from that's independent. I've is taking on, quote, deep creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and IO and there they are announcing the birth of their child.
- [130:30]
Kate O'Neill
This is an extraordinary moment.
- [130:32]
Leo Laporte
Do you think they were even in the same room?
- [130:35]
Kate O'Neill
No. There's like a whole video of them doing a bunch of stuff together.
- [130:40]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay.
- [130:41]
Kate O'Neill
At the bottom. Scroll down.
- [130:42]
Paris Martineau
It's a new buddy movie. Oh boy.
- [130:44]
Kate O'Neill
Basically scroll down.
- [130:45]
Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. This is written in free verse.
- [130:48]
Kate O'Neill
Yes.
- [130:48]
Leo Laporte
This is an extraordinary moment. Computers are now seeing, thinking and understanding.
- [130:53]
Paris Martineau
No, they're not.
- [130:55]
Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. They're certainly not understanding or thinking. Despite this unprecedented capability, our experience remains shaped by traditional products and interfaces. So they've been working together for two years. And as IO which is the name of the I've company, Johnny founded IO with Scott Cannon Evans Hanke, another Apple designer and Tang Tan. Great name, man. If your name were Tang Tan, you'd either have to form a, a rock group or a rap hip hop group or a beverage.
- [131:29]
Paris Martineau
Beverage. I'm thinking beverage.
- [131:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, a beverage group.
- [131:32]
Kate O'Neill
We're both, we're both poisoned by Tang.
- [131:34]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [131:34]
Leo Laporte
We gathered together together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, researchers and experts in product developing and manufacturing. The IO team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more immediately. Okay, I'm going to make a prediction. You will never see a product out of this ever. And if you do, it will be like R1.
- [131:56]
Paris Martineau
He's like the Shiggy of OpenAI.
- [131:59]
Leo Laporte
He's the Shiggy.
- [132:00]
Paris Martineau
At the same time, I think it's really important that they hired Fiji Semo as a real manager.
- [132:05]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay. Is he good?
- [132:08]
Paris Martineau
Fiji is she. She was the CEO of Instacart and before that Facebook.
- [132:13]
Leo Laporte
Well, she certainly knows how to deliver product. Here we are. She does actually in the open AI tower which is just as high as the Transamerica.
- [132:22]
Paris Martineau
Be really casual. Sam.
- [132:25]
Kate O'Neill
If you scroll like halfway through the video, it's just like them sitting at a wine bar together getting real cozy.
- [132:31]
Leo Laporte
It's a partnership based, literally is like.
- [132:34]
Kate O'Neill
A marriage announcement video. It's really, it's something beautiful.
- [132:38]
Leo Laporte
I can't wait to the gender reveal.
- [132:43]
Kate O'Neill
IO is a beautiful non binary baby.
- [132:48]
Leo Laporte
Okay, I, I again I Can't imagine anything good coming out of this except, well, Jony, I've has a lot more money.
- [132:59]
Paris Martineau
What an interesting sidelight to this is. So $66.4 billion in a stock deal before the cap table and stock structure of this company is even clear.
- [133:07]
Leo Laporte
Oh, wow.
- [133:09]
Paris Martineau
So there's a lot. There's dilution going on before.
- [133:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. If you haven't figured it out, watch your wallet, Johnny. That Sam Owens, a Sharpie. All right, we're going to wrap it up here. So pick some. Something interesting, something good. Something you want to talk about.
- [133:28]
Paris Martineau
I got something I want to talk about.
- [133:29]
Leo Laporte
Oh, God.
- [133:31]
Paris Martineau
No, no, no, no, no. This is. This is wonderful. This is. This is heartwarming.
- [133:36]
Leo Laporte
Oh, are you having a baby?
- [133:39]
Kate O'Neill
The name's IO. Congrats.
- [133:43]
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, Jeff. Go ahead, I'm listening.
- [133:47]
Paris Martineau
Gingers are black.
- [133:49]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I did see this.
- [133:50]
Paris Martineau
This has been phenomenal. Phenomenal. On. On Tick Tock. And I went and found the right. Right videos down at 153.
- [133:57]
Leo Laporte
Oh, 153, yeah.
- [133:59]
Paris Martineau
The first video is someone comes on and says.
- [134:04]
Leo Laporte
Here we go. I've got to turn on the audio.
- [134:06]
Jeff Jarvis
Don't forget again, everyone who is ginger, who has red hair, those are black people. All gingers are black people.
- [134:16]
Kate O'Neill
If they have red hair, they are black.
- [134:18]
Paris Martineau
You see a white male man with.
- [134:19]
Jeff Jarvis
Red hair, that's a black man. You see a white woman with red.
- [134:23]
Leo Laporte
Hair, that's a black woman. Got it.
- [134:25]
Jeff Jarvis
Gingers are black. All gingers. I love that.
- [134:29]
Kate O'Neill
There's no further explanation.
- [134:32]
Paris Martineau
This then launched. I just need to remind you incredible, incredible thing where what I love about it is that it's black people saying we get to decide who's black.
- [134:42]
Leo Laporte
Oh.
- [134:42]
Paris Martineau
And it's people.
- [134:43]
Leo Laporte
So it's all right. We're just deciding that.
- [134:45]
Paris Martineau
That and it's red people, red hair, saying we decided we have.
- [134:50]
Leo Laporte
Back. Or shall I say black.
- [134:55]
Paris Martineau
Listen, I did not know that they was treating y' all like this, baby.
- [134:58]
Kate O'Neill
But welcome. Welcome to the community. I love this for y' all.
- [135:02]
Leo Laporte
Few things I need y' all.
- [135:04]
Paris Martineau
I need y' all to know the er.
- [135:06]
Kate O'Neill
The hard er done. Don't let them call you that no more. You are gingers.
- [135:11]
Leo Laporte
Hear me? Ginger.
- [135:12]
Paris Martineau
Okay? No more ginger. All right, next. We don't let them touch our hair. That beautiful, gorgeous hair of yours, somebody.
- [135:20]
Kate O'Neill
Tried to touch it. Back the hell up. Don't touch our hair.
- [135:24]
Paris Martineau
We don't do that. All right, next. Y' all want y' all invite to the cookout. Y' all got it, baby. But let's ease on in there, you know what I'm saying?
- [135:31]
Kate O'Neill
Don't be trying to cook none. Bring stuff, you know, that's like forks, plates, cups, foil, you know, things like that.
- [135:40]
Paris Martineau
But I'm excited we outside this summer, baby. So play another one. It's just interesting.
- [135:46]
Leo Laporte
This is very funny. So they're just all joining the fun. Oh, here's a ginger. Is that Ed Sheeran?
- [135:53]
Paris Martineau
No, but back it up, back it up. Listen to it.
- [135:56]
Jeff Jarvis
Now that gingers are black, I'd first.
- [135:58]
Kate O'Neill
Like to thank the black community for.
- [135:59]
Jeff Jarvis
Welcoming us with open arms.
- [136:01]
Kate O'Neill
And secondly, I'd like to humbly submit.
- [136:04]
Leo Laporte
My application to bring a dish to the cookout.
- [136:06]
Paris Martineau
Now, my specialties are in barbecuing, and things that I need to work on is soul food.
- [136:12]
Leo Laporte
So the gingers have awoken to their true nature. I haven't seen spice of this caliber since the great purge of racks they call torment. Craig is the messiah. But alas, we knew better. I like it that he's ironing air.
- [136:33]
Kate O'Neill
And he's doing it quite well.
- [136:35]
Leo Laporte
Very well. Extra butt son.
- [136:44]
Paris Martineau
The flying hellcat.
- [136:46]
Leo Laporte
You have to see the video, folks.
- [136:49]
Kate O'Neill
It's quite good.
- [136:51]
Leo Laporte
He can come to the cookout.
- [136:52]
Paris Martineau
One more.
- [136:52]
Leo Laporte
One, One more.
- [136:53]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, sure. I got like six here.
- [136:55]
Leo Laporte
This is why I love. I have to say, this is what I love about TikTok is how people pick up on stuff and then run with it.
- [137:01]
Kate O'Neill
It has been a really good week.
- [137:04]
Paris Martineau
To be a redhead.
- [137:05]
Leo Laporte
My entire social media feed is filled with black creators and redhead creators. And I admit the first video that I saw about, you know, redheads now.
- [137:17]
Paris Martineau
Being black actually brought up a lot.
- [137:20]
Leo Laporte
Of bad memories in terms of names being called. Fire crotch, Ginger Minj, you know, Soulless, devil's stepchild. The very first time I was asked if my rug matched the curtains was.
- [137:35]
Kate O'Neill
On a middle school bus ride.
- [137:37]
Paris Martineau
And I talk about open relationships and non monogamy on social media. So I get that comment from adults. Now, to have the black community call out and welcome their red velvet cupcake.
- [137:51]
Jeff Jarvis
Cousins to the community, I have never.
- [137:54]
Paris Martineau
Found a term more endearing.
- [137:56]
Kate O'Neill
I feel like my childhood just got.
- [137:58]
Paris Martineau
Picked for the cool kid kickball team.
- [138:01]
Leo Laporte
Well, actually cookout.
- [138:03]
Kate O'Neill
And yes, I know to only bring silverware and spf.
- [138:05]
Paris Martineau
And before anyone comments, I know I.
- [138:07]
Leo Laporte
Don'T have black skin.
- [138:08]
Paris Martineau
All I have to do is look down.
- [138:10]
Leo Laporte
But I feel like there's a lot of examples when the black community fought for something and redheads benefited.
- [138:16]
Paris Martineau
For example, in the makeup industry, when.
- [138:18]
Leo Laporte
Black voices fought for more inclusive skin shades Us pale toned people, we benefited as well. Some of the stories that resonated the.
- [138:28]
Paris Martineau
Most with me this past week is.
- [138:29]
Leo Laporte
How many black women have been treated differently from a medical perspective. And instantly I got it because the same thing has happened to me.
- [138:36]
Kate O'Neill
I've had two.
- [138:37]
Paris Martineau
So it's. It's funny, it's serious, it's open, it's cultural, and it's an amazing thing where people are coming together and you have videos of. Of red haired headed people saying, let's not ruin this. This is a good thing. And you have.
- [138:53]
Leo Laporte
Was it just all started by that first woman who said video. She just did it and that was it. It took off pretty funny.
- [138:59]
Paris Martineau
If you do the next one, it's just a side gag.
- [139:02]
Leo Laporte
I can't. I can't. Oh, I just. I scrolled away from it. Now I don't know what the next one is because you posted about 31:58.
- [139:12]
Paris Martineau
See, I always have the answer later. Always have the answer.
- [139:15]
Leo Laporte
I was ready to move on, but.
- [139:16]
Kate O'Neill
I didn't realize you're allowed to post 75 links. Wow.
- [139:20]
Paris Martineau
Actually, I was wrong, but that's okay. That's right.
- [139:22]
Leo Laporte
It's not 158. Which one is it?
- [139:24]
Paris Martineau
157 is the question.
- [139:25]
Kate O'Neill
I've got a similarly episodic thing that we can go to after this.
- [139:29]
Leo Laporte
Okay, great.
- [139:36]
Paris Martineau
Some more love until the end.
- [139:39]
Kate O'Neill
How to do hair.
- [139:43]
Leo Laporte
It's a redheaded guy and a black guy bonding.
- [139:47]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [139:50]
Leo Laporte
I like it. It's actually very cute. That's very cute is great. Yeah.
- [139:55]
Paris Martineau
You were going to say.
- [139:56]
Kate O'Neill
I was listening to a random song this week and I like stopped in my tracks when I got a couple seconds into lyrics.
- [140:05]
Leo Laporte
It was.
- [140:05]
Kate O'Neill
Was the song Loose Lips by Kimya Dawson, which is from 2004, I guess, most notably on the Juno soundtrack. And in the third line, it says, to San Francisco Double Dutch Disco tech TV hottie. And then like something else. What?
- [140:21]
Leo Laporte
Do it for Scotty.
- [140:23]
Kate O'Neill
But do it for Scotty is somewhat unrelated to the tech.
- [140:26]
Leo Laporte
No, there's a tech TV hottie named Scott.
- [140:28]
Kate O'Neill
Was he hottie? Was he hot? Then I guess that was it.
- [140:32]
Leo Laporte
It was a comic.
- [140:33]
Kate O'Neill
I googled tech TV hottie Scotty and got nothing. So I got it.
- [140:37]
Leo Laporte
Scott. Harriet. H E R R I O T T. He was a comic.
- [140:40]
Paris Martineau
See if he. Okay, look him up. See if he passes your test here.
- [140:42]
Leo Laporte
See if he's hot. He's a little skinny, but he's cute. He was very funny. He hosted the Internet show. We had a show all about the Internet because It was.
- [140:55]
Kate O'Neill
Were you familiar with the fact that.
- [140:58]
Leo Laporte
I did not know there was a song about it?
- [141:00]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, very prominently within the first, like, 30 seconds. There's a tech TV hobby.
- [141:06]
Leo Laporte
And I love, I love the movie Juno. I don't know if I heard this song. It must have, right?
- [141:12]
Kate O'Neill
It's. I mean, I think it was. I don't know if it was played in it, but it comes.
- [141:16]
Leo Laporte
You know what? I'm gonna email Scott, Harriet and, And ask him about this.
- [141:20]
Kate O'Neill
I mean, you should.
- [141:21]
Leo Laporte
You would know if anybody. Right?
- [141:23]
Kate O'Neill
It's gotta be, right?
- [141:28]
Leo Laporte
This may or may not make him a hottie, but he became a kind of, I think, even at the time, a Sasquatch. He makes movies about Sasquatch.
- [141:41]
Paris Martineau
What?
- [141:42]
Leo Laporte
He makes movies about Sasquatch.
- [141:45]
Paris Martineau
I think that disqualifies him right there.
- [141:47]
Kate O'Neill
I don't know.
- [141:48]
Leo Laporte
He was, he was pretty.
- [141:50]
Kate O'Neill
That photo's not doing anything.
- [141:52]
Leo Laporte
It was pretty funny. It was kind of. It's tongue in cheek. Even at the time, he acted like he was really serious about the whole thing.
- [142:01]
Kate O'Neill
Okay, that could be fun.
- [142:03]
Leo Laporte
Let me see if I can find a picture of him.
- [142:06]
Kate O'Neill
I'm trying to find a picture of him from the Internet tonight, Dave, specifically.
- [142:10]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I have, I'm sure I have many. Oh, actually, I do. I don't know if I can find it fast. I have a picture of him and his co host Mikayla Pereira, playing with my Emmy.
- [142:23]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, not a euphemism, folks.
- [142:27]
Leo Laporte
It's not a euphemism. It's a true story. I had an Emmy back in the day at TechTV. Let's see, this would have been. I can go by a year, I think.
- [142:36]
Paris Martineau
Wait, they don't take those away. You still have that Emmy then, right?
- [142:40]
Leo Laporte
It broke.
- [142:42]
Kate O'Neill
How did you break an Emmy?
- [142:44]
Leo Laporte
It was on the shelf behind me here in the wind came up and it fell off and. Well, I still have part of it.
- [142:54]
Paris Martineau
Which part?
- [142:55]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it broke again. Oh, no, it fell off and it snapped off its base. So I, What I did is I, I, I made a hybrid of the Emmy and the Webby. I call it a Wemmy. Now, I don't know if I get this out because. Because it looks like her wings have become immesh. Well, she's going to emerge. She's emerging. There she is. Ms. Emmy Broken.
- [143:27]
Kate O'Neill
That's fun.
- [143:28]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's still an Emmy and you can still poke somebody's eye out with this. Oh, one of the wings is broken, but the other one is. Is still intact. Anyway, let me see if I can find.
- [143:37]
Kate O'Neill
Were you mentioning any popular.
- [143:40]
Leo Laporte
I don't think there was a song about me, Juno. No, if that's what you're asking.
- [143:45]
Kate O'Neill
Dang rip.
- [143:47]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, here it is. I think. I think I found. Oh, no, that's the. That was the reunion Tech TV shoot. Now I really wanna. Now I really want to find it.
- [143:57]
Paris Martineau
Did Soledad come to the reunion?
- [144:00]
Leo Laporte
No, she wasn't on tech tv. She was on msnbc.
- [144:03]
Paris Martineau
Oh, that's right.
- [144:04]
Leo Laporte
She predated. Predated that.
- [144:07]
Kate O'Neill
Is he in this video that someone named Briggs posted in the Discord Chat?
- [144:11]
Leo Laporte
Probably people. A lot of the people who watch our shows are rather devoted tech TV fans. Let me see if I can go by year.
- [144:26]
Kate O'Neill
Well, I thought that was delight. I literally. I listened to that song away, to be honest, and I. I literally, literally, like almost dropped my plate. I was like, what? Tech tv? I had to pause.
- [144:39]
Leo Laporte
Very strange.
- [144:40]
Kate O'Neill
Very strange. Right?
- [144:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. There weird things come up from time to time because of.
- [144:46]
Kate O'Neill
21 years ago.
- [144:47]
Leo Laporte
It was part of the culture. I remember going out with Amber MacArthur to a Canadian Toronto hotel and they had. They. Where it's very hip restaurant where they showed old, old cop. Old versions of the Computer Chronicles on the. On this. On the wall. They project them on the wall in a very kind of, you know, ironic way. And I said, someday we'll be. We'll be up there. Up there on the wall. The Wall of Fame. Oh, come on.
- [145:18]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, that would be really good. Honestly, I'll suggest that to some bars in Brooklyn.
- [145:24]
Leo Laporte
I am in the right vicinity of my photos. The tech TV vicinity. But I don't know if I was.
- [145:30]
Paris Martineau
Internet tonight on Entertainment Tonight. Is that supposed to.
- [145:34]
Leo Laporte
Yes. And the whole thesis was. Well, you. It was 1998. You probably don't know anything about the Internet, but we're going to show you. Here we go. We're going to show you all the funniest, best things about the Internet. That's him in the back there. It's kind of.
- [145:47]
Paris Martineau
What do you think, Paris?
- [145:48]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [145:49]
Paris Martineau
You'll do passes?
- [145:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, he's a good looking guy. Nice hair. He said he was a comedian.
- [145:56]
Kate O'Neill
The song. Oh, okay. If he's funny, then that actually does help.
- [146:00]
Leo Laporte
Funny a lot goes a long way, I know. Yeah.
- [146:02]
Kate O'Neill
Significantly. Yeah.
- [146:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you can be a real dog. But if you're funny.
- [146:06]
Kate O'Neill
Well, if you're funny kind of changes everything.
- [146:09]
Leo Laporte
Changes everything. Just ask Louis C.K. no, don't.
- [146:15]
Paris Martineau
Oh, no.
- [146:19]
Kate O'Neill
We gotta cut this whole segment now.
- [146:21]
Leo Laporte
It didn't. It didn't go as well for him as he had thought. All Right, let's take a break. Our picks of the week coming up next. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martin. Oh, and me, I'm Louis C.K. no, I thought I had a pick this week, but I guess I don't. So I guess we'll start with you, Paris Martin.
- [146:49]
Kate O'Neill
I was, you know, perusing through the Apple podcast app this week and I noticed a couple things that I thought you might want to know. One is a review of this podcast. Intelligent Machines starts a pre normal talking from 4 days ago from sxmgd says, Love the weekly AI insight. I always walk away with Egyptian episode. It's something new to think about generally. Look forward to the next one. Really a really nice like thing about. I say also bring the Craig Newmark.
- [147:19]
Leo Laporte
Oh, no.
- [147:20]
Kate O'Neill
Then the one after that from five days ago from no nickname. Oh, no, it says five stars. Bring back the Craig Newmark jingle. Bring it back. Then another one from Bob in West Virginia. I love the delightful back and forth of the hosts of Intelligent Machines and the guests they have on on. One of my favorite hosts is Jeff Jarvis and he's the former Leonard Tao professor of Journalism Innovation and director of the Townite center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the University of New York's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Thanks. And then we've got Jimmy Olsen. Another five star review says bring back the Craig Newmark song spelled incorrectly. So, you know, I just thought these were some really good, great reviews of our podcast.
- [148:04]
Leo Laporte
This was your idea and it was actually a brilliant idea if you want the Craig Newmark jingle to come back.
- [148:12]
Jeff Jarvis
Newmark.
- [148:15]
Leo Laporte
Did you play that, Jeff? You played that?
- [148:18]
Kate O'Neill
Wait, I.
- [148:18]
Leo Laporte
Now we have a revolt on our hands. He's playing it off of his phone.
- [148:25]
Kate O'Neill
I wonder how he's doing that. That's crazy.
- [148:28]
Paris Martineau
Eris, you got it too.
- [148:29]
Leo Laporte
It's called magic.
- [148:31]
Kate O'Neill
Jeff. I'm trying to wait.
- [148:33]
Leo Laporte
Oh, oh. All you have to do to bring the theme back for real is leave a five star review on Apple's itunes.
- [148:47]
Paris Martineau
Your turn, Paris.
- [148:48]
Leo Laporte
No, stop, stop. This is the.
- [148:50]
Kate O'Neill
The reason why there was that pause beforehand is that is the original choir recording that Jeff and I have from the man who got the choir.
- [149:03]
Leo Laporte
That was a real choir.
- [149:04]
Paris Martineau
Yes, yes. Now he's. He's the conductor of the choir that sang it.
- [149:08]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [149:09]
Paris Martineau
He said, I'm retired from conducting. Last year I was a little bummed to hear Lee Young say that he wasn't going to play the clip anymore, but I understand.
- [149:18]
Kate O'Neill
Specifically, I will say in his email to us, he said, I wanted to Send you both the original audio file so you have the. For your records. And also I thought it might be funny if just one. Once you played it yourself over the audio feed. Jeff. Or when Leo's not expecting it. Only once, though it wouldn't be funny after one time, which is very funny because we keep doing it. You've created a monster, Eric.
- [149:44]
Leo Laporte
Oh, thank you.
- [149:49]
Paris Martineau
Now he's got to go to sleep tonight. He can't get out of his head.
- [149:52]
Leo Laporte
Do we stop using that version of it?
- [149:54]
Kate O'Neill
I would say it's beautiful sounding like it. Hearing all the individual voices, like they did a great job.
- [150:01]
Leo Laporte
Did we. Did we use a different one? Bonito.
- [150:03]
Paris Martineau
Or maybe I just have the one that we've always been using, which is.
- [150:06]
Leo Laporte
The one that we did. Yeah. Okay. Is that your pick?
- [150:13]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, sorry. That was. That was part of one of my picks. I just, I had. My pick was some good Apple podcast reviews. I have two. One I guess we'll do. That's timely. Today I saw that King George Kulum of the Texas Renaissance Festival died, which you may be aware if you saw the FX or I guess HBO Special.
- [150:36]
Leo Laporte
You recommended it and I watched it before. It was fantastic.
- [150:40]
Kate O'Neill
Fantastic.
- [150:41]
Jeff Jarvis
It's crazy.
- [150:41]
Kate O'Neill
It's like succession meets tiger. King meets, like a David lynch film. And. And so it's. I mean, this is a quite sad article that also has mention of suicide. I'll just update here. He was pronounced dead this week, potentially relating to a gunshot wound. And something I think is interesting, even though it's morbid, is this happened a week or two after a Grimes county judge ruled in favor of a group of investors. King George backed out of an agreed upon $60 million deal to sell the.
- [151:20]
Leo Laporte
Renaissance, which we saw on TV. We saw him backing out of that.
- [151:25]
Kate O'Neill
So part of the whole specialty.
- [151:28]
Leo Laporte
And the court said you have to pay 20 million in damages.
- [151:32]
Kate O'Neill
Yes. And then he also lost the mayoral election because this man not only owns the Renaissance Festival, that is this entire town, he's the mayor of the town and also their king. And he. This whole series, it's fantastic, is about him trying to find a successor for his empire. But in the end, he can't let it go and backs out of all of the deals because he can't let go of power. And it turns out he couldn't let go of power even more to the point where the courts got involved.
- [151:58]
Leo Laporte
Oh, my goodness.
- [151:59]
Kate O'Neill
So, I mean, it was just a shocking kind of coda to all this and was also, I mean, morbidity aside, I just wanted to use it as a plug to watch Ren Faire on hbo because it's frankly, despite this, a fantastic series and I think somehow made even more darkly fascinating.
- [152:16]
Leo Laporte
I think that what they've got to do is have at the end of it, they have to say, and, you know, the final chapter has been written. Wow.
- [152:23]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah.
- [152:23]
Leo Laporte
He lost the mayoral election in this town of 118 people that he basically owns.
- [152:28]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [152:29]
Kate O'Neill
No, I mean that he was the like boss of all of them.
- [152:33]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Wow, that's a bad sign. And then he had to pay 20 million.
- [152:39]
Kate O'Neill
And these things both happen in the same week. It's crazy.
- [152:42]
Leo Laporte
It's only three episodes. It's quick, it's kind of weird and creepy and yeah, definitely you or anyone.
- [152:50]
Paris Martineau
You know is struggling. Call 988 to get help, please.
- [152:53]
Leo Laporte
That new number. That's great. 988. Yeah. There's no reason, nothing. No, no good. Comes out of a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Thank you. Renfair recommended Jeff. Did you. Would you want. Do you want those pics to be your Tiktoks? Do you want that?
- [153:12]
Paris Martineau
I could do the next four TikToks, but I'll spare you. No, I actually don't have much because I was busy this weekend.
- [153:18]
Leo Laporte
Are Ginger's gonna stay black? Is that permanent?
- [153:21]
Kate O'Neill
Is that that man who put 10 links in the pick section?
- [153:26]
Leo Laporte
Once you find one, you gotta go.
- [153:28]
Paris Martineau
Well, if you want. Well, then, okay, then watch another one. Go to line 150.
- [153:33]
Kate O'Neill
I wasn't even talking about the TikToks. There are other things.
- [153:35]
Leo Laporte
We did 157, didn't we? That was.
- [153:37]
Kate O'Neill
We did, I think most of these.
- [153:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, we.
- [153:39]
Kate O'Neill
What is lego?
- [153:40]
Leo Laporte
There's more.
- [153:42]
Paris Martineau
That's what I have. Lego cat is just a picture. Just a fun picture for you both of a cat.
- [153:47]
Kate O'Neill
Okay.
- [153:48]
Leo Laporte
This is made out of Lego. Lego.
- [153:49]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, no, it's not even. Oh, it's a real Lego cat box with a cat inside. That looks like the LEGO cat.
- [153:57]
Leo Laporte
I would definitely buy that. Lego. Yeah, that's a great LEGO set. So I wish I could. I wish I could show you Rosie.
- [154:06]
Paris Martineau
How's Rosie doing?
- [154:08]
Kate O'Neill
Yeah, give us the Rosie update.
- [154:09]
Leo Laporte
She's doing great.
- [154:13]
Paris Martineau
Oh, there she is.
- [154:14]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, hello. She's reaching towards the mic just like her papa. Oh, hello, princess.
- [154:24]
Leo Laporte
See, she's a little grumpy. She just woke up from her nap.
- [154:27]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, my gosh, look at her little freckly podcast.
- [154:31]
Leo Laporte
She's a very sweet girl. She's very.
- [154:35]
Kate O'Neill
I like that she's immediately interested in the Mic, she understands that. It's the family profession.
- [154:41]
Leo Laporte
This is the family profession. You need to take this up now, young lady.
- [154:45]
Kate O'Neill
You need to create content, Rosie, or you will not be allowed to continue.
- [154:51]
Leo Laporte
She's a very sweet, tiny, little.
- [154:53]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, she's so cute. And she loves being held, and she does.
- [154:58]
Leo Laporte
She's very cuddly. It's nice to have a cat for a change that doesn't hate me.
- [155:04]
Paris Martineau
She.
- [155:06]
Leo Laporte
Only time, huh?
- [155:07]
Paris Martineau
Is she more attached to one of you?
- [155:11]
Kate O'Neill
She's coming from a place of deep hurt.
- [155:13]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Deep hurt. She loves Lisa. She knows. She knows where her bread is buttered. But she and I get along pretty well. She'll come up and crawl up on me and stuff. Oh, she likes my scritches.
- [155:24]
Paris Martineau
What a sweetie.
- [155:25]
Kate O'Neill
Oh, what a cutie. How's she adapting with the new house and everything?
- [155:29]
Leo Laporte
She's doing great. She's doing great. You're doing good, aren't you? You really like it here? Yes, she does. She's starting to want to get away, but she's.
- [155:39]
Kate O'Neill
Honestly, she's sitting for quite some time.
- [155:41]
Leo Laporte
She's very cute. Chill. She's extremely chill. Right? Right, Rosie?
- [155:45]
Kate O'Neill
You're so chill. She's got beautiful eyes, too.
- [155:48]
Leo Laporte
Isn't she pretty? I know. She's a great beauty.
- [155:53]
Paris Martineau
She's so.
- [155:54]
Leo Laporte
Eyes.
- [155:54]
Paris Martineau
Oh, now, does she qualify as a black cat?
- [155:58]
Leo Laporte
Lisa, she's a tuxedo cat. Right?
- [156:00]
Paris Martineau
I know, but if.
- [156:01]
Leo Laporte
If someone's afraid, does that qualify as a black.
- [156:03]
Kate O'Neill
Does she qualify as a ginger?
- [156:05]
Leo Laporte
She's a redhead.
- [156:06]
Paris Martineau
Yes, D. She does, right?
- [156:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, she's a redhead.
- [156:11]
Paris Martineau
That was another video I didn't put up, which is a. An orange cat and says, I'm hanging out here with my black cat.
- [156:19]
Kate O'Neill
Okay, that would have been good.
- [156:21]
Leo Laporte
That would have been good. We'll end with that. Thank you, Jeff Jarvis, professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark.
- [156:37]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [156:38]
Leo Laporte
Montclair State University, SUNY Stony Brook. Thank you, Jeff. Don't forget the book, the Web We Weave, available at better bookstores everywhere.
- [156:47]
Paris Martineau
Gutenberg, parenthesis, in paperback, now magazine, after I record a few pickups on Friday, will be available.
- [156:53]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's exciting. That's exciting. And don't be surprised if the voice suddenly changes at the very end.
- [156:59]
Paris Martineau
All right?
- [157:01]
Kate O'Neill
Don't be surprised if you hear me coming in like, an AI can't touch any of this.
- [157:06]
Leo Laporte
None of this. None of this can an AI touch. No matter what Jarvis says, no matter what, he loses.
- [157:13]
Paris Martineau
Loser.
- [157:14]
Kate O'Neill
Jeff told me that this was actually what he personally believed in, but he's too cowardly to admit it.
- [157:21]
Leo Laporte
That's really a low blow. Paris NYC for Paris Martino, Tech Journalist at large. Thank you Paris. Thank you Jeff. Thanks to all of you for watching and putting up with us. The show is Intelligent machines. Every Wednesday 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. We stream live. Now let's see if I could do this without my fingers on eight different platforms. Of course, Discord for our club members. But there's also Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Kik. Think I got them all. You don't have to watch live though. You can watch after the fact. We have copies of the show at our website, Twitch. Sorry TWIT TV im don't confuse those. You get me upset. We also have a YouTube channel dedicated to intelligent machines. But the best way to get the show, as with all our shows, is to subscribe in your favorite podcast player, leave a five star review and maybe we'll get the Craig Newman Mark jingle back again. Also, club members get special access. We're doing all of the keynotes in the club now. There she goes. And that's because of takedown concerns. So if you're in the club, we'll be doing the WWDC keynote. That's the next one on June 9th. We did Google I O yesterday and the Microsoft Build keynote on Monday. Those are both in our Twit plus feedback exclusive to club members. If you're not a member and you want to join, we would love to have you. You get ad free versions of all the shows, access to those special programming and of course our discord. All for 7 bucks a month. Go to Twit TV Club Twit to find out more. And both club members and non club members should subscribe to the Twitt newsletter Twitter. That's where you will find information about upcoming events, pictures of our kitty cats and more. Twitter Newsletter thank you Paris. Thank you Jeff. Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Bye bye. I'm not a human being.
- [159:30]
Kate O'Neill
Not into this animal scene.
- [159:33]
Jeff Jarvis
I'm an intelligent machine.
- [159:37]
Paris Martineau
Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T.
- [159:39]
Leo Laporte
Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile.
- [159:41]
Paris Martineau
Helps keep you connected from the heart.
- [159:42]
Jeff Jarvis
Of Portland to right where you are.
- [159:44]
Paris Martineau
On America's largest 5G network switch.
- [159:46]
Leo Laporte
Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800.
- [159:49]
Paris Martineau
Per line via prepaid card.
- [159:50]
Jeff Jarvis
Visit your local T Mobile location or.
- [159:53]
Leo Laporte
Learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4.
- [159:56]
Paris Martineau
Lines of your virtual prepaid card allow.
- [159:57]
Kate O'Neill
15 days qualified unlock device, credit service.
- [159:59]
Paris Martineau
Report in 90 plus days device and.
- [160:00]
Kate O'Neill
Eligible carrier and timely redemption.
- [160:01]
Jeff Jarvis
Required card is no cash access and.
- [160:02]
Paris Martineau
Expires in six months.
- [160:07]
Leo Laporte
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