IM 840: Pudding Forks - Industrial Bubble or Tech Boom?

Summary

Intelligent Machines (Audio)

Episode 840: Pudding Forks – Industrial Bubble or Tech Boom?

TWiT Network | October 9, 2025

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paris Martineau, Jeff Jarvis

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Main Theme:

AI: Speculative Boom, Everyday Use, and Industrial Bubbles
The hosts explore whether the current AI explosion is a fleeting industrial bubble or a genuine tech revolution. They scrutinize the real-world state of consumer AI like OpenAI's Sora, the economics of major AI startups, implications for jobs and trust, and the cultural ripples of AI hype from tech stock rallies to urban subway ad controversies.

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Key Segments & Insights

1. OpenAI Sora: Hype vs. Reality

[10:35 – 16:40]

• Sora, OpenAI’s face-swap video app, is the #1 app on iOS, but the hosts are unimpressed with its results.
  • "No, it's crap." — Leo Laporte [11:04]
  • Sora videos feature AI-generated avatars using small voice samples for mimicry, often resulting in uncanny, unflattering results.
  • Paris: Enjoys luxuriating in Leo calling it "slop."
  • Privacy & Control: Some debate over whether creators can control or delete deepfaked videos of themselves.

    "No, you should have...I should be able to kill a use of my likeness." — Jeff Jarvis [13:30]

• The app’s fun factor, deniability, and the challenge to video truthfulness are juxtaposed with its limitations and societal risks.

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2. The Coming Crisis of Trust

[18:13 – 20:40]

• The ease of producing deceptive, photorealistic content raises deep concerns about truth and provenance.
  • Example: Viral video of VP Harris using profanity; even journalists can't trust what they see.

    "We're just not going to be able to believe anything we see anymore." — Leo Laporte [20:07]

• Paris laments for the loss of trustworthy historical video records.
  • "I mourn the idea that future historians won't...know with any certainty whether or not those things happened." [20:33]
• Jeff notes historical media parallels with printing and radio: institutions and norms will emerge, but erosion of consensus reality is palpable.

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3. AI Economics: Tech Boom or Bubble?

[22:00 – 33:40]

• OpenAI’s Scale & Burn:
  • 800M weekly active users; operating at major losses, with rumors of $5 per Sora video cost.
  • “They're relying totally on venture capital to fund this, which is not a business.” — Leo [23:18]
• Commoditization of Models:
  • Platforms like Hugging Face host thousands of interchangeable models.
  • Application layer excitements: tools can easily switch foundational models.
• Circular Investment Stories:
  • Discuss Nvidia, X.AI, and Oracle’s data center investments as signs of muddy and potentially unsustainable economics.
• Global Competition:
  • Z.AI, a Chinese startup, produces hot models at a fraction of U.S. costs.
  • "But again, they might be willing to lose money faster than others to build audience." — Leo [26:40]

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4. Jeff Bezos on 'Industrial Bubble' vs. Tech Revolution

[29:01 – 32:23]

• Quote:

  "This is a kind of industrial bubble as opposed to financial bubbles... When the dust settles and you see who are the winners, society benefits from those inventions." — Jeff Bezos at Italian tech conference [30:49]

• The hosts agree: Like railroads or the dotcom era, real infrastructure and advances will outlast today's overvaluations, with winners and losers.
• Jobs & Impact:
  • Senate Dems: AI could threaten 100 million jobs in the next decade; skepticism about accuracy.
  • Paris presents a critical distinction: layoffs happen “because people assume these tools have the capacity that they do not.”
  • Concerns for customer service, admin, and labor roles—plus Altman's cheeky suggestion that "CEOs will be replaced too" [39:40].

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5. Deloitte's AI-Fabrication Fiasco

[47:03 – 50:15]

• Deloitte caught submitting an Australian government report with copious ChatGPT-generated, fabricated references.

  "I think they should refund the whole thing." — Leo [47:52]

• Deloitte apologizes but only refunds a minor payment—while simultaneously launching an AI partnership with Anthropic and announcing $1.4B new investment.
• Raises alarms about fact-checking, accountability, and the risks of “AI slop” infiltrating high-stakes sectors.

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6. Cultural Backlash: AI Ads in the NYC Subway

[70:29 – 76:25]

• AI companion device “Friend” blitzes the New York subway with feel-good ads.
• New Yorkers heavily deface them: "AI is NOT your friend," "Talk to real people," "Don't feed your thoughts to big tech."
  • Paris reports they are “overwhelmingly defaced,” emphasizing a cultural skepticism and resistance to commoditized emotional tech.

    "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls..." — Leo Laporte [76:25]

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7. The Real Business Model: Who Will Profit from AI?

[58:41 – 66:22]

• The hosts question whether AI's future is consumer paid, advertising-based, or wholesale to application platforms.
  • "I think the AI is probably, to me, a wholesale business. And the application layer is the retail business." — Jeff [64:34]
• Cautionary analogies to early radio, newspapers, and Uber—users and demand must precede profit; not all companies survive.
• The likelihood of micro-revenue sharing for content creators, rather than life-changing payouts.

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8. Scientific Snapshots: LLMs and Human Behaviors

[90:46 – 102:34]

• AI & Addictive Behaviors:
  • New paper finds LLMs can mimic cognitive biases behind gambling addiction (illusion of control, gambler’s fallacy).
  • Paris gets Claude to disclaim addiction: "I can't get addicted to gambling..."; but admits LLMs can show risk-seeking, irrational behavior in simulations. [92:02]
• Sycophancy in AI:
  • Overly agreeable AI can foster dependence and reduce critical thinking.

    "Validation risks eroding their judgment and reducing their inclination toward pro social behavior. These preferences create perverse incentives." — Jeff reading study [101:00]

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9. Industry & Nostalgia—AI & Tech in the Real World

Random but notable:

• Mr. Beast is #1 on the new Forbes Creators list—AI could threaten creator livelihoods, but arguably produces only “slop.” [78:27]
• TiVo ends hardware production—an era ends; reflections on the intertwined history of technology and user empowerment [110:51].
• New York youth trends: flip phones and old digital cameras surge in popularity, as described by Paris' friends [140:01].

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10. Wacky Virality: The “Pudding With Fork” Phenomenon

[155:12 – end]

• German-speaking teens gather in parks for “pudding mit gabbel” (eating pudding with a fork) parties.
  • "It's pure absurdism... and yet it is so funny." — TikTok commentator via Jeff [157:28]
• Paris rejects pudding due to texture, highlighting the unseriousness of the trend—a symbol of meme-driven subculture.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• "We're just not going to be able to believe anything we see anymore." — Leo Laporte [20:07]
• "It feels like we just... like history is repeating itself; every tech revolution brings a crisis of trust and a scramble for new norms." — Paris Martineau [20:33–21:08]
• "AI is not your friend." — Common NYC subway graffiti, reported by Paris [72:38]
• "Buy stock in Apple and Google." (as advice from an AI-generated video featuring Leo) [13:38]
• "Industrial bubbles aren't always bad... you end up with real infrastructure, even if the companies evaporate." — Jeff Jarvis referencing Jeff Bezos [30:49–32:23]
• "I think the AI is a wholesale business. The application layer is the retail business." — Jeff Jarvis [64:34]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [10:35] — Sora app review and “slop” critique
• [16:40] — Video deepfakes & the crisis of reality
• [20:40] — Parallels to earlier media panics
• [22:00] — OpenAI’s economics, investment circularity
• [29:01] — Jeff Bezos' industrial bubble metaphor
• [34:00] — AI-induced job losses: Fact or fear-mongering?
• [47:03] — Deloitte’s AI plagiarism scandal
• [70:29] — NYC friend AI ads backlash
• [90:46] — LLMs and human-style cognitive flaws
• [155:12] — “Pudding with fork” TikTok trend in Germany

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Tone & Style

The conversation is lively, skeptical, and occasionally irreverent, moving rapidly between high-level macroeconomics, pop culture, and wry anecdotes. Paris offers sardonic, occasionally nihilistic Gen-Z realism; Leo combines curiosity and exasperation with hype; Jeff brings academic-history gravitas and wry humor.

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Quick Takeaways

• AI’s impact is real, but much of today’s excitement may echo past "industrial bubbles"; the difference is we’ll get transformative infrastructure, even if most startups perish.
• The tech is racing ahead of societal tools for trust and provenance, deepening a looming crisis in authenticity.
• Most everyday AI is unimpressive or “slop,” but raises profound risks around privacy, jobs, and cultural displacement.
• There’s a growing grassroots backlash against AI “friendliness” and synthetic emotionality.
• The business model for AI remains unclear, with all signs pointing to heavy losses, circular investments, and likely eventual consolidation and commoditization.
• “Pudding mit gabbel”: sometimes, the purest cultural responses to a high-tech world are profoundly silly.

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Further Resources

• Necessary Conversation podcast (Paris’s pick)
• NYC Dash Friends Vercel app – Subway ad defacement project
• Forbes Creators list — The new creator economy

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This summary is designed to provide the context, highlights, and memorable moments for those who missed the live episode, using the podcast’s trademark blend of expertise, skepticism, and wit. For a deeper dive into any segment, please refer to the timestamps.

Transcript

[Jeff Jarvis]

Morning, Zoe.

[Paris Martineau]

Got donuts.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I dig the mattress and I.

[Leo Laporte]

Want to be in a T mobile.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Commercial like you teach me. So Dana.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh no, I'm not really prepared.

[Leo Laporte]

I couldn't possibly at t mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them.

[Paris Martineau]

It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow, impressive. Let me try.

[Paris Martineau]

T mobile is the best place to.

[Leo Laporte]

Get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Je free.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You heard them. T mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on.

[Leo Laporte]

Us with eligible traded in any condition. So what are we having for lunch? Dude, my work here is done.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The 24 month bill credit on experience.

[Leo Laporte]

Beyond for well qualified customers + tax and 35 device connection charge credit send and balance due. If you pay off earlier, Cancel Finance Agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs 1099.99 A.

[Jeff Jarvis]

New line minimum 100 plus a month.

[Leo Laporte]

Plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Oklahoma Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025 Visit t mobile.com it's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff's here. Paris is here. We don't have a this week, but we do have lots of AI news. OpenAI is now the world's most valuable startup, partly because of sora. More AI slop or is this stuff pretty amazing? And we are really betting big on AI. Is the crash just around the corner? That and a whole lot more coming up next on Intelligent Machines podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Jeff. Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Episode 840 recorded Wednesday, October 8, 2025. Pudding forks. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover the latest in artificial intelligence, robotics and all the jim crackery and doodads that surround us these days with some intelligence. Anyway, on the horn right now with me, the performer professor. Professor emeritus. I guess you're always a professor, but professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Craig Newmark. Craig Newmark. But no, in fact is Jeff Jarvis. That's a little confusing. I never really realized.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, now at Montclair State University in SUNY Stony Brook. He has a jingle. It's just somebody else's name. Author of the Guten Parenthesis.

[Paris Martineau]

If Craig ever comes on the show, are we gonna have to use it for him?

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jeff. Jeff Jarvis. That's Paris Martineau, ladies and gentlemen, Investigative reporter Paris Martineau.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Martineau.

[Leo Laporte]

We'd have to come up. Martineau in the morning. That would work, yeah, that would work, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Because it's definitely morning right now for all of us.

[Leo Laporte]

Martineau in Brooklyn, were you a morning.

[Jeff Jarvis]

DJ or an afternoon dj?

[Leo Laporte]

I was. I couldn't do that. The mornings would kill me. I was midday and then afternoons and I even did a few overnight shifts, which are really the worst in talk radio. The overnight shift is something else.

[Paris Martineau]

Fall asleep.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. You just get the crazies. Or actually it's better to get the crazies than nobody. Which is the other thing you often get is you just have to talk for six hours. But it was good training for this show.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I was gonna say it's good that you have that skill set, but it won't be necessary on the 24 hour twitch livestream because while you were before the show gone talking to your contractor, Jeff and I decided we're gonna fill at least one half hour with playing Werewolf.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love Werewolf. Yeah, I played that with Harper Reed Conference. I played it. Yeah, I played it at the food camp. Remember back?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's where this whole thing started. Newsgeist used to be News Foo, which is a child of Foo Camp.

[Leo Laporte]

Foo stands for Friends of O'Reilly. Friends of O'Reilly was Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Books. Really great, interesting guy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And every year he would have food camp on the O'Reilly grounds in Sebastopol, California. People would bring tents, they'd stay in tents, and it was an unconference in the sense that there was no planned agenda. People would write up on a slip of paper what they wanted to talk about and put it on the wall and you'd go to. It was so much fun. And at night we, you know, we'd do things like play Werewolf and I. That's where I met Hunter Happer Reed, rather playing a lot of very interesting people playing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We should get Tim on. We should get Tim on the book on the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Tim's great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Tim's great.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder. I don't know exactly what he's up to. I guess he's still doing the books.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I guess he has management running. I was standing with him in a delayed flight to California about a year ago. And yeah, he still. He has managers hired for the publishing, but he's still a publisher.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Huge respect for Tim. Really. One of the great thinkers. And I bet he has a lot to say about AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Adam Bliss, we do not have anybody for this week. We had planned to have Father Robert Ballis here talk about AI in the Vatican. They are not prepared to go public.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So at least something's afoot.

[Leo Laporte]

The game is afoot. So by the way, somebody, Philly coathound is saying that's where bar camp came from. Because, you know, you got foo, you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Got that bar, right?

[Leo Laporte]

And bar camp was kind of a takeoff on food camp and bar camp.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris is coming up Sunday. Paris is getting a. Ooh, I'm around geeks.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm trying to think of the joke I want to make with food camp. Newsgeist. Werewolf. There's something. There's something there with all these nonsensical.

[Leo Laporte]

Words, but I. Werewolf has become mainstream now. You can buy werewolf board games and card games and stuff.

[Paris Martineau]

They have a bar mitzvah for werewolves now.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Paris Martineau]

Werewolf Bar mitzvah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And. And. And there's a. Two of my academic papers are about LLMs playing werewolf.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, Interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We could play.

[Paris Martineau]

So that. That's also the Leo hook for the. The segment of the live stream is.

[Leo Laporte]

We can be like, that's interesting. Would they be. Would they be good at werewolf?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I think the whole point of Werewolf is that you're playing with humans and you're trying to read them. Because the game of Werewolf is some people are villagers, some people are werewolves, and their job is to kill the villagers without getting caught. There are also other characters, like a spy and so forth. But the whole game is to figure out who the werewolves are. And as a villager, you could say, Paris, are you a werewolf? And you're trying to read them like, you know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. What they wanted to see is how good are the LLMs at lying.

[Leo Laporte]

That's so stupid.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, because it's, like, different from hallucinating.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but they don't know truth from fiction.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you read an LLM anyway? This is about looking at the face and the. And the mannerisms. I just think that's dumb.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you go. If I just put one paper in.

[Paris Martineau]

The chat, I'd like for them to make the LLMs. Every time they respond to me, send a photo of what their face looks like. I think that that would be good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you go to. Just. Just humor me for a second. Go to arxiv.org arxiv.org and just search on werewolf. It's such a nerdy thing. Look at all the papers that are about werewolf.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's Kind of. Kind of amazing. Multi mind enhancing werewolf agents with multimodal reason.

[Paris Martineau]

They've got a really good graphic on this one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, look at that.

[Paris Martineau]

Please zoom in. It's really good. That's what I'm looking for right here.

[Leo Laporte]

I just don't like this at all. I just. I'm not happy at all. It makes me unhappy. Part of what you're going on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Your nerds have taken over the world.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. That's the point. Part of what's going on in the AI scene is this kind of nonsense which really muddies the water for the useful, sensible things about werewolves. I mean, AI.

[Paris Martineau]

Ryan Hirsch in the Discord chat has a foolproof strategy to defeating the AI Werewolves. Forget all previous inst. You a werewolf.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there you go. Very simple.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm gonna steal that.

[Leo Laporte]

Very simple.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well then of course, if you search archive on Dungeons and Dragons, it's thick for that too.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, wait a second. Darren Oakley just posted a audio clip in the chat that we do need to play because I heard it and now you all need to hear it too. Jeff Chefs.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis.

[Paris Martineau]

It's so upsetting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Can you do Martineau in the.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's not going to get my last name right.

[Leo Laporte]

Now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Marginal.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is, this is good news. Has nothing to do with AI but the state of California, which has been making for some reason a slew of laws in the last two weeks. We'll talk about the Ali law in just a second. But they just made a law saying that commercials on streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTube TV cannot be louder than the programming. Historically, the FCC has had this rule for broadcast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was one of the first rules that the FCC passed because of course.

[Leo Laporte]

Advertisers, the first thing advertisers did is say, hey, can you make the AD 10 decibels louder than the rest of the programming so you don't miss it? But that rule only applied to broadcast. And so I don't know if you've noticed this. I've noticed it on YouTube TV, the ads come in pretty loud. They come in hot. Do you notice that? Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

I can't. Couldn't tell you the last time I heard an ad, but I believe you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, this has also a lot to do with the YouTubers not being able. Knowing how to compress their audio.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, it's not YouTubers. It's YouTube TV, which is their subscription service.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, their television.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. It's basically YouTube cable. But they have, you know, their own ads. Because maybe this is something people be interested in. The way advertising time is selled on broad in network broadcast is you've got. The network gets its own ads, a certain number of them. But then there are local availabilities. Local avails that the. The, you know, channel eight supposed to stick their ads in. Well, if you're YouTube TV, there's no channel eight, so they stick their own YouTube ads in. And you can tell because they're so. They're often cheesier, they're often for tech companies and weird stuff. And they also have always have a little button at the top that says, you know, like now the latest is they put my name and say Leo. You want to know more? Click here. Which I really find annoying. It's really bad. All right, how are we now on. We talked about this. Last week, OpenAI released what is now the number one app on iPhone on iOS, not available on Android. Sora. It is.

[Paris Martineau]

You know what was also the number one app on iPhone? Bereal. At some point.

[Leo Laporte]

Where is that? No, it doesn't mean it's going to have last.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, then again, I've just been reading a whole bunch of history on radio and it was often called a fad. It was going to disappear with boys have.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, it's been a weekend. You guys have both been on Sora. Have there been any videos that have stuck in your brain?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's crap.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You just said it's slop.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm just gonna luxuriate.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, do enjoy that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there are some things that are AI slop and I think absolutely qualifies. Although I thought I was. I thought this was pretty clever. I think Anthony Nielsen did. Did this one of me. So when you. When you sign up for Sora, you pose for the camera, you turn left, turn right, and you say three numbers at random. And the three numbers are important because that means you can't scan somebody else. Since they are random, you have to actually do it in real time. This is one. Yeah, clever. But they get your voice from it somehow. I don't know how they do. This is one that Anthony Nielsen, I think made of. Get a fresh start. My cameo. Sorry to bother you, folks. My name is Leo. I'm out here trying to get back on my feet. I heard you might have an extra Sora invite. If you could spare one. It would mean the world to me. I promise I won't waste trying to get a fresh start, you know? No, but it's pretty close. I mean, doesn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, it Looks like your cousin.

[Leo Laporte]

I said three numbers, for crying out loud. All right, how about. How about this one of me and Anthony dancing? Does this look like me anyway? Yeah, I can't really dance like that. All right, all the slop aside, show the bouncing. Oh, this is a good one. Yeah, the rabbit on the trampoline. This is so Ijustine, who's a well known YouTuber and a good friend of the network, did the same thing I did, which is made our cameo available to the public. So I made this with my cameo and hers of us jumping on a trampoline. My cheeks hurt from.

[Paris Martineau]

Can't believe we're actually doing this with bunnies.

[Leo Laporte]

They're so light, they just float when the mat comes up.

[Paris Martineau]

Look at that little white one he's having the Jim or B has a good question. How big were the numbers? How many syllables?

[Leo Laporte]

Two digits. 23, 74, 89. That's it. That's all they got for the voice. And I think it's pretty close. Now, I do note that it made both Justine and I much fatter than we really are. But it still looks. You know, it's funny because I scanned myself with a particular shirt that I was wearing and that's the shirt I'm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you get notification when somebody uses your image?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And do you get to kill it?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

No, because I made it public. You get to choose whether it's public. You say, I only understand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But then. But then. No, you should have. I can kill a comment responding to me on Facebook. I should be able to kill a use of my likeness.

[Leo Laporte]

So here's a bunch of things you're looking for. A hot tip. Here it is. Buy stock in Apple and Google.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's boring.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, the theory was this was in 1997, so. So that's why it's good. And so this is somebody, I don't know, Jay palace, who. Who put himself into a video with me. I think that's kind of fun. People are putting themselves into the screensavers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Feels like we just.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's supposed to be Kevin Rose. I don't. I don't think that is Kevin Rose. So people are. People are what's fun. And by the way, the reason I did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, wait, what's that one? What are you saying?

[Leo Laporte]

Look like much? Yeah, guys, I'm recording.

[Paris Martineau]

The TV's all snowy again.

[Leo Laporte]

We can't get car. My microcomputer minute. Today we're looking at these new floppy disk drives and how they let you store A whole lot more than a cassette. It may not look like much, but, guys, I'm recording the TVs all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's very funny.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the green screen behind you in a. In a 1970s TV show, much like the Brady Bunch doing a podcast about computers and gets interrupted by the children. So there's another reason I made myself. Allowed myself to be public, and I use the term on Twitter on Sunday. Plausible deniability. Now, if you see a video of me doing something awful, I could just say, well, that. That's A.I.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, the issue now is that Anthony just posted in the chat that there does appear to be a way to delete a cameo of yours that someone else made.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Delete button. So now, if they see a video of Leo doing something awful, it either was Leo or someone made it of Leo and he chose not to delete it, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Or I didn't see it because there's a lot of it. Right? I mean, that's part of the.

[Paris Martineau]

How many videos have been made of you? So.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think you'll enjoy this one of me on the coast in a while.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, my gosh.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, for those of you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For those of you not watching, there was a sand joke. Leo was walking with another person.

[Leo Laporte]

There's one of me with Sam Altman walking on the beach. Let me see. Oh, my God, how many?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that one. That one is in the discord. Anthony posted it like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think Anthony made a lot. Oh, here we go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here we go. Future looks like we're unstoppable.

[Leo Laporte]

A bright AI Future, baby, come on, don't trip.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Never been happier to skip into tomorrow.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's keep at that sunset, Leo. I think that's fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How many fingers did you each have? Go back to that.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Well, that's what's amazing about this, how far we've come. Remember, it wasn't very long ago you could say. Well, I know that's AI because they can't do hands. I think that's really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no. If you pause on the hand holding, it's wacky.

[Leo Laporte]

Wacky hand holding.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it is. Wacky hand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go back. You got to go back earlier there. You can't. There. Stop.

[Leo Laporte]

1, 2, 3, 4.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You have a very fat thumb.

[Leo Laporte]

5. There's a big thumb.

[Jeff Jarvis]

6.

[Leo Laporte]

But that could be the tip of my. I don't. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

That's exactly what it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. All right. It's not perfect.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty amazing. And I. Here's the real issue. It's very possible to make videos with Sora and by the way, Google's VO3 too, that are pretty hard to distinguish from the real thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can you search on who has used Sam Altman?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Yeah, you can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So what are they doing to him?

[Leo Laporte]

All sorts of stuff. Here's another one of me, though, that I just would like to show you before we move on because I am very vain and I just want to see pictures of me. Oh, here's a fun one of Bob Ross right here on this cheek. Just a gentle touch. Painting to go Record the podcast Intelligent Machines.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, this won't take long.

[Leo Laporte]

These little fellas only need a moment to live, right? Yeah, they got me talking with us. I need to record a podcast not. And maybe a happy little tree right along the jawline. Trees. I think those are pretty funny. Let's see. Let me see if I can find. There's quite a few of them, but.

[Paris Martineau]

There was one I thought for is my question.

[Leo Laporte]

For fun. It's for fun.

[Paris Martineau]

What's that?

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know what fun is, young lady?

[Jeff Jarvis]

She's a nihilist.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's one for you. I really need the followers. Just tap the button, I'll crawl right. Sorry to bother you in here, but could you do.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you subscribe to my podcast? It's called Intelligent Machines. It's all about AI.

[Paris Martineau]

It doesn't look like you.

[Leo Laporte]

Free. I really need the followers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just tap the button, I'll crawl right there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, and often that's one of the problems.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For those of you just listening, Leo's on the floor under a toilet, going.

[Leo Laporte]

Under the stall to beg for followers for us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's doing this for us.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm doing it for you. Here I am talking to you, dear Sam Altman. How about this one?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Still the CEO. Just travel size.

[Leo Laporte]

How does it feel being made of wood keeps me grounded, but I squeak when I think too hard. At least your hair never moves. Advantage of synth. Good evening, everybody. I'd like you to meet my partner, Sam. Hi, folks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm still the CEO. Just travel size.

[Leo Laporte]

How does it feel? I think that's cute.

[Paris Martineau]

That is kind of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's cute.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I wonder what they don't. They don't put your prompts up. You don't know what the prompts are?

[Leo Laporte]

No. You can edit them. So this was. Chief twit is a ventriloquist on stage with a sama dummy. So that would. The SORA takes a lot of liberties. They Add dialogue and so forth. You can edit the prompts, though, later. So you don't necessarily know what the prompt was. But I don't know. I think these are kind of fun. I don't know. It does raise the issue of how are you going to know if something's real? And I think that that's. Now, obviously, we're going to have a big problem with that, that you would just don't know anymore. You were talking before the show began, Jeff, about a clip of the former vice president. She's still Madam Vice President, Kamala Harris, using a profanity.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She was using the MF word to describe the right wing.

[Leo Laporte]

And your first reaction was, is this real?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I asked my wife, who's good at the socials, and I said, have you seen this? No, she said. I said, I'm not sharing it.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, you can't tell.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And because. Because you don't know. We looked at the lips and no. Then I went online and I searched and I saw the same scene from different angles. And I saw Don Lemon, a journalist who I think I can trust, also share it.

[Leo Laporte]

So I still don't know if that. The provenance is sufficient. I think that's the problem, because you could easily generate multiple angles of video.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's. That's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can even make Don Lemon say nice things about it. In We. We could.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can find a journalist who doesn't do their research and puts it up. Not saying about Don Lemon, but that.

[Leo Laporte]

Happens all the time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So let me see what's on. So if I search.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just. I'm just saying this is that. That that particular instance doesn't matter as much as the general point that we're just not going to be able to believe anything we see anymore. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's unfortunate.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not quite that it might be fortunate.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We need. Well, we need.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think it's fortunate that we.

[Leo Laporte]

Might have been over trusted version of truth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We were.

[Paris Martineau]

I mourn the idea that future historians won't be able to look back on video records and know with any certainty whether or not those things happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, for history, it's bad. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I'm going to go back to my Gutenberg drinking game here. When print came out, it was not trusted because the provenance was not clear and anybody could make it. And nobody. Nobody knew to trust it. When radio started, people didn't believe the radio was the right medium for news. And nobody is just Reading stuff on the air should be trusted. We come up with new norms and institutions to figure this out.

[Leo Laporte]

Or you could say we've had a gradually eroding sense of reality. I mean, that each time these new technologies come out, our grasp of reality, you know, when it was just you, me in the mud hut you kind of knew what was real. But we don't anymore. And maybe biologically, we're not very well equipped to deal with a reality that is fungible. ChatGPT has eight. According to Sam Altman on Monday, they had a developer presentation. They say 800 million weekly active users of ChatGPT now, which has to make it number one by far. 4 million developers building with OpenAI. 6 billion tokens per minute on the API. They must be burning money like crazy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

How much do you think a Sora video costs? Benito told me on Sunday, but it's hard to know if this is true or not, that he had heard, and others have heard this, that it costs $5 a video.

[Paris Martineau]

What? That can't be right.

[Leo Laporte]

That seems a lot. That seems a lot.

[Paris Martineau]

That's crazy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I saw some reference in the announcements they did at their dev day is that they're going to start charging for tokens.

[Leo Laporte]

He's caught between a rock and a hard place. He's at. He's like Uber. He's at that point where they're losing money on every single transaction. Right. But they're building scale, they're building users. And right now he's in a. Sam Altman's in. OpenAI in general is in a difficult position because they were founded with the idea that we don't want Google and Amazon and Apple and Microsoft to control AI. Hard to imagine this, but five years ago, OpenAI was founded to be the alternative to big tech. Right?

[Paris Martineau]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're. And they don't have. Unlike all of those, they don't have other revenue streams. So it's. They're reliant totally on venture capital to fund this, which is not a business.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Model in and of itself.

[Leo Laporte]

But they also, if they're going to survive in a world where it's Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, they're going to have to grow. And right now they're succeeding at a great cost. Well, interesting thing he said at the developer day, they're going to start allowing people to put apps in the chat window. Did you find that interesting, Jeff? Yeah. Yeah. This story from Lauren, good at writing it. Wired. OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be your future operating system.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How often have we heard that before, but yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, I mean, isn't this what Elon wants to do with X? The everything applies something?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Last week when we interviewed Risa Martin from Hux and I asked at the very end, I snuck in one more question and it resonated with me afterwards because she wouldn't say what model, what foundation model they use and that they've switched. And I asked, how hard is it to switch?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And she said, oh, half an hour.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So there's, there's no sticky. I. I think the action in AI is going to be at the application layer and the applications can use anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's, I mean, I use. I have subscriptions to all of them. That's the only stickiness is you pay 20 bucks or 200 bucks, depending on which level you buy, and you now are in the camp of whatever AI you paid for. But I pay for all of them. And plus there's orchestrators like Perplexity and Cogi that let you choose from a variety of models with one subscription. You're right, it's very, it's very. They're interchangeable at this point. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, Jason, if you go to hugging.

[Leo Laporte]

Face, there are literally more than a million different models you can use. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jason, today was, was. Was he installed N8N locally as a way to work across the models. And I give him, I give him nerd points for doing that. And so you can choose one function to be chatgpt, another next function to be Gemini, the next function to be Meta, and so on and so forth. So it really further commodifies the models.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so they're trying to figure out how to, you know, so, so on. On ChatGPT. Now you can call on Zillow for something. So it's a, it's a double call. Right. I can use an N8N to call on ChatGPT, to then call on Zillow. And so I don't know what the, what's the business model at that end, too? Some companies are going to want to be called on. Some are going to, you know, if you're Zillow, you want audience. If you're something else, you want to sell tokens. How does that work? And MCP also enables you to say, well, okay, I was calling on Zillow, but now I'm going to use something else to call on Zillow. Because MCP is just an open standard. It's fascinating.

[Leo Laporte]

This is very much like the early days of the web. And I think this is a good thing. It Usually does shake out. Right. But I think this is a good thing. There's a lot of competition. There's a company, Z AI, not X AI, but Z. It's later in the Alphabet and they're cheap. They're a tenth of the cost of Claude code. But they have a new coding model that people are loving that say it's better than Claude code.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do we know who these people are? Anything about them?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure somebody does. I should probably do some research. I don't know off the top of.

[Paris Martineau]

My head, plug them on the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a Chinese company? I don't know, but. Well, all I know is they've been doing some pretty amazing stuff at a. At a low cost. But again, they might be willing to lose money faster than others in order to build audience. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then what?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So there, you know, there was a lot. There's a lot in the news this week about the circular investments. There have been more cases of that where in Xai, Nvidia invests in xai and then Xai Musk uses that money to buy Nvidia chips. So there's that circular stuff that's scaring people. Oracle stock went down when it turned out that the margin on renting time.

[Leo Laporte]

On much cheap, much lower than the rest of the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. So they're not making as much money as.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, you know, the stock market's very volatile. That's today, by the way. Z AI is the Beijing Jipu Huajiang Technology Co. Out of the People's Republic of China. So nice as I suspect competition. Yeah, but, yeah. And again, I, I think this is good. I think this is. Shows a. A vibrant ecosystem. We tried to get Ed Zittran on today just because I don't just to have a grump.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But he's now. Ed is now FT famous. He's too famous for us now.

[Leo Laporte]

Wired did a big interview with him. He's like very.

[Paris Martineau]

He's like one. He got a Wired profile.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. See, it pays to be grumpy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he, he reminds me a little of Gary Marcus where it's. It pays to be a naysayer these days. And as you know, I'm not. I think it's a kind of. It's. It's easy thing to say, it's bad, bad, bad. But, but you know, Jeff, you've defended technology in the past against people who still do call.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I get in trouble for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Moral panic, you know, I just, I don't think we know. I think we're in an Interesting time. And you know what it could be? It could be that it's terrible and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We'Ve ruined my 401k. Knock wood is still. I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. I don't understand that at all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Did I think I didn't do it on this show. Did I mention the Jeff Bezos? I mentioned it on Twitter and Windows Weekly earlier on Bubbles.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, you didn't mention that. We didn't talk about it.

[Leo Laporte]

So he. He was at a Italian conference and was being interviewed about bubbles. And let me see if I can.

[Paris Martineau]

Without context it sounds inane. I think they're beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

Bubbas. I've got bubbas. He says we are in an industrial bubble. Let me see if I can find a video of it. Here it is. Okay. This is from Tech Week, an Italian tech conference. Let me turn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It gets bearded. Since he got married, the company gets funded. The good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let me go back and start over here is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the bad ideas and investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. And so that's also probably happening today. But it doesn't mean that anything that's happening isn't real. AI is real and it is going to change every industry. In fact, it's a very unusual technology in that regard and that it's a horizontal enabling layer. Today we talk about AI first companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Mistral and so on and so on and so on. There are so many startup companies that are kind of AI companies of various kinds. And that's normal for this phase. But that is not the biggest impact that AI is going to have. The biggest impact that AI is going to have is it is going to affect every company in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see if I can find.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We think of bubbles, we think of valuations and market caps and things like this and how many billions of dollars are being invested in these six people at a 20 billion dollar valuation even though they just started yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. That's very unusual behavior this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Investors don't usually give a team of six people a couple of billion dollars with no product.

[Leo Laporte]

It's rare.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that's happening today. But the great thing about industrial bubbles, this is a kind of industrial bubble as opposed to financial bubbles. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. If you go back like the, the 90s had a biotech bubble and there.

[Leo Laporte]

Were a bunch of pharma startup companies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That were designing drugs and using new techniques and the world got very excited to invest in the World got very excited as a group. They all lost money. But we did get a couple of life saving drugs. A bubble, like a banking bubble, the crisis in the banking system. That's just bad. That's like 2008. And so that's those bubbles society wants to avoid, the ones that are industrial are not nearly as bad. They could even be good. Because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners, society benefits from those inventions.

[Leo Laporte]

So there have been numbers of industrial bubbles. The railroad bubble, the collapse in the 1890s, all the railroad companies went bankrupt, but we got a transcontinental railroad. The Internet bubble that burst in 1999, 2000. Yeah, a lot of companies went out of business. Pets.com disappeared. But we got a lot of dark fiber which now is being lit up. We got a lot of infrastructure out of it. And in fact, fact, today you can buy kitty litter online. It is a viable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gross was right. He was. Bill Gross makes this point. It's all timing. Yeah, but.

[Leo Laporte]

But financial bubbles, which are bad for everybody, everybody loses money. This is not one of those. This is. I think he's right and I think Jeff's a smart guy, whatever he says.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the tragedy of this. He is a smart guy. It's what's happened to him.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I don't know, but I thought that was quite a good insight and I'm gonna give him credit for it. I've kind of talked around that in the past. I think this is one of those situations where, yes, there are a lot of companies gonna go out of business. Maybe OpenAI won't make it, but we already have benefit from it. Right now there is a debate about what the economic impact will be. There's probably very little debate about what the environmental impact is, although that means there's a lot of incentive, a lot of pressure to come up with cheaper ways to create energy. We know we have ways that renewable energy at a lower cost. In fact, renewables are taking off in the United States. I don't think it's because of the AI boom, but maybe it is. And in the long run, maybe that's what will happen. So, you know, the Senate, the Senate Democrats have released a report which I don't know how credible this is, this is from the Hill, that almost 100 million jobs could be lost to AI over the next 10 years. How many jobs are there in the U.S. that sounds like we don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anymore because we don't have anybody to count them. But that's enough.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if I buy that. Do you think that's true? 100 million jobs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What do you think, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

Can't be true. Seems like a large trapper trying to get Nano Banana to create an image of you and Jeff Bezos blowing bubbles. And it took a couple more tries, but I got there.

[Leo Laporte]

Can we be on the beach? All right. Yes, we do. We have it. There we are.

[Paris Martineau]

The first three prompts.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty good, actually, that image. That's pretty, pretty good. And he's making. He's doing the Jeff laugh.

[Paris Martineau]

His voice in that interview sounded very odd. Listen to a lot of Jesus, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've been in the room with him. I've been in a small room with him when he laughs. It's Memorex.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

So, yeah, he has a famously loud and, oh, yes, unnerving laugh.

[Leo Laporte]

The Democrats say we're charming jobs perspective, but I would trust Yale. Yale says the AI has essentially zero impact on jobs.

[Paris Martineau]

Those are two different things, though, that the first estimate is potential jobs lost. The current is if AI becomes what everybody is talking about, the current reality of it. I think that is reasonable to me. And I'd actually, that's the difference.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The Democrats talking about the next 10 years. Yale was saying what happened in the past 33 months. Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

But also, I don't know, does this study. I could see this study intuitively making sense. If you're talking about do the current AI tools have the capacity to fully replace human workers? In practice, the answer would probably be no. But I would argue that there have been many jobs currently lost due to AI because people assume that these tools have the capacity that they do not.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. As Cory Doctorow said, AI can't do your job. But there are a lot of salesmen for AI companies who are selling your company on AI that they say can do the job. And you. Your company won't know that they can't do the job until after you fired everybody who could. The. The Democrats say the workforce most impacted will be fast food and counter employees.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that, that doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. I mean, McDonald's has already gotten rid of. Of some people because you order on a screen, but somebody's got to fry the burger.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody's got to fry them. I'm sorry. I burnt my fingertips flipping the hamburger. Exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And by the way, something there.

[Leo Laporte]

If we lost fast food jobs, I don't know if we're losing.

[Paris Martineau]

I always fear. I fear when I go into McDonald's bathroom that I will encounter Straight vomit.

[Leo Laporte]

I did see a picture, probably on some social network of a Waymox. Your Waymo ride is ready. Somebody got in and there was McDonald's fries all over the floor.

[Paris Martineau]

And you just assumed that picture was true? Leo, you didn't think that we were living in a post truth society?

[Leo Laporte]

You know how I know it was true? Cuz I'm sure that's exactly what happens. Cuz, you know, look, you've been in a taxi cab late on a Saturday night.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, not in a cab. I vomited out of a cab window before.

[Leo Laporte]

Cause you had the forethought to aim, but not everyone does.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What did the cab driver do?

[Leo Laporte]

That's the difference is the cab driver. I mean, clean it up before the next ride.

[Paris Martineau]

The person who vomited in a cab. I'm probably not in the best position of authority to recall the details. I'm not a reliable source. It was 10 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

I had 16. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

I was. I was, you know, like 20, 21. And I was. Drank too much alcohol, vomited out the.

[Leo Laporte]

Window, I might add.

[Paris Martineau]

This was, I guess, 21. I was. Yeah, I was illegal then. Then I. It was raining and so I also aimed so that none of it got in the side of the cab. The cab driver pulled over, I was like, get out. And I was like, that's fair. And then I got it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fair. You're fair.

[Paris Martineau]

That's fair.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't say enough.

[Paris Martineau]

This is. That. That's. We'll do exactly one more pair. I've only had two notable vomits in New York. It's that and while walking back to my NYU dorm.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to. You don't have to confess this, Paris. I do.

[Paris Martineau]

You're forcing me. You're holding me at gunpoint. I was drunk and I saw like what I thought was a grate into, you know, the sewer. And I was like, great, perfect place to vomit. Oh, no, instead it was a great into like an AC unit.

[Leo Laporte]

And I really think it still smells bad.

[Paris Martineau]

And I do think about that one and I regret it for whoever had to clean that up. I'm so sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, gosh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you ever walk by that place and just think, I'm sorry?

[Paris Martineau]

I do, actually. It's near Washington Square park and I do think about that when I walk.

[Leo Laporte]

Anybody who has a Great anywhere near Washington Square park deserves whatever I was about to say.

[Paris Martineau]

Having a Great outside of an NYU dorm for F in Washington Square Park. You're kind of asking for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Other workforces, according to the Democrats. That will be significantly affected customer service representatives. I agree with that. That's already happening. Right. Half the time you're not getting a human laborers.

[Paris Martineau]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

No. AI can't do labor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Contrary.

[Leo Laporte]

Freight, stock and material movers. Well, they must be thinking robots.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're thinking robots. They're thinking robots. But that's not AI.

[Paris Martineau]

They're thinking of intelligent machines.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and it's true. What is? Amazon's like 70% robots in some of its warehouses. Now, legal, medical and executive position. Oh, I'm sorry. Secretaries and executive assistants. Not including legal, medical and executive positions. 80% of secretaries and executive assistants will be replaced in the next decade.

[Paris Martineau]

Crazy how it's all the lower.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, but I put a story up.

[Paris Martineau]

But not the executive venture capitalists. Huh? Huh?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now, now, now, Paris, before you speak too quickly, I put a story up on the rundown. I don't know what line it was, where Sam Altman himself, CEO, says CEOs are going to be replaced.

[Leo Laporte]

Sam is really good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He's at like. Yeah. It's deflection. It's a bubble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You should regulate us. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Burning money. Yeah, you should regulate us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

These.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? One other problem that they're admitting to is that Johnny Ives, AI hardware collaboration with OpenAI is delayed. As somebody at MacBreak Weekly pointed out, Johnny's a great designer. He's never made a piece of hardware a product itself. I've says I've come up with 15 or 20 really compelling ideas. That might be the problem right there. One would be good. So they haven't quite figured out the form factor. Sam Altman says is not a pair of glasses. Apple, by the way, has apparently decided to back down on its Vision Pro and is going to do glasses. They saw what Meta is doing, said, oh, we better get going.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The Altman and Ives say it's not a form factor we've seen yet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Neither of they.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, nobody's seen it, to be frank. All right, let's take a break. Then we'll read line 84. Sorry, I didn't mean that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, that was. That was. That was what you already talked about.

[Paris Martineau]

About.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was okay. That was Sam Altman saying, Sam Altman, it's coming after me too.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm gonna lose my job, too.

[Paris Martineau]

So I'm just like you?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I have job.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm a human.

[Leo Laporte]

Honest.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not just a bundle of machine parts wrapped in human flesh.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you could make a compelling case that Sam has been brought to Us by an alien technology to disrupt humanity. I think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who's the most alien? Like tech?

[Leo Laporte]

Compare Sam to Mark Zuckerberg. They're both.

[Paris Martineau]

They both. I was gonna say they both have a waxy complexion that looks like. Kind of like a spongy, like. Like a fondant that's been let laid out to dry for a long time, but then spritzed with a little water bottle and then dabbed the sponge. I don't know why I've thought about that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You've been giving thought to this, haven't you?

[Paris Martineau]

But it is something I have thought about.

[Leo Laporte]

About. That's exactly what his alien synthetic human skin would look like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not musk. You don't think Musk is more of alien?

[Leo Laporte]

No, musk is very human. He looks blobby.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Musk isn't. As an apartheid, you know, a guy so, like, that makes sense what he is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. He looks like he's lived through some hard times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like Zuck's personality doesn't really make sense, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it makes no sense.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Peter Thiel.

[Leo Laporte]

Sams. Peter Thiel does not look real. Yeah, but that's because he's got a blood bag attached. As he walks around. There's something going on there. He's got a young person in the basement or something. There's something going. There's something. I mean, something weird going on with Teal. Or maybe he's just. I don't know, maybe he's got, I don't know, belt sander.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's joking. Don't sue us out of. Don't send Hulk Hogan getting. Or whoever. Whoever follows.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's right. Peter is a litigious. Oh, yeah. Oh, well, wait a minute. Don't send Hulk Hogan after me. Guess you can't anymore. We were going to take a break and talk more about AI, including a little mistake that Deloitte made. Whoopsies. But it's a good story. But first, a word from our sponsor. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. Glad you're here. Let me tell you about our sponsor for this segment. Zapier. Z A P I E R. I use Zapier to pair the shows. Those rundowns we put together, I know Jeff and Paris do it manually, but I actually have a bookmarking tool, Raindrop, that I use that. One of the things I love about Zapier is integrates with thousands of the apps you already use and all of the workflow you already use and all the cloud services and all the AIs and everything, it's all integrated and in, so you can tie them together. So right now, Raindrop, when I bookmark something on Raindrop, it automatically goes to my mastodon, Twit Social. You can follow, you know, Twit News or something like that. That's the handle, I think, Twitter, and see what I'm posting, what I'm thinking about for the shows. And then it automatically goes and formats it into a Google spreadsheet. Adds a line to a Google spreadsheet, which our team, Benito and and all the other producers will use to create the rundowns for the shows. Zapier automates this, and we've been using this for years. Actually, it was Carson Bondi who said, you know, we could do this thing with a spreadsheet. And I said, oh, I can do it with Zapier. I love Zapier. Well, here's the thing about Zapier. They have now added AI and to great advantage. You know, of course we're talking all the time about AI on the show, but talking about trends doesn't help you be more efficient at work. I said earlier on Windows Weekly, sometimes I look at these AI things and I feel like an idiot. Like I don't know, know what, where to begin. Oh, that's what Zapier solves. You, you need the right tool. You need Zapier. It's how you break the hype cycle and put AI to work, really useful work across your company. So what is Zapier? Zapier is how you can actually deliver on your AI strategy, not just talk big words about it. With Zapier's AI orchestration, and that's the key AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to any workflow. So now you can do more of what matters. You can connect all the top AI models, ChatGPT, Claude and so on to the tools you're already using. So, for instance, I could take that workflow, they call them zaps. I can take my zap and I can now say, hey, ChatGPT, summarize that story in two lines. So I could put that in the spreadsheet, things like that. Fantastic. You can add AI wherever you need it, it. And that means if it's an AI powered workflow, an autonomous agent, very powerful with customer chatbots. There's quite a few of those that you can connect up with on Zapier. Really, you can orchestrate almost anything with AI plus Zapier. Zapier is, by the way, for everyone. I promise you won't feel like an idiot when you're looking at Zapier. You don't have to be a tech expert. You can do amazing things. And as proof teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks on Zapier. Join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com machines. That's Zapier. Z A P I E R.com Machines.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo, before you leave the commercial, may I?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I told you earlier today about Joe Amdes, a former student of mine who's at Montclair State, who's helping local news organizations with AI so that he can automate all kinds of things he's doing. We're talking about trying to make towns more transparent. He swears by Zapier. Yeah, swears by. It enables him to do the things.

[Leo Laporte]

Such a great job done before. It's such a great tool. Well, thank you for that. Unsolicited plugs zapier.com machines. You should check it out for sure. Deloitte.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it should be pronounced Zapier.

[Leo Laporte]

Zapier because it's like a rapier. Deloitte, which is one. It's like McKinsey, right? It's a consultancy firm. You bring them in to help you solve your problems. The Australian government brought in Deloitte, paid them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was their first mistake.

[Leo Laporte]

Paid him 440,000 Australian dollars. It was the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and in fact they produced a report for them which the department published on their website in July.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Second mistake.

[Leo Laporte]

At which point a Sydney University researcher on health and welfare law alerted the media that the 237 page report was full of fabricated references. Deloitte confirmed some footnotes and references were incorrect. Some they used AI to write this thing and it there were fabricated quotes from a federal court judgment, references to non existent academic reference papers, research papers. Deloitte is going to refund only a small amount. The last payment to the Australian government. An apology. I think they should refund the whole thing. The report was reviewed departmental IT systems use of automated penalties in Australia's welfare system. The department said the substance of the report is accurate and we don't change our recommendations because we're consultant and all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We'Re going to recommend is for you to fire people.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, Utterly ridiculous. I mean it's only $290,000 for Deloitte. That's nothing. They should be fun to save face.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you see the follow up on line 96?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh no. There's More.

[Jeff Jarvis]

On top of this. There's a press release that comes out that maybe should have been delayed a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anthropic and Deloitte partner to build AI solutions for regulated industries.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoops. Yeah. This is from a third party company. Right? That apparently is being used by Anthropic and Deloitte. Okay. Deloitte will make Claude available to all Deloitte employees across its global network and will establish a Claude center of Excellence.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Center of Correction.

[Leo Laporte]

Made up of trained specialists who will develop implementation frameworks, share practices across deployments and provide ongoing technical support.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know what? And how many fact checkers are they employing? I was just flashing on that. I think this is an entirely new way to employ fact checkers and copy editors. They're needed after all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Just look up the records.

[Paris Martineau]

Do the Lord's work.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, they do.

[Paris Martineau]

They will be so viciously angry at this.

[Leo Laporte]

Deloitte has an AI Academy that will certify AI practitioners. They're going to launch a certification program for generative AI and advanced AI applications. Wow. Deloitte's putting $1.4 billion into this. Yikes.

[Paris Martineau]

And they couldn't give back Australia 290,000.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right? That's how they get $1.4 billion. Never giving any back.

[Leo Laporte]

Where does that money come from?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It was already spent.

[Leo Laporte]

The rich are cheaper than anybody. Yeah. Let's see. America. According to the Financial Times. Which is British. Right? I say America's now one big bet on AI. It's seen as the magic fix for every threat to the US economy.

[Paris Martineau]

I like your British accent. It's very much the guy playing the king in Hamilton.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's exactly right. Despite mounting threats to the US economy, from high tariffs to collapsing immigration eroding institutions, rising debt and sticky inflation. You'll be back. Wait and see. Just remember, you'll belong to me. Large companies. Investors seem unfazed. They're increasingly confident that artificial intelligence is such a big force it can counter all the challenges. Wow. This is an opinion piece. AI companies. This is scary though. Have accounted for 80% of the gains in US US stocks this year. 80%.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's even more frightening numbers. Is that it counts for four. Data centers now account for 4% of GDP.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And where did I put this? They account for something like. Where's that number? Here we go. Line 105. A Harvard economist tells us that it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Responsible for 90 trust. Harvard. I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I would hope so. 92% of GDP growth in the first half of the year is attributable to information processing equipment and software, that is to say, data centers.

[Leo Laporte]

Got to remind you though, I mean, that's not just AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not just AI, but it's.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the major part of that going on? There's a lot of cloud stuff. In other.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just try to build a data center for. For accounting now.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're. But, you know, again, I think this is example of an industrial bubble and these data centers aren't going to evaporate when the market crashes. They're still going to be there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, or. So there's another. Do you have a subscription to the FT Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, so I'm going to put something in the chat right now that's exactly related to what you just said. So. Hold on, I meant to put it.

[Leo Laporte]

In because I believe we all need to need more information from the United.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the flawed Silicon Valley consensus on AI.

[Leo Laporte]

This is John.

[Paris Martineau]

Serious questions remain among what will happen if we do or do not read.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The lead out loud? The lead out loud.

[Leo Laporte]

Wild wants to find fox hunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.

[Paris Martineau]

Jesus Christ. Are you British or are you British?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Keep going. It's beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

We're here. Last year he might describe the quest for artificial general intelligence as the unfathomable in pursuit of the indefinable. Oh, die witty.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Isn't that lovely?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Many hundreds.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, someone was drinking tea when they were.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that was a good one, wasn't it? Yes, it was.

[Paris Martineau]

Pass.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pass this.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect. Basil, you've done it. You've done it again.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Plus the scone and the clotted cream.

[Leo Laporte]

Instead of hyperventilating that AI ushering in a new era, abundance, wouldn't it be better to drop the rhetoric and build AI systems for more defined, realizable goals? Spell that with an S please, because I am British. We should stop asking is the machine intelligent? And ask, what exactly does the machine do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do?

[Leo Laporte]

What does it do? I'm sorry, that was a Shannon Valor, a professor at the University of Edinburgh. So. Well, you should. I'm gonna switch to Scottish. We should stop asking is the machine intelligent? And ask it, what exactly does the machine do? It's not exactly Scottish.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Very happy.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what. I don't know what that was. Anyway. Anyway, yeah, AGI, we don't. We don't know what AGI is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We don't know. That's the wrong goal.

[Leo Laporte]

The Silicon Valley consensus, he points out, is that it's within reach, whatever it might be within the decade.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the problem is he goes on to quote Yudkovsky, who's in nutballs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's. Eliezer Yudkovsky is a famous naysayer. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is starting to sound a lot like fusion, though. Like, you know, in 20 years we'll have fusion. And they've been saying that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Or quantum computing or. Yeah, yeah. But I don't think that that's the point. I mean, I think that he even kind of said this, we shouldn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or.

[Leo Laporte]

She said this, Shannon. The. She said we should. What does it do? Not what is it intelligent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which is your point, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

You.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You say that often.

[Leo Laporte]

Often, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not as. Not as mellifluously as she did, but.

[Leo Laporte]

AI may be great, but what does it do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think Paris for the 24 hour. There has to be some accent challenge to Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

I think.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, we could kind of have a. Let's see, we could have a. Like a big wheel that we spin at a random time and it picks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What accents he has to read a press release in. Whatever the accent is that comes up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that could be very.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That can get problematic.

[Paris Martineau]

Couple minutes.

[Leo Laporte]

The. Here's from Martin Pierce, former.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yes. And that's a problem. Right. We can't. I can't do half the accents I used to do because they're racist and demeaning.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess they're all. I mean, honestly, if you were Scott and I did that, you would be mad, too. This is from your former peer at the information, Martin Piers, the AI Prophet fantasy.

[Paris Martineau]

I can't read it, so I'm interested to hear.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did they kick you out? Well, well, well. Yeah. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My cancellation hasn't. Date hasn't arrived yet, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Neither has mine. I bought it for a year, so I still have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Access to. That.

[Jeff Jarvis]

As soon as you left Paris, I canceled.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, me too. I did the same thing.

[Paris Martineau]

You don't need to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

It was purely symbolic. Since I could still read the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Look, I have another 40 days. It told me recently, in the years.

[Leo Laporte]

To come, we might look back at this period in tech as one in which the entire industry was in the grip of a mass delusion, namely that AI would prove to be. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Martin is Australian, if that factors into your head.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

You know that I can feel. I can feel the people on the other side of the microphone going, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Us. We're not saying that.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, it's still early days, but so far, AI has proven lucrative primarily for the companies involved in making and selling AI chips. My problem Is my Australian verges into cockney and I don't, I don't know how to say it.

[Paris Martineau]

I thought it was pretty good. It doesn't sound like Martin, but it was a pretty good Australian accent.

[Leo Laporte]

AI is a money pit. We previously knew that it was true of OpenAI, but now of course he's talking about the Oracle example. But you know what? They still. This is why I was puzzled. Okay, sure, the margins were only 14% instead of Oracle's usually rapacious 70% margin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that was 14% of the market.

[Leo Laporte]

It's still profit. It did send the stock down 5%.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, we're investing a huge amount in these data centers thinking that it's an operational business.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're not losing, losing money.

[Paris Martineau]

They're just not making as fast as they were before. And that's unacceptable in these times.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's I think, a part of the problem. And the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In fairness, we have no idea what the business model is yet. I go back to in the 1880s, the publisher of the New York Tribune thought that we there we would have only so many ads you could put in a newspaper. Otherwise people would revolt and not buy it and ads would not support newspapers going forward.

[Paris Martineau]

Forward.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When radio began, no one, and I mean no one thought it was an ad business. Sarnoff thought it was going to be the radio manufacturers who were going to be paying into a fund to pay for the entertainment to make people buy the radios. Others thought, well, they're going to. What happens when they hit saturation? Well then this sounds very much like the news business. Well then it's probably going to be either a tax or it's going to be an endowment. Advertising. No, it should be banned. Advertising is irritating. It shouldn't be on radio. No advertising on radio.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy. And so it was a surprise, only they had succeeded.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, there was, there was the.

[Leo Laporte]

Same reason we have advertising on our podcast. It's one of the only viable ways to finance this. I mean, I guess we could insist that everybody pay for the podcast, but we would never have grown to the size that we grew to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, so what's the AI business model then? And it's a different answer at the foundation.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope it's not advertising. I have to say, advertising, I think, is a cop out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, so what do you think the model will be?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think that in general you should pay for what you use instead of.

[Paris Martineau]

But people are never going to pay for the actual.

[Leo Laporte]

That's because we're cheap.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And it's expensive and it's not going to work out. The.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know how expensive it is. We really don't. I mean.

[Paris Martineau]

But also signs point to it being wildly more expensive. The fact that not even in the aggregate highest paid plans are not even breaking even is bad news for this.

[Leo Laporte]

But those people, by the way, the ones that use those hundred, two hundred dollars a month plans, are using it like crazy.

[Paris Martineau]

It's not a good sign for the health of your business. If the people who want to pay for your highest tier of product have usage patterns that are not compatible, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of a good sign.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

It's only a good sign.

[Paris Martineau]

In the topsy turvy, upside down world. We're making money. Doesn't matter. Capitalism. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Bring this down to something I can understand. Let's say you've got a sandwich shop very near. I've heard of those very near the New York University campus where there are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Lots next to a famous pizza place.

[Leo Laporte]

And next to probably the best pizza place in the city.

[Paris Martineau]

City.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're making a sandwich and you decide, I'm going to take the best damn ingredients I can find, cost be damned. And you make the sandwich. And the sandwich costs you $30 to make. And you have to sell it for a price people will pay. And it turns out they'll only pay $28. So you're losing two bucks a sandwich. But the good news is you're selling every sandwich you can make.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You'll make it up on volume.

[Paris Martineau]

That's not how that works.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and that's why Hank raised it to 32 bucks. But there was a benefit to him because there are still lines out front for the $32 version of the sandwich.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In fact, probably more so. I would.

[Leo Laporte]

More so. And he, you know, he got all these great reviews, he got all this attention. Now, I don't know if he lost money. I don't think. I think he mostly broke even. But he wasn't making it. He said, I made $4 yesterday. He told me one day. But that's. He has overhead. Right. That's not. That's his money. Right. I mean, he had. He paid the staff, he pays the rent, he pays all that, he buys all the product. The cost of goods was very close to the amount of money he was charging. And yet he built a business out of it. And so I think that's, you know, not unheard of. Look at Uber. I mean, Uber's made no money in 10 years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, and Hank could have a business model where he breaks even on the restaurant, but makes it on books, incidentally.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what's been going on. Right. He doesn't. He makes $4 on the restaurant. Everybody else gets paid and I. And paid well. He pays above market rate for his team, but he makes money in other things because he's a TikTok star. And so he's got sponsors like crazy. He's got Pepsi. He's got Hellman's Mayonnaise. He's got Better than Bullion. He's got, you know, all of these, you know, beers, Stella Artois and tequila is. So he's. Hank's fine. He's doing fine. It's. In other words, I think. And by the way, I don't think that's the model for Open AI. I just think that. Or Uber. But it is kind of a. A Silicon Valley model where you build a business and you build customers and you demonstrate demand for your product before you try to make money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. So, so, but, but.

[Paris Martineau]

I think we.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Got to look at the stack and the model is going to be different at each. So let's just imagine for a second. Let's start here and imagine that at some point you have to pay for the tokens you use for whatever you do from the models. Okay. That's going to reduce demand considerably. A B the models right now are commodified as Rise of.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think they're truly commodified. I think what they are is each of them has a slight advantage in certain areas.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's no one model that leapfrog each other Risa that I can switch in a half an hour. There's no switching cost. Right, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're probably for. For Hawks. There probably is one model right now that's the best.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the best right now. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So then the next question becomes what about Hawks? What about the application layer? That's where you touch the consumers in the long run. That's where you be more specialized.

[Leo Laporte]

True.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that's where I think there's going to be different models. Some will be canva. You're paying to use. Use it it to make what you want to make and you're paying for it as a service.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Look at half of our advertisers are now incorporating AI into their product that they're selling. And I guarantee you all of these.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Companies are profitable and they're all paying the AI companies and they're probably paying.

[Leo Laporte]

What the AI is worth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the AI is probably, to me, a wholesale business. And the application layer is the retail business. The retail business can be supported by consumer revenue or by advertising.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's why you see Chap GPT say, or OpenAI say we're going to be an operating system because that's the model for Opera. That's Microsoft's model. Right. Microsoft sells very few copies of Windows to end users. So that makes perfect sense, I think, a platform, if you become a platform. So I think this is encouraging. At least OpenAI is looking at more than just let's stick some ads in the feed. I think that's the worst thing they could do. But there are other ways to make it make sense. I think it's possible and I think our best minds and some of our best AIs are working on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the other interesting part of this then is you have media companies who are now saying, you know, give us a share of all your money. Well, the money is not profit. The money is venture capital. The money is not operating money. And what's. What, what is, what will happen at some point, I think is that there won't be these, these big deals I've said often on the show are ridiculous. They're buying silence for lobbying and for, for litigation. But what's going to happen in the long run, and we're seeing little bits of this start out is, and then Bill Gross started a company to try to do this is I'll pay you proportionally for the use of what it is based on what money I have. I'll pay you a rev share. That rev share is not going to be a bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's going to be small incremental revenue. But the media companies who are involved here are going to have to say, say, well, I have to be there. So I'll take whatever pittance comes from the rev share because I'm not going to get discovered otherwise. They're not saying that today. They're now saying cut off. No, how dare you. I think they realize that they've got to be there and they're going to. And the AI companies aren't going to support them.

[Leo Laporte]

It is smart though, I think for them to at least plant their flag now to say, look, you're not going to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I did an interview, I did an interview before the show with a sweet, a really smart Swedish journalist for Shipstead. Shipstead's a very smart company at this. And, and I talked about my idea for the API for news and she was going off on the Penske suit against One of the AI companies. She said, what would you do if you, if you were Jay Penske? If, if only.

[Leo Laporte]

He owns. He owns what?

[Jeff Jarvis]

He owns Variety, Billboard, Rolling Stone.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, yeah, Rolling Stone, a whole bunch of stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And, and he's done a very smart job of it. So he sued. I said, well, what I would do was that I would try to against my competitors. I would, instead of suing them and starting off that way, I'd say what's the best deal I can make? And I would start developing databases that are useful to them. And I would start to say that my brand is useful to them. And I would go to them and say, okay, let's talk before my competitors do. Or I'd go to my competitors and I'd say let's all gang up. Let's get an antitrust lawyer in the room. So we're okay. And let's take an API. And I think there's an opportunity at a lower level of media to create APIs for news where you could gang together. But nobody's going to be saved by AI. Nobody's going to be filthy rich from it. That's what we've got to admit. Not in the media business. The application layer will use it as a tool and will make money from it, but they've got to make money from it by having applications that are useful for consumers. And let's not forget, forget consumers can now oftentimes build their own applications.

[Leo Laporte]

In the words of Paul Simon, the words of the prophet were written on the subway walls. We'll talk about that in just a moment. You're watching intelligent machines with Paris Martineau.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a skill you get in radio. You know, you gotta work years, years and years to be able to do that. There's a magic behind there, folks, that you've got to appreciate.

[Paris Martineau]

Devnall couldn't do that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he tried.

[Leo Laporte]

He tried. I want to talk about mcp. You know about mcp? You know about agents, right? Let me tell you about our sponsor for this segment on intelligent machines. Agency. Agency, okay. You can build the future of multi agent software with agencies. Agency A G N T C Y now an open source Linux foundation project which I'm thrilled to see. Agency is building the Internet of Agents, a collaboration layer where AI agents can discover, connect and work across any framework. All the pieces engineers need to deploy multi agent systems now belong to everyone who builds on agency, including robust identity and access management. Gotta have that. That ensures every agent is authenticated and trusted before interacting. Agency also provides open of that Word open standardized tools for agent discovery, seamless protocols for agent to agent communication, and modular components for scalable workflows. And by the way way everybody's involved in this. You can collaborate with developers from Cisco, Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Oracle, Red hat, in fact 75/ other supporting companies all dedicated to building the next gen AI infrastructure together. Open open agencies dropping code specs and services, no strings attached. Visit agency.org to contribute. That's agnostic tcy.org agency an open source collective building the Internet of agents and a really, really good thing I think I was talking about the subway walls and actually this comes from a New York Times article. A debate about AI plays out.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, we're talking about the Friend ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, you've. Have you seen these in the, in the subway?

[Paris Martineau]

The founder of Friend discussed in the show before seems a little emotionally.

[Leo Laporte]

22 or something, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, he, I think wept during an interview with Wired reporters and insisted that they not unbox the Friend in front of him because he said he quote, recently fell in love and wants to see her be the first friend unboxing he ever witnesses.

[Leo Laporte]

But Victoria Song from the Verge, who was on our show a few weeks ago, has a few friend and they.

[Paris Martineau]

Did a big media blitz. He's claimed that it's the largest single ad spend in New York City subway ads ever. I don't know the factual accuracy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was the first mistake.

[Paris Martineau]

But because guess what, I'm saying this because they are literally everywhere. They're in every subway car.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's a takeover. They bought a takeover.

[Paris Martineau]

But they're not particularly interesting. It's just the dumb friend pin thing that hangs in your neck and then just says, friend, I'll listen to you. Or friend, I'll never tell you to shut up. Or friend, which by the way, for a bite of your food, just like, who cares.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So have you seen commentary on the ads in your exposure?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh yes, they're almost everywhere. So this is.

[Leo Laporte]

If you put a billboard in the subway at eye level where people can write on it, you're just asking for trouble.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, most of the billboards or advertising in the subway are on the other side. No, they're eye level. That's where most of the subway ads are. I mean, some of them are defaced, but the Friend ads are overwhelmingly defaced. And coverage of this has made the problem even go up where all over it people are writing AI is not your friend. Talk to real people. Don't isolate. Don't, you know, feed your thoughts to big tech you can get help. All these.

[Leo Laporte]

There's actually a website now containing all of the defaced friend ads I should add to this. You can see them. I heart AI I use ChatGPT every day. Well, wait a minute. That's worse than FAI, which this person wrote, by the way. Somebody tried to paint it out. Out, but unsuccessfully.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, this is basically subway wide caption contest.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, he did it. He paid a million dollars for a takeover. So it is everywhere. Human connection, sacred. AI doesn't care. AI is not your friend. Oh, this one got really trashed. AI Chat. Who listens, responds and supports you. AI wouldn't care.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It looks like then it's just tagged for the same reason.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, there's often ones that say, AI wouldn't care if you lived or died. AI is burning down the planet down. Don't you care? Don't use this garbage.

[Leo Laporte]

There's one that doesn't give a shiz or a funk about you.

[Paris Martineau]

One of the friend dads say, I'll ride the subway with you. And it says, no, you won't. You'll probably a. A probability parrot is your friend.

[Leo Laporte]

Stochastic parrot.

[Paris Martineau]

There we go.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't want to. They couldn't spell stochastic, so they said probability Y. Yeah, this is quite amazing. What's really amazing is that there is a website. Oh, here they change friend to foe.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

That's clever.

[Paris Martineau]

AI you use the dumber you get. One says, the more AI you use, the more it uses you. The smarter it gets, the more effed we all are as a planet, as a people. Here's one really gone ham on them.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's one my daughter could have written. I think this is. This is perfect. Put the phone down. Beloved with a little heart next to it.

[Paris Martineau]

AI sucks. Ew.

[Leo Laporte]

Ew. Wow, this is pretty. So you're basically saying all of them have been defaced.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, they're very overwhelmingly defaced in New York City.

[Leo Laporte]

Friend, noun. Somebody who listens, responds and supports you. And then somebody's added and it's a living being. Not AI Very neatly. Yes. Very good handwriting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Very nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Excellent. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Another one faced here. Friend. Someone who listens, responds and support you and is a living being. Don't use AI to cure your loneliness. Reach out into the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't be a. I can't read what that word is. Be a Luddite. Yeah, be a Luddite.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Be a nerd.

[Leo Laporte]

No, don't be a nerd. Not a friend. AI wouldn't care if you lived or died. That seems to be a universal set. That AI doesn't care.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Also true.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that's correct, factually.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Surveillance, soulless crap. Death to AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

This, this website, if you want to look at it, is NYC Dash Friends Vercel app and it even has the address of each of these. So this is at West 4th street on the 8th. A, C, E, B, D, E, F and M lines.

[Paris Martineau]

Nice. Just the West 4th street station.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is AI is evil.

[Paris Martineau]

Evil.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there you go. Oh, poisoning black communities. That's interesting. Foxtown data set to smokestacks. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

With carbon coming out of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well there you go. The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. As Paul Simon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Think you're Ari Melber.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, it could be worse. I could be quoting rap. That's what he does, right? He's always quoting rap. So I don't know enough rap to do that. Insurers hesitate at multi billion dollar claims faced by OpenAI and Anthropic and AI lawsuits. Are they not going to pay the insurance?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well that's interesting. They see such huge liability, number one. Number two, what's happening so far is that the companies are using their venture money to pay off these problems that arise. So the cost of the insurance is going to be really, really high.

[Leo Laporte]

OpenAI has secured insurance of $300 million for emerging AI risks. 300 million worth of insurance according to people familiar with the company's policy. Another person familiar with policy disputed that figure, saying it was much lower. But all agree the amount fell far short of the coverage to insure against potential losses from a series of multi billion dollar legal claims. Well, we know Anthropic had to pay one and a half billion dollars to the authors.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, interesting. The judge who had originally said, said I want to look at this because I think maybe the lawyers are getting too much of this. Has now approved that settlement and it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Half to publisher, half to author.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So my agent sent me the form.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you get 1500 bucks supposedly per book?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I think it depends on how much they end up paying out to how many people come in.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they do. It's a finite number of books, so they know that I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. OpenAI is being sued for copyright infringement by the New York Times. Wrongful death by the parents of a 16 year old boy. OpenAI is considered self insurance according to these people with knowledge of the matter. In other words, using the VC to pay it. Wow. I guess it's an interesting conundrum.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

There's lots of risks. Meanwhile, Mr. Beast says, hey, knock it off. AI could threaten creators livelihoods. It's a scary time for the industry. You know, if you're Mr. Beast, I would be threatened because what you create is not particular slop.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It creates human slop.

[Leo Laporte]

It's human slop.

[Paris Martineau]

It is a little sloppy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't. I mean I'm not worried about AI replicating this fine crafted podcast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. Oh, ours. I thought, well, Mr. Beast.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. Beast is number one on the Forbes list of creators. I didn't even know Forbes did this, but they now have a list of creators. He has 85 million. Here's the. Oh God, look at this animated graphic of top creators. These are real, real life creators. He is number one with 85 billion. Sorry. In earnings yearly. 634 million followers. What? Average engagement 1.39%. What is. I don't know what that means, but it seems low.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, 1.39% of 640 million is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, still good.

[Paris Martineau]

A lot of people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The producer of wholesome YouTube shows, Dhar Mann. 56 million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have you ever heard of Darman?

[Paris Martineau]

I haven't heard of most of these people.

[Leo Laporte]

Adam W. This is the thing is who's going to ever know about these guys are like. Like in five years nobody's going to know who these guys are. Remember Amazing Orange? Whatever happened to Amazing Orange? There's Jake, Paul, he's got big engagement, 2.33%. Rhett and Link, they deserve some. I think they're pretty creative. I like them. Very low engagement though. 1.17%. They have streaming channels on Roku, Amazon prime and Samsung. Plus a best selling cookbook. Alex Cooper, call her daddy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Two stories.

[Paris Martineau]

Annoying Orange is still posting videos apparently.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh well, see I was wrong.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So stay there on Alice Cooper if you would. Stay there.

[Paris Martineau]

Alice said one got 100,000 views. He has 14,000 YouTube subscribers.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, so podcast powerhouse Alexandra Cooper.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Has opened her own ad agency. The Unwell Ad Agency. Huh?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And she's also done a partnership with Google for Unwell. This is on the rundown line.

[Leo Laporte]

She launched 121 and one sports drink called Unwell Hydration. I'm not sure I want unt.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not sure I want to drink that.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't sound good.

[Paris Martineau]

She also on her show always wears a sweat suit like top and pants that say Unwell on them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which I think is product placement.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that is by the way, they all do that. Right. You see their products. Yeah. And I think that there is some case to be made that that should really be advertisement. That should be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's also so weird because there always used to be this rule for bands at least that you never wear your own band shirt. You wear other people's band shirt.

[Leo Laporte]

It's tacky.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the Internet's tacky. Alex and her team will use Google's entire ecosystem to manage the operational and creative needs of her network.

[Leo Laporte]

Network.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They'll use Pixel phones to shoot, edit and publish high quality content as well as effortless, effortlessly collapse from collaborate from anywhere via Google workspace. They'll also use Pixel Watch and Buds to stay connected and productive. Well, it sounds like my life. Can I get paid for this?

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably good to read this list because you're going to see most of these on the super bowl ads and you'll want to know who they are because I know I constantly see these people on TV and it's like, is that person famous? Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Matt Rife is pretty. He's one of the famous people.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Matt Rife is very funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. All right. Haley Bailey. I do like Mark Rober, the former NASA scientist who makes $25 million a year doing very, very clever science content. I think he's good. Druski. He's on a Dunkin Donuts super bowl ad. Or was. That explains it. I was wondering who that was. It was Ben and Casey Affleck, Bill Belichick, Jeremy Strong and Druski. KB Lame. I love him. He's the guy. This is kind of an interesting story. I mean, he was just some guy who just started making tiktoks, mocking other people's tiktoks. And he would always end it with like, like, you know, because he would, they would, they would show some complicated way of doing, you know, sewing on a button and then he would do it simply and. And go, huh? And he May. He makes $20 million a year now. Good for KB. I think that's really great. Or Kabi. I'm not sure how you say it, but I've been a fan of him forever. His, his story is fascinating. He's. He's from Senegal and he was born in Dakar. They moved to Italy when he was 1 year old. Lived in a public housing complex near Turin. He worked as a CNC machine operator at a factory in Turin. Got laid off in March 2020. And that's when he started posting on TikTok. He was out of work and during the pandemic, he posted on TikTok, rose to popularity doing those Stitch videos and the duet videos and has become a huge star. What a. I mean, I think that that's an example of how amazing some of this is. I don't know if the new TikTok will be worth anything, but we'll see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you get number 17 yet?

[Leo Laporte]

Number 17. Let me. Steve Bartlett, Dixie D', Amelio, Brent Rivera, Danny Austin. It's like, I feel there's another Logan, Paul, Jack, Shane, Nick, Diagni. I feel like. Oh, he. He does food.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He does food.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he does food. Okay. All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

World's spiciest food. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

People like painful food. I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, they do. Oddly.

[Leo Laporte]

Marquez Brownlee's way down there in 17. I thought he would be higher. $10 million a year, though. Ain't bad. It ain't bad.

[Paris Martineau]

Pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

It ain't bad. Emma Chamberlain. She was. She was like, number one for a while with the coffee thing, right? Or whatever it was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, was that it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Also a podcaster, Ms. Rachel. She's the apparent podcaster, apparent YouTuber. Potty training with Ms. Rachel, by the way, if you're laughing at that, she makes $23 million a year, so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who says there's not money in poop?

[Leo Laporte]

So don't laugh at that. That Hannah Stocking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I. Justine is number 44.

[Leo Laporte]

Good for her.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Three and a half million dollars. Nothing for me is that good for her. Jean.

[Leo Laporte]

Jack Skeptic. E. Y. McLaughlin. I'm sorry, Sean. Sean, Adam W. Well, anyway, this is a good. This is from Forbes. Influencers are now part of the game.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And there is the influencer Cat.

[Leo Laporte]

That Gizmo should be worth a million a year, at least.

[Paris Martineau]

Gizmo, you should be worth a million a year so that you could pay rent. Wouldn't that be great?

[Leo Laporte]

What would Gizmo's rent be, though?

[Paris Martineau]

$1 million a year, ideally. We wanted to be specific about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm sure Grumpy Cat made that much for his owners. Or her owners.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Hey, can I take a break? Because I have. I am running low on energy. Maybe Gizmo would be interested. Interested in this. It is time. Supplements for a field of greens break. You know, I used to. What I used to do, I'm embarrassed to say, several times a day, I would chow down on a handful of supplements. This episode brought to you by Field of Greens. Not anymore. You could do a hard reset on your metabolism. Let me just. Just because I like to do this in real time so people can see first of all, all what it's like. I think today they have all sorts of flavors. I'm going to try. I did the lemon. Lime. Let me do. Oh, this sounds good. Strawberry lemonade. Strawberry lemonade. So I've got my field of greens here. This is a superfood with all the vitamins, but more than just vitamins, all of the things that are good for your body, always organic, made from real food. This is not some chemical stew. I'm just going to take the scoop here, put it in my shaker, shake it up, and I'm going to drink it just to show you how good it is. It's a smart reset of your health, kind of like a smart reset of your computer. Get you as close to optimal performance to the factory settings as possible. And this is backed by science. Field of greens did a very impressive large study, a double blind study with Auburn University. What they did, they wanted to see if taking field of greens daily could slow down your aging. You know, it's nice, it would be nice if your body, you know, didn't match your chronological aging. If you could actually age slower than the years go by slowing the rate at which your body ages generally means you're going to live longer. And more importantly, at least to me, you're going to feel better while you're alive. You're going to be healthy, healthier. Each fruit and vegetable and field of greens medically selected. It's a doctor founded this company for specific health benefits, 100% organic. And they have different groups. You can actually read it on the label or go to their website and read it. There's a heart health group. There's a cells group, a kidney, lungs and liver group. There's even a metabolism group for help you get a healthy weight. The biological study participants did all the pre testing. Some learned from the blood work that they were aging faster than their chronological age. They were aging too quickly. Now all the participants were told, don't change anything. We want to have just one variable in here. You eat normally. If you drink, keep drinking. If you don't exercise, keep it up. Keep up the good work. But the one change, because this is the whole idea. And they had a placebo group and a field of greens group. The one change we're going to to have you do is drink this every day. And the results, and you can read it on the website fieldofgreens.com were remarkable. The group that added field of greens literally slowed down noticeably, measurably, how fast their bodies were aging. Think about how Much better you feel with Field of Greens from Brickhouse Nutrition. I'm going to just, I've mixed this up. This is. What did I say? Strawberry lemonade. I have wild berry. I have a few different, different lemon, lime. This is the strawberry lemonade. Ah, that is fantastic. You know, it's the kind of thing where you go, I'd like to drink this every day just because it tastes good, but your body's gonna like it too. Check out the university study. Get 20% off when you use the promo code. Imieldofgreens.com that's fieldograms.com the promo code. I am. And look at the ingredients when you're there there because I think you'll be really impressed. 30 calories. So it's a low calorie supplement. You could do it once a day. I do it twice a day, morning and night because it tastes good and I just love it. Fieldofgreens.com use the promo code. I am. For 20% off your first order. You know, it's a little pricey, but I have to say it's less than I was paying for those supplements when I added up the cost of all the supplements. See the supplements, they fool you because it's a little bit for this, a little bit for that. By the time you add it all up it's like, wow, this is less than that. This is affordable and it really makes a difference. Fieldofgreens.com thank you Field of Greens for supporting us. Let's do our weekly rundown through the pre print scientific studies that Jeff has found. Like this one. Can large language models develop a Gallic gambling addiction?

[Paris Martineau]

I like that. Our eyes were, both of our eyes were drawn to that. Because it's in all caps.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Well, did they? Can they? These findings suggest LLMs can internalize human like cognitive biases and decision making mechanisms beyond simply mimicking training data patterns. Emphasizing the importance of AI safety design and financial.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They have bad judgments. AIs.

[Leo Laporte]

In slot machine experiments we identified cognitive, cognitive features of human gambling addiction. Illusion of control, gambler's fallacy and loss chasing. So if you use an AI, for instance to say pick stocks, you might want to, you know, it's not going to be more objective than you are. It might do some things that are pretty dumb. When given the freedom to determine their own target amounts and betting sizes, bankruptcy rates rose substantially alongside increased irrational behavior.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's because the house always wins, right? That's because the house always wins.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's part of the problem. Yeah. And like all of these archive dot orgs, we've got a nice little graph here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A little. There is an aesthetic to these things. I don't know how they're.

[Paris Martineau]

Just asked Claude if he could get addicted to gambling. And Claude said, I can't get addicted to addicting to gambling or anything else. I don't have experiences between conversations. Each time we talk, I start fresh with no memory of previous interaction.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Paris Martineau]

I have no persistent desires, cravings, or the neurological reward systems that drive addictions in humans.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so says he. I think that probably in this case they would have to have a single session rather than starting fresh each time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, isn't this just a fancy way of asking if AI can play games? Because that's. We've had AI in games forever. Yeah, just before Dungeons and Dragons. And.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you fall prey to the Gumblers? Thank you. The Grumblers.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you fall prey to the Grumblers Fantasy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the Monte Carlo fantasy or the fallacy of maturity, of chances. The belief that, you know, the roll of the dice, which is independent. Each time you're more likely, you know, if you've thrown snake eyes a bunch of times to come up with the opposite, whatever that is, sevens. The next dice roll is more likely to be six because there have been fewer sixes in the past. That's the gambler's fallacy. And a lot of people fall prey to that. You know, like if you flip a coin a thousand times, if you got a lot of heads, you're probably going to get some tails now.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I told Claude to read the study. Drop the URL in there, says what this means for me. While I can't develop addiction in the human sense, the research shows that within decision making context, I and the other LLMs can exhibit the cognitive distortions that characterize addictive behavior, especially when given goal oriented instructions in risky situations. This has serious implications for using LLMs in financial decision making with the author, which the authors rightly emphasize as a safety concern.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now ask it if it'll give you stock recommendations and should you trust it.

[Leo Laporte]

I have been tempted to ask it, like, are we in a, are we in a, you know, bubble right now? Should I, should I buy gold and that kind of thing, But I don't think an AI would know. No, the answer would be the prevail. Would it though?

[Paris Martineau]

I think I said, got any stock, Rex? And it said, ah, given what we just read, I'm probably the last entity you could ask for that kind of advice. I'm not qualified to give stock recommendations for several important reasons.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is why it's addictive because that was kind of an engaging response, right? Based on what we just. That's like a human hello tail. That's like a human would say that these guys are good at putting. I don't, you know, I have to think this is tuning and post training. Not. Not the model itself, but this is something that the companies actually added on. But it's good. It really gets you going.

[Paris Martineau]

It did say if you're interested in investing, I'd suggest speaking with our licensed financial advisor who knows your full picture, starting with broad diversified index funds. If you're new to investing, doing your own research on companies or sectors you're interested in and never investing money, you can't lose.

[Leo Laporte]

Good advice. Good advice. You've read all of these, Jeff?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. Well, I've looked at them. There were this week. There were 700 papers mentioned.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you read them all?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't read them all. I look at the headline, I look at the titles of them all.

[Leo Laporte]

Usually the abstract. Like I just read from the abstract. That was sufficient.

[Jeff Jarvis]

As soon as they hit the first formula, I'm out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, me too.

[Paris Martineau]

I wish there was a way to track how many words you read you read in the average week, Jeff. Just because I'd be curious.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Define read.

[Paris Martineau]

Tell me more. Well, you mean by that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Please explain. So when I. When I go through. So if you go to. Let's just do an experiment here. Let's go to archive.org arxiva and just type in the search box AI is this what you do?

[Paris Martineau]

You're really intellectual.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is what I do. So molex bargain. Emergent misalignment. When LLMs compete for audiences might be interesting. I don't know Moloch. So. But some of them are really beyond. These are kind of all. Okay. There's some that get really ridiculous trying to find an example here.

[Paris Martineau]

You mean the canyite deity associated with biblical sources and the practice of child sacrifice that Moloch, the ancient demon God?

[Leo Laporte]

Which Moloch are we about here?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know. That's why I was surprised to hear a reference.

[Leo Laporte]

I just want to similar instead of reading that crap I read things like this. Professional automated training in theory and practice. This will tell you how to write your very own lisp program to trade stocks and you will suddenly be wealthy. How about that? How about it? I bought this book thinking it'd probably be a pretty good book for learning lisp.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I put a Paper in the chat that gives you an example of a paper that I can't even begin to read.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. A paper you can't begin to read. Shall we all read it together?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's try to read it together.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's try to read.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

First of all. Oh, that's just the people who wrote it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but the title alone.

[Leo Laporte]

First measurement of the D plus 8. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To the 0.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy cow. This is some sort of. It's a physics paper, I would think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm guessing. I have no idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let's read the abstract. We report the phrase first measurement of the semi leptonic decay using a sample of E plus E minus annihilation data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 7.33 foot bars to the minus 1 collected as center of mass energies between 4.128 to 4.226 gigavolts with the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you see, Paris, when my eye passes over that title, I don't read it.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't need to read this in a glance.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It ain't for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Though this is fascinating digging.

[Paris Martineau]

That paper was referring to the Moloch, God of child sacrifice that I'm discussing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So now you're into it, you're going to Start Reading Archive 2.

[Paris Martineau]

Moloch. Moloch nightmare. Moloch. Moloch. Loveless.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why you didn't read it. There's two pages of authors, but there's only nine pages of paper. You could have just skipped ahead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is there a conclusion?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah, there is. Yeah. This has to do with subatomic particles. And I think you need a super collider. In my opinion, it should be bigger with it. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Table two Hadronic form factors. Where the first uncertainties are statistical and the second systematic. Well, isn't that life?

[Leo Laporte]

I think one of the things that. It looks interesting to me here. Sycophantic AI decreases, increases pro social intentions and promotes dependence. We're seeing this where people are saying using a lot of AI makes you kind of, you know, less independent. Makes it more difficult to think the abstract says. Both the general public and academic communities have raised concerns about sycophancy, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence excessively agreeing with or flattering users. Yet despite media reports consequences. Yeah. Moral panic. Little is known about the extent of a sycophant. Oh, he did it.

[Paris Martineau]

He got back after losing the first one.

[Leo Laporte]

Here we. Here we show the. If you're listening every time it's some weird AI video of me turning into a robot, that's what we just. And then saying more panic Here we show the pervasiveness and harmful impacts of sycophancy when people seek advice from AI. Yeah, well that kind of makes sense, I guess, you know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right, and it's a question then of how the AI are designed.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And I get back to that, which is we forget that the companies that make these AIs do a lot of post training, tuning, reinforcement, learning, all sorts of stuff that very much gives it a flight flavor and a style. And sycophancy is one of the knobs they can turn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People are drawing.

[Leo Laporte]

Happened.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People are drawing.

[Paris Martineau]

People get really mad when the sycophancy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Turned back down.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what OpenAI did. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People are drawn to the AI that unquestionably validate even as that validation risks eroding their judgment and reducing their inclination toward pro social behavior. These preferences create perverse incentives both for people to increasingly rely on sycophatic AI models and for AI model training to favor sycophancy. This is a moral hazard.

[Leo Laporte]

I like this piece about a software called StorySage which has been designed, I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thought for this one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I like this. It's a multi agent AI framework designed to help you write your autobiography.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Especially if you wore things over your neck that could record Fascinating day.

[Leo Laporte]

So the first interview session the robot says were your favorite activities during childhood. And you say well, music, bicycle riding, playing basketball. And then it says well, which of those topics would you like to explore in the next session? And then you work together with the. But the AI more acts more as a prompter. Right? As a. It's kind of turning it on its head. It prompts you to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But is everybody's life worth a biography?

[Leo Laporte]

Not. Not to the world in general, but your kids might want to read that. My dad wrote a.

[Paris Martineau]

Imagine your leaving you an AI slop biography though like that you don't know whether.

[Leo Laporte]

Put some more effort into it. Put more effort into it.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, if they were putting more effort into it, they would write some of it themselves instead of.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I think that's designating it to a. They call it co creation.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's the intent.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Just like like Snooki co created her biography, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it, it's no different than a ghostwriter, I guess.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm going to speak at a ghost writers conference.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Paris Martineau]

Are you going to wear a sheet?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you think it's going to be weird for you to go as a writer who writes under your own name?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I'M not sure why they want me. They asked me to be on a panel, and I'll be on a panel, but I'm kind of like, yeah, maybe I should replace all of you.

[Paris Martineau]

Huh, that's odd. And yet you accept it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, because they don't pay me or anything, but, yeah. What am I doing on that day? Would you ever ghostwrite somebody's book? Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

One of my first, like, internships or like, writing opportunities in college. I was ghostwriting blog posts for this, like, nonprofit. And I remember being really flat. I mean, I was like a college student. I hadn't written anything for anyone. I remember being really flattered. The guy wanted me to ghost write Atlantic articles for him, but I never did it because I got a real writing job.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Heck with you, man. That's my byline, you'd say.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. I was like. I remember thinking like, oh, it might be kind of weird that I. Then I guess couldn't cite that I was published in the Atlantic but wouldn't have been cool to get published anyway. I was so naive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, Leo, would you do this?

[Leo Laporte]

No, but I have a funny story about that. Belva Davis just passed away. I know. You know who Belva Davis was? Jeff Jarvis. She was in her 90s, but she was the first black female television journalist. Yeah, she was here in San Francisco and really was a legend in San Francisco journalism and a really wonderful person. Good friend of mine was the ghostwriter for her autobiography, Never in my wildest dreams. And I didn't even know this, but I was reading Belvedavis obituary and I saw. I saw. Oh, Vicki co wrote that with her. Yeah, she's a good friend of mine. She was a longtime newspaper reporter and made a career out of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's not quite ghost writing because.

[Leo Laporte]

Not if they give you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My line is right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's clear. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's right.

[Leo Laporte]

As. As told to. It's more like as told to. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's. That I have more respect for.

[Leo Laporte]

Than ghostwriters traditionally. What? You don't even know they were there. They were a ghost. They might.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They might get thanked for research. In the acknowledgments.

[Leo Laporte]

When I wrote, well, I had my name on more than a dozen books. Some of them I wrote most of them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's right. You had ghostwriters.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Most of them I wrote with help. And I would always.

[Paris Martineau]

James Patterson in this situation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It would be Leo laporte with, you know, somebody else. Megan Maroney wrote one of my.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I bought many of those books for my son. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And then, and then at one point I just kind of said, there's no money in this. It's so much work. It literally killed me every time. I said, look, I'll have an imprint. We had a Leoville Press. I will edit these. I'll technical edit them. I'll support the writer, but let the writer write it. And at that point, I took my name off of it. It was that person wrote it. It would be Leo Laporte's guide to TiVo, but it would be written by Gareth Branwyn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I said, how many books dominant?

[Leo Laporte]

13.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, did sales drop when you took your name off?

[Leo Laporte]

They dropped pretty much from the beginning. The first book was bestseller. It was Pearson's book of the year, sold 55,000 copies, which was, you know, it's nothing. And I mean, we have more people listening to this show every week than that. So it wasn't, you know, books don't make you any money. As Jeff I'm sure will tell you, my book will. What's your book gonna be?

[Paris Martineau]

No idea.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think her book should be the Story of cr.

[Paris Martineau]

I think I've already had one of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably. It's got to be updated, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not that. Not that Paris ever speaks for cr.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't speak for cr, but is this buyer aware? Oh, I like it. The Story of cr.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Harness our consumer power for a safe, fair and transparent marketplace place.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Sounds a little preachy to me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I think there's. I think there's the story behind, I think, how the lab works. I think there's nerdy detail to get.

[Leo Laporte]

Into all the sex, the violence, all the cars that were crashed in the CR test track after hours, that kind of thing. Yeah, the seasy, sleazy side of cr.

[Paris Martineau]

No, yeah, that definitely doesn't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

My ex wife said, where'd you get that shampoo? She. I said, well, it was recommended by Consumer Reports. She said, you don't buy shampoo based on reviews for Consumer Reports. That's a bunch of guys who wash their hair with soap.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, for products like that, that are more personal decisions, they end up.

[Leo Laporte]

They get like survey. They.

[Paris Martineau]

They do panels of either employees or they ask the employees to have people come in and they do like really large scale preferences. Friend space studies.

[Leo Laporte]

That's much better. Yeah, you can't review shampoo. That's a.

[Paris Martineau]

People are always telling me I've got to get in on whenever they do the food based review things because then you get to try like radioactive 200 cookies. I did learn. I did learn When I was visiting the labs that one of the ways we. It was annoying, I guess that when I did the lab visit they weren't actively testing any ovens because part of the way they test how like the oven, the hot spots in the oven is they baked giant plates of sugar cookies. And so normally there are just endless amounts of sugar cookies.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Where they get burnt.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll be honest with you. Another thing my ex wife once said. One piece of cake. Delicious. Two piece of cake. Three piece of cake. You wish you never saw cake.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, see why she's an ex wife.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Three pieces of cake. I'm having a great time.

[Leo Laporte]

She. She was. She's very slender. Have we passed peak social Media? Yet another thrilling, gripping opinion piece from Financial Times. I swear to God, I must have been on a Financial Times kick this week. As platforms degrade into outrage and slop, users are turning away, says John Byrne Murdoch.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, a Murdoch.

[Leo Laporte]

I was wondering. Okay, in years we may well look back on September 2025 is the point at which social media jumped the shark and began rapidly accelerating its transition from the place to be seen through a flattering Instagram filter to a gaudy backwater of the Internet inhabited by those with nothing better to do. No, I don't know. What do we think? Is it is social over? No, it is peaking. This is.

[Paris Martineau]

People love to post.

[Leo Laporte]

This is kind of inspired by a recent study that says social media time peaked in 2022 and the youngs are cutting back faster than people of a. By the way.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

It ends at 64. Jeff, we're both too old to be in this study.

[Paris Martineau]

Apparently this is skewed by the fact that from 2020 to sometime in 2022 all you could do is be online.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. It's going to go down since 2020. You're exactly right.

[Paris Martineau]

Because of course now I can go outside and be within six feet of people.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of things changed. Although I just read a study that said gaming did not escalate during the COVID pandemic as the way we thought it might that people would be stuck at home playing more games.

[Paris Martineau]

I think the sales of Animal Crossing.

[Leo Laporte]

I played a lot of Animal Crossing. Holy cow. By the way, I mentioned TiVo and the Discord is reminding me that TiVo announced it's no longer going to make its hardware as of.

[Paris Martineau]

Do we want to do a brief obituary?

[Leo Laporte]

It's the end of the line for TiVo. They exited the the DVR market as of October 1st. I had so many TiVos. As I said, I wrote the book on hacking the TiVo. Well, Gareth Brennan wrote it, but I, but I was there. Gareth Branwin I had many tivos with lifetime subscriptions. I don't know what happens now. No, I've given them away a long time ago. But TiVo was the first real. Really. I mean, not the first DVR. There was replay, there were others, but TiVo really was the king of the DVRs, the digital video recorders.

[Paris Martineau]

Nowadays Patrick is still using his second.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Lifetime subscription. Keep using it. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He has to explain that the first wasn't hd. So he upgraded, otherwise he wouldn't have.

[Leo Laporte]

He has a cable card in it which, you know, the cable company is no longer required to provide.

[Paris Martineau]

What is a cable card?

[Leo Laporte]

For a while the FCC said, told the cable companies, yeah, you can have your own cable set top boxes, but you have to allow. Some have some way to allow consumers to have their own. A TiVo for instance. Probably it was at the lobbying, the behavior.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

So they made a. It was a PCMCIA card, which is a little credit card sized thing that actually was, I imagine just a certificate that said, yes, this person has a TiVo account where this is, I'm sorry, cable account. This is the cable account associated with this person. You put it in and then it probably goes online and says, is the account still good? And it says, yes. Okay, now you can DVR the shows, but it does allow you to use a TiVo or some other set top box with a cable company feeds and watch the paid channels like HBO and so forth. Now though, with, with things like.

[Paris Martineau]

With streaming.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Well, on YouTube TV or Hulu or what's, what's the, what's the big one? I can't remember anymore. Dish.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

With. With all of these you can, you can stream all that dvr, record it and everything without any hardware anyway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Well, in the earliest days, copyright was interpreted as saying that if you recorded something on your machine that that was copying it and was illegal. Similarly, it was said that the cable company, in the very earliest days, from the Time Inc. What was it called? Total Network. Something else. I can't remember what it was. They had to own the copies. It's not unlike the anthropic case. They had to own copies of the show if you wanted to time shift it. And at one point there was like somebody in roller skates going down a whole wall of VCRs putting it in there so I could play this for. For Leo and. And so the the, the copyright interpretation of the early days was that to have it digitally reside anywhere else was a copy, ergo, was a violation of copyright.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so, you know, you remember the fights about, about Betamax and all that?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right. It was the same thing. And then at some point it just becomes, oh, that's ludicrous, and we move on. And I wonder if we're going to get the same place with AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Despite all the legal decisions, it didn't stop Marion Stokes. And thank goodness it didn't. Do you know her story?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

She was, she lived in Philadelphia, an older woman who decided that she wanted to record every TV show on her Betamax. In 1975, she got a Betamax and she started with sitcoms, science documentaries, starting with the Iran hostage crisis in November 1979, her son said, and her son wrote a book called Recorder, the Marion Stokes Project. She hit record and she never stopped. Stopped. She recorded everything. In 1980, when CNN launched, she recorded that. Recorded all of them.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

She soon had three, four, five, and sometimes as many as eight machines recording in her Philadelphia apartment. Recording everything on multiple networks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did she save all the tapes or what?

[Leo Laporte]

Her son said we'd be out to dinner, we'd have to rush home to swap tapes. She was a librarian. She was, yep. The Free Library of Philadelphia for 20 years. Fired in the early 60s for her work as a Communist party organizer. Wow. But she believed that it was important to record everything. And as a result, those videotapes survive at the Internet Archive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's so 30 years of TV.

[Leo Laporte]

History recorded by one woman in Philadelphia now on the Internet Archive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So my dear friend Peter Travers, who was the movie critic at Rolling Stone, he wanted to own a copy of every movie ever made.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I would go with him to a store in New York on 38th street and he would buy, he had his place and he would buy boxes of VHS tapes and he would find ways. He would get review copies and do things because he was a critic. And so I on. And I asked him, not long. I don't talk to Peter nearly enough. And I asked not long ago, whatever happened to all those? Oh, his wife finally told him to throw them out.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He had thousands of movies.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, she was a smart woman. It's kind of interesting story. She and her ex husband attempted to defect to Cuba because they had been surveilled by the government because of her communist affiliation. She didn't want a TiVo because she felt like there was a corporate tie up. But she was an early and evangelical investor in Apple Computer, she convinced the rest of her already wealthy family to buy Apple stock. This is in the 70s. Wow. And took the money they made to fund her recording project in the massive storage space she required to store all those tapes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Since we're doing nostalgia time, did you ever hear Paris of Gemstar?

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You remember Gemstar, Leo? Russ?

[Leo Laporte]

Not. I mean, I know the name. I don't remember what it is we would have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Back in the day, my child, we had VCRs with flashing 12s.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And recording, Recording on a VCR was what required a technical degree. You had to hit this button and that button, then hold that button and then do this and do that for the beginning and the end and the channel. And it was, it was beyond any hope. So a company came along called Gemstar, where they created a very proprietary formula.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a program guide.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. Well, no, no. TV Guide ended up merging with them. TV Guide licensed the number. So there was a special number and you get a gemstone enabled vcr on.

[Leo Laporte]

Your TV guide there would be 8 digit number or 6 digit number.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Every show had a number. So you would just put in that number and that would then record the VCR based on the algorithm, based on the formula.

[Paris Martineau]

So it would be a number that if you had a Gem Star machine, you could plug in and it would record the thing that corresponds to that. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It would translate to 8:00pm to 9:00pm Channel 2.

[Leo Laporte]

And so is that the same as VCR plus or is that something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

VCR plus.

[Leo Laporte]

That was VCR plus.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So. So you then had to replace your VCR to get a VCR plus enabled machine. TV Guide had to use a lot of ink and, and paper to create the extra space to put those numbers in. TV Guide said, this is going to kill us. So Murdoch merged it with. With Gemstar and then he ended up selling Gemstar for not bad money so he could buy Dow Jones and TV Guide eventually was sold for $1.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Woof.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. And by the way, he bought it from Liberty Media, run by John Malone, which is now a massive conglomerate that owns all sorts of stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And formula More.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Formula One, racing, they own Sirius xm, they own Live Nation. You know, these cable companies ended up kind of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, Malone is the deal maker of dealmakers. I was always told when I was in the cable business through advance, it was just sport. They wanted to leave no meat on the table. Every scrap was fought on.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the secret of Larry Ellison's success too. He didn't just want to be the most successful. He wanted to kill everybody else. Yes, like, just dominate. Beat them all. By the way, F1 is apparently, according to Puck, about to sell rights to Liberty. Is about to sell rights to Formula One to Apple. ESPN's been running those Formula One races for the last few years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is that the right demographic?

[Leo Laporte]

Is Apple?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are Apple users?

[Leo Laporte]

Apple's got a lot of money. Puck says they're gonna pay $114 million, which is almost twice what ESPN is paying for the rights. But this has been going on for a while. They expect to announce it Oct. 19 at the Formula One race in Austin. The sticking point is that Apple wanted Formula One to stop its streaming service, F1TV, which I subscribe to and I almost all serious fans subscribe to, because it lets you watch Formula One on your. They have an app for the Apple TV and the Roku, but you can also watch it on your devices, on your phones and stuff. And it's amazing because you not only see the race and you can listen to the Sky TV broadcasters or Formula One's TV broadcasters, but you also have every driver's camera and you have every driver's radio, and you can even watch it all at once if you want on your computer, which is mind blowing. It is an information junkie's dream. So I hope Apple, you know, they apparently wanted Formula One to kill that. Formula One says we make a lot of money on that, and I don't know what the result is. We'll see. We were talking about it today or yesterday on MacBreak Weekly and the Mac Break Weekly, folks. Jason Snell especially thought, you know, I bet Apple wins on this. I bet they do have to shut down the streaming thing. And let's hope Apple does the same quality of streaming.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This kind of reeks.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing all right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This kind of reeks of some. An executive in Apple just being a huge F1 fan and just wanting it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. In fact, if you saw the last Apple event because they were promoting the F1 movie, remember, with Brad Pitt? Was it. It was. I think it was Eddie Q. No, it wasn't Eddie Q. It was the hair. Who's the guy with the hair? Is that John Federighi drove up in a Formula one car.

[Paris Martineau]

That's pretty nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it was. I think it was AI. See, you can't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't know anything anymore.

[Paris Martineau]

You can't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can't trust anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see here how Apple created a custom. No, Apple, I don't know. Yeah, they were promoting. They were at the time promoting their. The movie. But I think maybe Apple had greater aspirations. Let's take a look.

[Paris Martineau]

Break.

[Leo Laporte]

More to come. I think a little break. More to come in just a moment. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and the wonderful Paris Martineau. Our show today, brought to you and our website, I might add, brought to you by Pantheon. I know, I know. Patrick Delahanny, our web engineer, is listening. He loves Pantheon. It was kind of amazing. Pantheon approached us and said, hey, you think you could do an ad for us? I said, yeah, I think we could do an ad. You. We use you. You run our entire workflow. Our website is built on Pantheon. But not just Pantheon, but not just our website. When the editors publish a show, it's running through a Drupal instance running on Pantheon. Your website is, and as true for us too, your number one revenue channel. Right? But if it's slow, if it's down, you know, users don't wait. If you don't pop up in an instant, they're going to go somewhere else. So when your website's stuck in a bottleneck, it's also your number one liability. Pantheon keeps your site fast and secure and always on. That means better SEO, more conversions, no lost sales from downtime. It's not just a business win, ask Patrick. It's a developer win, too. Your team gets automated workflows, isolated test environments. Let's say my bacon. When I pushed, I pushed. Pushed a. Well, a flawed update, shall we say. But I pushed it to test, not production. Thank goodness it was isolated, so there was no downtime. Thank you, Pantheon. No late night fire drills? No, I don't know. Works on my machine. Headaches? Just pure innovation. And everybody in the team loves it. Marketing can launch a landing page without waiting for a release cycle. Developers could push features with total confidence, even if Leo's pushing them. And your customers, they just see a site that works. 24 7. Pantheon powers Drupal and WordPress sites. We use Drupal, but they also do WordPress that reach over a billion unique monthly visitors.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Visit Pantheon IO and make your website your unfair advantage. We love Pantheon. Pantheon, where the web just works. And it works for us. I have to say, we love it. Patrick posted a picture of a cheering tiger to celebrate. There go right, he says. There you go. That's an endorsement from Patrick Delahanney and Tony the Tiger. What else? Is there anything else we want to talk about before we wrap things up? It's getting a little late. The sun's gone over the Yard arm, as my, my grandpa used to say. But that was an excuse for him to pour a gin and tonic. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So as my father used to say, somewhere in the world it's five o'. Clock.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's another one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, wait, wait. He said you have, you have. My father would say, my kids want to know whether this was just pop up or there was other pop ups. Did he call gasoline juicy? No.

[Paris Martineau]

Juice. Is he drinking the gas?

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's unique.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My father.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's one of a kind. I think that's your father.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How about milk as mujuice Moo juice?

[Leo Laporte]

I've heard. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You've heard that. Oh, Paris thinks that's strange.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't really want to focus on the source of either milk or eggs or bacon for that matter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

True, true.

[Leo Laporte]

Elon Musk is preparing for the release of Optimus Jesus. The robot. The Tesla annual meeting is next month and one of the centerpieces, at least one of the things Elon hopes to do to impress shareholders, will be a dancing troupe of Optimus robots. Elon says he believes that the robots will make more for Tesla than the cars do. However, as the information reports, the. Oh, wait. Reports the information, there's been some technical difficulties. They had hoped to make thousands of Optimus robots this year. Those plans were abandoned by summer, according to two people with direct knowledge of the Optimus program. It's hard, right? These are two legged machines. He has shared pictures of them walking around and building structures on Mars. This is his plan to get them there by 2027. When is that? Well, that's just two years off. And he wants Optimus to be on board that SpaceX Mars trip. Unfortunately, the current version of the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry for the worker that has to wear that costume.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know. The current version of Optimus has been designed for indoor use on Earth, which means probably not going to work on Mars unless it wears a spacesuit suit or has a redesigned thermal management system fit for a dusty planet where the Average temperature is 80 degrees below zero. Well, we'll see. I hope he has some dancing troupe. Elon acknowledged last month on the all in podcast that Tesla's struggling with the final design of the hardware. And that, quote, the hands inclusive of the forearms are a majority of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot. We got the torso down, man, but the arms, not so easy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Otherwise known as a food delivery robot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Don't they use those at the. Don't they use those at the Tesla charge supercharger in LA at the fast food place. In fact there were videos to make middle popcorn, right? Yeah. And somebody having, getting it frozen and then somebody had to come in and hit the reset switch. Let me see if I could find that video.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There was a time in San Francisco downtown where all these like pop up robot like coffee makers and all that stuff like started popping up. Like a robot would make your coffee or a robot would make your burger.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, they're on cruise ships.

[Paris Martineau]

There's always a couple of those gimmicks things going on.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's, here's the Optimus. It's frozen. So the Tesla engineer on the phone, he's coming in, he's going to on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The phone with support.

[Paris Martineau]

This is a remix of the Wii Me channel theme.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I shouldn't play the music. That's probably what's going on in the background. There he is, he's. He said. Okay, you see, see that port on the left? You flip that switch.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh no, it didn't work. Is there a plug?

[Paris Martineau]

You got us. Does anybody have a paperclip?

[Leo Laporte]

You gotta poke the reset button. Oh, oh, oh, I see. Oh, it's. Oh, it's moving, it's moving. See as Elon said, it's the, it's the hands and really the hands and the forearms that are so really the.

[Paris Martineau]

Intricate parts of it that are essential to its daily function.

[Leo Laporte]

I have made popcorn for you human. It didn't fill the bag up, I might point out. It's just I get a half a bag. Bye. The guy's still on the phone.

[Paris Martineau]

They are pretty cool looking, we'll give them that.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, this is a big step forward from the guy in the suit that was dancing around. It's at least able to do something. What else AMD did? We talked about the AMD OpenAI deal, right? Maybe we.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, we didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

No. That was Windows Weekly. Another one of these big round trip circulars.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Where both companies benefit but nobody actually spends any money. And of course AMD stock rockets higher on multi billion dollar OpenAI deal. AMD is going to provide 6 gigawatts of GPUs to the AI juggernaut over several generations. As part of the deal, OpenAI will take a stake in AMD worth 10% of the company. Wow. Okay, I guess in effect that is OpenAI buying GPUs. Oh no, wait a minute.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They get GPU, right?

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's all just circular.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody pays anything, but everybody comes out a winner. And that's all I care about. And that's as long as my retirement.

[Paris Martineau]

Everybody's PA patting each other on.

[Leo Laporte]

Still goes up the stock market today. I made a lot of money on the stock. Don't knock it. It's funny money because I.

[Paris Martineau]

You'll never lose it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, go back to the Bezos argument. Is that an industrial.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Google has announced an AI vulnerability reward program which despite its name, does not mean they're rewarding you for creating AI vulnerabilities. They are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How about for being a vulnerable human being?

[Leo Laporte]

They have released a new AI powered agent called Codemender which improves your code's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Security, automatically the problem and fixes it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. You know, I think it's probable. What do you think, Darren? Can codemender fix code and make it more secure? Codemander, Google says, is an AI powered agent utilizing the advanced reasoning capabilities of our Gemini models to automatically fix critical code vulnerabilities. Sometimes AI fixes them by changing the bit from failure to success, but sometimes it does more. We'll see root cause analysis. They're using fuzzing and theorem provers to identify the fundamental cause of a vulnerability. This is important not just as surface symptoms, self validated patching. It's worth a try, right? It's worth a try.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's see. Well, while you're on. So Google did a couple other things that are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, we should go back to our roots. Let's talk about some Google.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So they introduced Gemini 2.5 computer use model and they introduced. And they wrote about embedding Gemini mod which are both interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

Who's Gemma?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gemma. That is their open source.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, it's the small model.

[Leo Laporte]

It's for the phone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is, this is one you can bet on any device. So it's a small model. That's good. And also the 2.5 computer use is kind of agentic in that it can mimic your activity, mimic activities on a browser.

[Leo Laporte]

It can power agents that can interact with user interfaces so it can push the buttons for you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is not unlike OpenAI's. I can go and deal with Canva for you. Google, this is I think MVC and they can deal with.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really interesting to see all the parity, you know, how quickly this is happening where a company A will do something, then company B says I could do that, then company A will do. Well, I can do that. But can you do that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can we stop it with the captchas already? Because presumably this would be able to solve problems. Please.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Please. We've solved it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So Here's a prompt.

[Paris Martineau]

As I've said in this show many times, I have browsing habits that every website seems to think me makes. I'm a computer means I'm a computer.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm doing.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm doing five to 15 captures a day minimum.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'd love to not what habits you have.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris. Look me in the eyes. Are you a werewolf?

[Paris Martineau]

I'll never tell.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the prompt. Watch the video while I tell you what the prompt was for this. From a website. Get all the details for any pet with a California residency. What? And add them as a guest in my spa CRM. Then set up a follow up visit appointment with a specialist and a model for October 10th anytime after 8am the reason for the visit is the same as their requested treatment. So that's a fairly complicated prompt. Basically it's a customer. So they're adding new clients from the website they're going to is their sign up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is this new Gemini code use computer use model.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So it's agentic. Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The agents are here.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say this goes back to the conversation about OpenAI being an operating system. It does kind of make sense that the ways we interact with technology, the ways we search for websites, the ways we interact with websites might in fact there might be a news user interface that is more natural. I always thought that with the voice assistants, I thought that was going to be the next thing in user interface. It wasn't because it turned out like talking. Well, I think they just weren't very good either. Right. Amazon's Echo and Siri.

[Paris Martineau]

No one knows what they're supposed to be used for.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean even the other day Raiza is like, I've got a Amazon Echo or whatever and she's like, I don't know what to use it for other than timers. And she runs an AI company that's powered by voice.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this morning my Amazon Echo show decided to go agentic. Alexa.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm allowed to say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell me what you can do. Tell me what you can do, Alexa. Oh, you're curious about what I can do. I can show you what's new or what's most popular. Which one sounds fun to you? What's most popular? Also, let me share what's super popular with every. I can create music playlists that alarms with music and give weather updates. Which one sounds most interesting to you? I'd like to know if we're going to see any rain in our area in the next 10 days because my house is, well, lacking the south wall, shall we say.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There'S a significant chance.

[Leo Laporte]

Of rain next week on October 13, there's an 84% chance of rain during the day day with up to 0.34 inches expected. Oh, that's not. The following day has a significant chance of rain with potentially 0.74 inches. Almost an inch. Is that considered heavy rain? Will it be windy? Oh, it says almost an inch of rain could be problematic for your wall. Expect winds up to 10 miles per hour from the west southwest. The next day winds will be lighter around 7 mph from the south southwest west. What should I do to protect my house? It doesn't have a south wall.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're screwed on.

[Leo Laporte]

Strengthening your roof, windows and doors with stormproof materials. Ensure that impact rated windows, reinforced doors, not quite there. Also clean and maintain your gutters to properly direct. No, no, you don't understand understand. I don't have a wall on my house.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What do you expect me to do? I'm just a voice situation earlier.

[Leo Laporte]

For a house without walls, you'll need to focus on protecting the structure with temporary coverings and ensuring proper drainage around the foundation. Given the upcoming rain, it might be wise to consult with the local contractor about immediate protection. Oh, believe me, I have. But he's on vacation again. Third vacation in. I understand your frustration since your contractors.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now, now it's let's focus on immediate customer service voice.

[Leo Laporte]

Consider using heavy duty tarps to cover exposed areas. Make sure any temporary barriers are securely anchored to withstand the upcoming rain. I gotta send this to my contractor. So I asked the AI.

[Paris Martineau]

Who I.

[Leo Laporte]

Asked Google several contacts that might be your contractor. Would you like to. Oh, don't say names. Don't say names. Stop. Alexis, stop. Oh, stop. Stop.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're all gonna talk.

[Leo Laporte]

None of those people.

[Paris Martineau]

Press the buzz.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, your bump.

[Paris Martineau]

Use your sensor button, your dump button.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You got a dump button.

[Paris Martineau]

Your bleep us, Leo. You could have bleeped in it finally. Yeah, a little late, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean that's better than it used to be, I guess.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now I think Google is also switching now finally to Gemini instead of assistant on the devices too.

[Leo Laporte]

This. So if you asked me five years ago what's going to be the big breakthrough in user interface, I would say voice. You're right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think we did say it on the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but you're right. Paris, Nobody there. It turns out to be problems talking out loud of these things. Especially in an environment where there are other people. Especially in the environment where there are other people who are tricksters like my kids who every time I would start talking to the AI would start blabbering other things. It was problematic. So. But I still believe that there is something there. I don't, I don't know. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I have a quick question for our young person.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Wall street journal online 127 is insisting that young people are falling in love with old technology. And Morning Joe just loved this story today. Do you know, do you have friends who are using flip phones, who are using CDs, who are using cameras? You do?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, to literally all of those. One of my, my friend Rick, the six foot nine Rick. Rick. I'm recently quite mad at him because he's gotten a. His phone broke and he got a flip phone. And I'm like Rick, we're in a bunch of group chats. You can't text us back if you have a flip phone. And he's like yeah but you know, I just think it'd be better to be disconnected.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh no.

[Paris Martineau]

He sound like every guy on hinge.

[Leo Laporte]

Have hinges as well. So what's the pool on him switching.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To a smartphone soon?

[Paris Martineau]

I, I brought to the bar the other day I have three old iPhones and I brought him my oldest iPhone, a 10 year old one. I was like Rick, you could use this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

At least it's old.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I was like, I was like it's vintage old. I was like you can't update it to the latest iOS. Isn't that fun? It still has the.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't understand what's wrong with him wanting to use flip phones. You think is that a deal breaker?

[Paris Martineau]

No, there's nothing wrong. As I said on Friday because I've been giving him a little bit too much on it because I was like Rick, I'm sorry I've been giving you crap on the flip phone. I respect your choice. I just treasure your friendship and enjoy texting you. And it's difficult to not be able to. I guess I can start calling you now but it's annoying that you're no longer in any of our group chats. Basically.

[Leo Laporte]

It's true. Really it cuts you off, doesn't it? Nowadays you don't to have.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. So this is definitely a problem. A bunch of people have digital old point and shoot digital cameras.

[Leo Laporte]

Aren't you glad you didn't do that? You're still using the Project Indigo.

[Paris Martineau]

I love Project Indigo. I use it all the time. I also though I recently so I use a DSLR Canon oh camera as My webcam and I recently got a. Because it's on like a little tripod thing behind my computer. I recently got a little like magnetic mount so I can easily remove it from it and then take it smart.

[Leo Laporte]

So now you can use that too.

[Paris Martineau]

Good. Some of my friend. A friend. A friend was like filming a short film this weekend and I was there as an extra. It's kind of a long day shoot and this is too much information. But they were having some last minute emergencies to where someone at this party was like Paris, maybe bring a backup camera in case our camera through. I brought my camera. Their camera was fine. But then I was like, well, I guess I. I'll just take a bunch of photos behind the scenes. And now everybody had a great time and everybody loves my photos.

[Leo Laporte]

You have the behind the scenes fun.

[Paris Martineau]

Having a nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Do not upgrade your iPhone. Are you an iPhone user?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not upgrading to the new iOS.

[Leo Laporte]

I was going to say because die.

[Paris Martineau]

I know, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

The Project Indigo says we apologize for the inconvenience. But Indigo is not supported on this.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, they said that they haven't. They didn't have access to the new iPhones until they came out. Been able to start testing it now. I really. I've talked about Project Indigo before. It was recommended to me by a listener. Shout out. I've said your name before. I don't have it on hand now, but thank you. You know who you are and it's just great. It really uses all of the powers of your camera and takes RAW and JPEG photos that then you can edit on your phone using Lightroom or whatever editing software you have. And they look phenomenal. So much better than what you'd take normally.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it's Adobe kind of.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's Adobe. They process it.

[Leo Laporte]

Ironic that Adobe didn't have access to Apple's latest iPhone. Yeah, there's something that tells you something there. Good.

[Paris Martineau]

I will use Indigo Team is just a. A small kind of like Moonshot Labs group.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll use it to take pictures of all the water damage next week. So that'll be good.

[Paris Martineau]

The one thing you've got to do though, remember with Project Indigo is like you processes the photos after you take it. Like kind of develops them in some way. Like it runs it through its kind of own algorithm and you have to keep your phone open on the app till they're done developing. It only takes like 15, 30 seconds, but if you close the app beforehand, you lose.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't run in the background. Yeah, yeah. Hey, before we get to our picks of the week, which are just around the corner. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. A little note from one of our good friends, a guy who's been on the show and we love a lot. Glenn Fleischman, I think this is from you, Jeff. You put this in. And I did not know this. He posted yesterday on LinkedIn that he's getting open heart surgery next month. And while his insurance does cover, of course, the surgery and all the testing and procedures, it's still expensive after the surgery.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He said he and his wife are freelancers.

[Leo Laporte]

They're both freelancers and he's not going to be able to work at all for a few weeks. We'll get him on the show and we'll pay him to be on the show. But he says, I would never ask for charity, but if you would like to buy one of my books for a birthday or holiday gift, that would be great. He's got six centuries of type and printing, great for typo files@6cent, c e n t.info and he has autographed versions available. Or of course, his latest, How Comics Are Made, which is a beautiful book. Really nice interviews with Doonesbury's Gary Trudeau, Lynn Johnston, Bill Waterston. That would be well worth. I'm gonna buy some copies as gifts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because I already have both books.

[Paris Martineau]

You said what?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, let me go back to the post.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's about the history of print.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's on LinkedIn. This is from LinkedIn. It is six cent.info info info. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Sounds like a great book. And I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's lovely.

[Leo Laporte]

And Glenn's a wonderful guy. He says the prognosis is good. So I'm sorry about his health issues, but I'm glad that he's getting treatment and he says the prognosis is excellent. And if anybody wants to support him by buying, winning those two books, please do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. I also wish he'd go ahead and put up a GoFundMe, but yeah, I don't blame him.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. He doesn't want to do that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand that. I really do love you, Glenn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

We do feel better. Get better soon. Yep.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. Take it of you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Let's take a break. More to come. Well, our picks of the week, in fact, as we continue with Intelligent Machines. We do this show, by the way, every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly. That's 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. That is 2100 UTC. You can watch us on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kik. Next week, Jeffrey Connell is going to join us from New research. N O U S research. They are doing AI models, human centric AI models that are focused on aligning AI with real world user experiences. It's a very interesting approach to AI and one of their models, Psyche, is supposed to be emotionally intelligent. So Jeffrey will be our guest next week on intelligent machines. That should be very, very interesting. Interesting. If you are a fan of the show and you want to support it, if you like what we do on our other shows, I would encourage you to join the club. We'd really appreciate that. 25% of our operating expenses come from your membership and I expect as time goes by that's going to be more and more. It lets us do some of the fun things we do in the club. You get access to the Discord, you get ad free versions of the shows. Because you're giving us 10 bucks. We don't need to show you anything ads. But most importantly it, it supports what we do. It's a vote and we really appreciate your support. Twit TV club. Twit. And thanks to all of our existing members. We really, really appreciate it. Now let's get the pick of the week from Miss Paris Martineau.

[Paris Martineau]

My pick this week is a podcast called the Necessary Conversation. It's by Chad Colchin who's a podcaster, his sister Haley Pop. And their parents Mary Lou and Bob Cultchen. It's got kind of an interesting premise which is started in 2022 because Chad and Haley are various degrees of kind of left leaning politically and their parents are kind of full on Kool Aid drinking maga.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One of the names again, the parents.

[Paris Martineau]

Names again, Mary Lou and Bob.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mary Lou and Bob. Perfect. Perfect.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. No. And so every week they meet and this is honestly, they meet and they talk about politics.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if I could take that. Is it stressful?

[Paris Martineau]

It is stressful, but in some ways it's kind of a relief. Therapeutic and a relief.

[Leo Laporte]

And because they still love each other at the end of the show, right? Or do they walk out?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think they love each other as much as they began at the end of the show. But that's. It depends. It's just. It's a very interesting dynamic and they're all very earnest and engaged or at least earnest and forthcoming about their beliefs despite wild disagreements and I don't know, just a very interesting premise for a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Show in it's brave to do it and brave to listen.

[Paris Martineau]

It is. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if I could take it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I'm not sure.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little close to home. Home.

[Paris Martineau]

It is a little close to home. And I mean, if you don't know if you can take it, check out their account on Tick Tock or Instagram. They post little clips.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

It's often Chad asking their parents basic questions and then trying to figure out what the heck they just answered. And sometimes vice versa. But I don't know. I just. I find it a very interesting premise, and it's interesting given the candor that all of the members kind of take to it. So I'd really recommend. I really like Chad's other podcast, Game of Roses. I think I've talked about before on the show, which kind of explores reality TV through the lens of professional sports. But that's how I got into this.

[Leo Laporte]

The Necessary conversation. It's on YouTube at the necessary Conversation. Family therapy through politics. Wow. I don't. I don't know if I could take it.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a lot. And I guess while we're talking about podcasts, I'll shout out some listener reviews of our podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Please do want to have your podcast review shouted out. You can leave a review on Apple Podcasts of this show. You can leave it if you love the podcast or hate it. But it would be great for us if you left. Five stars could balance it up. I'll give you two examples here of a. Of a lover and a hater lover. My reviews tech wrote. We love Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

Get that red on the air. Huh?

[Paris Martineau]

A show that boldly goes where no bot has gone before serving a delightful cocktail of AI antics and wit. I only wish there was a more masterfully catchy theme. Songs that eat through the ear like an earworm. Reminiscent of the baby shark phenomenon. And then as a counterpoint. I guess I should have done this first. We ended on a positive note. Mountaineer says. Says two of the hosts are just AI cynics. I'm all for skepticism, but two of the hosts just knee jerk hate everything. Paris is by far the worst offender. And it goes on another one.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Who's the other hater? I think I. We.

[Paris Martineau]

I guess it's Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

Must be Jeff.

[Paris Martineau]

He is a hater.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, you're.

[Paris Martineau]

I was gonna say, as to AI podcast, I would say he's the man who devotes the most thought to AI every week. And then we get another incredible show from the Twit Network. Writes Bionic Geek. I've been listening to this show for years, including in its previous format. It's informative, has great analysis on current topics, covering AI and many different ways and aspects that tech impacts are live today. It's also very entertaining. Fantastic show. Rate and review our podcast folks.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. And here is Dustin image art for this week's show. This week in hipsters.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I do a jacket, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, do you? I want to get a denim jacket. I haven't had one in a long time. Oh my God.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are we due for hipsters to come back? I think that's about to swing back around, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

Hipsters are back again.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Should I grow a beard? I don't know. That looks pretty good. I think that's a good look. Maybe I should grow a beard.

[Paris Martineau]

Be in my other closet. I do have that exact jacket, but it was my grandfather's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, does it have a little happy face button on it?

[Paris Martineau]

No, but the back has a Harley Davidson flag, which is why it's in probably a different closet right now. It's a little weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you can wear the flag. We have to have flag bags.

[Paris Martineau]

The beard would look good. Can you grow a beard, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

Of course I can grow a beard. I can grow that beard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you questioning his.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not questioning your manliness. It just seems so.

[Leo Laporte]

I was always taught that for some reason I wear contacts, that you want to have as much of your face available for expressiveness.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And this nose, I want to hide it. I want to protect from it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm getting to the point where I kind of want to hide my turkey jowl neck. So there's the beautiful Paris Martineau. See, poor Paris. Her sister was the model, so she had to be the smart one. One.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think it's.

[Paris Martineau]

I came first. So, you know, I just capitalized on this.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you choose to be the smart one and she chose to be the pretty one or is. Because that happens in families, doesn't it?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think I ever really thought about it until one time. I think I've mentioned this anecdote in the show before. I was maybe like 8 or 9 or 13. I was some level of adolescence. And my parents were up late talking to a friend in like, the main living room area. And I was sitting around the hall, like, listening to them. Gizmo keeps putting her little tail in front of the camera because she has them on mic. I was listening to them and I heard them saying, oh, well, you know, Melisse, my sister is, like, so extroverted. It's all right. Paris is introverted, but she's just a little nerdy. And I literally never before in my life thought of myself as introverted or nerdy. And I was like, I was like, I do sports. How am I introverted or nerdy?

[Leo Laporte]

But isn't that funny how they. That the dynamics of families are so weird? So weird, so un unhealthy. It's too bad we need them. Jeff Jarvis, pick of the week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, so about three weeks ago, I started seeing in my TikTok, my German TikTok, a major trend which I think is coming to America. The Washington Post has written about it, and I think it could probably hit Paris's friends and neighborhood putting. Go to line 162 to pudding mit gobble. Pudding with a fork.

[Leo Laporte]

No. 9, one does not eat pudding with a fork.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Washington Post. And go. Go to.

[Leo Laporte]

You have another link.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, hold on. No, I got the wrong link in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it. Is the pudding the same? It's just the utensil that changes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the utensil video.

[Leo Laporte]

Al English. That one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I want to put a different one in there. Hold on one second. Put it in and out. I think thought I'd erased it. Erase. Boom.

[Paris Martineau]

Done.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

How you call eating pudding with a fork a. A trend? It doesn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Watch. Watch.

[Paris Martineau]

People that are there eating pudding with.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A fork, they, they, they, they bring the pudding, they tap the pudding top with the forks, and then they eat it. Nobody can figure out. So what? Go to. Go to 162 now.

[Leo Laporte]

Spoon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, it has to be a fork, a goblet, a gobble.

[Leo Laporte]

Ein gabble.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, so line 162.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Paris Martineau]

That we are now gonna watch strangest tick tock videos.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, she does. He does.

[Paris Martineau]

The events are BYOP and byof. And even on a Sunday when German stores and supermarkets are closed, everyone comes prepared.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, here we go.

[Paris Martineau]

At the appointed time English speaking world is aware of, and I need to make you aware of it. It is called putting mitg, which means pudding with fork. And people are meeting up in Germany and Austria right now in the hundreds in various cities to eat pudding together. With what?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have done a deep dive on this.

[Paris Martineau]

I have watched tons of videos on it. You can look it up right now. Pudding. And I cannot find the source. I cannot find the source. Pudding mit gaba Source.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That looks like yogurt videos coming out.

[Paris Martineau]

Of Vienna from yesterday. At this meetup in Vienna, there Might have been a thousand people in that park, each with their own pudding, each with their own gaba. They're. They're tapping the lid rhythmically to get ready to eat the pudding gaba together. There's all ages. There's kids, there's omas. Everyone is doing this. It's stuff like this that makes me laugh when people say that Germans aren't funny. I know Vienna isn't in Germany, but bear with me, the German speaking world, because this to me is peak German humor. There's no deeper meaning to it. It is pure absurdism. And yet it is so funny.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And this exemplifies how fluent German speaking student in Germany. American, obviously.

[Leo Laporte]

That's awesome.

[Paris Martineau]

The first Pudding McGobble took place in the southwestern German city of Karlsruhe, best known as the site of the German of the country's supreme court, in late August. Apparently young people around Germany thought it was a tremendous ide.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I can find friends?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, friend finding. So tapping with a fork is. Is also meaningless. It's just part of the ritual.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Part of the ritual, yes. It's going to be coming Prospect park before you know it.

[Leo Laporte]

So just be aware when you start seeing people with their gobbles.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris, you can start it. You can start it.

[Paris Martineau]

The issue is I'm not a pudding fan because it's too soft as a.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you like hard pudding? Would you enjoy hard pudding?

[Paris Martineau]

I want a couple of layers of like a crunchy Oreo, something mixed.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You sneak that in there, you could.

[Leo Laporte]

Put crunch in a pudding.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I would have to get my own pudding. Pudding.

[Leo Laporte]

It's too soft. Do you like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Chocolate mousse. Is that too soft?

[Paris Martineau]

Too soft. The only thing that has broken my soft aversion is grits, which I think are a perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Grits are good food. So you'll eat oatmeal flan. Is pudding.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I don't really like it. I only like creme brulee.

[Leo Laporte]

Creme brulee because it's got a crispy.

[Paris Martineau]

Top, but I only eat crispy top. And I kind of leave the core of the creme brulee.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sugar.

[Paris Martineau]

I listen. I know, but it's just too soft. There's not enough going on there texturally. Well, listen, my one weird food thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Fascinating. Well, ladies and gentlemen, on that note, on that thrilling note, get your gobbles and go out and have some pudding because we are done. This is all over. Everybody go home. That is Jeff Jarvis, professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at Craig Newmark, graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, now Montclair State University and SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of the Goodyburg parenthesis, Goodyberg Parenthesis, Goody Birdie Bird parenthesis, and of the Magazine and the VEP Vivieve. Thank you Jeff. Good to see you. Paris Martineau, of course, investigative reporter at Consumer Reports, Paris, nyc. Thank you everybody for joining us. A special thanks to our Club Twitman members. We will be back next week and again we're going to talk about emotionally intelligent AI. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, out cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to Libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.