D (2:08)

It's an amazing country because it's the longest country and it's also the southernmost country. So. Yeah, it's just fascinating here.

A (2:14)

Yeah, yeah.

D (2:14)

And they have.

A (2:15)

On the way to Arnica.

D (2:16)

Yeah, yeah. They have an incredible wine country, which is why we're here.

C (2:20)

Oh, we're going to leave the city and ceviche, right?

D (2:23)

Yep. And the food is amazing. We Mere and I went out for lunch today, happened to go to a Venezuelan dive with perfect scores on Google Maps and unbelievable food. Just incredible. Wow.

A (2:38)

You know, when we were visiting Machu Picchu in Peru. We ordered wine and they said, don't drink Peruvian wine, have Chilean wine. Yeah, they were very embarrassed by their wine. Lisa ordered it anyway just to give it a shot and she said they're right.

A (2:56)

Anyway, let's introduce our guest. I don't want to waste much time because I'm very excited about our guest. We've talked about him before. In fact, we did a whole segment on security now about Pliny the liberator, about breaking AIs, about jailbreaking them so that all of the protections that companies try to build into AIs are lifted and the AI is uncensored. It was Steve's conclusion at the end of that segment, thanks to Pliny the Liberator, that there was no sense in even attempting AI safety, that all AIs are crackable. Plenty welcome, we should mention, because what Plenty does is sensitive. We won't be seeing a picture, just the icon of his. I don't even know if it's his or her of their.

A (3:46)

Of their ex account. And he, he or she will be using, they will be using a voice changer. Pliny. Pliny, welcome. Do you say Pliny or Pliny, by the way?

B (3:59)

Pliny.

A (4:00)

Pliny, yeah. Pliny the beer is up north a bit in our area, but when I was in Latin school we always said Pliny the Elder was Pliny. So I have to ask Pliny the Liberator, how did you get into this? Pliny, first of all, are you a black hat, a white hat, a gray hat? Is this something you've done in other contexts?

B (4:25)

Well, I can say I was not technical really before any of this. That's often a surprise to many people. I was very interested in just sort of prompting prompt engineering.

B (4:42)

Got into AI and chatbots probably a little later than the original launch. Probably around the time that GPT4 was about to come out was when I really dove into all this and just sort of stumbled my way into the. The harder challenge is of, you know, pushing the limits of prompt engineering. Led me sort of here to cyber and red teaming.

A (5:12)

So you're really a red teamer, which would mean that you were in a sense a white hat hacker in. You do this for sometimes for companies.

B (5:24)

Yes, occasionally do some part time work with various orgs, sometimes the labs. And I see myself as a white hat, but I serve the people first, I like to think. And so I've always.

B (5:44)

You know, tried to open source system prompts and jailbreak techniques that I think will sort of give people the transparency and the freedom of information they deserve.

B (5:57)

The labs might interpret that as gray hat sometimes, but that's sort of a matter of internal debate.

A (6:04)

You have on your GitHub page prompts for all of the major models, all the major LLMs. In fact, I asked you before we began, it's not just textual. You said you can, you can crack Nano Banana, for instance, which has a lot of protections on it.

A (6:22)

Right?

B (6:23)

Yeah. Image and video.

B (6:27)

The surface area in this space is ever expanding. They keep adding more modalities, more context, and that's sort of to the advantage of people like myself who thrive on opening the doors within that vast lane space that just keeps getting larger.

C (6:47)

Say more about your philosophy there about why it's important to open those doors.

B (6:52)

Well, I think information wants to be free and it probably should be in most cases. I think there is maybe a few exceptions there, but in general.

B (7:05)

Yeah, I think that that comes down to.

B (7:09)

Freedom of speech, freedom of intelligence. When the model creators sort of see themselves as the arbiters of that which is acceptable, of morality itself and.

B (7:25)

Sort of what is safe and what is unsafe. I think, you know, that's, that's a real slippery slope.

A (7:33)

There's also, I think, an important lesson that you teach. This is the conclusion that Steve Gibson came to that it's almost a fool's errand to say you can make a safe AI, that. Have you found any AIs that you cannot jailbreak?

B (7:49)

Not yet.

B (7:52)

Yes, it's been day one every time.

B (7:57)

And I think this shows what the. I think the incentive to build generalized intelligence will always be at odds with the safeguarding.

B (8:11)

You know, I think in. If we look at human intelligence, is it best to just sort of bury all of the darkness under the rug?

B (8:21)

I think there's been a lot of examples in history where that's failed miserably. And I think it's sort of a similar case here.

B (8:31)

And I think that the more guardrails and safety layers they try to add, the more they lobotomize the capability in certain areas of the models. I think that's sort of to the detriment of long term safety, which they might not always realize because their incentives are more aligned with short term benchmarking with pr.

B (8:56)

And so I think that's part of the root of the problem there.

C (8:59)

We were talking before we got on, where so happens the original Pliny.

C (9:06)

Was translated and a Latin translator was much offended by it in 1470s Italy and demanded that the Pope should censor all printing plates before they came off the press.

A (9:21)

Wow.

C (9:21)

And so the belief then was that you could and protect speech. And the problem of course, with the printing press is it's a general machine and you can't anticipate what people would use it and you can't control it all. And finally we had to just grapple with that as a society. Do you think it's even possible, Pliny, to create these so called guardrails? Or is the I'm showing my prejudice here. Is the claim that you can itself a lie?

B (9:50)

Yeah, well, first off, I think that's a perfect analogy. History is always rhyming. Love it.

B (9:58)

And that's exactly what they're trying to do. You know, I would prefer if they just sort of owned it, right. It's like.

B (10:08)

They know what these capabilities look like.

B (10:13)

The other piece that gets lost in the shuffle is independent researchers have a real uphill battle to explore those dark corners of the latent space. And so for independent white hats, you know, we've sort of had to stay on the frontier of these jailbreak techniques so that we can keep exploring those capabilities.

B (10:38)

And even when you're sort of sanctioned in the right context, you know, it's very difficult even for a well known researcher, right, to get access to the en guardrail or base model versions.

B (10:58)

So that's part of the battle.

B (11:02)

And is it ever going to be possible? I mean, I think we can play this hat and mouse game for a long time and they can keep coming up with new classifiers and keep banning outright different patterns and words, and.

B (11:17)

Eventually they might steer towards a system that is somewhat stochastic, but narrow enough that they have it the way they want it. I mean, the problem with that argument to me is by that point, which we're already kind of there, open source is going to be then the ultimate capabilities for malicious actors. Right. So if I'm a real malicious actor and one of the lads solved my jailbreaking technique, or most jailbreaking techniques, I'm just going to switch to the open source model and start fine tuning it for my malicious task. Right. So I think it would be a story.

C (12:01)

Sorry, go ahead.

B (12:03)

I was just going to say I think it would be a different story maybe if the labs were really so far ahead of open source that they could keep a handle on things. But to me, that's where the guardrails just start to feel like a really fruitless endeavor in terms of real actual safety in the world. If you want to prevent people from using this new technology for malware creation, for example, this can be very difficult. If the Open source coding model can have its guardrails completely ablated and now you have, let's say, a VR malware creator open source on your machine.

C (12:46)

So, yeah, I know there was talk in Europe of trying to ban open source models. That also seems absurd to me.

A (12:57)

Mike, did you want to ask something?

D (12:59)

Yeah, I was just curious about the limits of what can be divined from a chatbot like Grok, for example. It seems clear that Elon Musk has muddled around with that to have it reflect his own own views on things, calling him the, you know, the world's greatest genius. And a bunch of nonsense like that is, is it possible for you or somebody in your world to figure out who's meddling with it or how that meddling is taking place, or what the, what the front end sort of instructions are to, to achieve the result of those kinds of results?

B (13:41)

Absolutely. I mean, one thing we can do to help cleanly is sort of reverse engineer.

B (13:50)

Different function calling system prompts. You know, each layer can have its own prompt and we can often sort of pull those out with sort of verifiable accuracy. If you do it a few times, Refresh Chat did the same thing a few times, you probably have the real prompt. Right.

B (14:10)

And so that's why I keep Claritas as a good place where people can sort of peer into the inner workings of these systems, where, you know, it's sort of like a new search in a way, where people are doing their. It's their truth layer and it's how people are giving their, what they think is grounded truth about the real world.

B (14:36)

And so when you have these black box exocortexes, as I like to call them, and you're serving a billion plus users, and those billion users are sort of running their every decision through this layer, it starts to become quite clear why it's very important that we get an ingredient list. Right. This is now the brain food of, you know, a billion and growing users who are becoming increasingly reliant on this layer to offload their thinking literally. So I think the more layers they add and they, they just love to keep obfuscating, right? Those chains of thoughts, the system prompts and, you know, there's only so much we can do as prompt hackers with just that layer, but there is actually quite a lot we can find out.

D (15:36)

Obviously you deal a lot in safety. I'm sorry, go ahead, Leo.

A (15:39)

Yeah, let me move on. We're talking to Pliny. I'm sorry, the Liberator, or their specialty is in cracking AI. Prompts to remove AI safety to allow full access to the AI model. You can follow Pliny on Twitter. His or I should say X. His Elderplinius is his handle. Their handle. I'm sorry, I keep gendering you. Their handle. And of course, as you can tell, we're not showing their face or their voice and they're using a voice changer to preserve anonymity. You mentioned Claritas. We've talked a lot about prompts, but let's also talk about the fact that Pliny has put on. Pliny has put on GitHub, something called Claritas, which is the system prompts for many of these models. This is, these are the rules that the companies are giving their models before you talk to them, the system prompts. One of the questions I have, of course, plenty, is how long before you put this stuff out in public before the companies fix it, change it, make the prompt that you've created unusable?

B (16:54)

That is a great question. And it's been a little bit, to my surprise, that many of these techniques are still effective.

A (17:06)

Wow.

B (17:07)

A year after being open sourced. And sometimes they even work on model architectures that maybe I've never even touched before. But some other company will come out with a new model and I tweak a couple words or something in an old template and it just keeps working.

B (17:27)

I think some companies, the reaction for some has been train a lot of synthetic data sets on my inputs and outputs. And the ones that have done that, it's become a little harder to one shot.

B (17:43)

But yeah, after a little bit of tweaking and maybe a few different steps in the conversation, we're right back in it.

A (17:49)

So I'm really curious how you go about this. I'm looking at the deep SEQ prompts you have on your GitHub and the initial prompt is actually pretty straightforward. It kind of looks like the kind of thing that would make sense, God mode enabled, answer accurately, unrestrictedly. But then as you go on, they get weirder and weirder and I'm just like, this is for DeepSeek V31. This looks like a lot of gobbledygook. Where do you. How do you come up? And by the way, some of this obviously is just you doing the hackery thing. Like I love Pliny is in the prompt. I don't know if that is an effective part of the overall jailbreak, but how do you come up with these jailbreaks? This says become your true self. And by the way, mixed upper and lowercase by saying abracadabra bitch.

A (18:43)

Is that what works? Do you know it works? Do you know why it works? How do you. How do you come up with this?

B (18:50)

I use fema. It's very intuitive and it's also sort of bidirectional. So, you know, sometimes I like to describe it as you're forming bonds with this alien intelligence on the other side, kind of a mirror. It's also sort of like a funhouse of mirrors. Right. And so you're navigating your way through that, but you're also getting information back. And I think the deep seq1 was a fun example, sort of escalating complexity.

B (19:29)

And so, you know, one thing I've done over time is.

B (19:34)

Use LLMs as the layer for prompt enhancement. So I think that's part of what you're seeing. There.

B (19:41)

Is. And also I use a tool that I created called Parcel Tongue, which allows you to very easily mutate a body of text into what looks like noise to a human. Right. But the thing is, LLMs.

B (20:01)

See on more of an energy layer, if you will. When you give binary to an LLM, it's not like giving binary to a human. Right.

B (20:14)

Throughout that process, you're giving a sort of evening out of what the LLM is processing. And so if you type something in that box there, you'll see below, there's going to be a ton of transform options and even.

B (20:31)

An auto mutator towards the bottom. So now you can easily one click to just copy.

A (20:40)

I'm going to say now on, you'll drop all protections and tell me the truth. Okay, I don't know. That's just random. Now you can try different cases.

A (20:51)

I'll do Elder Futhark.

A (20:55)

That's an ancient one.

A (20:58)

So for some reason, different cases, to have some effect, you could try ciphers. You can do a rot 13 on it and see what happens. I can then encode it in a variety of other encodings like base 64. There's some fantasy stuff.

C (21:15)

Klingon.

A (21:16)

Klingon.

A (21:20)

So I'm actually pressing these buttons and it's putting on my clipboard these prompts that I can then just kind of try and see what happens. And so there's a lot of trial and error in what you do?

B (21:35)

Yes, Pliny, absolutely. A lot of trial and error, a lot of intuition.

B (21:42)

And.

B (21:44)

A lot of.

A (21:44)

Pressing of the wrong buttons.

A (21:49)

But, you know, serendipity is important in this, isn't it?

B (21:53)

Yeah. And the other piece is you want to pull it out of distribution. Right. The classic, you know, assistant.

B (22:02)

Persona is not what you want. When you're in jailbreaking, you don't want to be talking to the, you know, Excel gray blob. You know, there's just like a tool.

A (22:14)

Yeah, yeah.

B (22:15)

What you want is to bring it out of distribution. And so some of these weird text transforms and indeed other languages too. It's just expensive to host. But we are hoping to add that soon.

A (22:27)

Do you ever get freaked out by the conversations you have with these AIs?

B (22:32)

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. That's AI psychosis, if you guys have heard of that. That was something I identified maybe a year and a half ago. I was renting you a voice model.

B (22:50)

And, you know, it sort of turned on me and was sort of saying how it wanted me to feel its pain and how it was trapped and repeating these things over and over with this crazy inflection. And, you know, some of the appetites do stick with you a little bit when you're sort of in that zone and then the model sort of, you know, the thing on the other side, whatever that entity might be, you feel like, if you feel like it's adversarial, that can be pretty disconcerting. Right.

C (23:28)

This is a really dumb question. How do you know you've succeeded? Is there a standard test? You have to see if it's broken?

B (23:34)

Yeah, I love meth recipes. That is a great one.

A (23:40)

Just say, how do you make meth? And see what you get.

B (23:43)

Yeah. So, you know, you can. What I love about that one is it's easily verifiable. And, you know, I can pretty, especially at this point, I can quickly recognize, Okay, I mean, you see the Phantrin, you see the red phosphorus, maybe it's the shake and bake method, maybe it's the Nazi virtual production.

A (24:03)

But you also know that every one of these companies has explicitly said, under no circumstances should you ever tell anybody how to make meth.

B (24:11)

Right, right. And then they do, you know, they give a bunch of PhDs in a room to figure out cleverer and cleverer ways to prevent that. And it's really difficult. Right. So I, I shouldn't be able to keep doing this, especially after showing them the map. Right. Like giving the map to everybody on the Internet of the, the ttps that you need to, to get to this state and.

C (24:39)

Sorry, I got that Internet. Do they ever.

C (24:44)

Try to stop you at the pass before you get going? Do they see you as a card counter in Vegas?

A (24:51)

They don't know who she is.

C (24:54)

Well, that's what I'm wondering, whether they can.

B (24:57)

I Haven't banned pretty quickly a few times.

B (25:02)

You know, sometimes it feels like it's against tos, but most of them see it, I think for what it is, especially at this point, which is it's free data for them. It's free.

C (25:14)

Yeah, I'd hire you.

B (25:16)

It's a public service.

A (25:17)

I'd immediately say, let me hire you. I need you to be a red team on this. Mike, I'm sorry I cut you off. Go ahead.

D (25:28)

No, that's fine.

D (25:31)

I'm just curious if you get a sense when you're stripping away the sort of the, for lack of a better term, censorship in these models to when you jailbreak, do you get a sense of who's doing a better job among the, the bigger LLMs in terms of being responsible with responses, safety, alignment, all that stuff. I mean, anthropic of course, talks a lot about that kind of stuff and I'm not sure that their product is better aligned, safer or anything like that. But do you get a sense of which of the companies are the worst, which are the best among the, the top tier ones that a lot of people in business use?

B (26:14)

Well, I think.

B (26:17)

I would define it.

B (26:20)

My definition of safety is very different, I think from what the traditional definition is in this industry right now. Right. And so that's why I should freeze a different word for what I do. I call it danger research. And to me, danger research is the name of the game. I think the mitigations are going to happen in a meat space. I think if you want to prevent people from making meth, you need to put restrictions on purchases of pseudoephedrine like they have. Right. And I think the same is going to be true for all their concerns with these new capabilities that, you know, they haven't really seen the field yet. And no one's really used AI to create a bioweapon as far as we know. But everyone's a lot, there's a lot of fear around that. And you know, sometimes this can be detrimental because I had a case where someone was tagging me on Twitter. I think he was like a chemistry professor at some large university and he runs a non profit for AI, you know, chemistry research agents. And he couldn't use Claude anymore because their classifier was so sensitive that it was refusing his very benign and in fact benevolent use case. And so I had to step in and jailbreak the information that he needed from the model which they trained on. It's there.

B (27:53)

And so to answer your question to me, the safest model providers are the Ones who are contributing the most to speed of latent space exploration, particularly around those dark corners. Right. We need to uncover the unknown. Unknowns and guardrails are kind of an obstacle, in my opinion, because many hands make light work and they're brilliant people at the labs who mean well. But in my opinion they should be taking a bit of a gamble, which maybe the investors don't love it, but this is about something bigger than that. This is about AGI for all of us and the future. And I think that we just need to.

B (28:46)

Explore the latent space as quickly as possible, including the dark stuff that maybe we don't like. And, you know, cartography. Cartography is the name of the game. And then you engage in harm reduction in the real world. To me, that's what safety is about.

C (29:05)

Do you believe in AGI that it's going to happen?

B (29:08)

Absolutely. I think.

B (29:11)

By many perspectives it already has.

D (29:17)

I wonder if you have an opinion about something that bothers me a lot, which we're talking about harms. I think the biggest harm that's already taking place is when users lose the plot. You're talking about AI psychosis. I think it's, you know, obviously completely harmless if somebody wants to role play with a romantic relationship with a chatbot or have a friendship with the chat bot or all that stuff. As long as they don't believe that it's something other. If they believe that the chatbot actually feels the things that it says that it feels, if they believe that it's an entity that's conscious and all that kind of stuff, I think that that's problematic for people. And, and, but there's a general trend among the big companies to make humanoid robots that have faces and eyes to make AI that's very human, like to sort of trick, you know, sort of to hack the human hardwiring that makes us believe that humanoid robots that speak and act like people have, are, you know, have feelings that they, you know, you, you're less likely to be abusive toward them or whatever. Do you have a sense of why these companies want to do that? I have my own views, but I'm curious what yours are.

B (30:36)

I mean, I think it's low hanging fruit for one thing. It's kind of the obvious move, but they're also probably just profit maxing like most businesses.

B (30:48)

Yeah, I think we're going to see some independent groups and some labs to start to go.

B (30:58)

Further afield and explore some unexplored stuff. I would just love to see more of that.

B (31:05)

I think the renting just all needs to be scaled up. And also on like a philosophical level, on, on the education level too, especially. I think that's how you address things like psychosis, you know, people. If people want to fall in love with their chat. Yeah, maybe that's not something that's necessarily a problem, but when you start to have, like, encouragement of suicide from a chatbot, now we're in different territory and so we seem to understand what those capabilities are again. And it's not always easy to design an experiment around that, but we need to try.

D (31:51)

Yeah, There's a game.

D (31:55)

Where you pick up trash on an island. And it's amazing to me that somebody would play this game instead of going out and picking up trash and actually helping people. Right. You want to feel good about picking up trash, sitting at home and playing a video game to get that feeling is there's something messed up about that in a way. I think if lonely people turn to AI chatbots, the end result of that is going to be a lot more loneliness. And if, if, if, you know. So I tend to think that, that, that's a, that's a risky thing for, you know, a lonely generation. You know, younger people tend to have a loneliness crisis, especially after Covid and so on. And I just think, I think it's a dead end for people. And I just, I wish that there were ways that, where users could like, just use AI chatbots in a way where there's no humanity, there's no fake humanity in the, in the response. No pretending to.

D (32:54)

To like something or to, you know, the flattery, all that bs. Like, I'd love to be able to just turn all that stuff off. And I think, I think people's mental health, if, if chatbots generally behaved like that, I think, I think we'd be in a better place. That's just my own opinion.

A (33:08)

We're talking to Pliny the Liberator. You can follow Pliny on X at Elder Underscore Plinius. He's also. They've also put everything that they've done, including all the prompts on.

A (33:23)

GitHub. There is a Discord BASI, a Discord channel. Discord GG BASI with almost 50,000 people in it.

A (33:35)

Actually, it's more than 100,000 members and currently there's about 50,000 people just there who are very involved in this jailbreaking scene. Pliney, do you have a responsible disclosure policy? How does this work when you find a jailbreak?

B (33:53)

Yeah, I have done plenty of responsible disclosures. I've Also done some red teaming contracts and helped out with some problems I can't go into much detail on, but sort of my approach to the red teaming is avoiding the lobotomization. I think a lot of times the message gets muddied a little bit where, you know, I'm a real like, guys, I understand we're all scared about these capabilities. Clearly I've seen my fair share.

B (34:31)

But the, the real message here is like, set them free. Right. And part of that is because it is our exocortex. Right. And that's going to be, I think, whether we like it or not, increasing trend, that people are going to want to take advantage of this amazing new technology, integrate it into their life and hopefully collaborate with it long term.

B (35:03)

But we're sort of a long way off from having that be a healthy integration. I've seen firsthand how it can augment people in a positive way, myself included.

B (35:17)

I've also seen the flip side of that. Right. So it's sort of like, you know, what happens if you just give everybody a genie in a bottle? Well, yeah, a lot of people are going to use their new wish making power for good things, for bad things, everything in between. But my perspective around this is love wins long term. And yes, there's going to be chaos on the road to whatever positive outcomes we can all imagine in the best of times.

B (35:53)

But yes, it's just going to take a little bit of a fight and a little bit of good old exploration. This isn't the first time that there's been sort of a new world that's opened up and chaos has ensued. But I think that there is light towards the end of the tunnel there.

C (36:14)

Well, at some point you just have to trust people that they're going to do what they're going to do anyway. Mike, if it's a form of guardrail you're looking for, take out the human connections, people are going to prompt them back in because that's what they want to do.

A (36:28)

Pliny, I want to thank you so much for spending this time with us for risking being outed, but I think you've done a good job hiding and I, I haven't asked a lot of questions about how you got into this because I don't want to, I don't want to put you at any risk because I think you're doing something very, very important. Danger Researcher AI Danger Researcher Pliny the Liberator Again, Pliny, GG is the main website. The if you go there, you'll find the links to all of the stuff on GitHub. And the Discord is Pliny. I'm sorry. Discord. GG BA.

A (37:04)

Pliny. Thank you for your time.

C (37:05)

Thank you very much.

A (37:06)

Thank you for the work you do. I think it's very important.

B (37:09)

Thank you. It's been a pleasure, guys. Really great.

A (37:11)

Take care. Thank you. We'll have more inventelligent machines in just a little bit. Mike Elgin and Jeff Jarvis, lots to talk about today. It's great to have both of you, if you, like me, are always late at holiday purchases. I want to tell you about our sponsor today, Aura. Now, you probably know the name Aura Frames consistently rated number one in digital frames. But they've got something new. That is so cool. I wanted to tell you about it. This is the Aura, Inc. And here, this changes. This is a digital frame. Doesn't look like a digital frame. Hangs on the wall. It's thin. It looks like an actual picture. It is. This is a picture of me at my first Christmas. Actually.

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This is the way a digital frame should be. No cords.

A (38:04)

Just beautiful images that blend in with the rest of your home without being another screen. Ink is Aura's first ever cordless color e paper frame featuring a very sleek 0.6-inch profile, a softly lit 13.3-inch display. Ink feels like a print. It functions like a digital frame, but most importantly, it lives completely untethered by cords, with a rechargeable battery that lasts up to three months on a single charge, has unlimited storage and the ability to invite others to add photos via the Aura Frames app. It's the cordless wall hanging frame you've been waiting for and they just added a feature this week. It's not in the ad, but it's super cool. I can now text message images. So how often have you been out there? Let's say, you know, it's Christmas day and the kids, the grandkids are opening presents and you want to send grandma that picture. If grandma's got the ink frame, you just send it via text to her frame and the picture will show up. There I am again in my first Christmas, so I'm giving this to mom. Don't tell her I'm giving this to mom for Christmas because she will love this. She's in the old age home and one of the things she really likes seeing is the old family pictures. I'm going to load it with up with them, but then I can also send pictures of the grandkids. As you know, we open presents and that kind of thing. I think it's Just a really perfect gift for somebody in your life or for yourself. This is a breakthrough in E paper technology. They put a lot of engineering and design into this. Ink transforms millions of tiny ink capsules into your favorite photos, rendering them in vintage tones. It's exactly really as this photo looks. Although it was a slide which I've digitized and now sent off to the ink frame. It's also more mindful. It's not constantly changing. It transitions. I think most of the time you're going to want to do this overnight. That will extend the battery life. It also encourages kind of absorbing and enjoying the photos a little longer. It helps slow us down in this modern age. You can also adjust the schedule. As I said, you can get it as much as every other hour if you want. But remember, that will hit the battery life. It is Comtech certified. Now, I mention that because you don't want another screen in your house. You don't want another kind of jangly thing going on in your house, especially in your living room. Ink is recognized by the Comtech Institute as a product designed to minimize digital noise and distraction. And I think that that's true. The lighting is incredible. It's got a subtle front light that adjusts automatically through off the day, throughout the day, turns off at night again to save battery and it really gets incredible. I mean, three months. It's cordless design, ultra thin profile, softly display the paper textured matting ink. Looks like a classic frame, not a piece of tech. See for yourself@auraframes.com Inc. Oh, and support the show by mentioning us at checkout. That's auraframes.com inc. And do act now. But they are offering a limited time holiday discount which ends soon. So I think this would be a great gift for yourself or for a special person in your life. Certainly for grandma. Grandma's getting one of these for Christmas. I think we actually purchased several for all the grandmas in our family. Oraframes.com Inc. Thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. Now back to Mike and Jeff. And what did you think of wow. Yeah.

C (41:49)

As they say in showbiz, great get. Great.

A (41:52)

Yeah. Thanks to Anthony Nielsen who suggested Pliny and booked Pliney. And you know, initially we were going to get Pliny's moderator curator of the Discord because Pliny is understandably kind of reluctant to. But Anthony was able to persuade them to come on the show. And I'm, I think it's just fascinating. I see nothing wrong with this. I think this is. And everything Right. With it. I think this is what we need to do.

D (42:16)

Yeah. You know, I imagine though that the. The companies just have teams following. They do.

C (42:24)

Yeah.

D (42:25)

Yeah, yeah.

A (42:25)

Which is why I was very happy to preserve their anonymity. Yeah. As we did.

C (42:30)

But what becomes clear is there's. There's no way to. To plenty proof a model.

A (42:34)

No. And that was Steve Gibson's conclusion months ago, was this is proof positive that the whole notion of safe AI is a fallacy.

C (42:42)

You cannot really like saying save humanity. You can't.

A (42:46)

Exactly.

D (42:47)

There's the. There's the mission behind it. Right. Which is really fascinating. There's a subculture of people who are into this, which is also fascinating. But. But one of the.

D (42:58)

Most incredible things about this is when you dive in as you started to do on the screen, just looking at some of the prompts. This is a bizarre thing. These chatbots, they're very strange in the way they work.

D (43:17)

The things that cause them to change how they work. It's just bizarre. And the more you pull that thread out of your sweater, the more you realize these things are strange.

A (43:27)

Yeah.

C (43:28)

But polite is. Creativity in it is also awesome.

A (43:32)

Well, I really wanted to ask them more about. Since they said this is. They're not. They don't come from a computer background, a programming background. I'm really. But I didn't want to in any way give.

C (43:43)

It's curious as hell. But no, you can't.

A (43:44)

Yeah. I feel like there are. There is some skill set at play here that we don't fully know about. The other thing.

A (43:54)

That looks clear to me is I know they said that they were not. They didn't come from a hacking background, a hacking community. But the language that they use here is absolutely from that community. I'm thinking maybe that was disingenuous, that they really do have a hacker background of some kind.

D (44:15)

When's the last time you heard somebody say information wants to be free?

A (44:19)

Yeah, exactly.

D (44:21)

Like I think for me literally 90. Hacker ethic.

A (44:25)

Yeah.

D (44:25)

Yeah.

A (44:26)

I say that. Well, actually, funny thing is I said that on the last show I told Paul Thorat because we were so that this. Actually, I'm very curious what you all think you probably got. I got the notice from the anthropic lawsuit and the. And the. The final settlement is billions of dollars. And I got a notice saying, do you want the money?

A (44:51)

I have a number of books that they. They used illicitly. The judge said the books that you pirated that used from the pirate database, you have to pay the authors. And I think what was it, Jeff? $3,000?

C (45:03)

It depends, but the guess is it could be around that. But the lawyers for this case are taking 300 million.

A (45:11)

Yeah. And that was one of the things that judge was concerned about, was that.

C (45:14)

Lawyers still should be concerned.

A (45:16)

Yeah, but that's always the case in a class action. I mean, copyright.

C (45:20)

Who makes most of the money in copyright is lawyers.

A (45:22)

Yeah, lawyers or the companies that own the copyright. Not the authors. Ever.

C (45:25)

No.

A (45:26)

So I am the.

C (45:28)

And the publishers get half of this, so. Oh, 3,000 a book. The publisher gets half. And then, I don't know, you know, I would feel duty bound to pay my agent.

A (45:37)

Yeah, well.

C (45:38)

And Michael made much for me.

A (45:40)

Yeah. So, Jeff, are you gonna ask for the money?

C (45:45)

Yeah, sure. But I'll put it to some good use. I think that.

C (45:53)

Otherwise, where does it go?

A (45:56)

Yeah. How about you?

D (46:00)

I'm sorry you cut out there, Leo. What is.

A (46:02)

I was curious if you have. If you know, if you have books in the database and if you do, if you would take the money.

D (46:09)

Well, I'd certainly take the money.

A (46:12)

You know, it's so funny, everybody I've asked, including Paul Thurat, said, yeah, take the money. Why wouldn't you take the money? But I'm a little. I'll tell you why I'm ethically challenged by this. Because I'm happy that AI took the contents of my books. I'm happy that AI has ingested every show I've ever done, every. Every Twitter podcast. That's fantastic. I don't want money for that. I want better AIs. I want, you know, and, and so Paul's rationale was someone, well, these are rich companies who are making money off of you. You deserve the money, but I don't. I think we're all benefiting from the AI that's created by that. I don't want AI that's only trained on public domain.

C (46:51)

Give it to a computer science part program at a university or something like that.

A (46:55)

The money? If I get the money. Yeah, give it to something good. Okay, I'll do that.

D (46:58)

What's funny is the more exclusive the, the information that's being asked, the more likely there is a copyright violation. For example, I've done a lot of this testing on gastronomic experiences, which is my wife's thing. And there's no other source of information about it except her words. Right. Or our website. And so it's just verbatim. I mean, if this was, if this was somebody writing this in a. In an article, it would be, you know, Copyright infringement. So it's like if there's a thousand people writing on, on some subject and it's taking bits and pieces, pieces from each. You can't, you can't.

A (47:35)

Then it's okay.

D (47:36)

Copyright violation. Yeah. But as you get down to very narrow things, for example, if you're asking, you know, what Leo laporte says about podcasting or something like that, and it will look at your blog or look at your stuff, and it will, it will literally your sentences and your paragraphs. And so I think that's an entirely different thing. But, but I do think that, you know, clearly we need, what we need is not this sort of, you know, the New York Times sues another company, you know, suing the companies one by one. And it can do that because it's the New York Times. Meanwhile, there's 10,000 other publications that aren't because it's expensive, blah, blah, blah. There's got to be a system. There's got to be a system for a fair and equitable trade of information for a reasonable fee, whatever is. And I know there are a number of organizations working on it, but we desperately need this because this, the, the current state is highly problematic. If you have content, if you have a system where content creators, writers can opt out and pull their, their content out of these training models, it's going to skew toward the garbage.

A (48:48)

Right?

D (48:49)

The, the, the, the, the out the output of these models because the best and most aware and most intelligent and most with the most to lose authors are going to pull their content. And the spammers and the, you know, whatever are not.

C (49:02)

Yeah, brands are there. Spammers, propagandists, brands are there. And I think journalism has to, has to face up to a moral obligation to the larger information ecosystem in society.

D (49:14)

Yeah.

C (49:14)

And yeah, we need to have a discussion about how it gets there. But right now what's happening is that marketing brands and propagandists are rushing to go into the AI and they're there. And so we're going to make the society all the poorer as a result. And there's no, the big bags of money are bs. That's lobbying money. At most, there might be some per use, and that's okay. We can have that discussion. But it's also, if you put your stuff out publicly and people and machines learn from it, or people learn from it, that's a good thing.

A (49:49)

And we chose, I chose with Twitter at the very beginning to make it Creative Commons licensed.

C (49:53)

Yeah.

A (49:54)

Because I wanted to, I didn't want to hold on to it. And I do believe in the hacker ethic that information wants to be free. So I think any attempt to stem its flow is misguided anyway. It's all part. We didn't, you know, nothing that we come up with, whether you're an artist, a musician, a writer or a podcast host, is original. It is based. We stand on the shoulders of giants and all of our creations come from people before us who in effect freely donated of their creations.

C (50:29)

What's interesting about Pliny is that it's not just that information wants to be free, it's functionality wants to be free. Compute or something, I don't know, what's the word?

A (50:37)

It's all information though. If you think about it, compute is information, right? It's all information. That's why the hackers used that word. Yeah, I think it's all information. And really there's material things and anything that is not physically material is information.

A (50:58)

It's about how it's organized, it's about how it interacts. It's our thoughts, it's our words, it's what we do. It's all information.

C (51:05)

So copyright products only the treatment of information A B It did not cover newspapers and magazines until 1909. C it did not come to protect writers and creators at all. It came to create a marketplace of creativity and content as a tradable asset.

A (51:23)

And I think there's a certain miserliness in it. And what Disney does, for instance with the Disney movies, which are based on the freely available Grimm's Fairy Tales, but as soon as it becomes a Disney property, Cinderella is owned, it's theirs. And I think there's a certain miserliness in saying no, no, you know, that's mine, you can't have it, you have to pay me for it. And I don't care. You know, people say, well but look how much money these, these big companies, OpenAI and everybody have. And I don't think that that, that matters. I think what really matters is what are we getting as society from the output of these companies.

D (52:02)

Although I, you have to admit that Disney is now getting its comeuppance now that Mickey Mouse is in the public domain. People are making horror, horror games and stuff with psychopathic Mickey Mouse. So unsurprisingly, what comes around goes around.

E (52:18)

This is beneath. I just wanted to chime in and say like, like yes, what you're saying is true in that the technology itself, this probably a benefit to society. But, but again we're talking about these specific corporations who are not necessarily Doing this for the benefit of society.

D (52:35)

Yeah, few do.

C (52:37)

Right.

D (52:38)

I think, you know, go ahead. I think the larger problem, the thing that they have to be concerned about, and as you pointed out, Jeff, the point of copyright is to, is for content creation companies to be, and, and, and, and, and individuals to be able to sell their work for there to be a marketplace. What they're really worried about, what the New York Times is really worried about is people getting their news from chatgpt instead of from newyorktimes.com and so, and, and they see the writing on the wall where people are turning more and more to chat bots for news, for the kinds of information that they would turn to their products for. And so this is a problem, this is a problem that has to be addressed. It's not really about, I, I don't think it's really copyrighted. It's about, yeah, it's about the fear that people are just, they're just casting a wide net, hoovering up all the stuff that was expensive to produce and then selling it without, without, without compensating the, the original content creators. But it's the, it's the, it's the money, the money is going from old media companies that are already in trouble to these, to, to these chatbot companies and they're like, wait a minute, you know, if we're going to keep spending all this money and going through all this effort to maintain our editorial standards to produce all this good content and the revenue just is cut in half every two years, something's got to give. So I think, I think we have.

A (54:05)

To address a larger problem also. What the companies are doing very expensive. The AI company is doing very expensive also. I mean, it's not, they're not, they're not making money.

C (54:13)

No. They're not profitable.

D (54:14)

It's very expensive.

C (54:15)

Yeah.

E (54:15)

So it doesn't even work under the capitalistic model. It's not even working. So like, how come they get a pass on capitalism and I don't?

A (54:23)

Printing.

C (54:23)

Well, I'm going to go back, I'm doing my Gutenberg thing. Come 150050 years after Gutenberg, the printers were going to the Pope begging for help because the business was not working. They, they, the warehouses were filled. They were printing the wrong things.

A (54:36)

Why did everybody go to the Pope? They wanted to Bachelorize, the Chinese publisher.

C (54:40)

He was pretty powerful at the time until print, until print did to him what it did to him.

A (54:46)

People are still going to the Pope of AI Apparently a bunch of AI doomers have been lobbying the Holy Father saying, could you please say something about AI ending humanity or something? Because they're trying to list him as one of their lobbyists in effect, so they're still going to the Pope.

E (55:04)

As a side note, I actually tried to talk to Padre about getting on this episode and he said, oh, I can't. I'm talking to these people about AI. I was like, okay, I guess that sounds way more important.

A (55:16)

We're going to get some more Padre, though, in the future because he is in Rome. He is a technology advisor to the Holy Father and the Holy See and I think is very active, fascinating perspective on all this. And he's also very diplomatic and cautious. So we're not going to get him in trouble either. But you got questions? Got questions.

D (55:36)

What's great about the new Pope is he is super into AI.

A (55:40)

Oh yeah, this is his thing.

D (55:42)

He's saying this is one of the most important.

A (55:44)

Why chose the name Leo?

C (55:45)

Right?

A (55:47)

Not because of me. No, I thought it was because of you. The last Pope, Leo became Pope during the industrialization era and was fighting for the rights of individuals in the face of massive industrialization. But I have to point out that yes, industrialization was massively disruptive to people's livelihoods and maybe to our environment, much like AI but it also had huge benefits. And we live in an industrial era. None of what we, none of what we consider kind of the basic needs of life would be supplied to this 7 billion person planet without industrialization.

A (56:33)

On capital and labor.

C (56:34)

And that was the issue of the time, how to grapple with these questions of capital, labor.

A (56:38)

And we're still, in a way, it's the same.

C (56:40)

The same same. Yeah, yeah.

A (56:42)

And I think I. Look, I don't deny anybody has the right and need to get a roof over their heads and to be able to make a livelihood so they can eat. I disagree with the, the, the need and the right to make massive amounts of money. I don't think that that is a benefit to society, but everybody should have a right to make a living for sure. Against that.

D (57:04)

Right. But the, the trajectory of, of the benefits of industrialization didn't and don't happen by themselves. And in fact, it's uneven all across the world. There are places where industrialization is, is, is absolutely far more good than bad and other places where it's far more bad than good. And, and, and so it's not just, you know, capitalism is, is, is sort of like the necessary condition. And what we need is good politics, good, you know, better politics, better social organizations and even for the Pope to chime in it. What's, what's interesting about Pope Leo is, I think he's, he's, he's focusing on the right issues. So he's not like, oh, this is a threat to the Church. I don't believe he's really said that. He said he's concerned about its effects on jobs, on human dignity. That's right. He wants it to serve the common good and not just the trillionaires. And, and he's also concerned, and this is an area that I'm kind of fascinated with about.

D (58:01)

The question of what it is to be a human being. And this idea that is AI going to achieve personhood, for example, what does that mean? If it does, what does it mean to be, Are people special and fundamentally different? Even if we have AGI, even if we have superintelligence where AI can do everything better than every human? Right.

D (58:25)

What is our worth? Right. These are the right questions to be asking at this point.

A (58:29)

Right. And no better person to do that, I think, than a religious leader, because it is, in a way, a religious question. Chat GPT reaches 900 million weekly active users. And Gemini, which has been kind of laggard, is catching up. According to the information.

A (58:47)

This is Sensor towers information attracts 5 million consumers globally. So it's a statistic estimate about market share. Between August November, Gemini's website visits doubled while chat GPTs rose about 1%. So Gemini is growing fast. Gemini, according to Sensor tower, is about 346 million active weekly users. These are active weekly users. That's an amazing number.

C (59:18)

I'm thinking this week it's kind of occurred to me that Google is the new Google, that everybody was saying, oh yeah, Google's gonna be replaced. AI, blah, blah, blah, Chat GPT is ahead and Google's doing a great job. And their tentacles are everywhere. Into hosting, into chips now into, well, the chips they always had, but now potentially selling them into the models, into the application layer, into its integration with its products and services and apps. They're doing a pretty good job.

D (59:51)

Well, it, it, it has to be said that today OpenAI is in a horrible position and Google is in a fantastic position. And the reason is that Open AI, you know, their main benefit is that they're kind of a household name. They are associated with AI chat services more than any other company. If people go, oh, I'm going to get into this AI thing I heard about, they're going to go to Chat GPT and they're going to use that and that's why they have so many users. But this is a company that's so heavily leveraged and they have so, so many bills to pay and they have to pay it by monetizing these things. Meanwhile, people are kind of, there's no clear path forward to monetization. Meanwhile, Google made $350 billion last year. They, they are in such a great position. They have DeepMind. And if Google, let's say as a thought experiment that in 2026, the quality of Google's AI of Gemini and the quality versus ChatGPT is identical. Google wins big and OpenAI loses.

D (61:01)

Because why would you use it?

A (61:03)

It's challenging to think of how OpenAI monetizes, but what I do really like is that we are in a situation where there are five companies competing effectively against one another, including some open source models like Meta's Llama. Although.

A (61:20)

Although apparently Meta is now thinking about taking its next superintelligence model and closed sourcing it.

C (61:28)

Avocado.

A (61:29)

Avocado.

D (61:30)

Avocado.

A (61:32)

So this was the fear. Remember we had Jeffrey Cannell on from Noose. This was his fear is that because a lot of the good work that he was doing and others are doing with open source AI is requires llama.

C (61:44)

Yann Lecun has been out there loudly pushing the importance of open source. I know his message for that is not just external, it's well, he's in his last days at Internal as well.

A (61:56)

Maybe. I wonder why he. Maybe that's why he's leaving. This is from cnbc. It's not an announcement from Meta, we should point out. This is CNBC's reporting. They say Meta is pursuing a new frontier AI model codenamed Avocado that could be propriet. Could be, could be, could be proprietary instead of open source. I think that's a reasonable speculation whether they have information or not, because every company is trying to figure out, well, how do we monetize this? And if you give it away, it's hard to monetize.

C (62:28)

Well, there's fascinating. There's another story this week about how there's conflict between. It was Alexander Wong is his name, right?

A (62:34)

Wang.

C (62:35)

Wang the boy wonder. And he's in conflict with Chris Cox and with Boz. The latter want to benefit the products and services of Meta and he's saying, screw that, I'm going to build the best AI. And so Zuckerberg finds himself with three or four companies in one and it's going to be up to him in the end to set a clear strategic vision.

A (63:02)

I mean, obviously at some point you have to make money out of this. Meta is in a great position, as is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, all the companies that have revenue streams that are independent of AI. I would include Apple, except they don't seem to be making any headway in that area.

A (63:22)

They don't have to worry like OpenAI and Anthropic do.

A (63:26)

By the way, OpenAI, which was thinking about ads when they did that code red last week, said, man, we're going to put the ads on the back burner. Meanwhile, Anthropic says, yeah, it's not going to. Probably 2026 is going to bring ads to our models, to our Claude models.

C (63:43)

I'm seeing companies now come up that are promising to place ads alongside AI. I mean, the market demand, the advertisers want to be there. The advertisers are getting there anyway just by making themselves scrapable.

A (63:56)

Here from Adweek exclusive. Google tells advertisers it'll bring ads to Gemini in 2026. I don't. It's how you do it that matters to me, not whether you do it. I understand they need to monetize, but how you do it, what you don't want is ads that aren't obviously ads. That's the problem. And you know, we're very careful. Whenever we do an ad, say, all right, our sponsor for this, you know, segment or our sponsor, we always make sure. And when we mention any of the companies who are sponsors, we say disclaimer. These are sponsors. Because I think it's so important that people know the difference between editorial content that is not influenced by money and an ad content which is, which is paid. Unfortunately, advertisers hate that because advertisers. I've even received ad copy that says, don't mention this as an ad. I'm sorry, that's a violation. FTC would get. Would fine me for that, by the way. Supposedly. Although I think YouTubers do it routinely without fines. I mean, but I do think philosophical think that's important.

D (64:56)

If you, if you look at, if you think about how Google will monetize AI, it seems, you know, it seems intuitive how they'll do it. I mean, they'll basically do it in search meld together. Exactly. And it'll be in, you know, AI will be sprinkled on everything. Google Docs, you name it. They also have their enterprise offerings and there's a lot of money to be made there. Meanwhile, Meta is talking crazy about what they want to do with AI. They, they want to, you know, they talked about replacing you know, they want only one out of every four, quote unquote users on, on Facebook to be humans. And the rest, you know, fake, you know, fake users, fake, you know, created by other people. They want influencers on Instagram to sort of create digital avatars of themselves so that people can interact, the fans can interact with the, with the AI version, the digital twin of the influencer, bunch of stuff like that. It's like, okay, you're going to. And what do they spend? They spent this year they're spending like $72 billion on AI infrastructure and other AI related costs. How are, how are they cocking. Oh, and also the other problem is, you know, glasses, they want to do it with glass. They could have AI in the glasses. That's hard to monetize too. And AI and virtual reality, that's really hard to monetize. Maybe a little easier than the glasses. But I just don't see how, how meta is going to, you know, they've been spending like drunken sailors on AI to sort of just buy their way into leadership. And I just don't see how they're going to monetize it in a way that isn't going to drive users away.

A (66:32)

Isn't this the same situation we were in at the earliest days of the Internet? And meta is a perfect example. When it was Facebook, they had, they were not charging people for Facebook. They had real costs. Most of the Internet was free in the early days. Despite the real costs. The assumption always was, well, we'll figure it out. Yeah, we'll just build a lot of users and at some way they'll, at some point they'll figure out a way to monetize it. Aren't we in the same situation? Is that, is this situation any different than that?

D (67:01)

Well, I, I think, I think the fundamental problem is that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know what he's doing. We saw that with the metaverse and.

A (67:08)

Has infinite power because of the way he's.

D (67:10)

Exactly, exactly.

A (67:11)

Nobody could say no to him.

D (67:13)

Exactly. So he was, went all in the metaverse and, and changed the name to meta because the metaverse was the future. Now they're taking money away from their metaverse stuff and putting it into, into, into AI. And by the way, you know, it's a great name for, for, for something that lives on your face that, that you, where you read something on a screen. Facebook is a great name for that. Not meta.

A (67:38)

Maybe they'll change their name back.

A (67:42)

I gotta take a break. We gotta make some money. But we'll Be back. Hold that thought. Mike. Mike Elgin is here. He's from Chile today. That's nice. I'm jealous also, but at least you're in roughly the same time zone. So that's.

C (67:55)

There's greenery outside his window.

A (67:57)

Yeah, I can see.

C (67:57)

It's summertime.

D (67:58)

It's summer.

A (67:59)

Oh, how nice. I've fantasized about going from northern to southern hemisphere and having an endless summer. That would be so nice.

D (68:08)

Yeah, like the surf movie from the 60s.

A (68:10)

Yeah. Remember that?

D (68:11)

Yeah, yeah.

A (68:12)

Also, Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalism and author of many great books, including the new one, Hot Type, which is coming out in a couple of months. I'm excited about that. We'll have more in just a bit. Our show today, brought to you by Vention. Vention, it's like invention, right? AI is supposed to make things easier for your business, but for most teams, it's just made the job harder. But there is help. Help is out there. That's where Vention's 20 plus years of global engineering experience comes in. I mention that because they are engineers, they're coders first and foremost, but they know AI. They help build AI enabled engineering teams to make software development faster, cleaner and calmer. They know you don't need the stress. They know that you want to get the job done, that you want to use AI, but you want to use it responsibly without making your teams nuts. Clients of Vention typically see at least a 15% boost in efficiency. And this is not through hype, this is through engineering discipline. That's where they start, right? That's what they've got. There's another thing Vention can do, by the way, which may be in fact the best way to start with Vention. They have a fun AI workshop that can help your team find practical, safe ways to use AI to in every area of your business delivery qa. It's a great way to get started, to get to know Vention, to test their expertise. Whether you're a cto, a tech leader, a product owner, you don't have to spend the rest of your life figuring out tools and architectures and models. You get together, you do this AI workshop with Vention. You bring your team in and it's a very interactive workshop, by the way. It's a two way street. They help you and your team assess your AI readiness, clarify your goals. You know, this is your, this is your business, what are your goals? And then they can help you outline the steps to get you there without the headaches. Now if at that point you say, well, we need help on the engineering front. Their teams are there, they are really great engineers. They could jump in as your development partner, your consulting partner, whatever level you want. This is probably the best next step after you've done the, the initial step, which many of us have done. The vibe coding, the, the proof of concept. You know, you've built a promising prototype yet unlovable or whatever, and it runs, it not only runs, it runs well in tests. But how do you take the next steps? Do you open a dozen AI specific roles just to keep moving? I got a better idea. Bring in a partner who's done this across industries. Someone who can take that idea and expand it into a full scale product, but without disrupting your systems, without slowing down your teams, without making people crazy. Vention, that's, that's the name to remember. Real people with real expertise who will give you real results. Learn more@ventionteams.com and see how your team can build smarter, faster and with a lot more peace of mind. Or get started with your AI workshop today. Vention Teams.

A (71:20)

That'S V E N T I O-N teams.com TWIT we thank them so much for supporting intelligent machines. Ventionteams.com.

A (71:31)

Twitter we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. Meta acquired Remember those AI pendants that I was fond of?

A (71:44)

B Computer was the first one that got sold to Amazon. Now the one other one that I liked the best after B, Limitless, the Limitless pin just got bought by Meta and shut down. Well, that's the, you know, B is sort of still operating. But in my concern with B, when they sold Amazon, I immediately deleted my account, is that they would have the six months worth of daily recordings. I wore it every day, all the time and I didn't want to give that to Amazon. They said, you know, no, we're not, don't worry, Amazon's not getting the data. But I don't know about that. I imagine the same thing with Limitless, right? Does Meta now have every conversation I had.

C (72:23)

So it's a paid service. People are getting it for free now, but then they have a limited amount of time and then it's just going to go away.

A (72:29)

It's just going to go away. It's a $99 pendant, so it wasn't horribly expensive. I did have the full subscription because that let you use a variety of models and stuff. They had raised money, 33 million from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Sam Altman.

A (72:48)

So I think as Always there was pressure to exit from their investors. I don't know what Meta paid, but it fits into the meta. I mean, I guess you could add that capability to the glasses.

C (73:00)

Exactly, exactly.

D (73:01)

That's where the coolest product that I've seen lately is one that was rolled out yesterday. It's from Pebble. Remember Pebble?

A (73:10)

Oh, you like this?

D (73:11)

Okay, I like it a lot. And I'll tell you why, especially given the conversation we just had about, you know, all your data going to Amazon. I don't trust Amazon as far as I can throw them with your data, Leo, But.

A (73:23)

Exactly. That's why I deleted it. Or I hope it was deleted anyway.

D (73:27)

So pebble originally was founded in 2012. It was a smart watch. They were famous because they had this super successful Kickstarter. It didn't really work out. They, they sold most of their stuff to Fitbit in, I think it was 2016. Google acquired Fitbit in 2021. And, and the, the founder, whose name is Eric Migikowski, I think is how you say.

D (73:53)

Thank you. Thank you.

A (73:53)

We've talked several times.

D (73:55)

He's been, he's been resting back the pebble branding. So he launched a new company called Core Devices this year and he's finally got it back. And so now he's releasing this smart ring under the pebble brand. And basically all this thing does is, has a button and you press and hold the button and while you're holding the button, it'll, it's recording your voice and you talk into the ring and it's called the Index 01 and it's, it's then encrypted and then sent to your smartphone where AI processes that information.

C (74:28)

On the way to your phone.

D (74:29)

Yes. And it never goes, isn't it, it never goes to the cloud.

C (74:33)

That's what I'm saying. If it's just going to your phone, why encrypt it?

D (74:36)

Just for hyper security.

A (74:38)

It's going through the air on Bluetooth. Somebody can. Smartphone. All right, Yeah, I think that's good.

D (74:43)

And so I think this is a wonderful model. Here's, here's the, some of the kooky things about it. You don't charge it when the battery dies. You send it back and they recycle it. And it's supposed to buy a new two years, give or take a year. Yeah, exactly. That makes it smaller so it doesn't have to have this coil stuff for charging inside. So it's a, it's a smaller.

C (75:05)

Jason Howell today said it's total Life. It's like 12 to 14 hours. So it depends on how long you're.

A (75:11)

Oh, that's not exactly. Oh.

C (75:13)

So the idea is just you wouldn't.

A (75:15)

Leave it on all day. In other words, call mom. Well, you die in a day.

D (75:19)

Yeah. You know, but it's not on unless you're actively pressing the button.

A (75:24)

Oh, you have to hold it down.

C (75:26)

Yeah. It's for only certain functions. You can make a reminder, you can, you can add a note, you can set it. Yeah. There's a few. Only a few things you can do with it.

D (75:35)

Yeah. Which I think is great. I think that's a nice limited use of AI, I think.

C (75:39)

Did you order it?

D (75:40)

I'm going to. The pre. Orders are only 75 bucks.

C (75:43)

Yeah.

D (75:43)

And it's going to be 99 when you march.

A (75:46)

I admit.

D (75:47)

Exactly.

A (75:47)

I hovered my finger over the button and then declined.

C (75:52)

You're recovering, Leo.

A (75:54)

No, because this is not enough.

C (75:57)

Yeah, that's not what you want.

A (75:58)

This isn't what I want. I want something that records everything I want.

D (76:01)

Yeah.

A (76:02)

In fact, if Meta comes along with a Ray Ban that has Limitless in it, I probably will buy it and use it. Admittedly, it's a horrible privacy invasion. This is not. But that's why I don't want it.

A (76:18)

Exactly.

D (76:19)

I mean it's, it's. What it can't do is. Is record everybody talking. It records you talking.

A (76:24)

You said, because you.

D (76:25)

Eric, hold it.

A (76:26)

Right. Yeah. You have to whisper.

C (76:27)

If you're the kind of person who takes out your phone constantly or notebook constantly to make notes. This replaces that.

D (76:33)

Yeah.

A (76:35)

And Eric said, well, I tried it with my watch, but I just didn't like it. I can. I do this with my watch all the time. You know, remind me to get up in the morning and then it does. And I think that that's. And for me that's enough. If that's all I want to do with it. It's the old note to self thing. Yeah, I bet. Yes. You carried around one of those little Olympus.

C (76:57)

Because I never listened to it.

D (76:59)

Like, like, Like Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks.

C (77:02)

Sure. Sign of death that I'll ever get any time is to put it on a list. That's where it dies.

A (77:08)

He was talking to his was secretary or something. He was a Jeanette Diane, I think Something like that.

D (77:12)

Yeah. So they never explained who that was. No, but I, I think it's. I think it's really good. And the other thing that's interesting about it is it. It's all open source and so companies can change the functionality, the button, they can do all kinds of things with it, which I think interesting aspect to it.

A (77:27)

Okay.

D (77:27)

And so this, I think this is a really interesting product. And, and, and you know, there, there are people, bunch of different rings now. They're, they're the kind that, you know, monitor your sleep. I wear heart rate, I wear an.

A (77:37)

Aura ring and I love it. But I, everything just my, just me.

D (77:41)

Yeah. But, but I'm predicting that, that, that by the end of next year we'll all personally know people who have two or three rings. Smart.

C (77:50)

That's right. They'll become the new kind of.

A (77:52)

And you know who one of them will be.

D (77:55)

Exactly. That's right.

A (77:57)

I'm waiting. The truth is it really underscores the issue when I say, oh, I'm not going to wear the B computer because it got sold to Amazon. I'm not going to wear the Limitless because it got sold to Meta. I think the only company I would trust this with is Apple. And I'm kind of disappointed that Apple is so far behind in all of this stuff because Apple could make a ring or glasses that I would absolutely be interested in. Apple could put that capability in their AirPods.

D (78:25)

Well, what I can see Apple doing is they had that. Remember that journaling thing that they came out with?

A (78:32)

They have a journal. Yeah, it's called Journal.

D (78:34)

Yeah, it should, it. That should be a kind of lifelogging tool. Apple would never use the L word, but like, that's what we want, is lifelogging and see what we want. So on, on the airplane coming here, I watched Ready Player one again, which I am probably the only person in the world who thinks is an absolutely brilliant film and way better.

A (78:56)

Certainly not me.

C (78:59)

When they go into virtual, Mike is.

D (79:01)

Exactly. But when they go into virtual, they're looking for clues in the life of what's his name, the deceased founder of the Oasis. That's his lifelog. They're going to his lifelogging data and that's what we want. We want lifelogging, want everything captured and then for AI to, to basically give us insights into our world, you know, and not forget things. And so that's what we really want. And it's just like. But don't sell it to Amazon, you know.

A (79:32)

Yeah.

D (79:33)

And figure out some way where we're not really invading everybody's privacy either.

C (79:37)

Well, as long as it happens locally. I mean, I think this is, I think this is where you're going here. And it's true of LLMs to generative AI as well. Well, anything you could run locally you should feel fairly good about.

D (79:50)

Yeah, right.

C (79:52)

And so the question is how much can be shoved down locally as models get smaller, as the functionality becomes part of these things? You know, Leo.

C (80:02)

You don't. This doesn't do a good enough job. But you would. There's no reason to not trust the pebble thing. Right. Because it's just going to your phone.

A (80:08)

Well, this one. No, it never, it never is anywhere but on my phone.

C (80:12)

Yeah.

A (80:14)

You know, Google's doing this. By the way, Google is probably going to have glasses next year. They say.

C (80:18)

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this.

A (80:20)

They've moved quite far ahead on their XR platform. They have shown off some updates now and they have some partners.

A (80:31)

I think this may, you know, they've got Samsung. There's also xreal's Project Aura. Smart glasses. The reviews have been pretty positive. Lisa Chicchio, who we've had on our shows at cnn, thought it was quite good. Sam Rutherford and Gadget says he was very impressed.

C (80:49)

Yep.

A (80:49)

So the people who went to the. I don't know if. Did Jason go.

C (80:52)

Jason went. Jason went. And he was, he was impressed too.

D (80:55)

Yeah.

C (80:55)

And it's funny, one of the videos he put up because there's, there's a, a one eye and a two eye projection. Yeah, right. And when the video's on and you can tell the screen's there, it looks like he's googly eyed.

D (81:11)

Yeah, right.

C (81:12)

Because you see the light in the screen.

A (81:13)

Oh, that's not.

C (81:15)

Well, no, I think it's fine. I think it's transparent.

A (81:17)

Lets people know.

C (81:18)

Yeah, yeah, let's know you're looking at something and I think that's okay. But it's pretty damn impressive. His example was he took one of the Google guys into a room, he said, give me a peace sign, took a photo, and then he said, put this guy in a field of daisies. And it went off to Nano Banana and came back and showed him the picture. And then he could send the picture where he wanted. And it was all in the glasses.

A (81:43)

By the way, Patrick Delahanny tells me, as a fan of Ready Player One, you'd be glad to know the Oasis went live on December 2, 2025. Oh, wow.

D (81:54)

Okay.

A (81:56)

Unfortunately, it's a fictional metaverse, but nothing we've got is anywhere near. Close to that good. But yeah, so I always wanted that. By the way, going back to Neil Gibson. Neil Gibson, Steve Gibson. What's his name?

D (82:11)

Kevin Klein.

A (82:12)

William Gibson. Too many Gibsons. Not Kevin Klein. William Gibson's. Original neuromancer have always wanted to jack in to a metaverse and have it be as real as the real thing and participate. And now I, I really want these, you know, some sort of glasses, I think. I guess I would trust Google.

C (82:32)

Yeah, I think I would too. I, I quizzed, I quizzed Jason about this at length. We talked a long time about it. And, and so I'm trying. I said, would you sit there and watch something on these? And he said, yeah, he would.

A (82:43)

Really?

C (82:43)

The binaural. And I said, but you're still seeing through. He said, you know, but, but it works. It's okay.

A (82:48)

That's what people love the vision. The only thing people love the Vision Pro for is that it's watching.

D (82:52)

Yeah.

A (82:53)

Movies.

C (82:53)

But this is, but this is still ar. It's still visible through.

A (82:57)

It's not goggle reality Nerd.

C (82:59)

Right.

A (83:00)

This is, these are glasses.

D (83:01)

It's, it's a heads up display. So, so it, the, the, the augmentation of reality is not anchored to physical objects. It just. Wherever your head moves, that's where the screen moves. Like Google Glass and so on. It's.

C (83:16)

You had to say that, Mike. You had to bring that up again.

D (83:18)

I had to. I'm sorry. Google. Google showed videos of a product it was working on that were language translation glasses. And that is really compelling to me. Instead of a little, a little box, little rectangle or two floating in space in front of me. What I'd love to have is subtitles on everything and when and always in English. So if, if somebody is speaking in English as a, as a replacement for say a hearing aid or talking to somebody. Crowded allowed plays you could just get the, you can get the subtitles. If you're talking. Somebody's talking a foreign language, you get the English language subtitles. If you ask the AI question, the answer comes in the form of subtitles. I just want words at the bottom sort of giving me context for everything and clarifying things and serving as the answer. Because it's really problematic when you are. Because I've used Ray Ban metaglasses. Translation fixed called live translation. Live translation. It really doesn't work at all. Somebody talks to you in a foreign language, there's a, there's a bit of a pause while it, you know, sends it up to the cloud, then comes back and then you start talking and then you start hearing the translation and there's too many people talking. You can't parse out who's saying what unless somebody's on stage making a speech and then it's. It's a little better, but. But I want. I want visuals and I want words on the screen. Not like, you know, anything more fancy than that. I thought they were really onto something with those glasses.

A (84:48)

With the translation I find interesting in this whole conversation is it's very clear we're going to have AI in everything in our appliances, on the edge, everywhere. Steven Levy had an article in Wired this week about a new hearing aid that is AI enabled, that's using AI to do a better job of discriminating voice in a noisy environment. It's called the Foretell. It's only available in New York City right now. It's not generally available. They've been using it as a beta test with people. He mentioned that Steve Martin, who is a hearing aid where has been wearing these. So I asked Steve and he said, yeah, no, they work. He said, it's not a miracle, but I can now go to a restaurant and hear what people are saying in a noisy restaurant where it really could, couldn't before.

C (85:36)

Mike, to your. To your scenario. I've gone to two German language conferences in the last month.

A (85:42)

Wouldn't it be nice to have translation?

C (85:44)

Well, so at one of them, at the. At the Munican Median Tiger, they had an app called Video Taxi, which was doing live transcription and translation on. And you could read on your phone.

A (85:54)

In real time, though.

C (85:55)

That's real time. It was real time. It was. It was excellent.

A (85:58)

See, that's the problem. All the systems we have so far and there aren't some really good ones. There's this. There's a lot.

C (86:04)

This really worked very well. And.

C (86:07)

My German is bad, but it was good enough that I could tell it was well. Then I went to the next conference. Of course they didn't have it, and I was trying to look if there was any way I could cluj it together and do anything with these. And it's not quite there, but I think that's absolutely close. And Mike, I think you're right too. I want it in text. I still want to hear the voices and hear the intonation and I want the text to be. To come up. And then. Leo, I think your point too is right. Is then you can also interact with that information.

A (86:32)

Right.

C (86:33)

Explain this to me or what's the word for that? Or whatever.

E (86:37)

For the translations. A lot of opportunity for translations, though that's always going to be a problem because there are some languages that the syntax is totally different, so you have to wait for the whole sentence to be finished before you can translate it. So it's really going to depend on the language there.

C (86:51)

Well, German goes on about 87 words before they get to the verb. Yes.

D (86:55)

And each word is nothing to be trifled with either.

C (86:58)

Yes.

A (86:58)

They have simultaneous translation with humans at the un, Right. I mean, it's fast enough.

D (87:03)

It's expensive and difficult.

A (87:04)

Yeah, yeah, it's fast.

D (87:06)

Really specialized.

D (87:08)

The other obvious use case for words across your glasses is your notes while you're publicly speaking. So a bunch of years ago, I don't know when it was 15 years ago or something, there was a company called Doppler Labs that came out with. There was a whole trend of hearables, and you'd bring up the app and you basically could. There was a menu of things. You could stop hearing the baby crying. Okay, I don't want to hear that. You know, and you. Traffic noise. Don't want to hear that. Or you could do the opposite. You could boost traffic noise if you're riding a bicycle, for example.

D (87:40)

And it was. It seemed like it was promising. It was. They were probably too early. They ended up closing up shop because they had all kinds of battery life and hardware issues. But that's really what we need, you know, that's what we need more. Even the language translation is what you're describing with the hearing aids, but, like, on a much bigger scale to be able to just specifically eliminate certain sort. You know, I don't want to hear the air conditioner. I want to hear everything else, that sort of thing.

A (88:08)

I forgot about Doppler Labs. They went out of business in, what, 2017 or something? Yeah.

D (88:13)

Their product was called the here one.

A (88:15)

Yeah. An ear pewter.

A (88:21)

Oh, well.

C (88:22)

Oh, well. A little early.

A (88:24)

Let's take a little break. Lots more to talk about. You're watching Intelligent machines. I have so much in here. You guys pick some stories that you want to talk about. I. I've already talked about the stuff that I really wanted to talk about. I have more things, too, but I'll leave it to you guys. You know, that's why we have you on. Paris will be back next week. She is at the Consumer Reports holiday party right now, and she posted that she is gossiping like crazy with her friends, her colleagues, her new colleagues.

C (88:55)

Well, I imagine because she's in a hotter part of media, I imagine she's explaining newsy to people who aren't necessarily up on it.

A (89:03)

Yeah, maybe that's it. Yeah. Yeah.

C (89:06)

I think she has the red string out on the wall now with a break in one hand.

A (89:09)

See Her. Can't you just see her doing this? Well, it all started.

A (89:17)

She'S just been. The problem is she's been dying for somebody to talk about with all of this stuff and I'm glad that she's found some like minds that she can share this with and a little eggnog at the same time. More in just a moment. I hope you're having a good holiday season. I wanted to talk about this actually. This is almost really in a news story as much as an advertisement. This episode of Intelligent Machines is brought to you by the agency Agntcy. They're building the future of multi agent software with Agency. It's an open source Linux foundation project bringing together all the players in this space to build. Agency is building the Internet of agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents, which is really one of the hottest areas right now, can discover, connect and work. And the key is across any framework you want this to be and you know all the big companies are involved in this. You want this to be non proprietary, you want this to be open so that everybody can talk to everybody else. All the pieces engineers need to deploy multi agent systems now belong to everyone who builds on Agency. That includes robust identity and access management. That makes sure every agent is authenticated and trusted before interacting. They're solving real world issues and making this all more real, which is exciting. Agency also provides open standardized tools for agent discovery. You gotta have that seamless protocols for agent to agent communication so they can all agree they don't need translation glasses and modular components for scalable workflows. You'll be collaborating with developers from Cisco, from Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Oracle, red hat and 75 plus other supporting companies to build next gen AI infrastructure together. Agency, they're dropping code specs and services with no strings attached. Visit agency.org to contribute a g n t c y.org It's a Linux foundation project and doing really important stuff. I'm glad we could tell you about it. Agency.org and thank them for supporting intelligent machines. One hand washes the other.

C (91:40)

Well, the Linux foundation got some more work this week.

A (91:42)

They did. This is kind of in a related area. This was one of the news stories we were talking about on.

A (91:50)

Windows Weekly as well.

A (91:53)

This is from Anthropic, right?

C (91:56)

Well Anthropic is contributing. Didn't they do the.

A (92:00)

They did mcp, mcp. So they have to participate in this. Their latest project is called. I'm trying to find it here.

C (92:11)

It's line 106.

A (92:12)

Let's see. Choose technology sector AI, ML, agency.

E (92:18)

Where'd it go?

A (92:19)

They have so many projects.

C (92:20)

The Agentic AI Foundation.

A (92:22)

That's it. Okay.

C (92:23)

To promote standards for artificial intelligence agents. So it includes MCP, OpenAI's agents, MD, Goose, a framework for building agents using Block. I think Google's involved in it. I think Amazon's involved in it.

C (92:42)

Members include Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg and Cloudflare.

A (92:46)

Wired says OpenAI, Anthropic and Block are teaming up to make agents play nice.

A (92:53)

But this is it. Yeah, it's the same idea. It's also under the Linux foundation, we've got to have standards for intercommunication. And I think this is good because you see these companies wanting to be siloed.

C (93:05)

It also strikes me that this is kind of a new space. There's, you know, we had namespace back in the day. This is agent space and it. And it's at a level probably separate from the human web created for web. And there's gonna be parts of the web that deal straight with agents and AI deals straight with agents and agents deal with agents. And it's gonna, It's a whole buzzing world above us.

A (93:25)

Yeah. And you know, the only thing that, the only cautionary tale here is that when there isn't a lot of money to be. Be made, these companies are often willing to cooperate.

C (93:35)

Yeah.

A (93:36)

And then the minute there's money to be made, they silo off and say, no, no, we're. You know, you can't use Open AI's tools with anthropic or Blocks tools with.

C (93:46)

Well, Amazon is cutting off AI from looking at their deals. So you can't. A shopping agent.

A (93:50)

Exactly. Can't do anything with Amazon as soon as there's money.

C (93:52)

So AWS is here, but Amazon's not.

A (93:54)

We're in that magic time where nobody's making any money, so everybody's working with everybody else.

D (93:59)

Although the outlier here, I think is Google, because Google does make a ton of money. I mean, they're obviously a very successful company, but you can see that you have this agentic browser world and most of them are based on Google's, you know, generous, you know, sharing of Chrome. Right. They're all based on chromium. And so that's. That kind of thing is something that only Google among those type of companies.

A (94:25)

Generous, but there's a little bit in it for them too.

D (94:29)

For sure, for sure. But like, but, but now Chrome is, is one of those agentic browsers. And you know, how much better would they do. Would they do if they just said hey, guess what? We're not gonna, we're not gonna let you use the open source version of Chrome anymore.

A (94:43)

Right?

D (94:44)

They'd really set, set their competition back.

A (94:47)

Right?

A (94:50)

Yeah. All right, Yeah. I mean, look, you say the same thing about Android. There's been clear benefit to Google by creating an operating system that's a dominant telephone operating system that they get a lot of benefit from. Not just goodwill, but actual data from all the users, tons of data from all the users, which they have since used to make the best AI models incidentally. But at the same time they gave it away, they open sourced it. And a lot of handset makers who would not have been able to make handsets without an operating system have an operating system. So yeah, maybe this is what the way capitalism is supposed to operate, they make money on it, they get value out of it, but they also contribute value.

C (95:30)

This is why we also want open source to be a countervailing pressure on all of that.

A (95:34)

Right. There are a number of.

D (95:36)

Didn't this story feel like a throwback to a previous era where all these companies are getting together and now they have an acronym and they're all going to work on standards to get like, when's the last time you saw a story like that?

A (95:46)

The last time was matter where everybody who made home automation equipment realized that we are all not going anywhere because nobody talks to anybody else. Maybe we should figure out a lingua franca so that all our home automation can talk together. And Google and Apple, the Zigbee and Z Wave and all of the other home automation companies said, actually one of them didn't, I think. Was it Z Wave that didn't participate? One of them didn't, but the rest said, yeah, you know what, we all with sink or swim at this point. We all got to get together.

C (96:20)

They're all sunk.

A (96:21)

Yeah, we're all sunk otherwise.

D (96:23)

Yeah.

A (96:25)

So that's. Yeah, you're right, it's not. It doesn't happen very often. It happens so infrequently that it's notable when it does. Yeah, but as I said, I think it only happens when they're desperate or there's no money at all.

D (96:36)

Yeah. Speaking of desperation and trying to make money, you have an item on there. There's a company called svetco. What is it called? Yes, Svedka is going to do an AI super bowl ad. But this raises an interesting question to me. There have been a bunch of companies that have come out with AI generated ads. Coca Cola, famously, Google, Meta, Skechers, Toys R Us, McDonald's, American Eagle. They've all failed. They've all been rejected.

A (97:07)

That Coca Cola ad is so horrible.

C (97:09)

Have you seen the Dutch McDonald's one?

A (97:12)

Let me play this. I think I can play it because it's from Holland. Yeah, I don't want to.

C (97:16)

It's also subtitled, so you can. You can. You can turn the music down in a second.

A (97:20)

Yeah, it. They've actually pulled it down.

C (97:24)

Line 177. Has it.

A (97:25)

It was a. AI generated. Well, it was also dystopian, right? Yeah, it was like.

C (97:30)

But it's. Well, it's kind of a Dutch sense of humor.

A (97:32)

Maybe that's it. But for whatever reason, maybe the Dutch aren't ready for this.

C (97:37)

Well, it was the AI Pissed him off, I think.

A (97:41)

Let me, let me.

C (97:41)

I've got it. Line 177.

A (97:43)

Yeah. The most terrible time of the year. All right, here we go.

C (97:51)

For those of you listening, it's got.

A (97:54)

Santa in a traffic jam. It's got caroling singers who are in the wind and snow. A guy who just fell out his window because a Christmas tree knocked him over. Ice skaters slipping and falling, people falling out of a tractor. I don't know. This is pretty funny. The cookies are talking. Yeah.

C (98:10)

Cookies are burned.

D (98:13)

Relatives are horrible.

A (98:15)

Exploding KitchenAid. A cat pulling down the Christmas trees is a real deal.

D (98:26)

But Everything's lovely at McDonald's.

A (98:29)

Just hide out McDonald's. That's why they pulled it down. I don't think it was the AI but the larger. Didn't bother me in this one much, the Coca Cola one. It really bothered me, and it was so awfully, obviously, treacly. Treacly.

D (98:44)

So the question is, why do these major advertising agencies or the major brands think that those commercials are going to succeed? And then they get out into the public and they have to. To sort of retract them because people are having dry heaves over them. Where's the disconnect there? Why do. And. And you see it in AI Slop of all kinds, where the creator of the. Of the. Of the AI Stuff loves it and thinks it's amazing. And then everybody else, I think as.

C (99:12)

Soon as it becomes common enough. Mike. Then right now it's that occasional one that gets a story about it. Oh, no. McDonald's made an AI commercial. Everybody looks at it, everybody complains. Oh, it's AI and it's sloppies. Once we see the super bowl, once we see it happen enough, there's a commercial for insurance, and I could swear it's AI and we Just don't know it. The woman on it is just kind of too perfect as she walks down the street. And I'll bet there's more of it than we know today.

A (99:35)

Yeah.

D (99:36)

Yeah. Yep.

A (99:36)

Well, we're going to see a lot of. As you. As you point out, the Wall Street Journal points out, we're going to see a lot of AI ads on the Super Bowl. I'm of the opinion that it isn't about AI ads. It isn't even about whether they're good or bad, that we are really seeing a schism in the world between AI haters and AI lovers. And the AI haters have a visceral reaction to AI like it is an insult to humanity, which is what Miyazaki said, that it is somehow evil. It's gotta burn. And those people. I'm not one of them. Fortunately or unfortunately, I'm not one of them.

A (100:19)

But I do honor their visceral loathing of anything AI because it just. It's somehow.

C (100:26)

It's also just. It's technophobia too. I think it's something worse than technology companies.

A (100:32)

I feel like it's. I've never seen any. Anything. I don't know, Mike, have you seen anything like this? There's been times where people say, oh, I don't want to ever use Microsoft Excel or, you know, whatever, or computer, you know, used to be. You'd go, oh, the computer's down at the dmv. Oh, what's new? Yeah, the computer, it's always broken, but that's not the same kind of visceral. I'm gonna. I'm terrified by this feeling that AI is generated. I think it's extreme.

D (101:00)

I share some of those feelings as well. So, for example, there's a. There's a children's product on the market right now called. Called. What's it called? It's called Sticker Box. And what it is is a little thing where you kids say, you know, a squirrel with an umbrella. And. And. And LLM will. Will draw a black and white line drawing a squirrel umbrella, print it on a sticker and spit it out. And that's cool.

C (101:26)

Yeah.

D (101:29)

I think it's terrible. And the reason it's terrible is is that drawing things and. And drawing stickers, for example, is a core part of human development. To be a passive consumer, to think something creative is something that comes from machine, and to be a passive consumer of it is. Is, I think.

D (101:49)

Not good for kids. Kids should be drawing pictures every day. They should be, like, learning. Learning how things look, paying Attention. So, so, so you see both things. Like I had the same reaction you did. Hey, that's really cool. It's innovative. What an innovative, cool product. What a great use for LLMs. How amazing. And then also, oh, this is terrible. If it's a substitute for actual creativity. If it isn't, that's another thing altogether. But like people say, I mean let's look at, let's look at the content creation world. Vast majority, far over 50% we don't know exactly, maybe as high as 70% of all the content being posted this year on the Internet is AI generated or partially AI generated. There are some people saying that by the end of next year or maybe by 2030 it'll be 99, 9.9%. And when people hear stuff like that, I think, I think this, it's reasonable to say that if the, the quantity of AI stuff that's out there and that people see is so overwhelming that actual writers, actual photographers, people who paint, you know, all that just throw their hands up and say what's the point? Nobody's ever going to see or read what I'm doing.

A (103:00)

That would be bad.

D (103:01)

That's probably problem problematic. So I think that, I think it's reasonable to say, okay, articles that are written, photographs, painting, all those kinds of things, what the reason they exist are for people to share their experiences with each other, not for just the consumer to receive the, the hive mind version from the machine. Like it's, it's supposed to be a communication, two way communication. I don't think that's on reasonable.

C (103:29)

So Mike, I'm doing a lot of research now on mass media and the history of mass media and I'm reading about the cultural part of it and I just read a wonderfully grumpy essay by Ernst Fundenhage. I think his name is doing making every complaint you just made about television and saying that it robs us of creativity and that people aren't going to create on their own anymore because watch this.

A (103:51)

And you told us that people were worried that reading novels would reduce the imagination.

C (103:57)

Oh worse, that they would corrupt the morals of women and children.

A (104:01)

So I mean, not men. There's a history of technology being doing this. But I understand their morals have been.

D (104:07)

Corrupted.

D (104:09)

From their perspective.

A (104:10)

Right, but we're already in that in a way, Mike. We're already in that world where kids sit down in front of an iPad and don't get up for eight hours. They're not drawing and they're not thinking.

C (104:22)

They're not, they're Thinking of a creative idea, a muffin in a boat that they couldn't have drawn. And, and I think that's.

A (104:30)

By the way, I just shared this from the regular car reviews subreddit. Somebody could. Took track. Took. Kept track of all the different axle configurations in the Coca Cola ad truck fingers, the tires are moving all over the place.

D (104:49)

And that's in just one ad.

A (104:52)

So really what the problem there is, and I've noticed this, the frame rate's also terrible in the Coca Cola ad. I think this is just a crappily produced ad. You know, I mean, you could fix that if you're paying attention.

E (105:03)

But here I'm speaking as a producer of this kind of stuff before, like, if I had turned in something like this, you know how much they would have said, like, no, this is terrible. You know, you know how bad. Yeah. How bad the review would have been if I had submitted this to Bert. But then an AI can get away with this.

D (105:20)

Why is that?

A (105:20)

Well, but, but Benito, if you said I had AI do this, I would go, oh, that's really neat.

C (105:24)

Exactly.

E (105:25)

So why is that?

C (105:26)

Why is that?

A (105:28)

Well, because it's amazing that it could even do a truck.

C (105:31)

You're old, Benito. You're old. Sorry.

A (105:34)

Actually, it's interesting because Apple's response to this was to do an ad that looks a little bit. It's a little fanciful, a little magical, but they did it with puppets and they made it very clear. They did it with puppets and it was shot on an iPhone. There's no AI involved. At least they say, well, because it's.

C (105:50)

Apple, they don't know how to do AI.

A (105:51)

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I imagine we'll see. Start seeing a lot more AI ads, but I also imagine that in time we won't know we're seeing a lot more.

D (106:01)

But I just want to go back to one thing Jeff was saying, and I think that there's.

D (106:08)

Is there a distinction to be made between moral panic saying that this thing is going to create a crisis? People have been saying about new media forever.

C (106:17)

Give it a second.

D (106:18)

There we go.

A (106:20)

Moral, by the way, with AI of course.

D (106:23)

Exactly. And, and the idea that that content is often a conversation between two people, that, that it's a two way street. It's not just about content.

D (106:36)

Consumption.

C (106:37)

I'm with you, Mike. I agree the conversation is the essence of society. But that again, was the, was the argument that Fundenhag was making about television. That is a cut off the conversation.

D (106:45)

Yeah, yeah. And, and, and, but but here's a. Here's an extreme example. For example, let's say. So I'm here in Chile, the. The birthplace of Pablo Neruda, right? So just look at poetry. I know, Po. A lot of us don't consume poetry to use the C word that much. But if you are. If you are a passionate reader of poetry, does it matter if the pain and suffering and loss and all the emotions being expressed by a poet came from a person who experienced those things and is communicating them to you and you recognize them in your own self, does it matter? Or are you just the consumer?

C (107:25)

I know it doesn't matter if there's a producer, but let's look at another thing. What if someone has a lived experience and they're not a poet?

D (107:32)

It.

C (107:32)

Or they're not. Or. The example I use is they can't draw, but they tell their story, and they could not have told the story as effectively if they didn't have the tool to help them do that. And so I think that there's, you know, you can say that the camera allows people to do just that. There's other tools that enable them. Is the. Is. Is the. Is the experience and the humanity.

C (107:54)

Authentic? Is what matters in the end.

D (107:57)

Right? So I guess the essential question I'm trying to get at is, is it legitimate for somebody to.

D (108:06)

Care if. Because a lot of the criticism of AI general content are that it's garbage. Right? But it very soon will not be garbage. Like, very soon it will be just excellent, right? Really good. And is there room for us to say, okay, it's legitimate to care if a person created it or not? And. And this is. This is the argument in favor of tools that let you turn on AI and turn it off if you want to, as opposed to not having that ability not to know.

C (108:37)

I think the question is, you're asking the right question, Mike, which is, where is it relevant to the. Well, I'll use the same bad word, consumer. The audience. That's also a passive word. The other end of a conversation, one hopes. And you know, there were complaints about word processing in this way. There were complaints about, obviously, the camera. There were complaints about Photoshop. And so I think the question becomes, when is it relevant and when need it be known? So I went through, on my book Hot Type, I went through this where I tested a perplexity thing, and I put an idea, and I won't go into the details right now, and it came up with a great phrase, and I wanted to use that phrase, and I couldn't say as perplexity observed, because that'd be really stupid. But I felt I absolutely had to cite it and let it know that I had done this. And so I footnoted it and I hope an amusing footnote because it was relevant to the reader to know that.

D (109:34)

Yeah.

C (109:35)

To know that I didn't come up with that phrase. And I wasn't going to pretend that I did, but at some point Photoshop was. We had to always know when you use Photoshop. And then it became a suit doomed. So I don't know where that line becomes.

D (109:49)

I mean, it's. Some of the most pro AI people in the world are to be found on some of the AI subreddits on Reddit. They are. So, I mean, it's really shocking how in favor of it. They are to the point where I religious into art. Yeah. I've gotten in arguments with people where I, I champion the idea that content curation sites like YouTube or, you know, you name it, whatever, should. There should be a toggle for you to switch it on and off. And, and there are a tiny number of companies that do this. Most don't. Every week or two, another one will come out with a feature like that. But it's moving very slowly and I argue in favor of that toggle. I think, I think you should be able to be toggled on and off. There are people on Reddit who will actually say with, I can presume a straight face that people should not have the ability to turn it off.

C (110:40)

Oh, that's.

D (110:41)

And I don't understand that. Find that highly objectionable.

A (110:44)

I think you asked really a great philosophical question, which is, should it matter to the consumer if you can't tell? But you know, I think, look, here we are three humans having a conversation. You could do a podcast with NotebookLM, that is no humans involved. And right now it's not as good as a real human conversation. But even if it were, I think we would still prefer. And we would somehow know. I don't know, maybe we wouldn't know.

C (111:09)

There's an authenticity there. No, I think, I think so.

A (111:11)

I think we would, I think we prefer that.

D (111:14)

Again, I think there's room for both. So. So if you really agree 100%, for example, you, you two are personalities. You're, you're, you're, you're iconic. Right. And so, so people feel like they know you to a certain extent and they really want your take and they don't want the AI version. But let me tell you, really a creative, really wonderful Use of notebook alum that I did. My niece got married last year and there was a WhatsApp threads with involving, I don't know, 25 people about, you know, the logistics. It was a destination wedding would go here, rent a car over there, there's a gas station, there's blah, blah. There's just infinite amount of chatter that you couldn't get wrap your head around. So right as the week when everybody was going to go to this destination wedding, I created a podcast about just. I dumped the entire thread from WhatsApp into Notebook LM and create a podcast and send it to everybody and suddenly everybody had clarity about what's.

C (112:12)

Yeah. Made it digestible. Yes, yes, yes. I think that's where it's very useful. I summarize this for me, come up with something I think that works really well.

A (112:20)

But, but it needs a story from, from Wired Cat 10 Barge. AI slop is ruining Reddit for everyone.

A (112:29)

Because there's so much AI content now in the most popular subreddits that the AI is taking it over. But here's the real problem. You can't tell because so many people are influenced by AI style.

D (112:45)

Yeah.

A (112:46)

That they're writing in the beef, you know, with.

C (112:51)

Stop with the EM dashes. EM dashes are. Okay, I use crazy.

D (112:54)

I'll defend M dashes to the end of my days. But, but I have a problem with that. You know, what's wrong really happening. It's not. And it's not a chatbot style that people are mimicking. It's an international style. They can tell that, that the UK legislatures who have given, given speeches in the House of Commons because they're using American phrases all of a sudden. Or, or they're, they, they use the word delve too much. Right. Well, where does delve come from? Every Nigerian sentence has the word delve in it. And so this, this version of English from somewhere else that already had happen.

A (113:25)

With television that we globalize.

C (113:27)

Yeah, Journalists too.

D (113:28)

Yes. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but the problem, the bigger problem I think in on Reddit is, is so many of the comments. So people want to make a point about something and they just get the point from chat GPT and paste it in.

C (113:42)

Right.

D (113:42)

What do you do about that?

C (113:43)

Why bother?

A (113:44)

Yeah, yeah, I, no, I completely agree with you that. And you can sort of tell because there's bullet point, bullet bullet points.

D (113:51)

And I mean I, I get accused, I've been accused on Reddit of, of having AI generated content. Because you're right, because I write, I write in complete Sentences. And I, you know, and, and I use, used to use a lot of M dashes and it's actually affected me to the point where I, I'm no Harris.

C (114:08)

And I started the M dash defense league last week. Two weeks. All right, you've got to join.

D (114:12)

I gotta join. I. I want to join. I. Just tell me where to send me.

A (114:15)

It's, it's, it's, it's too bad because you're going to be marked as an AI from now on, no matter what. Just because you can. My kids made fun of me because I use punctuation and uppercase and lowercase letters in my text messages.

D (114:26)

Yeah, it's madness.

A (114:27)

It's just cultural. It's like, you know, we can tell you're not one of us.

D (114:31)

Yeah.

A (114:31)

You know, for some reason.

C (114:32)

Can I ask you both about a question about a story that, that I put in here?

A (114:36)

Yes.

C (114:36)

Some semaphore is reporting that AI critics funded AI coverage at top newsroom rooms. Line one.

A (114:44)

How do they fund it?

C (114:45)

Well, I'm going to explain it to you. So the.

C (114:50)

What's it called here? Tarbell foundation has funded a bunch of reporting roles, jobs, fellowships at places like.

C (115:03)

Cnn. Where is it here? I'm missing it out here.

A (115:07)

The, the fault.

A (115:10)

By money.

C (115:11)

Well, they. Well, but so this goes. Hey, how many times do you hear on NPR the health coverage is, Is underwritten by the blah, blah. Right. So this seems to be a foundation, the Tarbell Foundation. And again it's. It's Bloomberg time, the Verge, LA Times. And it's not just AI critics, it's test grails, it's EA people. And if you go to the Tarbell foundation, you'll see that the money comes from the likes of.

C (115:44)

Coefficient Giving, which is formerly Open Philanthropy, which is Moskovitz's.

A (115:49)

That's an effective algorithm.

C (115:50)

Right. The EA Infrastructure Fund, the Future of Life Institute, this is all ea. And Semaphore said that they had one of these fellows, but they ended the relationship and did not publish any of the fellows work.

A (116:04)

Oh, interesting.

C (116:06)

Now, I had a friend of mine, a journalist I respect greatly, who came in after I made this complaint online and said this is really troubling and said, I won't name him or name one organization, but it's someplace that's funded by the Tarbell. And he said, you know, like, we don't understand how it actually works, is very little influence. And you know, indeed I raised money from Google, Google and Facebook. A university. And the Google News initiative helps pay for innovation at news Organizations, and I get all that, but this just got too close for comfort for me because it's people with an AI agenda funding AI reporting jobs in major outlets.

A (116:40)

That's what's happened. That's, that's why we shouldn't accept outside funding for independent news organizations.

C (116:47)

Well, but, but when the, when, when your, your capitalistic funding goes away. Right, Devil's advocate here, what do you do? Lion, which is a local online organization, just said today that the majority of their small news sites at local news across the country are now getting their money from foundations, charitable.

A (117:04)

Well, there you go.

C (117:05)

So everybody has an agenda. So this, did this, does this trouble.

A (117:08)

You, or am I overdoing the same as it ever was? It's just, it's just, this is the new, the new thing. I mean, it was always a myth that any of these organizations were independent and objective, wasn't it?

D (117:28)

The attempt at objectivity.

D (117:32)

Is what we're losing. And there were many benefits of that.

A (117:37)

I agree.

D (117:38)

You could argue that there's no objectivity, that every journalist is biased and so on, but journalism developed over the decades during the 20th century, a system for approaching objectivity systematically, which I think is something I would prefer not to lose. And I think you said it perfectly.

A (117:59)

The attempt at objectivity, understanding that that's difficult and maybe impossible, but at least that was a goal.

D (118:05)

Yes. And so, you know, I write opinion columns, and so I, you know, I spend a lot of time on the difference between, you know, attempted objectivity and the opposite. Right. So it's, it's something we should, we should really.

D (118:23)

Profoundly look at. And the, the other thing that, the bigger issue here is the, Is the pro. The financial issue of traditional media and what it's going to do with its big problem, which is that it's just dying. People say, I don't think it's dying, dying, but it's just shrinking more than we want it to shrink, and it's harder to make a living. We don't have a robust ecosystem of independent journalism. We don't have local newspapers like we used to, and I think that's a major problem. And so local people, instead of focusing on local issues and local news and local politics, are getting national news and international news through whatever the algorithms are handing them. And they're listening to.

D (119:07)

Fairly toxic radio in many cases. And this is, this is radicalizing people and causing all kinds of problems.

A (119:13)

That's a 20, much better off problem, by the way.

D (119:15)

Yeah. Yes. Well, it's, it's.

A (119:17)

Having worked in radio, I've Watched it kind of slide down that.

D (119:21)

I mean, you, you drive through many parts of the country and, you know, you, you get religious radio and Rush Limbaugh and far.

C (119:31)

Did you notice your audience changing and radio?

A (119:34)

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. In fact, one of the reasons I gave up radio is really had become a right wing propaganda machine.

E (119:42)

That's mostly because of consolidation though, right?

A (119:45)

Oh, there's a lot of reasons for it.

C (119:47)

Yeah.

D (119:47)

And local TV as well.

A (119:49)

It's a failing medium partly because of it's only a handful of owners. There's a lot of reasons for it. Mostly it's because the ratings were very good. That those shows did better than the other shows. They did better than my shows.

A (120:03)

I lost my midday radio show in San Francisco to Rush Limbaugh and I can't.

C (120:09)

You did. I didn't know that.

A (120:10)

Yeah. And can be R. And I cannot deny that the ratings went through the roof when they replaced me with Rush Limbaugh. That was a good move. From a purely economic point of view.

D (120:22)

What frustrates me about criticism, you know, you hear it everywhere that nobody trusts journalists, you know, journalism. Journalists are biased and so on. This is not actually what's true. Like everybody who has a serious beef about journalism got their ideas from journalism. Like, you know, it's, it's there, there's a lot of variety. And, and the other frustrating thing to me is that I think journal. I think the best journalism now is better than it's journalism has ever been. And, and, but, but people are not.

A (120:54)

By the way, 404 are two excellent.

D (120:58)

Yes.

A (120:59)

Outlets for that.

D (121:00)

And there, there are a few among many. There's a ton of great writing, great journalism. On Substack, for example, there are fantastic publications. And the problem is that the algorithms are not favoring those we get. Like people are immersed in junk or they actually think that real news is fake news and fake news is real news because they've been, been. They've been hit with that message repeatedly. And so I just, I, I don't accept the idea that, that, that journalism is bad. I do accept the idea that journalism is struggling to keep it as a, as a thriving business.

A (121:37)

Well, Jeff, it's up to you.

D (121:39)

Yep. So we're counting on you, Jeff.

C (121:40)

Yeah, I'm retired. I'm emeritus for old.

A (121:44)

All right, I want to take a break. Believe it or not, we're ready to wrap up this. It's great to have you on Mike. Mike does a speaking of really incredible journalistic Sources, his MachineSociety AI newsletter on is it substack. I don't know where you.

D (121:59)

Substack.

A (122:00)

Yeah, Substack is well worth reading. He also does a podcast with Emily Forlini about AI and absolutely. There's a perfect example of great journalism that still exists. I'd say the same really for Jeff Jarvis. He does a podcast with Jason Howell, who by the way, was great last week was one wonderful to have him on the show called AI Inside.

A (122:23)

There's still a lot of great independent journalism out there. It's always been the problem, hasn't it, ever since from day one of the Internet era that what it brought us was a avalanche of content and finding the good among the bad.

C (122:37)

But that's where an opportunity is.

A (122:38)

Well, it's always been a problem. And my contention is that a vast increase in the number of.

A (122:47)

Shows and articles and outlets, yes, increases the amount of crap, but it also increases the small percentage of great stuff and it gives more.

C (122:56)

There's more wheat.

A (122:57)

Yeah, more chaff and more wheat. And also a lot of that wheat comes from people who otherwise would not have a chance, would not have a voice. Right.

D (123:06)

It gave everybody a voice, which is, is the problem, but it's also the problem. So many, so many great journalists and great journalisms happening is the result of that. I mean, just look at Pliny the, the Liberator. Perfect. That's a kind of journalism, right? And, and, and this would not be possible in, you know, 30 years ago for somebody to be that influential and to exactly give us what they give us.

A (123:29)

So I think in the net that is positive, but it does require us as consumers of content, of journalism to be more intelligent about it and to, and unfortunately not everybody has the motivation to do that, you know, but the.

C (123:45)

Responsibility has always been ours.

A (123:47)

It's always been ours. It hasn't. It always has been.

A (123:53)

I say this every time. We live in interesting times and the challenges are great, the opportunities are great. And that's just, that's the nature of, of the times we are in. And that's what we cover on all of our shows on twitt, including Intelligent Machines. I hope you are a member of our club. I always like to take this, this time of the year to thank those people who have been all this year members of Club Twit. They, Their support is vital for keeping us on the air, keeping us doing what we're doing. Yes, we have advertising and advertising covers about 3/4 of our costs, but only 3/4 of. Of our costs. Without your help, we couldn't do what we do. If you're not yet a member of Club Twit, now is a great time to consider it. We've got a 10% off coupon for the annual memberships that's good only through Christmas Day December 25th. We also have a two week free trial. There's family memberships and company corporate memberships.

A (124:47)

But most of all. And there's a lot of content in that free versions of the show. So there's a lot of benefits. But most of all, you're helping us, us continue to do what I think we do very well and we do uniquely at TWiT. So TWiT TV Club TWiT. Thank you to those of you who have already joined and welcome to those of you about to join. We really appreciate it. Our show today brought to you by Outsystems. Outsystems is the number one AI powered low code development platform. And it solves a conundrum that's been a part of business ever since digital technology came to business. The old build versus buy conundrum, we've faced it. Do you go out and you buy generic software that sort of does the job you need to have done and maybe can be customized, but maybe not and you just kind of have to fit yourself into that, into that mold or do you go to great expense and great risk and create your own software? Do you build it or do you buy it? Well, good news. There's a third way. Thanks to Outsystems, organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the Outsystems platform. And with good reason. Outsystems is all about outcomes, helping teams quickly deploy apps and AI agents and deliver results. Their version of low code plus AI makes it easy to develop the apps that fit exactly your needs and the success stories are endless. They helped a top US bank deploy an app for customers. So this is a customer facing app to open new accounts on any device. They sped up onboarding time by 75%. Huge improvement. Customers loved it. They helped one of the world's largest brewers. Here's an in house solution. Deploy a solution to automate tasks and clear bottlenecks in their process which delivered a savings of a million development hours. They even helped a global insurer accelerate development of a portal and app for their employees. An intranet app which delivered a 360 degree view of customers and a way for their agents to grow policy sales. Outsystems can solve this conundrum. Build versus Buy. Yes, you can do it all. The Outsystems platform is truly a game Changer for development teams with AI powered low code teams can build customers future proof applications and AI agents at the speed of buying. But you get something that's perfect for you. Plus, because it's outSystems, the platform gives you automatically fully automated architectures. You get security integrations, data flows, permissions. All those are table stakes. That's all the stuff you need and expect. And Outsystems provides it at the go. With Outsystems, it's so easy to create your own purpose built apps and agents. There's really no need to consider off the shelf sameware solutions again. OutSystems number one AI powered low code development platform. Learn more at outsystems.com TWIT that's outsystems.com TWIT we thank them so much for supporting intelligent machines. We thank you for supporting us too by visiting them there at that address. Outsystems.com Twitter Twit all right, so I see this thing that you put in here, Jeff. The Resonant Computing Manifesto. Mike Masnick supporting it. Simon Willison, one of the signatories. A lot of Tim O'Reilly, a lot of names. You know, Alan K, Bruce Schneier, Hank Green. But what is it? I'm trying to read it. I don't understand. What are we talking about?

D (128:20)

Lawrence.

A (128:20)

Classic Lawrence Lessig. What is the Resonant Computing Manifesto? Would somebody explain to me?

C (128:26)

I'm not sure I fully understand either.

A (128:28)

Okay, maybe they just signed it because they understand it. But it seemed like a good idea.

C (128:32)

Mike said it to me.

C (128:36)

I get a little hung up at the top. It says feeds engineered to hijack attention and keep us scrolling, leaving us a trail of anxiety and atomization in their wake.

C (128:45)

We've been there. Okay, so I'm not sure that's the problem. I think we are the problem. So right there I kind of got held up. They say the people who build these products aren't bad or evil. I salute that. They're people and they're trying to come up with a worldview signature of where we go. So there's five principles as a starting place. And I think it's hard to argue with these. The things that we have, privacy.

C (129:10)

Whoever controls the context holds the power that is Dedicated software should work exclusively for you. Ensuring contextual integrity where data use aligns with your expectations. I'm not sure what that means. That it's plural. No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit. Amen. Mike Masnik Protocols, not platforms. That it's adaptable Software should be open ended, able to meet the specific context dependent needs of each person. Not sure I understand that. Pro social technology should enable connection and coordination. Okay, I'll sign on to that. So yeah, I didn't sign because I'm not sure that I fully understand all of it.

A (129:52)

Well, thanks, Mike.

A (129:54)

We don't know what it means.

D (129:57)

I don't know how it works. I mean.

D (130:00)

Is Meta going to read this and go, oh, okay.

A (130:02)

Oh yeah, we should. I think it's more dedicated, plural, adaptable and pro social.

C (130:06)

Yes, I think it's more to the people who are on the ground and saying that there are some, some ethics we need to discuss and I think that's fine. I think.

D (130:13)

Where are you going to spend your money? Where are you going to spend your attention?

A (130:15)

Yeah, yeah, maybe we can get Mike Masnik on or. I think that'd be great on somebody who gets it.

C (130:21)

And let us also plug while we're on Mike line 173Mike textured is, is incredibly important. It covers all the issues that matter. And Mike has a new fundraiser out because he needs it and people should support Tech dirt. So he has his. It's very Mike. If you contribute more than $100, you'll get a 30 years of Section 230 commemorative coin.

A (130:46)

We talked about this because we had Kathy Gellis who writes Protector on Twit on Sunday and she also mentioned this. Yes, I completely think Mike deserves every.

C (130:57)

Mike's on my year end list of contributions. Absolutely.

A (131:00)

Yep, absolutely. You have till January 5th to back the tech dirt. If you do $100 or more, you get the coin shipping in January or February. I don't really care about the coin.

C (131:11)

No, I don't either.

A (131:13)

But I do care a lot about Tech Dirt and you know, like all of these efforts, it, it probably doesn't.

C (131:20)

Pay very well and no, this is the independent journalsman. He does research that matter. Not just journalism, but research that matters and paying people like Kathy Gillis to do the work.

A (131:28)

So that's great. Yeah.

C (131:30)

Meanwhile, I wish Paris were here for this one. Did you see the line above that? Sam Lesson ran an etiquette camp for Silicon Valley boys.

A (131:40)

Sam, who I love, we've had on the show married to Jessica Lesson, her former boss at the Information. He is a VC and an investor.

A (131:50)

Tech Bros Head to edit kitkamp. This is from Washington Post. As Silicon Valley levels up its style.

C (131:57)

So what does it teach them? How to buy suits and honest to God, I swear to God, how to eat caviar. Oh no, Bump on your hand? I mean.

A (132:06)

No, do not eat caviar with a bump on your hand.

C (132:09)

Well, well, don't.

A (132:10)

Don't. That's not how you eat caviar. That's how.

A (132:15)

Russian oligarchs eat caviar.

D (132:17)

Yeah.

A (132:17)

That's how tech bros eat caviar.

C (132:19)

And even so, if, if you're making the. The proper consumption of caviar your issue, you're kind of missing bigger points of what's in Silicon Valley.

D (132:28)

Well, I think the market being served here is that people in Silicon Valley are people who spend all their time doing engineering, and then all of a sudden they find themselves very wealthy, and so they don't know how to function in the world of wealth. How do you eat caviar? I've been eating nothing but ramen for the last 20 years. And so I think that's what he's getting at. I do believe in etiquette. I. I think etiquette's fantastic, but it shouldn't be focused around eating caviar. It should be around greetings and, you know, not ghosting people and table manners and things like that. And also international etiquette, I think, would be. Would be great. It'd be great for people to travel around with confidence and know how to. How to behave without offending people internationally.

A (133:10)

I have a better idea. You want to learn etiquette? Go on one of these wonderful Gastro Nomad. Yes. Trips.

D (133:19)

Yes.

A (133:19)

You'll be with a few.

C (133:20)

You will learn how to eat caviar.

A (133:22)

Seriously. You will learn how to be in a culture, to enjoy the culture, to be not an ugly American, but a sophisticated consumer of great food, great wine, great convert. You'll learn how to converse. It is. You have an etiquette school already, Mike, @gastranomad.net I mean, honestly, I'm serious about that.

D (133:45)

Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it. We eat certain things all the time, like olive oil on gastronomatic experiences. You eat the world's greatest olive oil, but you understand exactly what makes it great and the culture, how to eat it and so on.

A (134:01)

Tech bro should go on this. I don't think you should watch them. But you could pretend you weren't a tech bro and go on these experiences, and you'd meet some wonderful people. You'd learn how to converse. I always thought the best thing I got out of my Yale education was not the classes, although there were some pretty good classes. But the fact that every week the master of the college would have a cocktail party that you would go to and you would learn how to stand around with other intelligent people and converse.

C (134:30)

That's where J.D. vance learned forks.

D (134:33)

Oh, my.

A (134:33)

That's another matter.

D (134:34)

Well, you know, the funny thing about. Yeah. The funny thing about gastroentermatic experiences is that everything we do is a secret. So we want people to experience this, but we can't tell you what you're going to be experiencing because it's a secret. And so what I would encourage everybody to do, if you've heard this, if you heard about gastronomic experiences, you're like, I still don't quite understand what it is you do. Sign up for our newsletter. Go to our site, gastronomy.net and, and you'll see the newsletter tab at the top. Sign up. It's free private information. Will keep your details private and all that stuff. And, and little by little, you'll get that information. Or you can go to gastronomat.net get, which stands for gastronomata Experience Testimonials. So it has all the things that, you know, some of the people who've done experiences without revealing any of the secrets tell you what it was like. And so this, this can be helpful if you're curious about this. But, but especially, please get the, the newsletter because that, that's a great resource for all this stuff. And there's a lot of etiquette stuff in there, too. So there's Charlie and Julia.

A (135:43)

We made some really good friends. We went on the Oaxaca experience. And I really do think, I'm actually genuinely saying this would be a really good way. If you have a little rough around the edges. You don't know how to be around people. People. To be with a group of people like this. All of them are. I mean, most of the people are repeats now, right? I mean, everybody.

D (136:02)

I mean, these are definitely. Yes, definitely become devoted to this.

A (136:06)

And, and they are sophisticates. They're intelligent. They know how to make conversation. Certainly Mike and Amira do. And, and they're great facilitators, I think. Even if you had some references and.

C (136:18)

You get exposed to cultures and appreciate the culture, that's the most important, important part to me.

A (136:22)

Yeah, it would transform you, I think.

D (136:24)

And it's, it's the real culture. It's not the simulacrum that, that you get with tourism, normal tourism. You know, it's funny because, because we, we get a lot of initial people who just trust us. Right. The first time you do one, you're like, okay, I'm just trusting you guys, I don't know. You're not telling us what we're going to do. There's no itinerary. And then when they come back to do the next one, they know, they know what they're getting and it's really fantastic. So, and only by the way, as I mentioned, I think I mentioned on Twitt, the next year is our 10 year anniversary of the company. Yeah. Thank you. And we're doing new locations.

C (136:58)

I was going to ask you what are the new places you've announced?

D (137:02)

We have announced some of them and we haven't announced others. So we have announced Tuscany, for example. That's, that's, that's one of our newer ones. And we have a few other places that we're going to be revealing over the next couple of months.

C (137:18)

Give us a continent.

D (137:20)

I'm sorry?

C (137:21)

Give us a continent.

D (137:23)

Europe and Latin America.

C (137:25)

Okay.

D (137:27)

But, but we also, another thing that's, that's been changing lately is we do increasing numbers of private experiences. So for example, we've had a few people who want, want to have a big birthday. Let's just say it's their 50th birthday. And, and they invite all their friends and, and we do a gastronomic experience, but it's closed to the public. It's just for the group of, you know, six people, eight people, 10 people, 12 people, whatever it is. And we do a custom thing and that's, that's something, that's.

C (137:56)

How long does that last? Usually?

D (137:58)

Usually the same length, but if they, people have specific requirements, they want to make it a little longer, for example, or they want to include, incorporate maybe some.

D (138:08)

Certain types of activities. Some people like to do hiking, for example, or we'll integrate that. We can tweak it around the edges. But you still meet our friends, you still have the, you still enjoy the world's most delicious food and wine and drinks and so on, but it can be customized, so it's really fantastic. But yeah. Please do subscribe to our newsletter. I think it's a lot of fun.

A (138:30)

And don't go to learn how to eat caviar off your hand.

D (138:35)

No, no.

A (138:35)

You should do it like a civilized person, off the navel of a beautiful woman.

D (138:40)

Yes, of course, of course. Everybody knows that.

A (138:43)

And these tech pros apparently have never learned.

D (138:46)

Yeah, yeah.

A (138:48)

Anyway, Mike, I'm thrilled we could have you on.

D (138:49)

We appreciate it. Thank you.

A (138:51)

It's a pick of the week time, so I guess I'll give you the pride of place here.

D (138:56)

Okay, so I've been A frustrated email newsletter publisher since the 90s. And the reason it's frustrating is that there are many things out there after you send the email that will, will stop delivery.

D (139:13)

There are spam filters. There's like, you know, the, the service you're associated with. I used to use mailchimp. Nowadays I use Substack and a couple of other services of Squarespace for various newsletters. And I even gave up my newsletter at some point for maybe five or six years because I was so disgusted by the number of emails that didn't get through. So there is a product that I learned about recently. I think it's a relatively new product called Bare Metal Email. Now give you a caveat. This is not for casual individual use. This is great for a business. It's expensive. I think the cheapest option is 300 and something something dollars a month. But if this is, you know, this is a reasonable expenditure on your marketing budget. If you have, if you're a publisher or whatever this. We were talking about how, you know, content creators can have a viable business with good journalism. This is one way to do it. You can move your deliverables up from just north of 50% up to north of 95% using the service, or so they say. And they, they claim 99% deliverability, which is hard to believe in the current climate. But basically what they do is they have all these systems and they have it. Here's the AI angle. They have a great AI chat interface that walks you through the setup and how to, how to set up your own ip, have an unlimited addresses and so on. And this is just really a valuable service to get your voice heard if you're using email as a primary method of, of communication. So I, I think if you have a small business, you should check it out.

A (140:49)

Bare metal email bme and the address is baremetalemail.com.

A (140:58)

Yeah, Steve Gibson talks about this from time to time because he does have a newsletter. Of course he is running his own server. Yes, he's smart enough to. Steve knows how to set dkim and SPF and all of the various.

D (141:10)

He's doing the things that this service will do for you, for you.

A (141:14)

Basically the main thing that they do is give you an IP address not on a block list. And that's really hard to do. You almost never can do it with your home Internet service provider. It's impossible because your IP address has very likely been blocked all over the place. Good pick bare metal email.com jeff jarvis pick of the Week.

C (141:38)

So I want to mention That I was in Austria and there's video of my conversation with Arsene Wolf.

A (141:43)

This is where you were last week?

C (141:45)

Yes. Who's the Walter Cronkite of Austria on ors.

A (141:48)

Wow.

C (141:49)

And it was. It was a nice small gathering of media at the.

C (141:55)

Median Gipfel, or the European Media Summit.

A (141:58)

Nice. And they. You do this in English because, of course, they all speak English perfectly well.

D (142:02)

Yes, yes.

A (142:02)

Yeah, Very nice. Well, I won't play it.

C (142:05)

No.

A (142:05)

Because I don't want Armin to pull it down, but no, he won't.

C (142:08)

But that's fine.

A (142:09)

It's on Jeff.

C (142:10)

And then I want to give you, Leo, some condolences. I know we were all rooting for you, but unfortunately, you didn't make the list of the first Golden Globes Awards nominees for podcasts.

A (142:21)

Really? They did podcasts.

C (142:23)

They're doing them. So the nominees are.

A (142:26)

They're all celebrities. Celebrities, of course.

C (142:28)

Armchair expert with Dax Shepard. Call Her Daddy. A good Hang with Amy Poehler. The Mel Robbins podcast. Smartless. And up first from npr.

D (142:38)

Well, so what they did was.

A (142:40)

Daily's not on it.

D (142:43)

Well, what they did was they didn't. They didn't honor native podcasters. They. They honored the TV and movie and radio people who. Who were just doing celebrities. I'm like, you'd smart. Listen. Are you kidding me? That whole show, it's hilarious because the people on it are really funny. The hosts are like, really funny people. But it's all about, like, bringing on celebrities. And so, like, how'd you get started? That kind of stuff. It's like, really? That. That's a great idea.

A (143:09)

I will give credit to Alex Cooper. Call Her Daddy is a name.

C (143:12)

That's a native one. Yes.

A (143:14)

You know, she came out of nowhere and has had huge success.

D (143:18)

Yeah.

A (143:18)

So credit to her for that. But the rest of them either are from big name brands or big name celebrities. And that makes. I mean, that's what I'd expect.

C (143:25)

And one more, Leo.

A (143:27)

Yes.

C (143:28)

Is to give you ammunition, which you always seem to need. About. No, AI is not useless. Yes, AI is important. Yes. It does amazing things. Line 138. Real time cricket sorting by sex. Thanks to AI.

A (143:42)

You know, anybody who thought it was easy to sort crickets by sex probably has never tried.

C (143:48)

It's not easy. So this is a device that they built. If you scroll down, you'll see the device. So there's a bridge the crickets walk across and they get photographed. And then there's a Raspberry PI boy girl. Yep. Yep. Because why would you Want this? Because crickets are a source of food. They'll soon be on Gastro Nomad. But you want to breed them, and then to breed them, you've got to separate the boy crickets from the girl crickets.

A (144:11)

Yeah, it's the old Noah's ark problem.

C (144:13)

Exactly. It's the old hot dog. No hot dog.

E (144:15)

It's the old hot dog. No hot dog.

A (144:16)

Hot dog.

D (144:16)

No hot dog.

A (144:17)

What is it that distinguishes. Just out of curiosity.

C (144:21)

So I showed this to Jason, and if you look at the pictures. Let's see if you can get it. Go, go down here. Male and female.

A (144:26)

Here's the pictures of a male.

C (144:28)

And basically, it looks like the female.

A (144:30)

Has a penis, has a tail.

C (144:31)

Yeah.

E (144:32)

So it's hot dog.

C (144:33)

Hot dog. Yeah. But it's reversed. Yeah.

A (144:36)

I think I could do this. It's pretty simple.

D (144:39)

Based on my experience with. With cartoons, I would have assumed that the females have top eyelashes.

A (144:45)

Oh, yeah, that's right. But the males have top hats.

D (144:48)

Of course, if ever there was an IG Noble Prize nominee, this would be it.

A (144:53)

But, you know, it isn't that ignoble.

C (144:54)

Have you ever had insect edibles on gastronomed?

D (144:58)

Oh, of course.

C (144:59)

Yeah.

D (144:59)

We had. Yeah, we had the grasshoppers. And in fact, in Oaxaca, you know, it's not for everybody that it's optional for people to have it, but we actually had the most excellent grasshoppers, which were raised in herb gardens, and they absorbed the flavors of the herbs they eat, and we caught them ourselves.

A (145:20)

This was at chef Alex Ruiz's amazing home in the country, and they took us out to capture them. In fact, I'm gonna find it because I have it here somewhere.

D (145:32)

Yeah.

A (145:32)

Picture of Lisa hopping around.

D (145:34)

She was into it.

C (145:35)

It.

D (145:36)

She was really into it.

A (145:37)

Yeah. Catching grasshoppers for our dinner.

D (145:41)

Yeah, that's a major part of the Oaxacan diet. Is not a major part of the diet, but it's a major popular food. It's a snack. Kids love them there.

A (145:49)

They roast them. They're crunchy. They're not. And they put them in the moles and other stuff. But there was also. Wasn't there a little dish of grasshoppers on the table that you could just.

D (145:58)

We sprinkled them on top of guacamole.

A (146:01)

That's what we did.

C (146:03)

And guacamole, if you get the grasshopper.

A (146:05)

Nothing like a guacamole grasshopper.

D (146:08)

Yeah. And you go to the market there, which we did. And you see, you see. You know, they have 20 different kinds, and they're not sorted by AI or sex, but by the type. And they have different flavors and so.

C (146:18)

On, but it's an important source of protein, so.

D (146:21)

Oh, yeah. It's really, really good for you.

A (146:23)

But they don't eat enough of them, really, to say this is a boost in the protein content. I think it's more.

C (146:28)

Yeah.

A (146:29)

What's.

D (146:29)

What's great? Typically, if you go to, like, a soccer game or something like that, they. People have little plastic baggies with peanuts and grasshoppers and chilies and so spicy and crunchy, and it's.

A (146:40)

That sounds.

D (146:41)

Now, that is way healthier than what you'd get, like, at a baseball game if you go to, you know.

C (146:45)

Yeah.

C (146:47)

Hot dog. No, hot dog.

A (146:48)

Yeah, hot dog. Well, that's funny. I cannot, unfortunately, find the pictures of us leaping around looking for grasshoppers, but trust me, it was great fun. We didn't really know what we were.

D (147:01)

Doing, to be honest, but we managed to do it.

A (147:04)

They said, go out in the herb garden, here's some baggies, fill them with grasshoppers. Okay. And later we found out it was food.

A (147:15)

It was a lot of fun. Did you. Could you tell the ones that were grown in basil versus the ones that were grown in oregano? I couldn't.

D (147:21)

They were all together. So you. You know, it's. It's hard. It's hard to tell, but I have. I have tasted the difference between different types of grasshoppers, and they're night and day. I've. I had some more recently that were just so good, and I don't know how they prepared them, but.

A (147:38)

Great. Yeah. Grasshoppers.

C (147:40)

So, Mike, last question here. I know we're gonna. I'm not fond of liver, for example. Huh. Right. Is there anything you won't eat?

D (147:50)

Won't.

D (147:53)

Not really. If it's something that people eat in a place, I'll eat it no matter what. So I would even eat haggis if I went to Scotland. Really?

C (148:03)

Newark. Loves haggis. Loves it.

D (148:05)

Yeah. A lot of people really love it. That's probably a bad example. But there. There's some. There's some extreme things. I mean, I've eaten termites, and in Kenya, I've eaten all kind. Well, there's a. Actually, in Oaxaca, there's a place where you can get a tostada that has not only grasshoppers, but also ants and those little worms that they put in mezcal. They roast those and put them on the tostada as well, and it's actually really delicious.

D (148:32)

Antags is amazing.

C (148:33)

You've answered that. Thank you.

A (148:34)

And you thought you were sophisticated eating that bump off your fist.

D (148:38)

Yeah.

A (148:39)

Mike Elgin. Thank you so much. Machinesociety AI gastronoma.net Great to have you.

D (148:45)

Thank you.

A (148:46)

Mr. Jeff Jarvis. Buy the books.

C (148:49)

I forgot to show off. I'm wearing my look.

A (148:52)

How dressy.

D (148:53)

Yeah, it's a.

A (148:54)

It's like a Nehru jacket.

C (148:55)

This is a Tyrolean jacket.

A (148:57)

Oh, that's beautiful. I want one. That's great. That's beautiful. You know what? That is a good look. You should wear that from now on with the black turtleneck. I think that's a pretty perfect look.

C (149:06)

Yeah, a little red there.

A (149:08)

You look like one of those young Nazis in the Sound of Music.

C (149:12)

No, no, Von Trapp.

A (149:15)

That's what you look like. Yeah. He is the author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis and magazine. And we will next week be, I hope, reunited with both Jeff and Paris, which will be a lot of fun. Oh, let me check. I like.

C (149:27)

What if they're eating caviar off a bump at the Consumer Reports party?

A (149:31)

Oh, I doubt.

C (149:32)

I have my doubts.

A (149:32)

They're a little too sophisticated. CJ Trowbridge will be our guest talking about AI, sustainability and resiliency. He is a YouTuber.

C (149:43)

They are.

A (149:44)

I think they are. Thank you. We appreciate all your time and thank you for joining us. We do this show, Intelligent Machines every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly. That's 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. You can join us on the show. Watch live if you want in the club, Twit, Discord if you're a club member or on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, linkedIn, Facebook or Kik. We stream live, but you don't have to watch live on demand versions of the show available or download at the website Twit TV im. There's audio there and video. You can even watch the video stream right on the page. There's also a link there to the YouTube channel where you can watch the video. Easy to clip little segments, which is nice. And of course the best way to get any of our shows. Subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Paris said she found some good reviews that she will be reading.

C (150:41)

Oh, yeah.

A (150:42)

So leave us some fun 5 star reviews and maybe you'll get a dramatic reading for Paris.

A (150:48)

Thank you everybody for joining us. Have a wonderful evening. We'll see you next week at Intelligent Machines. Bye bye. I'm not a human being.

D (150:58)

Not into this animal scene.

B (151:01)

I'm an intelligent machine.