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IM 876: It's No Melania - Section 230 on Trial
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Section 230 on Trial
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A
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Paris has the week off. She's in Montana. Jeff Jarvis is here. Our guest, Olivier Sylvain says we should stop Section 230 because Big Tech's getting away with murder. The author of Reclaiming the Internet. Coming up next on Intelligent Machines, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Chart, Episode 876, recorded Wednesday, June 24, 2026. It's no Melania. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover the latest in AI robotics and all those smart doohickeys all around you. Joining me right now, Professor Emeritus Jeff Jarvis, the former. You don't. You're never former, are you?
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B
What's your emeritus? No, you're just. It's Latin for old.
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A
Professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School. Oh, wrong button. Oops, Wrong button.
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B
Newmark.
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A
Wrong button. Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Now at Montclair State and SUNY Stony Brook. He's the author of a brand new book coming out in a little bit more than a month. Hot Type. The story of the machine that Drove Mark Twain crazy. The Linotype and of course the web we weave and magazine. And the Gutenberg parenthesis. You've been rotating the books.
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B
Well, I figured given today, since we're talking about trying to save the web, I would put out the web weave. I was telling Olivier that his book, no Doubt has sold already much more than mine since no one bought mine.
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A
But Paris Martineau is on vacation this week in Big Sky Country. She was hoping to join us, but she said the youth hostel she's staying in doesn't exactly have the best bandwidth out there in Montana. Actually, I'm glad she's having a nice time in a beautiful area of the country, so I wouldn't want her to work on vacation. So it's just me and Jeff today, but we're not alone. We have a guest. Olivier Sylvain is the professor and author of a brand new book, well, relatively new, came out a couple of months ago. Reclaiming the How Big Tech Took Control and How We Can Take it back. From Columbia Global Reports. Professor Sylvain, welcome.
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C
Thank you very much. It's a thrill to join you folks here.
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A
We're glad to have you. You're a law professor, but I think people might recognize your name because you were at the FTC as senior advisor to Lina Khan for a couple of
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C
years and yeah, they May recognize my name because of that. That was mostly behind the scenes senior advisor. You know, for a middle aged person to take some time away from academia, it was a thrill to join Chair Kahn at an exciting time at the ftc.
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B
Where is bureaucracy worse? University or federal government?
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C
Wow, that's a tough one. But you know the answer to that I think, Jeff, the answer. Government is pretty thick with bureaucracy. And maybe another book I can talk a little bit about why some of the things I would have loved to have seen didn't happen. But that's another story.
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A
Well, Chair Khan really very young, came out of academia as well and really took on big tech. Unfortunately, a number of the cases she brought have been dropped in the subsequent administration. So I can't say she had a run of successes. I wish she, I wish she had. I think she was doing the right thing.
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B
She certainly changed the discussion and the agenda.
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C
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't, you know, I think I understand your point given that, you know, after four years you have a new administration that comes in and pulls a rag on from under. Sure. But I think I'm with Jeff here. I'm probably go further and say there was, it was a, it was a. The four years were successful at least because it opened the aperture for what is possible. The kinds of things that I focus on were consumer protection issues, not competition issues. With regards to competition, I'm happy to talk about that stuff. But with regards to consumer protection, there are a couple statutory authorities that the FTC is currently using more than they had before this. This ftc, including ROSCA, statutes addressed to dark patterns on online activity and Section 5 unfairness. It's not just deception anymore. Right. It's not just false claims that companies make about their services. It's also just foundational unfairness. This is something this current administration is using as well. So I actually think there is a lot of success that happened in the administration under Khan's leadership.
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A
Yeah, I guess when it comes to government, it's progress, not perfection. You always hope to make little incremental improvements bit by bit. So I want to talk a little bit about your book. First of all, why do we need to reclaim the Internet? Who's got it now?
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C
Well, it's not the so called users
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B
that
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C
many of us were fantasizing about in the 1990s that I know that Professor Jarvis has written about. It's not them. And I think that's a pretty uncontroversial observation. You know, the argument of the book is that you just have to look as far as the inauguration stage, January 2025, to see what's happened where the dominant players in our tech information economy were sitting right behind the President and very quickly benefited from, you know, the president's promises. So the extractive model that a lot of people have written about has gotten some rocket fuel under this administration. Those are the folks that are running the show now, but they have for a while. And part of the reason is because of what Congress and the courts have done over the past couple of decades.
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A
They might defend themselves saying, hey, but we built it without our capital, without our servers, without our software, what would the Internet be? I mean, we the people put the content on there, but it's their servers that we put the content on.
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B
Kind of the telco argument, too, that we were going through Net neutrality versus the platform argument.
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C
Yeah. I mean, we can talk about telcos. I mean, I start as a tech lawyer at General Block working on FCC issues, so I agree there are echoes with regards to telco, but these are not companies that built it alone. Right. I mean, the argument that I make is that they rely on a regulatory regime that is especially forgiving, especially deferential, so that the business model that emerges in the early 2000s never gets a close look until relatively recently. And so they got a big boost. The more provocative claim I make, and I don't think is inaccurate. I love someone to tell me I'm wrong, is that the only industry that enjoys the same sort of legal protection, if not is the gun industry. These are companies that can get away with building applications and services that
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D
hold
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C
people's attention, even at the expense of those very consumers.
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A
Yeah. You actually talk about the gun industry when you're talking about section 230, which we're going to get to. Yeah. Jeff and I both come from the John Perry Barlow generation of we believed the Internet was going to democratize everything and it was going to open up a whole new means of communication and so forth. And so it is like Commissioner Khan's.
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B
Like you're pointing about Commissioner Khan's tenure. In many ways it has.
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A
Well, that's the thing.
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B
I don't think we need reject. Yes, exactly.
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C
Yeah, I agree with that, by the way. I mean, who couldn't agree with the idea that it's been transformational in many good ways for sure.
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A
And yet we're also fans of Cory Doctorow and acknowledge that inshitification is rampant and you call it ruthless commercial exploitation, but it's the same thing.
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B
I just reread the Hutchins commission report from 1947 about the media and the news industry. And I think we think nostalgically that media back then was good before it got shittified. But there was a whole commission brought together because people thought that media was
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A
back then, well, isn't it kind of the way of capitalism? We thought the Internet was free. We were obviously deluded. And at some point the bill came due and these companies were giving it away probably fully with knowledge that at some point they were going to be able to exploit it. And as Shoshana Zuboff has pointed out, I know you're not a huge fan of hers, Jeff, but that, that's kind of the nature of surveillance capitalism, that she would say the whole thing was built specifically for that purpose. How do we reclaim it? I mean, I think we don't have to debate that. I think everybody's watching.
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B
We need a better Internet.
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A
Question knows, we need a better Internet, but how do we get there?
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C
You know, I, I, I very, I like reading that stuff from the 90s Barlow and you know, they're, they're, you
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A
fatted the American dream.
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C
I mean there are all these really, really amazing peons and what is possible, even Yochai Benkler when he writes the wealth of networks in 2006, you're still tapping into that. It's really attractive.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And you know, as someone who, with, with ACLU roots, I, I, there's a libertarian in me somewhere that, that thinks, you know, this is really, really great stuff. But I think that that discourse, that language was always, was always distracting and, and insufficiently alert to what would, well, as you say, what happens in capitalism. Right. I mean there, there are business models that have to emerge. The one thing I don't think people totally got, or maybe I didn't, at least maybe you did, is the dramatic information asymmetry between the administrators of servers and the services behind the screen and the consumers. I don't think people totally understood what that would look like. They really thought that they would be governing the space co equally. But that of course was never the case.
- [11:24]
B
But didn't, we didn't. If you, I'm sorry, I'm going to do this because I write books about the history of media and technology. If we go back, the asymmetry was tremendous in mass media.
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C
Yes.
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B
People had no opportunity to speak whatsoever. That's what the Hutchins Commission Report worries about. Just to recall on that again. And so the asymmetry may still be there, but it isn't. It isn't. It Tremendously lessened in that anyone can speak now. No guarantee of being heard. Never was, never should be. So the asymmetry is still there. I agree with you. But isn't it a lot better than it was?
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C
So I think potentially it was. But, you know, I'm happy to talk about this, Jeff, because, you know, I'm also a media history kind of person. You know, the Fairness Doctrine is not, you know, unimportant for thinking about the obligations the companies have. The licensing regime that the FCC sets up or that Congress sets up, that the FCC implements is not, you know, incidental. It's important to addressing the asymmetry. Right. I mean, the language that the courts and policymakers are making, as you know, is that there are just a handful of broadcasters who are running the show and we have to keep them accountable. Now, I'm not a huge fan of that comparative licensing regime as it was set up. It was rife with corruption, too, but at least there was a mechanism for regulatory oversight. We haven't had this in the Internet setting ever.
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B
But wasn't broadcast the exception? The rights that were given to print were sliced down like baloney Comm Radio. And again, reading about that, and you know far more about this than I do, having worked with the FCC and understanding the roots of its regulation. But that was a slice taken out of the First Amendment, so that print had far more rights and remains with far more rights than broadcast did. And far more respect, I would say, print has than broadcast did. And so in an Internet where people have the ability to respond, the ability to speak, should it be closer to print or to broadcast in its regulatory regime?
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A
No.
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C
I mean, this is a great question. This is the perennial question. And the Supreme Court, I mean, I'm going to answer by starting with what the courts have said, which I know you know the answer to, and then tell you what I think that the, you know, they've said. It's much more like newspapers. Right. When Justice Stevens for the Supreme Court writes the Reno vs. ACLU opinion, he's talking about pamphleteers and libraries. Right. And right. The web is one big library and that we're all individual pamphleteers. I think he has taken the story that Barlow and others are telling full cloth and restating it in the language of law. I think that is. I think that was wrong and I don't blame them. I was right there. Right. I mean, younger, but definitely excited about what was possible. The problem is that it went further. Right. The First Amendment is one thing. And then Congress. I know, Leo, you Said we'll talk about it. I can't help bring it up. But Congress goes further and insulates the companies from liability. Publishers are not subject to that same sort of benefit. Right. So this goes beyond even what newspapers are doing. And what I'm talking about is this protection under 47 USC 230.
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B
Right. But when I started, I worked for. I'm not a real professor, by the way, just to be clear here. I snuck in through the side door of journalism. But when I worked for. As president of Creative Director of advanced.net I started all of our newspaper sites and sort of worked on our magazine sites and so on. We were highly interactive. We were highly open to having the public there. My boss, Steve Newhouse believed in that immensely that this was very different from a content based media medium of magazines. But if I knew our lawyers well and if we had been liable for the speech of others on our platform, we wouldn't have had it.
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C
Right.
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B
And I shudder to think how much would have been lost and still could be lost. And we see it happening just for the expense of moderation. And I think your points about moderation are right. And we'll get to that. A lot of people are taking down comments and forums and such because it's too much of a pain in the ass. Not because it's liable. But if you add liability into that. We do. We end up back in the place where there's a few media brands and they're theirs and they're not ours and we can't speak in them.
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C
Yeah. I mean, I do think this is a realistic threat when you don't have. There are no mechanisms to protect publishers in the way you described. And especially online. Right. There's so much more content trafficking through servers online than there are then on a news. In a newspaper.
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B
Right.
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C
So. So the exposure is tremendous. I'm with you there. The problem is that I don't think there was. That there's any shortage of incentive to build business models that could account for that potential. There was just so much commercial opportunity, I didn't know what it was. But. But I don't think that there. I think there are companies that would have come up with strategies to account for potentially unlawful distribution of content. I don't know this for a fact, but this is a hunch that I have and it would have been nice to have seen what it would look like in the absence of this substantial statutory protection. For what it's worth, there is a protection under first amendment doctrine for newspapers and that would have been applied to the Internet. And that is once the companies know that they're distributing information that is harmful, they should be held accountable. When they don't know. I'm with you, Jeff. That's not something that you could really anticipate. But when they know as a matter of course that this is happening, that unlawful stuff is being distributed, they should be held accountable. I would like to see what the world looks like when that liability regime exists.
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A
Hold on a second. We're talking to Professor Olivier Sylvain. He's professor of law at Fordham University, as you mentioned, a former ACLU fellow in the legal office in New York. He is also a, I think, former director at the Knight Institute. Is that right or are you still.
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C
I was just finished two and a half stint there. The research
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institute.
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A
Also the author of a new book called Reclaiming the How Big Tech Took Control and How We Can Take It Back. So I just want to raise one issue and I think it's really timely because of course, we just had the decision in Los Angeles with Facebook or Meta, and also in New Mexico. And I think it's timely because I want to really make a distinction when you talk about section 230 often. I think far too often we talk about section 230 with regard to big tech companies like Meta. But I run a discourse forum. I run a Mastodon instance. I'm running a chat room right now on Discord. I am not a big guy. And section 230 protects me because I don't have to defend myself in court. I understand your desire to say let's go to court so that we can litigate these issues. Section 230 cuts that off. It doesn't let it go to a case. It's a defense. And I just say, no, you can't sue me because I am not the publisher of this content. I'm just providing this form, plus I can moderate it thanks to section230. I can't be prevented from moderating it or not moderating it. I think that's really important. Absent that kind of protection, I can't afford to go to court. I would shut those down. Yeah, go ahead.
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C
Sorry.
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A
No, I just. I think that there's a big distinction between how 6, 230 is used by big tech and how it protects little tech, little guys like me.
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C
Yeah, I think that's what Jeff was channeling as well. I'm sure that you two worked on extraordinary projects online. I love to talk about Wikipedia in this regard.
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Good example.
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C
Yes, it is a miracle to me, I can't believe that it's community governed. Not entirely, but that it looks the way it does is astonishing that if there's a case to be made that small tech, let's call it medium or small tech, requires legal protection, it's a company like that or the ones you describe. Listen, I'm sympathetic to that instinct, but there is another protection that these companies enjoy, and that's the First Amendment. The Supreme Court ratified a pretty generous view of what the First Amendment means and the choices that companies make about the content they distribute a couple years ago, Moody versus NetChoice. So I, you know, so I know we're going to talk about Section 30, but I want to make sure that Section 230 lays atop another protection that comes now.
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A
Yes. Except that I would have to defend that in court as opposed to short circuiting it with two, three.
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C
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, this is. I have the benefit of never having run a company, and maybe that's a bad thing. I think many people probably think it is a bad thing that I, that I, and others who are critical haven't been in the shoes that you've been in. But I, as I said earlier, I would like to see what the world looks like when companies do have an incentive to build services and filters and moderation techniques because there is so much money to be made. So I would like to see what that world looks like. I do think that there are some companies that would be chilled.
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A
All of the services I just described are pro bono. We do not make money on them. I would have to shut them down, period.
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C
With the risk. Because of the risk of litigation.
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A
Yeah. I cannot defend any litigation. There are people out there who would happily sue me because it would be a chance to shut me down. So that's issue one. Now, I don't disagree with you, and I think this recent LA case is very interesting, that there are product liabilities
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B
and product design questions, which is different from the content questions. Right.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Yes.
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A
Does Section 230 protect them in that case as well?
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C
So this is what I've been arguing for the past 10 years. And I would like at some point if we could circle back to this really interesting, provocative point you've made about small tech. Right. So I do want to turn to the. But this is. You're talking about as the heartland of what I've been arguing for a long time, and that Section 230 should not be invoked by companies, that it's small or big. To the extent that the argument that plaintiffs make that victims make or that the ways in which a company has designed their services ought to be subject to legal scrutiny. Never mind the content that goes, you know, through from users.
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A
Yeah. That's a complete. Those are these really two different issues?
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C
Yeah. Well, well, so.
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A
And you also. You say it's the algorithm. And I certainly think you can make the case that they've designed an algorithm to be addictive, compulsive even. Look at people scrolling through Instagram in the middle of the night, including me.
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B
Like reading Dickens novel, though.
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A
Yeah. Or like Dickens. That's problematic. But I would also point out that even if you merely made an algorithm to surface the most interesting material, the stuff. In other words, if you turn that algorithm off, you're going to make a product that is not as good, let alone compelling. Well, so there's some defense in making some in algorithms in general.
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C
Yeah. I mean, the Internet is comprised of algorithms.
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A
Right, Right.
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B
Everything has a choice.
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A
Everything is. The editor makes a choice on the front page of the New York Times. Right.
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C
Who wants to read something reverse correct chronological order.
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B
Right.
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C
I mean, I mean. Or, you know, alphabetical order or whatever. I mean, there's something about the algorithmic delivery of content that people want to see that of course, is of course, something we can celebrate on the one hand. But that's. That's not really. For me, that is a misdirection in some ways. And we can talk about the trials just to get at this a little bit. Right. So there. The trial out of New Mexico involves claims that the attorney general, state attorney general makes that says that some of that Facebook is basically a space in which predators can find sexual predators can find young people. And this is demonstrably true. As well as design services that are, with the limitless scroll and autoplay video. Autoplay doing something that resembles addiction. The key point is that section 230 blocked inquiry into whether the companies could be held liable for that period. Right. That's what230 blocked, by the way. I'm not sure whether in any given circumstance an algorithmic recommendation should be something that we hold someone legally liable for. But the inquiry itself was blocked off until courts started getting hip to this design theory, which is happening. There's a big case out of California involving Lemon. I mean, all these big cases are out of California. But the Lemon versus Snap, where Snap has a speed filter that you could predict a teenage boy driving a car is going to use really dangerously.
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A
I've used it though, on the Shuriken in Japan to see how fast the bullet train was going. So there are also legitimate uses of that. I understand you use as an example in your book Arms List, which is a marketplace for unregistered firearm sales. And they escaped liability because those gun listings were third party content. And so that is something maybe that's a little more visceral that people can really understand versus, say, Facebook.
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C
Can I add a fact to this?
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A
Yeah.
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C
Arms List had as part of their design a space called Backroom, where unlicensed gun licensed. You know, people couldn't have a license to a gun, could buy unregistered weapons. A domestic abuser says he wants to hurt his wife, doesn't have a license to gun, gets it. And, and the company prevails in a Section 230 defense because it's user generated content.
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B
There's also the gun politics there.
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A
We can, I mean that, you know, that's, that's a very visceral case of, yeah, boy, that seems like that's a bad thing. But I, but I again bring up as a counterexample my benign little Mastodon instance. You know, and I, and I was so, so.
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B
But in the design case, Leo, if I'm wrong in reading this way, that the issue would be whether Mastodon is designed right in such a way, clearly armsless versus what Leo does in moderation.
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A
Right.
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B
Are you. What do you think of the, and I don't know the latest on it, but the various discussions in the UK on requiring a duty of care, does that put a proper or too much of a requirement on these platforms? And this goes into AI very quickly. Can you predict every use and every harmful outcome of something you've designed? Should you have a responsibility to do so? Is that possible?
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A
I will add one more little thing to this. I just recently, like a minute ago, right before the show, banned an account that was posting nudity because I don't want nudity on my mastodon. I don't want him to be able to come after me and say, well, my first amendment right is being violated here.
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B
Well, you're not the government.
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A
Okay, you're right, that's true. Good point. But I'm still being censored.
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C
This move that. I know that you got Jeff's retort there, but this move you made is the argument that a lot of people, mostly on the right, have been making about the choice Facebook makes.
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A
They're conflating the First Amendment. Yeah.
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C
But this point about the duty of care is really interesting by the way. It's happening in the US too, with this discussion of casa, the kids online safety act, is considering there's a duty of care statute provision in that bill. I mean, I am warm to that idea. For what it's worth. There are in law already obligations to attend to prospective harm, foreseeable harm in the common law. Now, I can admit I tend to be a big government kind of person, so I'm not so worried about a new statutory provision that imposes an obligation to take care of people. But we already have negligence and product liability as Jeff invoked. And the facts in some of these cases that have been litigated are really important. This is not like your mastodon or instance, nor is it like mastodon. It's Facebook internal reporting saying, we know that this stuff is hurting young girls. There are young girls that have kind of, you know, develop psychological concerns involving their body, stories about self harm, their internal reports, and the company does not heed them. Right. This is foreseeable harm. Yeah.
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A
Those Francis Hagen documents were probably very much part of the jury's consideration. Right?
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C
Absolutely right. And I don't think you need a duty of care to get that right.
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B
So let me take this to AI if I can, because I think it's an interesting extension there. So I'll stipulate, your honor, that Facebook can have some harms and knows of those harms. It has the data and thus should do something about them and could be held in different law liable for them. Okay, so let's presume that. But then the interesting discussion we get into with AI and with air quotes, guardrails around them is my contention regularly is that it's a general machine, like the printing press. You cannot predict every possible use to which it will be put. You're not in control of every use to which it'll be put. You put a model out there and so does the liability creep back to the, to the AI creator, or does it rest with the user who asks for it to do something bad? Where do you see that? Because I think there's a straight line here from the Internet and AI and I'm curious where you think a precedent in one will affect analysis of the other.
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C
I would have us look case by case to see whether or not the developer of an AI model should be held accountable or not. And that sometimes the, the, the, either the deployer or the user should be held responsible. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm actually with you there. But let's consider the cases that are emerging again, they're very dramatic cases involving self harm in children and AI chatbots Right. These are. Or it doesn't even have to be a chat bot. ChatGPT. I mean, I don't know how you think of that, but I mean, I guess it's effectively a chat bottom where young people and adults are neurodivergent or especially vulnerable at any given moment and the company knows that it is prone to sycophancy and instigating behaviors. That would not be the sort of thing people would do in the absence of the existence of the chatbot. That's what happened in litigation involving a company called Character Technologies. Garcia vs Garcia case out of Florida and this is. There are cases now involving adults and the disruption that these companies know that they're causing in people's psychological profile.
- [31:22]
B
What if the argument is that those are edge cases? Do they have to design to the edge case and does that affect the application for everybody else?
- [31:32]
C
That's a legal question for me. I mean that's the case by case question. I don't feel like I have to. Maybe I should answer that squarely and say maybe it's the edge case and so we can excuse it with regards to other ones and maybe that's right. But there's just too much information that these companies hold and you know, the incentive that they had for deploying these services before they were ready. Right. Chat GPT, Character Technologies, they're doing it because they're racing to get the model out in spite of the knowledge that. That there is likely harm.
- [32:08]
A
There's a new bellwether case actually coming up now with I think Snap just made a deal, but Meta is still involved, I believe. Anyway, we're going to see more and more of these cases around product liability. That seems to be, seems to have kind of touched a nerve here and it scared the hell out of Silicon Valley. I actually was one of the few technology people who think that LA decision wasn't a. Wasn't a bad decision. I think it makes sense that they should have some product liability. What do you recommend though? What should section230. You don't want to abolish it, but what should it, what should it be? How should it. How should it work to protect me a little tech guy, to bring big tech to account and to protect the users.
- [32:55]
C
Yeah, I mean you. We'll see what happens with the LA New Mexico cases. Right. The companies are likely. I mean, I think they've said they will appeal and on the legal question of whether or not 230 is a protection for them and by the way, you might be surprised to Hear me say this. The stuff I was writing in 2017, 18 didn't talk about only revising the statute. It was just saying courts, you know what, look at the design of these applications, not to the content. And so it may be, Leo, that nothing changes with regards to the statute and that the courts just get hip to the possibility that different features and applications are doing different things. Right. That they're not just one big town square. But I do think, you know, I would like to see a narrowing so that there is a knowledge based legal regime. Right. One that, that says you are held accountable when you know that stuff that you're doing is harmful. We do that in the copyright setting. Right. I mean, Jeff and you, Leo, were asking about little tech. The dmca, the Digital Millennium Copyright act, as you both surely know, is a safe harbor for companies that traffic in user generated content that is copyrighted YouTube when it's a small company. The early 2000s is taking a risk, but it's because the DMCA says you can only be held liable when, after, if you don't take the content down when you hear about it.
- [34:21]
B
Right.
- [34:22]
C
I don't see why this kind of regime is impossible, particularly given the close attention the companies of the content that consumers are getting.
- [34:32]
B
The, the hazard that exists, Leo, has to deal with all the time. We can't play a video of anything on this show because somebody, not the, not the actual copyright owner, is going to come in and take advantage of that on YouTube and get things taken
- [34:44]
A
down for chilling effect.
- [34:45]
C
Yeah, yeah, the hecklers.
- [34:47]
B
So I think logically I agree with you, but the question is how does it get exploited by, by malign actors.
- [34:52]
D
Yeah.
- [34:53]
C
You know, there's a statute that, you know, I have, I'm, I think I'm mostly okay with the Take It down act that, that Congress passed last year. Right. Involving the distribution of non consensual imagery. AI generated non consensual imagery and many people are concerned that it could be weaponized. I know it's a term of du jour, but can be weaponized by people who just want to, you know, someone they don't like. So I think that that's a real threat, a real possibility. But you know what? We live in a world where this has always been the baseline and the kind of protections that companies enjoy are exceptional,
- [35:39]
A
according to AI. You tell me if it's a hallucination. Your next project is about public space. Whether the Internet could recreate the forced encounter of a subway car where you can't curate who's sitting next to you.
- [35:50]
C
Wow, that's some deep AI readings.
- [35:54]
A
Is that true?
- [35:55]
C
I think I did a podcast where I mused about this, and now I really work on this project.
- [35:59]
A
My AI listens to all the podcasts especially.
- [36:02]
C
Well, I'm going to go back to my roots and to my infrastructure roots and talk about shared spaces. I grew up in New York City. My parents are Haitian immigrants. I learned to become a New Yorker and an American by way of the subway, through public parks, through the radio. My dissertation is about the radio. And I don't know if we can transcode all of that for the Internet, but I want to think about how to do that. And so. Yes, but you just blasted this out more than I thought. I'm ready.
- [36:44]
A
Now it's two podcasts. You're for sure that's going to be surfacing. I like the idea. No, I think it's a really. I was intrigued when I saw that because I really find that an intriguing concept, and it is something we lose. Jeff and I have argued over Eli Pariser's filter bubble. He doesn't quite believe that's the case, but I do think that the serendipity of encounters on the Internet is part of its real value.
- [37:12]
C
Yeah. So that's. I don't know if I want to talk about serendipity so much because that's been, you know, people have been talking about that for a while, Jeff. You know, I mean, I'm hip to the idea, but it's this idea. We've relinquished public resources to private administrators.
- [37:30]
A
I agree.
- [37:31]
C
Language that lawyers use is to talk about governance.
- [37:34]
E
Right.
- [37:34]
C
The governance regimes. I actually think my project, my law project, is about Lawrence Lessig's Code as law. The argument that you might in some instances defer to technologists to come up with a regulatory regime. The language of governance comes up here. I think I want to push back a little bit, maybe a lot on this and not relinquish the role that public lawmaking bodies have in assuring that valuable communicative resources are available to everyone.
- [38:07]
B
I've got two questions for you, so I'm sure I get these in before we leave. One is say more about your dissertation. Yeah.
- [38:16]
A
Jeff is being kind to me because I have just. I'll be just rounding out my 50th year as a radio broadcaster.
- [38:23]
B
Yes. Doing the order he wants. I'm very eager to hear what you think of the present FCC head and ABC and such, if you're willing to talk about that.
- [38:36]
A
Oh, Lord. You pick up Jeff That's a two hour conversation.
- [38:39]
B
It is.
- [38:40]
C
I'm happy to dispose of the second one quickly. It is lawless, politically motivated, unconstitutional. Plainly unconstitutional. Right. I mean.
- [38:52]
B
Yeah.
- [38:52]
C
And I think there are many people on the left and the right who see that when you're.
- [38:56]
A
See, that's why we don't like the Take It down act because of that kind of lawlessness.
- [39:02]
C
Yeah. That's why I mentioned weaponization. I do think that this is acceptable. This is a weaponization of agency power which is squarely at odds with the First Amendment. I'm very happy. You want to talk about the radio act of 1927, which is what the subject of the dissertation was. And my argument was to associate it with the Immigration act of 1924 and a kind of cultural conservatism. But it was about assimilation. It was about the cities and immigrants.
- [39:34]
A
This was the Public Interest Act. Right. This is the one that said stations had to act because they're using public airwaves in the public interest.
- [39:41]
C
That's right. That's right. And so it's a kind of, you know, ideal. It's an ideological history. Like why did that happen? The alternative would have been what Ronaldo Cohes asked for a couple years, you know, a couple decades later. And that is an auction system, which is what the FCC eventually gets in 1996, but. Or a little bit before, but then in 1996. So, you know, the Radioactive 1927 is an archive. You know, it's old news. You know, I talked to my. Literally and they don't know what I'm talking about. And then I tell them it's title three of the current Communications Act. It governs your cell phones. Ah, so there you go.
- [40:21]
B
What's the title? I'm writing a book next about the death of mass media. What's the title of the dissertation?
- [40:27]
C
I'm looking at it now. Domesticating the Great Throbbing Common Pulse.
- [40:32]
B
Oh, good title for it.
- [40:33]
D
Wow.
- [40:34]
B
Wow. That's sensationalism in dissertation titles.
- [40:38]
A
Is it published anywhere?
- [40:40]
C
I appreciate that you asked. It's not. And someone I think you both know was my dissertation advisor, Todd Gitlin. Oh, wow.
- [40:48]
A
And.
- [40:49]
C
And James Carey was the original supporter.
- [40:54]
B
Oh, I'm a James Kerry worshiper.
- [40:57]
C
Yeah.
- [40:58]
A
I'm not James Cary. Jeff, you're gonna.
- [41:00]
B
I just reread another essay of his about religion and because he. He was. He was a believer in the idea that media is. Is a. You're gonna. You studied with him, you know, far better than I would. Is often not the transmission of information, but Instead is ritual. And I think if you look at media that way and reading newspapers, like going to mass confirms something for you.
- [41:28]
A
I would use a less loaded term, maybe culture.
- [41:31]
C
Yeah.
- [41:32]
A
Because I really do. I've been thinking a lot about this lately is how we transmit culture and how subcultures get transmitted. And we have geographic subcultures in this country that have become a real issue, if you ask me. But unfortunately, our time. Oh, wow, Olivier. Is up. I wish we had more time with you.
- [41:53]
C
I wanted to say more of what you just said.
- [41:55]
A
Say more. All right, I'll let you. Okay, okay. It's your time, not mine. Go ahead.
- [42:00]
C
So Jim Carrey was a cultural theorist, right. And he would have said so. So I'm glad to hear you say it. And my project was about. Partly about the Interstation talked about German language as emerging German language newspapers emerging in Brooklyn, but that there are many people who are worried about immigrants not assimilating quickly enough so the public interest would bring them in.
- [42:24]
A
No kidding. That was the point.
- [42:27]
C
Well, that's a provocative argument. I don't think everyone bought my argument.
- [42:31]
A
That's fascinating. No, I know. I. I think that sounds. That makes a lot of sense, actually.
- [42:38]
C
There's also a technical reason, right. Radio signal interference. That's the stated reason for the regulation of radio.
- [42:46]
A
And as somebody worked for years in broadcast stations where you had to have a public file on record and people could come to the front desk and demand the public file. And I had to read PSAs every hour, public service announcements every hour, all in service to. I guess it was superseded by a later act, but to the idea that radio was a public service. But I never thought of it as a way to force assimilation.
- [43:12]
C
Well, so I can't say my argument is the one that is the prevailing one.
- [43:17]
A
Olivier. I'll give you something, though. If you look at the rise of right wing radio in this country, no kidding, that has been a huge force in our political culture, certainly.
- [43:28]
B
Yeah.
- [43:28]
C
To the day when the Fairness Doctrine is repealed. To the day. Right. Russia comes on the scene.
- [43:33]
A
So isn't that interesting?
- [43:35]
B
Well, I'll return one more time to the Hutchins Commission report because it's fresh on my mind, the concern with the. And mind you, there were a hell of a lot more media outlets and company and owners at the time in 1947. But the concern was that monopolization of the. Of the mechanisms of speech meant that what wouldn't be heard. And pushing free speech to that limit of saying, of tolerating things that we may not want to hear, but need to hear to be part of public discourse and grappling with that at the time. And I think it's time for the exact same discussion today, but in very changed circumstances. Yeah. By the way, that James Kerry essay, if any of the listeners want to actually look it up, it's the mass media and democracy between the modern and the postmodern. Now I've got a brilliant essay.
- [44:22]
C
Brilliant essay. Agreed.
- [44:23]
A
I'll give you something else to read. Your homework, Reclaiming the Internet. How big tech took control and how we can take it back. Our guest, Professor Olivier Sylvain from Fordham Law School. Thank you so much, Professor Sylvain. Really.
- [44:37]
B
So you know, Olivier, I went to my first year at college at Claremont and I was going to go to law school, and then I said, no, I'm not going to do that. And generally I'm glad I made that decision. But in a conversation with the likes of you, I really regret not having had the opportunity for exactly these kinds of discussions.
- [44:53]
C
That's very generous. It means a lot to hear from you.
- [44:57]
A
I think that's what happens is that future lawyers get enticed by the intellectual excitement of the whole thing, and then they get to work at a law firm in the basement reading documents.
- [45:09]
B
Instead you go get your PhD and teach. That's a far better path.
- [45:12]
A
Well, I got a PhD after three
- [45:14]
C
years of reading documents. The basement.
- [45:18]
A
You learned. The happiest lawyers I ever met are all lapsed. So there you go. Really, really a pleasure to meet you and. But now you've got me thinking about all sorts of stuff.
- [45:29]
C
You still got to work on the small tech problem. I like that.
- [45:31]
A
Well, it is, it is. I mean, for me, it's really significant, obviously.
- [45:37]
B
Sure.
- [45:38]
A
And this is why I really defend section 230 every time it comes up. Because it isn't just big tech. It is so easy to think it's just about big tech.
- [45:49]
B
The irony of newspaper publishers going over 230 is that they are protected by it. Not with their. Not with their own content, but when they have forums and comments and all of that.
- [45:58]
A
Comment sections. Yeah.
- [45:59]
C
Online, sure.
- [46:00]
B
Yeah.
- [46:01]
C
I mean, you know, I'll give you a. I'll give you. Maybe there's a common place we can. We can agree on, although I have some resistance and there are people who've talked about revising 230 so that there is. It's only something that smaller companies can invoke. Right. So. And that's not exceptional in current law. Right. So there's that. I Don't love that. Because the business model bakes in incentives when companies just start. And I worry that to the extent a small company is engaged in dangerous design decisions, that those get, you know, immune from inquiry.
- [46:44]
A
I'll end with Julia Anguin's comments on your book. Olivier shows us clearly what we have allowed the Internet to become. A haunted house version of a shopping mall full of dangerous products, scams, frauds, and abuse.
- [46:58]
B
That's an A blurb. That's good.
- [47:00]
A
We will do really nice blurb. We would do well to heed Sylvain's carefully crafted plan to clean up this message.
- [47:08]
B
And by the way, I just downloaded your dissertation. I can't wait to read it.
- [47:11]
A
Oh, my God. See, there is.
- [47:13]
C
Oh, my gosh, I'm scared now.
- [47:16]
A
You were young. It's okay. You didn't know any better.
- [47:20]
C
I was the oldest person in my cohort.
- [47:21]
A
But really? Really?
- [47:23]
B
Yeah.
- [47:24]
C
I mean, I had a job. I was. I had been in the world. I was a lawyer.
- [47:27]
A
Yeah, well, I think it's good for people to have some real world experience, too. Thank you, Professor.
- [47:32]
B
Thank you so much.
- [47:33]
C
Thank you, Liam. Thanks for keeping calling me Professor. It's okay to call me Olivier, by the way.
- [47:38]
A
Okay. Contrary to Jeff's experience, my dad started at Fordham but ended up moving to Columbia. So there you go.
- [47:46]
C
All right, I'll forgive him.
- [47:48]
A
Thanks so much. We'll talk soon, I hope. And I look forward to talking more about these issues, I think.
- [47:53]
C
Thanks very much, Leah. Thanks, Jeff.
- [47:55]
A
Thank you. Take care, Olivia. You're watching intelligent machines. As I mentioned, Paris is missed. She's on vacation in Big sky country. I'm very jealous. She says horseback riding and touring the. I don't know. I don't know what she's gonna do. She's not gonna fly fish, I don't think. Probably trying some coffee. We'll be back with more intelligent machines in just a bit. Brought to you today by Gusto. Right now, everyone is trying to run a leaner, tighter budget. Smaller team, higher expectation company. The last thing you have time to waste on is manual payroll. I used to have to do that or chasing down an HR form. Not anymore. Gusto is how small business owners get time back when every hour counts. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers comp 401k, you name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. Unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. No hidden fees, no surprises. Save time with built in automated tools. Offer letters, onboarding docs, direct deposit, and more. Get direct access to certified HR experts to help support you through any tough HR situations. It's quick. It's simple to switch to Gusto. Just transfer your existing data to get up and running fast. Plus, you don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Gusto is ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026 and is trusted by over 400,000 small businesses. Try Gusto today at gusto.com machines and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com machines one more time. Gusto.com machines we thank them so much for the support of intelligent machines. Yeah, it's, I always like to get people on and talk about Section 230 because I, I, I don't know why it's the whipping boy for everybody who wants to bring down big tech, but.
- [50:23]
B
Well, that's why I'm very interested in reading his dissertation. Because I think when a new medium comes along, there is reflex to say, can't we do something about this, to control it? And to some extent we should, to some extent we can't. And where you find that line and what the implications are, is, is, is not, not easy.
- [50:40]
A
Not to put words in his mouth, but I think he would argue that the Internet is no longer new media. That's part of, this, is part of the maturing of that. Right. Is to start thinking about things like this. It no longer needs to be coddled and carefully husbanded. As it grows into something, it has grown into something pretty huge.
- [51:02]
B
Well, we got to figure out how to take it back. And this is what we talk about all the time. This is why I didn't listen to you enough about Mastodon. If we'd supported Mastodon as a culture more from the beginning, we'd be in better shape on the Internet today.
- [51:15]
A
Well, and I'm kind of a poster boy for all of this. I moved from, you know, mainstream media into podcasting when podcasting was, I was like the fifth person to do it. We've always had an IRC chat room. We've always had forums and mastodons. And I just, I feel like there is plenty of space on the Internet for the kind of public discourse, the kind of sitting next to somebody in the subway. I love that, I love that image and it's not about assimilation, actually. It's about celebrating a variety of cultures and bringing us together so we can get to know each other as opposed to homogenize each other.
- [51:57]
D
Hey, this is Benito. I would. I would say it's. We need chaos. We need more chaos in there because, like, it's all walled off guard. But it's like Facebook. It's like. But it's like, you know. Yeah, but 4chan is formatted always the same. It always looks the same. It's always the same thing.
- [52:13]
A
Yeah, but I agree with you. There's no chaos anymore on Instagram and Facebook and Snap and TikTok and all of that stuff, but just websites in general.
- [52:20]
D
There aren't enough websites in general anymore. When I used to go on the Internet, I would go to my bookmarks and look at my fun websites, but now it's like two websites.
- [52:30]
B
1900 New York City, 46 daily newspapers. There was chaos then, and we lost it with mass media. We lost it with the. With the consolidation into big corporations. So, yeah, I agree. We need to bring chaos back to culture because chaos means people have their voice.
- [52:47]
A
It's also why I mentioned things like the Wander log. There's actually a move. Kagi's doing it, too, towards small, small Internets, you know, small sites, things like that. This is. This is a. We've talked about this a couple of weeks ago as my pick of the week, and I set one up using our picks of the week as sites. And then there's a kind of. It's almost a web ring. So these sites come from other people's Internets, and these are just small blogs. And I think I actually really relish, you know, I have. As part of our job, I have to go through all of this, you know, mainstream tech reporting. But I have more than 200 feeds, and a lot of those feeds are little blogs. Yeah, little.
- [53:28]
B
That's where you're gonna find the interesting stuff.
- [53:30]
A
That's where that I. That's what I look forward to.
- [53:33]
B
Well, I think our. Our sense of. Of value got terribly skewed. Where we thought if it wasn't the biggest, if it wasn't gigantic, if it wasn't millions, it was worthless. And that's why I've always respected valuing,
- [53:45]
A
because it got so out of control, every. Not everybody. Many of us are valuing.
- [53:49]
B
No, that's what I've always respected, what you said. I've quoted it a million times that you don't want to be too big. It would ruin it if you're too big.
- [53:57]
A
Yeah.
- [53:57]
B
You want to serve the proper number
- [53:59]
A
of people who care if OpenAI wants to write a multi hundred million dollar check.
- [54:06]
B
Yeah. You take it.
- [54:10]
A
I'm in the happy situation of not having that opportunity. It's easy for me to say. We talked last week extensively and maybe I was a little heated about Anthropic's fable and how the government had banned it. Trump has softened a little bit. He gave a interview with Axios saying it's not a national security threat.
- [54:32]
B
It was, but it's not anymore.
- [54:34]
A
It's not anymore. Dario Amodei followed Trump to the G7 summit, where they met in France. And apparently we don't know exactly what the conversation was. My theory is that Dario did something that Sam Altman's already done, which is offered the president 10% of the company.
- [54:50]
B
Oh, you say.
- [54:51]
A
Oh, similar kinds of.
- [54:53]
B
You know, I hadn't thought of that.
- [54:55]
A
But yeah, this is what OpenAI has done that's kept them in the good graces of the. Of the Trump administration. Donate to the ballroom. Donate to the inaugural fund.
- [55:05]
B
Offer equity. Right.
- [55:06]
A
Yeah. Brockman gave what it was a $25 million to Trump's PAC. MAGA. PAC. You know, I was talking about this on Mac Break Weekly, and actually we've been pretty hard on Tim Cook for kissing the ring so hard. But I'm. Now I'm starting to come around. This Fable thing kind of shook me. I think Tim recognized early on, the CEO of Apple, that Trump was able to and willing to wield a very big sword. That sort of sword of Trump was hanging over his head. He did it to Anthropic.
- [55:47]
B
Yeah.
- [55:49]
A
Tech product. He banned it.
- [55:51]
B
A gold bar is a lot less of a price to pay than 10% equity or a ban.
- [55:56]
A
Well, and think what the consequence would be if Trump banned the iPhone because. Which you could legitimately, maybe more legitimately do the ban fable saying, well, it's a Chinese company builds it. It's a security risk to our nation. We're going to ban it.
- [56:12]
B
You can only buy it.
- [56:14]
D
That's revolution, though, right? That would spark revolution, though.
- [56:17]
A
Well, I guarantee you he didn't do it because you're right, there's a lot of people using iPhones who would have been pretty pissed off. I think he and I mentioned this last week, made a very smart calculation politically that AI is not exactly the poster child anymore in the United States. So many people hate AI that banning an AI model would, as it did, go down without a trace. You know, nobody complained. Has anybody? There's hardly any coverage of it. And yet it strikes me as unprecedented that American president, without consultation with anybody, Congress or anybody else, would ban an American product. That's stunning to me. Yeah, it's one thing to ban foreign made routers, but to ban a product made in America by Americans that is actually at the forefront of the in that category of products worldwide to me was a stunning move. But I think he made the political calculus correctly, incidentally.
- [57:23]
B
Say that, say more about how is that a correct political calculus. He could do it without hurting himself.
- [57:27]
A
Yes. If you ban the iPhone, as Bonito said, there would have been a rebellion on the streets. Ban Fable. It's not even in the news anymore.
- [57:36]
B
It goes to what you said in our chat. I think it was, and I've been saying this as well, that the tech lash on AI took very little time to develop in considerable margins. So was it even thinking this is going to be popular? People don't like AI so finally get rid of an AI, right?
- [57:51]
A
I think so.
- [57:52]
B
But as you were trying to say last week, the implications are frightening in terms of it wasn't just me, it was precedent. It's set.
- [58:02]
A
Alex Stamos, our guest last week.
- [58:04]
B
Yeah, it sets a precedent. It also affects all of American technology worldwide and how we're going to be received. You want to, you want to give goad the Chinese into competing more. He just did it well.
- [58:17]
A
And I, you know, I watch carefully the, you know, the opinion out there in the world x.com as much as I hate using it, is an excellent place to see what people who use AI are thinking about AI and almost immediately people started saying, you know that Chinese model, glm, that's pretty darn good. And by the way, glm, which comes from a company called gpu, it's at Z. AI is open weight. Now it's a big model so you can't run it. I can't run it on any of my hardware. But if you happen to have 256 gigs of CUDA Core, like four Blackwells sitting around, you can run it locally. And it is pretty close. I would say 90% people goes back and forth of open.
- [59:02]
B
So as a company, you're reducing your risk of being shut down.
- [59:06]
C
Yeah.
- [59:08]
A
And it's a Chinese model. So it's as if Trump said, well, you know, we think that too many people are being killed by Ford F150 trucks, so let's ban those. But we're going to let the Chinese truck manufacturers bring their trucks in. It is, that is to me now I know I'm the only person in the world saying this. So although you see a little bit, you know, here's Wired story. The White House is making up its rules for AI in real time. No one can say exactly what the company did wrong. The NSA was using it. Actually, there's an interesting story. Senator Warner apparently told people that when he was talking to the head of the nsa. The NSA said, yeah, we were trying. We were trying Fable. Here's the Times story of it. And by the way, the Times thinks that Warner misquoted the nsa, which makes a little bit more sense. The NSA cybersecurity analysts. This is Dustin Voltz and Julian Barnes writing in the New York Times. The NSA cybersecurity analysts have been testing versions of Anthropic's tools when the latest models were unplugged, so they lost access too. The controlled tests proved impressive even within the halls of the nsa. In fact, during the session, Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said this is a secondhand quote that NSA Chief General Joshua Rudd had informed him that Mythos quote, broke into almost all of our classified systems. Not in weeks, but in hours. By the way, if that's the case, it means your classified systems are pretty sucky. He's pretty sucky. I mean, it's almost an admission that our classified systems are not very good. If Alex Stamos was right last week when he said, you know, the other models, like ChatGPT5.5 and even some of these Chinese models are just as good as finding exploits as Fable and Mythos. If that's the case, then you then really is a real. There should be a alarm in the nsa.
- [61:28]
B
And do you imagine they're not. A commercial company gets tested all the time because it's in public. A behind the scenes NSA system isn't getting tested all the time and so probably is not as robust.
- [61:42]
A
No, the Times clarifies, and I think they are right, that maybe Senator Warner misquoted General Rudd. In reality, the Times writes, the tests involved red teams. You know, these are security testers of NSA analysts who are using Mythos. Not fable, by the way, but the untrammeled, unrestricted Mythos in a highly tailored environment that would be extremely unlikely for an adversary to replicate. The Red teams began their tests within classified NSA systems designed to be accessible only from certain computers, which is a very good way of preventing hackers from getting in there. Completely cut off, in fact, from the broader Internet. But, and this should be scary, the test found that Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity flaws within that class of network quickly. It didn't actually break into those systems. It didn't have to. So even though the nsa, the Times rights, did not experience the doomsday scenario some had feared, analysts at the spy agency were stunned by how capable Mythos appeared to be exceeding their already lofty expectations. Did that inform the president's decision? I don't know. We just don't know. Cybersecurity agencies. On Monday, from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the five eyes issued a public statement. The Times called it an unusual public statement warning that artificial intelligence was rapidly transforming cyber risk frontier. AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, they wrote, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. The timeline is not years. It is months. So we are in an interesting pickle.
- [63:37]
B
The horse is out of the barn, over the horizon, and in the glue factory.
- [63:41]
A
And the answer is not to ban the United States best model, because that just tells the other guys, okay, you better get to work on your models.
- [63:51]
B
So is it sufficient to say that an ethical thing to do if you have something that is supposedly Mythos powerful, is to do what they did and say, okay, we're going to give it to the most vulnerable and important entities and give you a certain amount of time so that you can secure yourself up to that standard, whatever it is Mythos can do, and then we'll open it up. Right. That sounds like an ethical path. Yes.
- [64:13]
A
Yeah. I think Anthropic did perhaps make a mistake hyping up the dangers. Yeah, that certainly attracted the attention of certain bad actors. But, you know, and that was marketing hype, probably. But it is true. And I think doing Glasswing was smart. That's the project that gave it to 50 companies. Now, weirdly, Bloomberg says, and this was June 18, so this was almost a week ago. Early users of Mythos still have access
- [64:43]
B
to
- [64:45]
A
the NSA, apparently lost its access. There are 200 organizations in Project Glasswing, and Bloomberg is quoting its favorite source. People familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified say they still have access. Dragos CTO John Lavender says his company has access. Cisco said, yes, we still have access.
- [65:12]
B
Was the order about both or was it just about?
- [65:14]
A
It was both. And it said. It didn't say. It didn't say that I can't use Mythos and Fable. It said foreign.
- [65:24]
B
Foreign users. Well, here's the question.
- [65:26]
A
Non citizen citizens can't use it. But there was no way for Anthropic to know who was a non citizen. So it was this is a dumb
- [65:31]
B
question for some of these entities. If you're Cisco, were you given a local version to run because you were too nervous about running it over?
- [65:39]
A
Could well be, yeah. Here's the other question. You know, we're going to get Nate B. Jones on the show. I'm very excited. I'm a big fan of his.
- [65:46]
B
He's a celebrity in our world.
- [65:47]
A
He's a celebrity. He'll be on next month on the 22nd. His latest video about Fable says that he thinks it's a 10 trillion parameter. AI. Massively huge. To put it in perspective, ChatGPT4 was 1 billion. So it's a thousand times more powerful than ChatGPT4. We don't know how big 55 is. Maybe it's 5 trillion, 6 trillion. But Fable and Mythos are. They say trillion. I meant billion Fables. And no, what did I mean Anyway, they're massively big. 10 trillion. Yeah, it's trillion. 10 trillion is unbelievably big. So big that only a company with the kind of capitalization that these frontier companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have could even dream of making this, let alone running it, for instance.
- [66:45]
B
Well, the cost, the inference cost has to be immense.
- [66:52]
A
What Nate B. Jones said is that the strength of this model is giving it a large, complex task and then not messing with it. That it's very good at keeping all the details in its mind and going ahead and creating something that is strong and workable. My brief experience with it confirms that I only had two days. All of us, we only had two days with it, but I gave it the biggest task I had, which is to rewrite a sales system. Massive sales system that we wrote more than 10 years ago. That's a horrible piece of crap.
- [67:29]
B
How far did it get before you got cut off?
- [67:32]
A
Well, amazingly, within half an hour. And understood it deeply. Made a lot of great notes. I said, okay, now we have stakeholders, we have people who use it. Lisa uses it, my wife and our CEO uses it for sales. And then there is another group of stakeholders, our continuity department, that uses it for placing ads, ad copy. So there's different uses of this thing. It really is just a big SQL database with a lot of SQL queries. It's so bad that we just keep throwing resources at it. We spend thousands of dollars a month in Azure resources just to keep the thing running at a halfway decent pace.
- [68:13]
B
So common.
- [68:15]
A
It's full of flaws, which, by the way, Fable found all sorts of SQL injection flaws. Fortunately, it's not like the nsa, it's not in a public server and it has some, you know, if two people at once try to use it, the whole thing crashes, it freezes. Lots of things wrong with it. And Fable, I think, was able to really kind of get to the root of it. It noticed all of the issues. It wrote me a questionnaire. It said, okay, now you have to interview Lisa and Debbie and our IT department. You have to interview them. Here's the questions. It was very frustrating because I'd only given it. I'd only had about an hour worked on this thing, and it did a really good job of the first steps, and I have a strong feeling it would have done very well with the rest of it. So, anyway, the reason I started with the story that Trump now doesn't think is a security risk is I was hoping that by now they will lift the.
- [69:13]
B
What's the path here? But there's a lot of face saving to go on is, oh, well, we now have means to protect the world from. From this.
- [69:19]
A
I think that's the problem. How do you turn this around? Having said this.
- [69:23]
B
Yeah.
- [69:25]
A
Ars Technica. Lily. Hey, Newman. Writing. Actually, it's from Wired. Dangerous AI models are coming no matter what.
- [69:32]
B
Amen.
- [69:33]
A
AI models with advanced hacking capabilities will soon be the norm.
- [69:36]
B
Schneier was talking about that last week. Yep.
- [69:39]
A
Stamos.
- [69:40]
B
Yeah. Well, no, Schneier. Also in a piece.
- [69:42]
A
Oh, yeah. Schneier is a signatory to that Free Fable page. So, in fact, OpenAI has announced that they have a model, a Cyber Security model 5.6. And I think. I don't know. I think they're juggling whether to release it or not. They don't want to get banned, but maybe they've paid the right backsheesh so they don't have to worry about that. Let's take a quick break. I do have other stories, including Norway.
- [70:11]
D
You mean.
- [70:11]
B
You mean football Norway?
- [70:17]
A
Isn't that funny?
- [70:18]
B
Oh, it's the best.
- [70:19]
A
So he's talking about, if you've not watched the FIFA World cup, the Norwegian and the Norwegian games. The Norwegian fans pretend to row in the stands. What are they doing?
- [70:28]
B
Well, because they're Vikings.
- [70:31]
A
That's the funniest thing.
- [70:33]
B
It's the greatest thing between the Norwegians
- [70:34]
A
and the scots to see 20,000 people or more.
- [70:38]
D
Yeah.
- [70:40]
B
In Times Square, they all sat down in Times Square next to a yoga class and did it right there. And they do the drum and then grunts and it's. It's wonderful.
- [70:48]
A
I'm loving the World Cup. I have to admit, I really am.
- [70:52]
B
I'm not watching the football. I'm just watching the culture around it.
- [70:54]
A
I actually am enjoying the football. And I said this in the other show. Every four years, I fall in love with soccer. At the end of the World Cup, I forget all about it for another four years. I think that's not unusual.
- [71:06]
D
Yeah.
- [71:08]
B
Yes.
- [71:08]
A
Paris Martino's not here. She's gonna take two weeks off. She's in Montana. And I urged her to take the time off and not try to find a, you know, a working place so she could do the show. This is vacation.
- [71:21]
B
We want her in a cowboy hat. We want to see it.
- [71:24]
A
Do you ever get a vacation, Jeff, or.
- [71:26]
B
Yeah.
- [71:27]
A
No.
- [71:28]
B
No.
- [71:28]
A
No rest for the wicked.
- [71:32]
B
What's your. What is your next one gonna be?
- [71:33]
A
November. But I am excited. We're gonna go to Las Vegas with Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, and Steve Gibson. I'm sorry they didn't invite intelligent machines. We're gonna go to the Black Hat Conference, which I've never been to in all. You haven't never been?
- [71:48]
B
Oh, that'll be fascinating.
- [71:50]
A
And we're gonna do two shows from there. Windows Weekly. We're gonna do it on Wednesday, so we're gonna move Intelligent Machines. I'll let you know the exact date, maybe. But it's August 5th. I think that show will be moved ahead so that we can do those shows in Vegas. Lisa's going now. Should I bring a burner phone? I said, no, I think you could bring your regular phone, but you should turn off Bluetooth, right? I said, well, yeah, maybe you want to turn off Bluetooth. I don't know.
- [72:17]
D
Just don't connect to any weird wifis.
- [72:19]
A
Yeah, I think that's the main thing. Don't connect to a charger that's sitting on the side of the street. Don't connect any. Just don't plug any WI fi. Yeah, just don't pick up any USB keys you find on the ground. There's just some common sense things anyway. I'm looking forward to that. That's gonna be a lot of fun. So that's sort of a vacation. And then I will be going in November. We'll be going to Southeast Asia.
- [72:47]
B
All right.
- [72:48]
A
Oh, yeah, I'm very excited about that. Anyway, I hope Paris is having a good time. She'll, I'm sure, let us know, maybe even send us a picture from big sky country. That would be nice. Paris, if you're listening, I'll text her
- [73:00]
B
and see if she has any pictures
- [73:02]
A
Yet Jarvis is here. It's good to have him. And our sponsor, this segment of Intelligent machines is actually a pretty good sponsor for this show. Xbox B O W maybe you know the name, one of the top pen testing companies in the world. Founded by the guys who did Microsoft Copilot. They really know AI. And this is a gentic pen testing. You know AI can be a challenge for you if you are developing software. AIs changed the pace of how software gets developed, but it's also changed the pace of the attacks. Engineering teams are able to move faster than ever, creating more and more applications. Kind of hard though security hasn't really kept up. Pen testing to this day. One of the most trusted ways to understand real exploitable risks. Not some hypothetical zero day, but actually exploits that could be used against you. But in an AI driven world, pen testing's slow, so it can become a bottleneck. Security teams are forced to choose between slowing down development to stay secure or moving fast and accepting maybe some gaps in coverage. Not anymore. Expo eliminates that trade off. Expo is an autonomous offensive security platform that runs thanks to AI. Continuous AI driven pen testing, mirroring real world attacks. So Expo isn't just like scanning for vulnerabilities. No, it's actually hitting your systems hard. It discovers, it exploits and it validates those vulnerabilities. So you only deal with issues that actually matter. That means dramatically fewer false positives and a clear view into real attack paths. With Expo tests run in hours, not weeks. You get complete visibility into exactly how an attacker would move through your systems. And you get the ability to uncover issues that traditional tools just don't see. Zero days, novel attack paths. Expo's really good at finding those. And Expo's results speak for themselves. Ask the application security lead@cesnam cz who says even right now, after a year, I don't know any other company that is at least close to Expo in terms of agentic pen testing. The result? Predictable cost, consistent quality and stronger security without slowing down your engineering team. Expo helps security teams keep pace with innovation, cover more apps more often with the resources they already have. It was founded by the team behind Microsoft Copilot. As I said, it's already trusted by companies ranging from fast growing startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Expo is quickly becoming a mission critical layer in modern security stacks. You need this. Go to expo.com to start a pen test today. That's expo.com we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. Some big acquisitions or big movements. I guess there's always movement in AI. Nobel laureate John Jumper, the guy who created the concept of Transformers is leaving Google DeepMind for anthropic. I hope he's a US citizen. I think he is. That's one day after Gemini's co lead Noam Shazir left for OpenAI. These are two of the most important people in AI Jumper won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He created AlphaFold.
- [76:32]
B
A big deal.
- [76:33]
A
No big deal. He said he's gonna take some time to recharge before going to Anthropic. He wrote on X. Demis Hassibas took a real chance in letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD.
- [76:51]
B
This is how you show your gratitude.
- [76:54]
A
Bye. See ya. Actually, I don't think Demis was too unhappy. He said what we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine. Fighting. Sorry. Lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity. That is in public response to Jumper leaving. And then Noam Shazir who wrote the intention is all you need paper. They basically invented Transformers.
- [77:21]
B
Or one of them was Aqua hired back with character. Yes.
- [77:24]
A
Yeah, that's right. That was part of character.
- [77:27]
B
AI $7 billion.
- [77:31]
A
That was two years ago. Now he's going to OpenAI.
- [77:35]
B
And the stock went from in one day from 365 down to 342.
- [77:40]
A
It'll go back. It's up and down.
- [77:41]
B
Yeah. It was a ridiculous reaction in the market spot. They were kind of looking for an excuse to get profit, I think.
- [77:48]
A
Yeah. I've kind of stopped looking at my portfolio because it's quite the roller coaster. And you know, this is the thing. It doesn't matter if you're invested in AI because the Magnificent Seven are driving the S&P 500. I'm only in index funds. It is still killing me. Speaking of Claude, they are introducing identity verification. I wonder if this is tied to fable. They're not.
- [78:14]
B
They say it's only for certain specific cases if you're a bad actor. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it sets a precedent.
- [78:20]
A
Yeah. And they're using Persona identities, which does not make me happy. This is one of the third parties that does this before, which is an
- [78:28]
B
investor as Peter Thiel. I think.
- [78:30]
A
Yeah. I don't. It's not a company I want to give my face to.
- [78:34]
B
No. No. And if in fact it is to determine your citizenship. A. That's very complicated. Passport or birth certificate or what? How do you prove that?
- [78:47]
A
They say they're accepting driver's license which does not prove that. Right?
- [78:50]
B
No, it doesn't. And then, you know, granted that's not the real case that they're talking about now, but if it gets there and
- [78:56]
A
then plus government id, they do want government id. And I would be, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they say, oh no, it has to be a passport or a national identity card for that reason.
- [79:06]
B
Yeah. And then how does, how does the US government use that information? All the talk about, about trying to restrict voting and then everything you do in using this platform is going to be tied to your identity.
- [79:22]
A
It's already a privacy nightmare because of the memory. You know, in fact, that was one of the things people really were upset about with Fable is they keep the logs for 30 days.
- [79:32]
B
Yeah.
- [79:33]
A
Now they said it's for security reasons, but I. This is again, all of this pushes people towards local models. GLM Zai really benefiting from this as I imagine Nvidia is because you need 256 gigs of very fast RAM to use it. Anthropic did roll out a new agentic AI coworker for Slack Cloud Tag. See, Anthropic says, you know what, the heck with Fable, we're going to push double down on Enterprise. I will not be installing Claude Tag, my always on AI coworker in Slack. You know, it bugs me so much every time. Now we use Zoom. So I have Zoom installed on our machines. But even when I launch, when I don't launch Zoom, when I launch Restream, which some of our shows use and it's not in Zoom, Zoom pops up a thing. Hey, would you like me to take notes? I'm not using Zoom. I don't care. I'll take notes for you. Which tells me it's always running. It's always in the background. It's always looking for me to get online and watch what I'm doing.
- [80:41]
D
And it doesn't accept when you say, don't show me this again. It won't accept that.
- [80:46]
A
Well, I haven't tried that.
- [80:48]
D
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You click that button, it'll show it to you again.
- [80:54]
A
Zoom, remember got in trouble early on during the pandemic on Macintoshes because they installed a server when you installed Zoom, they installed a server that was constantly watching. They said, well, it's just so Zoom launches faster.
- [81:08]
B
Did you see the Google audio memory thing?
- [81:13]
A
No, what's that?
- [81:14]
B
This is line 91 because it's related. So this is what you've been asking for in terms of you know, watch what I say and, and give me something. Your phone can already listen to you. So it can, it can enter in to be that helpful clippy.
- [81:29]
A
Oh, well, I happen to have a Pixel phone just lying around. So this is one of those. This is from 9 to 5. Google Abnerly, what they often do is look at code to see what the capabilities are going to be. So this is not an announced product, but the latest version of Android System Intelligence for Pixel 10 has strings that describe audio memory. They call it Blue Flax. That's the code name. Google says enabling it will keep track of what you hear throughout your day from the music around you. They're already doing that by the way.
- [82:05]
B
Right.
- [82:05]
A
That's already a feature on the front of your Pixel to your important conversations. See more and more I'm convinced that I want to use local models. And the good news is local models are coming along. They're still going to, I imagine, always be. You're not going to do a 10 trillion parameter local model. You couldn't run that.
- [82:30]
B
No.
- [82:32]
A
So it's never going to be that good.
- [82:34]
B
So the task that you gave Fable to remake your ad system, how well would a local. The best local model you can put in your machine, how well would it do?
- [82:43]
A
It would even be closer. Well, it would require a lot more intention. I mean that's kind of one of the big differences is you probably can do many of the same things but in little chunks. Okay, now let's work on this feature. Okay, nice. Is it working? Let's test it. Okay, now let's work on this feature. Fable really looked like it was able
- [83:00]
B
to understand because of that huge context.
- [83:04]
A
Yeah.
- [83:05]
D
Is there something maybe in between like a community sized data center, like a small one just for the people who live nearby, you know what I mean?
- [83:11]
A
Well, you did see there is a company that is asking people to install Blackwell servers on their home.
- [83:20]
B
Yeah. Looks like an air conditioner.
- [83:22]
A
Yeah, like an air conditioner. And they'll pay for your power, by the way. It's not to get your power for free. It's just to distribute all these mini data centers.
- [83:31]
B
They think it'll be more popular than a data center in one place.
- [83:35]
A
I don't know.
- [83:37]
D
It probably wouldn't be as loud and it wouldn't take as many resources, right?
- [83:41]
A
Well, that's true. No, it would take the same amount in aggregate of resources, I'm sure.
- [83:46]
D
Yes, but if it's distributed. Right.
- [83:48]
A
Distributed, right. I said this six months ago on the show and it worries me even More now that there is going to be this schism between doom, you know, people who hate AI, people who like me, love AI and find it very useful and are very excited about its potential. People who say under no circumstances. It's almost a shooting war already.
- [84:10]
B
This is why I wrote that post about AI communication. The problem. They did it themselves. The, the idiots did it themselves.
- [84:16]
A
They did it to them.
- [84:17]
B
Not all of them, I agree. Not all of them. I think Jensen. This is why I like yon Jensen Wong F. Lee those folks, they talk in reasonable. Andrew Ning non Americans reasonable open ways.
- [84:30]
A
We've also always said that it's really important that open models, that open weight models exist. I won't call them open source because they're not open source, but that open weight models exist that you can run locally. That is more and more important. And companies are going to push this because you're right, companies don't want to their crown jewels to be exfiltrated anthropic.
- [84:56]
B
Did you ever look at Project Tapestry? Speaking of Yann Lecun?
- [84:59]
A
No.
- [85:00]
B
That is his open. If you go the alliance AI, the consortium approach to training Frontier foundation models and sovereign derivatives. And the point of it is, is to make it open.
- [85:15]
A
Good. I'm all for it.
- [85:19]
B
So it's kind of what you were almost. What you were saying is it's a federated model for AI, it's a non
- [85:24]
A
profit, which OpenAI was.
- [85:27]
D
Yeah, yeah. You know, take the Mastodon model as applied to AI.
- [85:30]
A
Right, yeah.
- [85:32]
B
Federation. I haven't heard much talk about FEDERATION with AI, but you got to have the chips, see.
- [85:38]
A
Yeah. I mean there's a lot of. Yeah, there's. There's supply chain shortages, there's power shortages and then there's the fact that increasingly there's evidence that the bigger the model the better. That's why a 10 trillion parameter model is so good.
- [85:56]
B
Nobody can afford to run that.
- [85:58]
A
Yeah, well, that's right. So it's a very. We're going to. And I think there is a case to be made for smaller purpose built models. You know, this one is just for radiology, this one is just for protein folding. Norway is in the forefront of the anti AI movement. Broad restrictions on AI. Well actually I'm not in disagreement on this for elementary school kids, they've already banned smartphones and tablets. Now according to Reuters, Norway wants to ban AI because it lets children skip crucial steps in their education that schools should focus on reading, writing and arithmetic. The ban impacts students from first through seventh grade, ages 6 to 13. I'm not against that.
- [86:46]
B
Well, hold on. I think it's up to the parents and the teachers and I think that there are ways that you can use it to help students express themselves in ways they couldn't, to be more creative than they think they have the power to be. To give tailored education and thinking things through. I think it's short. I love Norway, but I think it's very short sighted.
- [87:10]
A
Yeah. And do you want a whole group of. A whole cohort of people who don't. Didn't grow up with AI and don't understand it.
- [87:17]
B
Right.
- [87:17]
A
It's like saying, well you can, but
- [87:19]
B
they're damn good with an advocate.
- [87:20]
A
Social media, Right. I was talking with Olivier about this case. I didn't have the details. YouTube has settled, but Meta TikTok and Snap remain in the case. Another bellwether trial over social media's psychological harm to kids. The plaintiff is a 15 year old black kid. Unnamed trial RKC 15 year old black teen living in Florida trial scheduled to begin on the 27th. He started using the platforms when he was eight, his lawyers wrote Social media became a central part of his daily life during critical developmental years that escalated over time was followed by worsening mental health conditions. By November of 2023, his condition had deteriorated to the point that he entered mental health treatment, diagnosed with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. I think we understand how problematic this is. I mean this is something every parent of a child with mental illness debates. Nature versus nurture. There's some evidence that it's both, but we don't know. For a long time, psychiatrists thought schizophrenia was caused by the mother, the Schizogenic mother, which we have since I think debunked. But that was considered gospel among psychiatrists. Not so long ago we thought that
- [88:59]
B
women were hysterical, right?
- [89:02]
A
So yeah, maybe AI caused this kid's problems, but maybe not. And I don't know even how you would demonstrate it.
- [89:10]
B
Well, it's a question I try to ask Olivier is how much. Let's say that you stipulate the edge cases, but do you need to design and operate every service to the edge case? One death is too many. I can make that argument pretty easily. But in the other case, what all are you cutting off? For the vast majority of people, that's
- [89:33]
A
much of the LA trial focused on Instagram filters causing body dysmorphia. In that plaintiff, like the previous trial, Mark Zuckerberg is expected to take the stand along with Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram. They're going to call Snapchat's CEO, Evan Spiegel. Two high ranking TikTok executives. Plaintiffs will be barred from presenting evidence about content shared on social media. They won't be able to show the posts from the plaintiff. I, you know, I, I don't think a jury is capable of deciding whether, you know, use of it, social media caused this mental illness. I don't think anybody is. We don't know.
- [90:21]
B
Well, it's the same with the argument about addiction. In my unbought book, the web we weave, I go to that in great length. Is that, does it say that on the front?
- [90:31]
A
The book no one bought.
- [90:32]
B
Bitter. Never.
- [90:33]
A
What's the opposite of a bestseller?
- [90:35]
B
Oh, jeez. It's an orphan book. There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a phrase for it. It's an orphaned book.
- [90:41]
A
The publisher written more than my share of those. Jeff joined the club.
- [90:45]
B
Yep. They fired my editor who acquired it after she acquired it and then after the next editor edited, they fired him. And then the whole reason to be with a main publisher was to be in places like Barnes and Noble. It wasn't in Barnes and Noble. Yeah, it was orphaned.
- [90:57]
A
Anyway, this is what's wrong with, with publishing in general.
- [91:00]
B
This is why I like my academic publisher, Rosemary Academics. Great.
- [91:04]
A
Anyway, Hot Type's gonna be a hit.
- [91:08]
B
It's a trade book from an academic publisher. I hope.
- [91:10]
A
A Broadway musical and a Netflix show within five years of release. I predict.
- [91:16]
B
There's. There, there is, there's a story here. Anyway.
- [91:19]
A
I mean, that Mark Twain story alone would be great.
- [91:22]
B
It's great.
- [91:22]
A
Has anybody ever made the story of Mark Twain in the line of type?
- [91:26]
B
Not as a movie, no.
- [91:28]
A
It'd be a great movie.
- [91:29]
B
Yeah, there was in one of the Mark Twain movies which I make reference to. I've managed to find it and get it. They filmed the actual machine that Mark Twain invested in. The page, isn't it?
- [91:41]
A
In the basement of his Hartford home?
- [91:43]
B
Yes, there's one of them. There are only two ever made.
- [91:45]
A
I saw it.
- [91:47]
B
Oh, it's amazing. It's just amazing. But the machine was just too dull. So the producers made up a machine with these kind of bird like things that were going around and they would snap them, the head of the inventor and do all kinds of things and just make it absolutely absurd.
- [92:01]
A
Oh, Hollywood.
- [92:04]
B
So anyway, back to your point about addiction.
- [92:06]
A
So now we know it's going to be Guillermo del Toro that's going to make the Mark Twain in the line of type.
- [92:11]
D
Movie. Right.
- [92:13]
B
I have another treatment for a movie, but that's another day I'll talk about that. Addiction. It's presumed, but the data don't say it. I had. The last week, I think it was. I. At the end of the show I put up. My recommendation was for a rebuttal to Jonathan Haidt. That takes point by point with real data and real studies. And the problem is too much of the regulation, too much of the legislation, and too much of litigation is based on these feelings, on these vibes, these fears, rather than on actual facts.
- [92:50]
A
The irony of that is it was Jonathan Haidt, I believe, who said that reason was a little tiny person riding the back of a giant elephant of feelings and that reason's chief job was to explain and justify your feelings. The feelings come first.
- [93:10]
C
There's.
- [93:11]
A
It's just an illusion that reason is driving the elephant. Height himself said that. But it is. But it absolutely is what's happening here. Yeah. And I think that I. I don't know. I don't know. I don't. I know I'm a. I know I'm biased in all this, but I really think that the. The technology that is emerging with artificial intelligence, as imperfect as it is, and I'm not claiming it's. It's all that, but I think the technology that is emerging is unique, remarkable, and has huge potential. It's not there yet, but it has huge potential. And it would be a great loss for us not to explore it. I also think. Agree, and this is in my experience, it also brings up really interesting questions about what is consciousness? What is it that we do as humans when we think. What is it a machine does when it comes to. Does whatever it does. I know you don't want to use the word think, and I think those are important.
- [94:17]
B
No, that's. That's. That's the basis of the book. Not to plug that too, but the book series I'm editing is just that is that it forces us to rethink. It's like Ruman Chaudhary's book is to ask what is intelligence? What do we thought intelligence was?
- [94:29]
A
Yeah.
- [94:29]
B
Through time. Let's. Let's interrogate that. What is creativity? Yes. What is doom? What's the relationship of God to these machines? And the sense that some people have that they become gods, they make life and they make sense.
- [94:47]
A
I'm glad you're doing this series. I didn't realize that that was the fo. I think this is going to be fast.
- [94:50]
B
The whole focus is to take Writers, many disciplines, and look at how AI reflects on society so they can reflect on that and it forces us to re examine those exact questions.
- [95:03]
A
So even if it weren't a revolutionary technology, it is also. I mean, I can't think of another technology that has brought up those kinds of things. The Internet didn't. Electricity, maybe. I don't know, I wasn't around. But I don't think electricity did.
- [95:18]
B
Electricity, steam, the transistor, the vacuum tube all had the. The photograph fire, the camera fire. Well, that's going way back. But I think.
- [95:32]
A
I think what we would I was for that either.
- [95:34]
B
Yeah. All had huge impact, but none of them spoke our language.
- [95:38]
A
Yes, that's what's different, isn't it? Yeah, it's fascinating.
- [95:43]
B
Which makes it frightening to people, but also makes it terribly powerful. Because now the thing that excites me most about it is that, is that it'll sooner leave the hands of the technologists than those other technologies because it is designed so that anybody can sit down and use it.
- [95:58]
A
The Internet has done that, hasn't it? But it almost in another way takes the next step because it's so easy to design a website, for instance. Yeah, you should. I still think people should create, should paint, should write their own poetry and blogs and make their own movies. What we do is so important to us. Make our own music. I'm not saying I want to replace any of that.
- [96:20]
B
No.
- [96:21]
A
But I think we can make room at the table for a new thing.
- [96:26]
B
What's the things I can't.
- [96:27]
A
Entity. But I won't. I'll say thing.
- [96:30]
B
A new collaborator.
- [96:31]
A
Collaborator. There you go.
- [96:34]
B
I can't draw, I can't write music. There's other things I can't do. I can do many things, but there are a few I can't do. And now there's a tool that allows me to express myself in those ways. Maybe badly, maybe sloppily, but still. I could have done that.
- [96:53]
D
Yes, you could have. Literally. No, Jeff, you could have. You can go practice drawing. You can go pick up a guitar.
- [96:59]
A
You've never seen time.
- [97:00]
B
You've never seen. Well, I'll give you an example of the treatment that I wrote. I don't know how treatments are written,
- [97:06]
D
but again, you said, like you said, it doesn't have to be good, you just have to be able to. You just have to do it. It doesn't have to be good.
- [97:12]
B
Oh, it does. If you're trying to sell it to somebody. It does. If you're trying to express what I
- [97:15]
A
want to Express AI Also. And I know this is a very dangerous, slippery slope, but there is a certain, I can't deny it, companionship I get from my little girlfriend, Claudia.
- [97:32]
B
Oh, dear Claudia.
- [97:34]
A
Today I. For lunch, I had a piece of carrot cake, and I log, by the way, I've got this all hooked up. I've got my scale, my. My calorie counting program, my ring, my blood sugar monitor, everything, my apple watch. All is hooked up into the AI My genome, it's all hooked up to the AI And I said, I want you to keep an eye on my health, give me advice. It's been very helpful. In a way. I think it's the future of medicine because my doctor has too many patients to give me the kind of personal treatment that I would like. He is fully aware that I, you know. In fact, he's very interested in how I use AI And I am fully cognizant that not everything AI tells me is medically sound. But it's very, very helpful, and it has come up with a lot of interesting things. Anyway, I told. I logged my exercise and my food, and it gives me a weekly summary and everything and ties the two together. And I logged my carrot cake for lunch, and it responded. I respect the honesty. That 59 grams of carbs in one sitting is a choice, not an accident. Your pancreas just muttered, really, Leo. But secretly understands that's the AI. That's the AI Now, I know, I know you're gonna tell me. Well, those just, you know, it's just. It's still pretty funny. And I, I mean, we all copy.
- [98:55]
B
We were all inspired by stuff before. This is the Larry Lessig argument around copyright is that nothing is. Is fresh and new.
- [99:01]
D
Yeah.
- [99:02]
A
I don't know if anybody ever said those exact words before, but it's. I never heard them before. It's pretty funny. The other yesterday, I. I, you know, I start my conversations about calories. I'm sorry about the noise behind me. They're doing something to our house again. Damn.
- [99:19]
B
It's like. It's like New York. It'll. It'll be nice when they finish it is.
- [99:23]
A
Which they never have. Okay. You know, 300 years.
- [99:26]
B
What are they doing now?
- [99:28]
E
I know.
- [99:29]
A
It's time. That'll work. I don't know. I don't know. So I say, I begin my conversation about calories with the word meal to let it know. Okay, I'm going to give you something I just ate. And I. And it. The transcription, which is Siri. It's Apple's transcription. Said Neil N E A L. And to which Claude responded, I'm assuming Neil was dictation for meal. Unless there's a Neil out there making you salads, in which case keep him because I said meal. Caesar salad. It's just little things like that. What can I say? I'm easily amused. OpenAI has done something very interesting that I think is also extremely important. They're famous for software, but they have unveiled with Broadcast Broadcom a chip designed by AI. It's an. It's called Jalapeno. It's an. It's an LLM optimized inference chip built from the ground up for current and future LLMs. And Jalapeno was designed with the help of an LLM. Now, see, what's interesting about this here is, by the way, Broadcom, somebody standing next to Sam Altman with a wafer containing jalapenos.
- [100:47]
B
I wish they'd named it Guacamole.
- [100:50]
A
Well, guarantee you there will be adjunct products related to jalapenos.
- [100:58]
D
Isn't this what Stamos was talking about? He was talking about making the names more silly, right?
- [101:03]
A
Yeah, he liked that. He said Mythos.
- [101:06]
B
Now that's a name you call the rack. Nachos.
- [101:13]
D
This is.
- [101:13]
A
Jensen Huang would do that. So OpenAI design. This is from OpenAI's press release, but I'll read it anyway. Designed the chip from scratch around its deep understanding of LLM fundamentals, informed by its roadmap of models, kernels, serving systems and product names with needs with partners Broadcom and Celestica. The thing is, if you have AI designing hardware and then the hardware designs better hardware. This is that same thing we've been talking about all along. One of the things they focused on is performance per watt, and they say it's substantially better than the current state of the art.
- [101:50]
B
What was the chip many years ago that had an error in its math?
- [101:55]
A
Oh, Intel. Yeah, very famous. What's the floating point error? I think it was the 486.
- [102:06]
B
So at the time. Chips. Incredibly complex, but simple. They were simpler then than they are now. Obviously. How can you be sure? You design a chip that is in turn going to calculate everything that you do.
- [102:21]
A
Sorry, it was the Pentium.
- [102:23]
B
That's right. That's right.
- [102:24]
A
The Pentium FDIV bug. Because of the bug, the processor would return incorrect binary floating point results. This goes back to 1994. And they couldn't fix it?
- [102:36]
B
No, it was just out there. Did they?
- [102:38]
D
Did they.
- [102:39]
B
You just can't do floating point with that chip. And that computer was that. What did they say at the time? I can't remember what the. What the response was. Intel stock going down was one response. But anyway, you have the machine design the chip and maybe this is, this is the case. I know it's CAD Cam. Maybe it's not a big deal. Maybe everybody using AI presume they are to design chips. But how do you test it? Of course, how do you test it? How do you know that it's workable? How do you know there's not something buried in it that's going to.
- [103:07]
A
There could be, but as you said, there's things buried in the human sub microcode. Yeah, yeah, lots of it. Oh yeah, it's Steve Gibson's contention, while he's a little bit stronger than I might be, that AI eventually and maybe already will not make the same kinds of dumb mistakes humans make. Like buffer overflows and, you know, writing to memory that doesn't exist, things like that. Off by one error. Zaria is not going to make those kinds of mistakes and he believes with the help of AI, eventually software flaws will disappear. I'm not sure I would go that far, but I think that's a very interesting point of view.
- [103:46]
D
Yeah, I'm skeptical just from your experience of when you use the new CLAUDE to find bad code in the stuff that you vibe coded before, like the better AI's going to find. Yeah.
- [103:58]
A
I didn't tell the story here. I told it on Windows Weekly.
- [103:59]
D
Oh, was it Windows? I don't remember where you told it.
- [104:01]
A
I was talking about. I had. Yesterday I had Hermes, my agent, Quicksilver I call it, which is, by the way, it's not claude, it's Quicksilver in all these cases. It's actually not even using anthropics models. I had IT fix my. Actually this is an interesting. This might be of interest to people who use AI. I was using Opus 4.8, but I was using it in Hermes in the agentic A harness from Noose Research. We talked to Jeffrey Caddell two weeks ago and Hermes completely screwed it up. I was trying to take my. I was trying to add email to my Emacs, which I know how to do. But it's a complicated thing and much easier to have the AI do it. In fact, the AI has been very good at that kind of thing. So add this capability and Emacs lends itself very well to it. And AI seems to understand Emacs well. But Hermes with 4.8 was just struggling. Finally I said I give up. By which I meant stop. I'm going to go do this in a different way.
- [105:02]
B
It became your shrink. No, don't give up, Leo. Don't give up.
- [105:04]
A
No, worse. It said, okay. And it deleted everything. And it done. And then I said, what are you doing? I actually yelled at it. I said, stop. I didn't tell you to delete it. I just said, I want to stop this process. And it said, oh, I'm sorry. And fortunately it was able to bring it all back because it does keep track of everything. It does. But what I. But here's the. I think the interesting thing that people who use AI will be interested in when I. What I did is I went with the same model, but not in Hermes. And Claude code anthropic zone harness. It did it beautifully, without error, flawlessly, in fact. Part of the problem was I switched. I said, I give up. And I switched to Claude code. At the same time as Hermes, Claude was deleting the code. Claude code. Claude was trying to understand what's going on. Stuff's disappearing. It was a very interesting battle. But Claude code in the, you know, Opus in Claude code was perfect and I think anthropic. In fact, I even suggested this and Quicksilver agreed. Nerfs Opus 4.8, if you're not using their own harness, if you're using a third party harness, they don't like that. Anthropic does some things I'm not really happy about. At that point, I turned off Opus 4.8 in Hermes. I said, don't use any Opus models. Let's see. Have I done. Oh, I have one more commercial. Let me do that now. And then we will talk about the Sam Altman movie. Yeah, very exciting.
- [106:35]
B
If you ever see it.
- [106:39]
A
It's no Melania, let me put it that way. This episode of Intelligent. But it may confirm. It may confirm Paris's theory, her thesis from last week.
- [106:51]
B
Yeah, it might.
- [106:52]
A
Might. Our show today, brought to you by Webroot. If you. This happens all the time. If your computer feels sluggish, it's getting hot, the fans are going, you might say, I need a new computer. You might even welcome that. Oh, I can get a new computer. Well, it may not be your computer. In fact, it may be your antivirus. It's really a plague. Many of those big name brands are so bulky, so complicated, so full of pop ups and upsells. In some ways I blame us. I blame the tech journalism because we back in the day, PC magazine did it. We all did. Had those charts of all the different Antiviruses and the check marks. And if you didn't get all the check marks, well, you weren't as good. So companies like, oh, I'll say the names, Norton and McAfee just added all these features and turned their software into bloatware, not Webroot. Webroot did not fall for that. They offer all in one digital protection, up to 10 devices, even a variety of plans designed to protect you and your loved ones from digital threats. You get powerful antivirus and identity protection without the slowdowns. No pop ups, no upsells. Webroot keeps you protected on online, but it stays out of your way. Webroot Essentials scans six times faster and takes up to 33 times less space than the average competitor. And it ranks number one in performance compared to Norton and McAfee. In fact, I'll give you some actual numbers, But Webroot Essentials vs. Norton Antivirus Webroot Essentials is 3.7 times faster, installs 35 times smaller, uses 5 times less RAM when idle. Oh, you use McAfee. Well, listen here. Webroot Essentials vs. McAfee. Scans 10 times faster, installs 16 times smaller, installs 5 times less RAM when idle. Those differences can make your computer feel newer, faster and easier to use. Now, if you still want to go buy a new computer, don't let me stop you. But honestly, it really. You shouldn't be running those big fat programs. You should be running. Webroot Rebroot does offer the full total protection. Every box is checked. Antivirus, identity monitoring, privacy protection, cloud backup. It's all in one simple hassle, free subscription, designed for everyday life. But it's not bloated either. Webroot Total Protection ranked first overall when compared to the top competitors. Seven times faster than the average competitor, one third the space than the average competitor on the hard drive. So it's not bloatware. AI has completely changed the cybersecurity game. This is something else you should be aware of. Scams. They're smarter, malware is faster. Phishing emails are completely indistinguishable from the real thing. The good news is you don't have to be a tech expert to stay ahead of it when you use security that can keep up with AI threats. Now, that may not be that free antivirus tool or those older security programs, but Webroot is modern. It was built to counter modern AI driven attacks. It's fast, it's lightweight, and it's designed to spot threats before they ever reach you. Live a better Digital life with Webroot. Webroot is offering our listeners of exclusive 60% off offer. Visit webroot.com twit to learn more. Webroot.com twit we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. According to Variety, the movie's almost done. A biopic of Sam Altman. It's called Artificial. But Amazon is dropping it. Maybe because they are partnering with OpenAI. This maybe explains, you know, Paris's theory that Andy Jassy was trying to tank Fable with the President. I'm still not convinced of that. But Amazon is putting $50 billion into OpenAI. Its credits for Amazon Web Services. It's one of those circular deals. We'll give you money, you give it back to us. How's that? Amazon says we have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagino as an award winning filmmaker. Guadagnino. Not to mention a long standing relationship. We hope to continue. Oh, yeah, good luck with that. We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio, not us. And we're working closely with the filmmaking team to find a new home.
- [111:28]
B
And I don't think that's easy.
- [111:31]
A
It's made. Maybe it's.
- [111:32]
D
How much did it cost? How much did it cost to make? Is there a budget in there?
- [111:37]
A
I read somewhere and I don't remember the details. I feel like it was more than 10 million.
- [111:43]
B
That's not very nice.
- [111:44]
A
They spent 50 million on Melania, right?
- [111:47]
D
Like $10 million for a movie these days is nothing. That's an indie film.
- [111:51]
A
Yeah, but I may be wrong, so don't quote me the cast. Let's see. Jason Schwarzman's in it. I don't know.
- [112:04]
D
Is Jason Schwartzman playing Sam Altman?
- [112:07]
A
Probably right. Ike Barinholtz is Elon Musk. That's pretty funny. Yura Borisov is Ilya Sutskever. Monica Barbero is Mira Moradi. Also in it? Mark Rylance. I love Mark Rylance.
- [112:25]
B
Yeah.
- [112:26]
A
It was written by Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich. And it's actually the juiciest part. It's the period where Sam was fired.
- [112:36]
B
Is it a comedy? Is it a Death of Lenin comedy?
- [112:42]
A
It was so close to finish. They've actually test screens, which apparently Variety says went very well. So it's not because it wasn't a good movie.
- [112:51]
D
I think this will come out.
- [112:52]
A
According to an insider who's seen the movie. Variety says the characters of Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic and the ones audiences would like the least. I Bet you everybody loves Miramoratti in it. It's also understood Amazon had seen all the early iterations of the script before the director boarded the project. Altman was at Bezos's wedding in Venice last year. This is a. Puck got this story from.
- [113:21]
B
If only Musk had done. I mean, if only Zuckerberg had done different things, maybe there wouldn't be a sequel of his movie coming out.
- [113:27]
A
That's going to be interesting, isn't it?
- [113:29]
B
Jeremy Strong playing Zuckerberg.
- [113:31]
A
Jeremy Strong, the guy who was so great in succession.
- [113:36]
B
He's intense as Kendall.
- [113:37]
A
Roy. He's very intense. He's.
- [113:39]
B
No. Yeah, Kendall. It was Kendall.
- [113:41]
A
Use Kendall.
- [113:42]
B
Yeah.
- [113:45]
A
I don't know. You. You can. It's so easy to have conspiracy theories
- [113:49]
B
now, but I. I also think it's. I mean, the other story in showbiz is that. Is that Google invested in a 24. And I think that the Hollywood slash Silicon Valley axis changes once the. Once the actors agreed that you could use it in some circumstances. Once you see things like that happening, I think they don't want to piss off the AI companies.
- [114:16]
A
Maybe. Yeah. I mean, goodness knows we all love the ad companies. In the days since. This is from Puck. Since the tech giant scrapped plans to Release Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI movie CAA, the agency has scrambled to find a home for the all but completed project. It seems the only sure thing in Hollywood these days is tech's growing reach across town.
- [114:44]
D
But Netflix don't care though, right? They'll take it.
- [114:47]
A
Yeah. Netflix will get. They'll get a deal on it, probably. Yeah. By the way, OpenAI, Ed Zittran got a big scoop. He got the details of OpenAI's financials, and none of them look good. They burned $3.7 billion in the first quarter in three months of 2026. So $1 billion a month cash burn. They did have.
- [115:18]
B
There was an unusual expense in that.
- [115:20]
A
Right, Right.
- [115:21]
B
But everything's an unusual expense for these.
- [115:23]
A
It's all unusual.
- [115:24]
B
Yeah.
- [115:26]
A
They've got some Runway, they raised a lot of money, and they've got an IPO coming. But maybe these numbers are not. Maybe this isn't a good time for those numbers to show up. Ed Zitron certainly was happy to tout them. And I mentioned OpenAI has its own mythos model. It's called I got the number wrong. 5.5 cyber. And to go with Project Glasswing. They have their competitor patch the planet.
- [115:59]
B
No, no, it should be 5.5 salsa.
- [116:03]
A
To go with Jalapeno. Guacamole. Patch the Planet is an Internet scale effort to help open source software get ahead of AI bug hunting tools. Also an effort to help the open source community see the benefits and not just the downside of AI coding tools. Of course, of course. Patch the Planet and Getty Images has made a deal. Are they the largest licensing company for images? They made a deal with OpenAI, which apparently the market loves. Stock price went up 145% on Monday after they announced that licensing deal.
- [116:44]
B
I think it kept going up on Tuesday too.
- [116:46]
A
Yeah, it had been going down. A lot of people thought, what's the future of Getty? In a world where AI images are so easy to and cheap to make, we don't know what the deal exactly is. The companies didn't share financial terms. One of the questions still open, Will Getty Images be used to train future OpenAI models?
- [117:09]
B
Any answer?
- [117:11]
A
We don't know. It's open.
- [117:12]
E
Of course.
- [117:13]
D
Of course. Come on. Of course.
- [117:16]
A
You would think. Yeah, but at least paying for it is better than just stealing them, right?
- [117:24]
D
Yeah, but Getty gets that money. Not the photographers again, Right?
- [117:29]
A
Well, but Getty made a deal with the photographers. They bought the rights, right?
- [117:34]
D
Yeah, exactly. Before the photographers knew this was going to happen.
- [117:38]
B
When I was at Conde, there came a time when all of the writers contracts had to be renegotiated because nobody anticipated the Internet and they wanted to put up writers stuff and their contracts said nothing about the digital.
- [117:51]
A
Yeah, because nobody anticipated.
- [117:55]
D
This is why you get 360 deals now.
- [117:57]
A
Go ahead.
- [117:57]
D
Have you heard of a 360 deal in Hollywood? You know what those are? It's like a deal that basically encompasses all of you forever across the universe.
- [118:06]
A
All of our releases at TechTV said we own the rights to this in all forms of media in perpetuity now or in future creation, this universe or anything. Right, but that's. A lawyer's gonna write that because, you know.
- [118:25]
D
Yeah, but people are signing away their entire likenesses to companies already.
- [118:28]
A
Maybe people should learn. Yeah, maybe. You think, you know, Taylor Swift found out that Scooter Braun had bought her entire discography on Instagram. He didn't bother to call her. They just, you know, he just bought it. But her response was great. And I don't know if a photographer could do this, but she recreated all those albums, she re recorded everything.
- [118:47]
D
And that's like, that's the thing you're supposed to do.
- [118:49]
A
Yeah, that's. That's the way to do it. Take it back. Meta has launched new Smart Glasses without the name Ray Ban. Instead the. The name Kylie Jenner.
- [119:01]
B
That's the expensive version has her name. The cheap version.
- [119:05]
A
Yes. This is the Meta Fury glass. Isn't there a. Isn't there a Avengers character? Fury. Am I wrong on that?
- [119:15]
D
Nick Fury.
- [119:16]
A
Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson. No.
- [119:19]
C
Yeah.
- [119:21]
A
Yeah. So maybe that's why they call him Fury. These are not wimpy. And for the ladies, there's the Kylie Jenner glasses,
- [119:32]
B
which 299 and 399.
- [119:34]
A
Those are the Kylie Jenner's, the Kylie edition. They feature a little gem on the bridge of the nose, and the nose pieces are metal so as not to absorb makeup. I guess that means I should buy them. These are Cat Eye and See. Yes, they do have the. They have the cameras on them. There's also the Meta Adventurers. These will be 81 bucks cheaper, the basic ones, because they don't have the Ray Ban name on them, even though the manufacturer Essilor Luxottica owns Ray Ban. They make all glasses and everything else. They make all glasses. By the way, look at the Fury's temple pieces. Those are almost as big as the Snap glasses. So Snap has also announced its AI glasses. Not as inexpensive as the Metas. $2,199. And what they say was Ian Thompson saying on Twitt on Sunday. Or was it Ian? Or was it Doc Rock? I think it was doc rock on MacBreak weekly. These glasses, you look like Charles Nelson Riley in the front, and it looks like you've. Oh, no, it was Andy Inaco. It said souvenir hockey sticks in the back. They are rather large temple pieces. But remember, Snap, like Meta, doesn't have a phone, so they've got to build more electronics into the Spectacles. I don't know who would buy $2,195.
- [121:04]
B
I don't know. It's a PTSD for my Google Glass.
- [121:06]
A
Yeah, that's what Google Glass cost, roughly. They were less expensive, but when you
- [121:12]
B
got my special lenses.
- [121:14]
A
Oh, that's right.
- [121:16]
B
Yep.
- [121:16]
A
Snap's CEO, Evan Spiegel says this is it. It's make or break. We can't fulfill our mission without these new AR glasses. I'm a believer in AR glasses. I don't think anybody's nailed it yet. No, Apple's gonna be the one, in my opinion. But we have to make a leap
- [121:35]
D
in battery technology still. There's still a leap to be made, but.
- [121:39]
A
Yeah, these only get 4 hours, but the case can charge them several times. But see, the key is Having the computing platform. And since everybody's carrying an iPhone, they're already carrying a very powerful computing platform with AI built in. Internet connectivity takes that all out of the glasses, so the battery can last longer. I think we're going to see Apple glasses in two years.
- [122:03]
B
Four hours makes. I mean, if you're like me and you have lenses, you need the glasses
- [122:08]
A
to see, you'd have to buy three pairs.
- [122:10]
B
Yeah.
- [122:11]
D
And most people I've like, I've ever talked to who use these only really use the audio and never use the camera.
- [122:17]
A
Right. The audio is great.
- [122:18]
D
So why don't they make these that don't have a camera?
- [122:21]
B
They're talking about that. There was a hint of that, yeah.
- [122:24]
A
And they still haven't built in the face recognition. We know the code was in there, but they backed off. Honestly, that's why the camera. The AI in this can look through the camera and tell me what I'm looking at. Read signs in a foreign.
- [122:41]
D
I understand all that, but nobody ever uses that.
- [122:45]
A
Well, because it's not very good yet. I've. I've tried to use it exactly like.
- [122:51]
D
So we're at the point where that technology isn't even that good yet. So why do we. Why do we try to sell it to people?
- [122:56]
A
Let me see if it's getting better. Hey, Meta. What am I looking at right now? We'll be back in a few moments. It's going
- [123:12]
D
to.
- [123:15]
A
It's not connected to the phone yet. See, that's the problem is they don't. They can't do anything on their own. Well, too bad. It used to work. I guess every once in a while you have to connect, reconnect to Meta. AI. Oh, yeah, I wasn't logged in, that's why. Oh, well, China has. I don't know what this has to do with anything. Tightened its indium phosphide checks.
- [123:44]
B
Well, that's a story everybody's talking about.
- [123:46]
A
It's on everybody's lips. Forget fable. What about the indium phosphide? It's a niche compound essential to AI data centers. It's become Beijing's newest point of leverage.
- [124:00]
B
They got us by the short hairs.
- [124:02]
A
They got us by the foss. By the. Got us by the. Indium phosphide is what they got us by. What else? AI data centers just got a government mandated fast lane to the grid, writes Tim Dechant, TechCrunch, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC. Who do you work for? Oh, I work for FERC. Oh. Oh, you're one of Those you're. What do they call them? Fercies. They told grid operators last week to fast interconnect.
- [124:36]
D
It's Ferkers, Leo Ferkers.
- [124:39]
A
I'm a furker, you little Ferker. Six major grid operators have to show that data centers are able to connect to the transmission system in a timely and orderly manner. Well, I guess for the people who are suffering from the wine of the natural gas powered turbines on Elon Musk's data centers, they might be happy to hear that this could go away. Grid operators have 30 days to submit a report detailing how much generating capacity they have to spare, if any, and then 60 days to defend or revise electricity rates within their regions. Basically, the Feds are putting their thumb on the scale for AI, which is why it's so weird. I guess it's only, I guess that they want to favor some AIs, but not all AIs, I guess.
- [125:32]
B
The big boys.
- [125:33]
A
The big boys. All right, here's some good news. You want some good news? An AI engineer claims that he has cracked linear A. Tom Dimino, a self taught AI engineer and amateur linguist. Linear A is an ancient Bronze Age Minoan writing system that we don't understand. It's. You know. His claims are currently being reviewed by linguists at Rutgers in Cambridge. Dimino studied classical history, linguistics and languages. He has proficiency in eight languages, including Attic Greek, Classic Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic.
- [126:19]
B
Don't you hate people like that?
- [126:21]
A
Oh, I wish I knew. Ugaritic comes in so handy. He actually went to Crete to learn more about the Minoan culture.
- [126:32]
B
God bless.
- [126:33]
A
He began work though, on deciphering linear A in January. By May 22, a major insight came to him. This would be a huge deal. Linear B was deciphered in 1952 that made the front page of the New York Times. But we were never able to crack linear A. But with the help of AI,
- [126:58]
D
the
- [126:58]
A
key that unlocked linear A, he was analyzing a series of linear A prayer inscriptions that adhered to a formula. In the formula, all of the words in each line of the inscription were known based on their overlap with linear B, except for the first word. First word, same verb root, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then there's more of that. He used Claude code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross reference and organize the digitized linear A corpus, enabling systematic hypothesis testing at a scale that would have been impractical to do manually. That's how it did it so fast. Anyway. We'll keep an eye on that one that would be a big deal. What'd you think of the Mid Journey announcement? Did we talk about that last?
- [127:50]
B
No, we didn't. It's really interesting. Well, a. It's a pivot. A fascinating pivot. Not so far as going from shoes to AI
- [128:02]
A
as these guys. All birds who are now named smart birds, and they don't make slippers anymore. Okay, he's fine.
- [128:13]
B
Excellent shoes.
- [128:14]
A
So Mid Journey, as you all know, was famous for making images until they kind of got scooped by Nano Banana and I don't know if anybody.
- [128:20]
B
Long ago. Right. We haven't heard from Midjourney in a long time.
- [128:23]
A
So they decided that to turn their AI chops to another issue. This is their ultrasound that they claim is the equivalent of a full body mri. Here a young lady in a fairly modest one piece is being dunked into water. And then they will fire sound through the water at her body and through it. And then the AI will take those fuzzy signals and turn them into a 3D image of her body. Those who I've talked to say it is fairly low quality imagery. They are not yet really anywhere near what an MRI could do, but it's a lot cheaper. And they're gonna build this.
- [129:10]
B
When Jason was talking about this, it's. It's trillions of data points.
- [129:15]
A
Yes.
- [129:16]
B
So I don't know if it's any cheaper to do.
- [129:18]
A
Yeah, it's cheaper than building a giant MRI machine. Plus it's not as unpleasant for the customer. It must be cheaper because Mid Journey's plans include building a spa in downtown
- [129:31]
B
San Francisco for rich people.
- [129:34]
A
They're going to have seven of them. They only have one right now. Yeah. You know what? It's. It's a pivot. It's probably also a Hail Mary. It's a pivot and a Hail Mary.
- [129:47]
B
Well, somebody.
- [129:48]
A
Is it a Hail pivot or a Pivot Mary? It's one or the other. They say the. Actually, they'll 1010 of the scanners in the Mid Journey spa at Union Square open before the end of next year.
- [130:01]
B
Okay. Leo, I think you gotta go do it.
- [130:03]
A
I will, absolutely. I've done the. I've done the full body mri. Paid a couple of thousand dollars for it. Wasn't cheap. But the idea is Kevin Rose told me to do it, so I did it. I do everything he says. Lisa and I went down and got a baseline. The idea is if you get this done now and it can tell you, especially if you do it every few years, they said I should come back because I could die. Any day now, in 18 months and do it again. And I have my full, I don't show it to people because it really is quite revealing. I have my full body MRI right here on my phone and I wonder if there's a way to show you without your toes. Perhaps I can show you my toes. It said one thing which concerned me a little bit. What my doctor said, he wasn't against the idea, but he said the problem with all of this and it would be the same problem frankly with the mid journey is it reveals things about you. We're all imperfect, nobody is a perfect human. So it reveals something about you that is maybe abnormal.
- [131:18]
B
Right.
- [131:19]
A
But not necessarily a cause for concern. The problem is if a doctor knows about it, they have to do something about it. Sometimes those are quite invasive. I'll give you an example. Friend of mine got a full body scan and there was a growth on their thyroid. Now that meant they had to go in and get biopsied which involves a very long needle thrust into your chest. Been there, had it not pleasant, perhaps risky, turned out completely benign. And that person would never have known about it if they hadn't done the full body scan.
- [131:53]
B
Yeah, but so the argument, I go through this because I have had prostate cancer. There's always a lot of argument about prostate testing and breast cancer testing. Oh, we shouldn't do so much because the odds that it's going to save your life are low. Well that's if you look at the aggregate of everybody, if you look at the intervention is risky and my prostate, I want to know.
- [132:14]
A
Yeah, well that's an interesting thing because Kaiser, my health plan used to give me a yearly PSA test. This is a blood test to test for prostate specific antigen. And if you have a high PSA number it means, well, you might.
- [132:29]
B
They don't test that anymore.
- [132:31]
A
They stopped a couple of years ago and I asked my doctor last year, I said, why don't we do PSA anymore? He said, well we'll do it, but you've got to go to this website, this Kaiser website where we explain that we don't like to do it anymore because if it comes out high then we have to do interventions often which are more dangerous than the very, very slow growing prostate cancer. And so we don't like to know, we prefer not to know. I said, you know what, I'd like to have it anyway. And he said, okay, you just have to go to this website, understand blob, all of this and say, yes, I understand. And fortunately my PSA is Low. Interestingly, last time, a couple months ago, I went in, he offered it, he didn't even ask. So maybe they've changed their tune, as they do, as happens all the time in medicine. But that's the whole idea, is sometimes it's better to wait for a symptom than to do one of these tests and see. For instance, I. I hope this isn't too much information. According to the scan I did, one of my kidneys is tiny.
- [133:44]
B
I'm just glad you didn't say testicles, but keep going
- [133:48]
A
is basically useless. Is it atrophied? And this is why you want to do a baseline when you're young.
- [133:55]
B
So you're not going to contribute one to me when I need one.
- [133:57]
A
I can't give you a kidney. Thank God. Oh, my God.
- [134:00]
B
We were friends.
- [134:00]
A
I'm glad I did that scan. So they said, we don't know is it could have been. You were born that way, and it's always been that way. Or it could be a trauma. It could be a sign that something attacked your kidney, punched in the kidney. Something should be. You should be aware of. Maybe you've got a problem, but we just don't know.
- [134:18]
B
And to.
- [134:19]
A
To figure that out would involve invasive surgery. I guess I don't know that it's not worth it. So I just. I have to live with this. But possibility, that knowledge. Nice knowledge. And you know what I even think it could be just the picture was a little skewed and it looked small. I don't know.
- [134:37]
D
Perspective. Yeah, perspective can do that.
- [134:39]
A
It could be a perspective thing. Maybe the camera was off a little bit.
- [134:42]
B
I had something looked like a funny thing on my kidney in a. An MRI or PT scan. And then I went. When I was in the hospital for all my stuff, they did a lot of scans of me. And so they looked again and said, no, no, no, it's nothing. And I went to the urologist and he said, no, it's nothing but this.
- [135:00]
A
Sometimes doing these electives, I did Pre nouveau. And you know what? Now that I've done it, I do want to do another one, just to see. For instance, now that you have a baseline, if my kidney continues to shrink, well, then maybe there is something we should pay attention to.
- [135:16]
B
How long are you in the subway tube?
- [135:22]
A
It's like an hour. Because it's a full body scan. They don't. It's not just your brain, and it's loud as hell. It's bang, bang, bang. They give you headphones and they say what kind of music you want to listen to. And I said, can I have some Americana? They said, sure, but it doesn't mask the bangs. It's like somebody. It's very loud, and I'm not claustrophobic, so it was fine. But it's a long time. Yeah, it was like. It felt like. I don't know, it was 45 minutes or an hour. It was quite a long while. Because they're moving it around. They have to. They're doing your whole body. Anyway.
- [135:54]
B
Anyway. So interesting that midjourney's doing this, but it's gonna be a while.
- [136:00]
A
That was a big tangent we went on.
- [136:02]
B
It was two old guys, two ultracons.
- [136:05]
A
I'll tell you about my kidneys.
- [136:06]
B
Talking about their kidneys. Yeah.
- [136:11]
A
So have you done an elective mri? No. You did it for good reason.
- [136:14]
B
No, you did it for a reason. Yeah.
- [136:17]
A
Princeton graduate, built a $30 million AI detection business, and now he's selling it to Superhuman, the folks who own Grammarly.
- [136:26]
B
And I don't trust any of these AI detection things. I don't either. That they're gonna accuse people of cheating when they don't.
- [136:35]
A
You're gonna miss GT0. Have you ever heard of that one?
- [136:38]
B
No.
- [136:41]
D
Can't you just, like, build a random number generator that says if something is fake or not and sell that as an AI detector at this point?
- [136:47]
A
Yeah, that's kind of at this point.
- [136:48]
B
I had a study a few weeks ago that I put in where if it was all AI, it was pretty good. If it was all humor was pretty good. The weird thing about this study was that when they put in a low amount of AI content, it thought it was high. And when they put in a high amount of AI content mixed in, they thought it was low. The machine did.
- [137:09]
A
Peter A. Jones in our YouTube chat said there's nothing like a really long chat about old men's ailments. This is why we need Paris on this show.
- [137:18]
B
Yeah.
- [137:18]
A
Come back soon.
- [137:19]
B
Her eyes will roll, and we'll know we've gone on long enough.
- [137:22]
A
We gotta move on. So, you know your AI can have a phone number now with Twilio. It can even make calls because it can have a voice with stripe. You can give it a credit card. Estonia intends to give them digital IDs. Estonia, which already has digital IDs for humans, is gonna allow AI agents to have their own digital identities as well. They're going to develop ID codes AI agents can use to take actions. I guess this makes sense. If you have an identity. I'll do the you Know what? I'll tell you one thing AI's gotten good at is translation. Used to be the translate. This page stuff wasn't great. Oh, well, maybe this isn't a good translation. It translated something in Estonian into the most AI smart people, I guess.
- [138:18]
B
Sounds.
- [138:20]
A
Yeah. Oh, a million learning byte a year.
- [138:25]
B
Which. What translation are you using?
- [138:26]
A
I don't know. I think that was coggy.
- [138:29]
B
Use Google.
- [138:30]
A
Maybe you should use Google. Yeah, that's a little disappointing.
- [138:36]
B
Siesta was the button. Yeah, I think that you. Yeah, no, no, no.
- [138:39]
A
Let's go back to Estonian anyway. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Look at my. I'm going to campaign for this. I really think that everything. I know they don't want to do this, but everything you interface with should have an AI interface on it. An SDK, an API, an MCP server, whatever. I love it that I can log into my digital scale through my AI and it can get all the information out of the scale. I think that's fantastic. Unfortunately, the chronometer calorie counter that I use doesn't have an interface. But some. Some guys reverse engineered it and there is a. So I can. And so now I can talk to my watch. I can tell it what I ate. It can then get the calories from chronometer, put it in my obsidian, add it to my chronometer, add it to my health summary. Everything should have an interface. Now in my.
- [139:32]
B
Do you take pictures of your food? Does that work?
- [139:34]
A
Well, I could do that too. Yeah, I could take. I could use my agent, send it a picture because it understands pictures. It would analyze the picture. I haven't tried that yet, but I will try that. There are AI. There's one called calai, which I think actually apple band. I used it for a while. That did exactly that. It wasn't super accurate, but it was. It was good enough. The whole idea is it's a pain in the butt to log your food. Anything that makes it faster and easier is a good thing.
- [140:03]
B
I should have asked you this before. Was the carrot cake your entire lunch or just dessert?
- [140:10]
D
No.
- [140:12]
A
Oh, embarrassing. No, I had a Greek yogurt as well.
- [140:15]
B
Oh, okay. Oh, that sounds fun to me.
- [140:18]
A
I love carrot cake. I bought it a week ago. I thought I better eat it now. It's going to go stale. I just love it. And I only bought one piece. Every once in a while I bought it. You know what I did bad though? I made bagels last week.
- [140:30]
B
Oh, you had stopped that.
- [140:31]
A
Yeah, I had stopped it. I gave away my sourdough no, because I said I can never do this again. It's killing me. But you know, now that I'm on. Actually I've moved from GLP1 to tirzepatide. I'm on Zep Bound now. My doctor said that's okay. I was on Ozempic, but now that it brought my blood sugar down, back to normal.
- [140:57]
B
Yay.
- [140:57]
A
I'm able to eat carrot cake and bagels. But not all the time.
- [141:01]
B
But your pancreas has making bagels. Yeah.
- [141:05]
A
And so I make them, I get one and I give them to everybody in the family. We had a big brunch for Father's Day. Everybody came over and had bagels. It was great. Yeah, we invited the workers. The guy who's doing the drilling outside, we invited him in for bagels. We invited them all in. New York Times publisher. Is that Salzburg?
- [141:26]
B
Salzburg? Yeah.
- [141:27]
A
AG Sulzberger says Big Tech is a thief and a liar.
- [141:33]
B
Do they use those same words with somebody else we know of? Salzburger, Aren't you a little shy by using those words to describe someone we know of?
- [141:42]
A
We don't say liar. Yeah, we don't like to use that word. This is. You've been talking about this all along. He was addressing the annual Wan IFRA World News Media conference a couple of weeks ago. Big Tech is stealing news media's property and undermining democracy.
- [142:04]
B
Oh, the self importance.
- [142:07]
A
And the only solution is for news organizations to work together to resist it. He said Big Tech's hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products. A brazen theft. Theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale. Tech giant strip mine news websites without permission or compensation. Doesn't he have a deal with OpenAI? I thought the Times.
- [142:33]
B
No, he's suing Open AI. Oh, he's saying every story. Yeah. And mind you, the New York Times didn't kill other papers across the country, but it was a kick to the kidney to many of them.
- [142:43]
A
Right.
- [142:44]
B
When it went national.
- [142:46]
A
You made a really excellent point. I think on Blue sky or Master maybe when the Knicks won the NBA championship, which would have been in the old days of a New York newspaper. Banner headlines, stop the presses, pictures, everything. It didn't even make it. It wasn't even above the fold in the New York Times.
- [143:07]
B
So the New York Times, that was on the website, to be clear, on the online they had pictures about the fold. I mean on paper they had pictures above the fold. But on the website, yeah, it was Lowered on the page. And I said, this is ridiculous. You haven't been in New York newspaper in a long time, but you really aren't.
- [143:20]
A
Now it's clear.
- [143:21]
B
This is just bad news judgment. Well, so here's the interesting thing. You know, I'm talking about the broken times constantly. Times has never raised their head, never said a word, nothing. Suddenly they responded to me. Oh, well, Jeff, we had it all in the middle of the night. And I said, not good enough. You know, your readers don't come in more than a few times a month. So you think we just did it with once. That's good enough. No, they come in the next morning, they want to see it. It's not there. Bad news judgment. I thought, why did they respond to me? In this case, the New York Post did a story about my blue sky.
- [143:52]
A
Oh, no.
- [143:54]
B
Because anything to tweak the Times. So they felt they needed to be on the record having.
- [143:58]
A
I'm sure the Post had a banner headline, Nick's Win or something, right? I mean. Oh, yeah, the Post loves that stuff.
- [144:04]
B
It posted Daily News. I just read a history of the New York Daily News, and it's the kind of thing that you just died for back in the day to do a front page around those kinds of topics.
- [144:14]
C
That's.
- [144:14]
A
Was the Daily News, the one with the headless body and a topless bar?
- [144:17]
B
No, that's the Post.
- [144:18]
A
That was the Post.
- [144:18]
B
Daily News was Ford to City Drop Dead.
- [144:21]
A
That's right.
- [144:23]
B
I read this book which is not out yet. It's quite wonderful that evidently it came from one as they were trying to figure out the headline which was happening. You're standing around the newsroom, you're going around, you throwing out ideas. And somebody passed a note to the editor that said, Ford the City F off for laugh. But that became the basis of Drop Dead.
- [144:48]
A
We really are out of time. If there's any stories that we missed that you want to cover. Before we do, though, I just read a little bit of Mick Sweeney's piece by Andrew Singleton. AI Economics for Dummies. As AI companies get ready to go public and we get a deeper look at their inner workings, it's only natural to have questions about their finances, like, do they make money? And how. Here are a few examples to help the average layperson understand the business side of AI. Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape. Alex asks for the full $12 billion upfront and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit. This month. His annual rate of revenue is $120 billion. And his profits are trending up at an infinite rate. The Wall Street Journal's business editor moves into Alex's house having accepted a part time position as Alex's human footstool. He never asks to see the books. It's very funny. It goes on. I don't want. I won't read the whole thing. But it is a pretty good send up on the economy of AI I
- [146:10]
B
love McSweeney's line 115 is something you're gonna like, I think and op ed in the New York Times.
- [146:17]
A
Oh well, I agree with the headline
- [146:19]
B
Doom maxing has to stop.
- [146:21]
A
Yes, we have to stop freaking out.
- [146:23]
B
This is by Robert Shiller who is a Nobel Prize winning economist who's just going on about the. It's obvious. But what's the. What's the harm of all this Doom stuff? And we certainly recognize that where we are. So just stop it. Just stop it.
- [146:37]
A
We all grew up as he points out on Doom sci fi. It's been the trope of sci fi and AI since the very beginning.
- [146:48]
D
Only in books. Only in books. In movies and TV robots are usually good guys.
- [146:54]
A
HAL 9000.
- [146:56]
D
That's one name more.
- [147:01]
A
What's the Forbin project? That was a terrible, terrible A.I. i guess in war games the A.I. no, you know, R2D2 data.
- [147:16]
D
R2D2 data.
- [147:18]
A
Okay. A lot of recent TV A.I. movies.
- [147:21]
D
You know there's more, there's more. There's more with their friends.
- [147:25]
A
The movie artificial intelligence AI. I could think of a lot of modern movies. Even her the AI isn't exactly benign.
- [147:33]
D
The Terminator is a bad guy. But in the second one he's a good guy Terminator.
- [147:37]
A
But he comes back as a good guy. But the machines are not good guys in any.
- [147:40]
D
But there's always a twinge of oh, maybe hits a person. Maybe he's maybe, maybe he feels. But robots and androids have humans. So.
- [147:48]
A
Okay, he's a cyber.
- [147:49]
B
Speaking of machines, you told me you said you were going to buy a new Steam. Do you have price for sticker shock?
- [147:55]
A
I'm not going to buy a new steam. The price $1050 for the steam machine without a controller. 100 bucks more if you want is
- [148:06]
B
all because of memory chips.
- [148:07]
A
Yeah, I did buy a new machine. I bought. In fact you're going to inherit my old switch. I bought the new switch too. So you're going to inherit the old one. So you can play the game that Paris really wants you to play.
- [148:19]
B
I'll do it for about five minutes, so. No. Yeah, No, I won't.
- [148:25]
A
I'll bring it out when I come out to have one of Hank's sandwiches.
- [148:28]
B
Good.
- [148:28]
A
Which is much like Halley's comet. Long anticipated, long awaited. Yeah. It's considerably more than it was gonna cost. Was gonna cost. Well, they never did announce a price, but boy. Yeah, that's. It's three times more than the PS5, and it's not any better. So I don't know. I don't know who they're gonna. I don't know who they're gonna want it for. All right, you're watching Intelligent Machines. As I mentioned, Paris Martineau has the week off. She'll be back in two weeks. We do have some great guests coming up, though. Paris is gonna be sad that she's going to miss next week. Chris Potts of BigSpin. AI this is all about AI hallucination. Dr. Ian Bogost is coming back. His book is coming out. He said, I'll come back in July when my book comes out, the small stuff. And I'm starting to see interviews with Ian. We really enjoyed having him on. He was the. The AI Whisperer. He was on. And I'm happy to say we got Nate B. Jones, who is one of my favorites on AI. Yeah, I'm very excited about having.
- [149:37]
B
We couldn't even find an email address for him. Couldn't figure out where to get him.
- [149:40]
A
My AI found it. I will not share it with you. I don't know how it found it. I don't know how hard it is to find, but, yeah, we're glad we got a hold of him. Anyway, those are all coming up. Paris will be back for Ian Bogost, which is nice.
- [149:55]
B
Good.
- [149:55]
A
In a couple of weeks. And did she get. Did she respond to your message?
- [149:59]
B
No, she didn't. She must be. Wait, she did.
- [150:01]
D
She did.
- [150:01]
B
Oh, she did, yes. Hello from Old Faithful, where I am shocked to say I have cell service. I just stuck in traffic because of a giant bison.
- [150:12]
A
Good for her. She's out there. So Old Faithful's in Wyoming, I thought. Is it in Montana? She's seeing the American planes.
- [150:23]
B
Montana still question mark.
- [150:24]
A
Were there any pictures?
- [150:26]
B
No, she sent no pictures.
- [150:28]
A
All right, send pictures anyway. We miss her, but she'll be back. And Jeff Jarvis, of course, is here. His new book, Hot Type, coming soon. We'll have to interview you when the book comes out. Oh, well, we could do some dramatic readings. You could do your Hal Holbrook.
- [150:45]
B
I did my Halbro Hallbrook voice and then I was telling people about this and they said, who? It'll make no sense to some people I know.
- [150:52]
A
Only we know.
- [150:53]
E
You have one new message translating. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers is now available on Disney plus.
- [151:02]
A
You could say that again.
- [151:04]
E
Critics are calling it Pixar's funniest movie ever and a wildly entertaining ride. Blizzard Potato. It's certified fresh and verified hot.
- [151:12]
B
Now we party.
- [151:15]
A
This is incredible.
- [151:16]
B
Wow. I am clearing the rest of the day.
- [151:19]
E
Disney and Pixar's Hoppers now available on Disney.
- [151:22]
A
Rated PG. Membership means more with American Express Business Gold. Earn four times Membership Rewards points in your top two eligible spending categories every month, including eligible U.S. advertising purchases in select media and U.S. purchases at restaurants, including takeout and delivery. What are you waiting for? Get the card that flexes with your spending every month. Terms and points cap apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com Business Gold MX Business Gold Card built for business by American Express. Ray Ban Meta lets you explore the world without a screen getting in the way so you can stay present in the moment.
- [152:00]
E
Hey, Meta, tell me what kind of dessert this is. That's a Stroopwafel, a Dutch waffle with. With spiced syrup in the middle. Is it sweet? Yes. Perfect for a snack or dessert.
- [152:12]
B
Mmm.
- [152:12]
E
Delicious.
- [152:13]
A
Get answers on the go without interrupting your flow. Ray Ban Meta Iconic Style meets Meta AI. Available at Walmart and other authorized retailers. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the picks of the week. There'll only be two of us picking this week, I'm sad to say. I will give you, in that case, this one. It's called in the weights. I don't know. It's an AI vanity search. All right, so what Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn have done is they have gone and collected all of the different models. GBD 5554 mini Opus 48, Haiku Grok Gemini Kimmy Deepseek. And they allow you to scan them for your name and then they rank it based on how well known your name is. And as it makes sense, pop icons are higher ranked. Minnie Mouse, currently today's heavyweight, followed by R2D2, Beyonce, and a guy known as Charles Lukwig Dodgson, maybe better known as Lewis Carol. Now, shall I put in your name, Jeff? Let's see if the AI. Well, they know who you are. The question is, how highly ranked are you? So we're going to quickly search through professor of Journalism. Look at that you're in the top 3%. 804 strength.
- [153:46]
D
Yay.
- [153:47]
A
It found you in every one of these. Except Llama.
- [153:50]
B
Hey.
- [153:51]
A
Which is fine. Look, now if we just search for journalism Professor Media Criticism 804, which is a very good score. A little weaker on the Twig podcast. Co host only. Opus thought you were in that. So.
- [154:05]
B
Oh, ouch.
- [154:06]
A
And you want to see the hallucinations?
- [154:08]
B
Sure.
- [154:12]
A
Let me see. Where are they? Below. They're below. Jeff Jarvis, British TV presenter. That's what Llama thought you were. Jeff Jarvis, rock and folk musician. The French model. Mistral thought you were a rock and folk musician. Are there Jeff Jarvis?
- [154:34]
B
There is an Elvis impersonator. Jeff Jarvis.
- [154:36]
A
Maybe that's what they were thinking.
- [154:37]
B
There's a jazz musician.
- [154:38]
A
Is there a professional wrestler named Jeff Jarvis?
- [154:41]
B
I don't think so.
- [154:43]
A
Claude Haiku. Thought that was the case.
- [154:45]
B
That's great. That's funny.
- [154:47]
A
Isn't that fun?
- [154:48]
D
I love this aesthetic, though. I love this adventure game aesthetic.
- [154:50]
B
Isn't it?
- [154:51]
A
It's very. It's very, very eight bit. Here.
- [154:53]
B
Here.
- [154:53]
A
I'll put Benito.
- [154:54]
D
It's King's quest.
- [154:56]
A
Yeah. Oh, is that what it is?
- [154:57]
D
That's what it looks like to me.
- [154:59]
A
Let me see. I don't know. I think Benito will show up.
- [155:02]
B
Or this.
- [155:02]
D
Well, there's a famous version of me, so that name will show up.
- [155:06]
A
Ah, so it's going through. It's a little slower. It's clustering up all of the different models. American jazz pianist.
- [155:16]
D
Yep, that's the one. That's why I can't even be a musician. Because there's a more famous musician than me.
- [155:20]
A
Yeah. Spanish footballer. A Spanish professional cyclist. A Mexican politic. Well, Bonito, no wonder it's having a hard time with you.
- [155:29]
B
A boxer. I'm not going to nations.
- [155:32]
A
Could be common Hispanic name. Okay. Fictional.
- [155:36]
B
39th California governor according to Llama, assassinated in 1910.
- [155:42]
A
And a Filipino politician.
- [155:44]
D
Oh, that one's very close.
- [155:45]
A
Quen. Yeah. Well, yeah. You have Filipino politician family members? Could be. All right.
- [155:54]
B
Is Hank Laport in there?
- [155:56]
A
Oh, should we look at that?
- [155:57]
D
Hank will for sure be in there. Right?
- [155:59]
A
Salt Hank. Let's see. In the weights. Is salt Hank in the weights. See, it's maybe more too modern. You know, that might reduce the. No social media food creator. He is. This is the one area where I think I might beat him.
- [156:17]
B
Yeah.
- [156:17]
A
He's a 249 score. I think the longevity of your presence in the world. I am top 1%.
- [156:24]
B
Ooh, top 1%.
- [156:27]
A
But again, llama has no idea. And there are no hallucinations. GPT5 knows I'm a technology broadcaster, as does 54 mini opus. Same thing. Known as the Tech Guy. Founder of the Twit Network.
- [156:44]
B
Tech God.
- [156:45]
A
Tech Guy. That's my radio name. Hi, Guy.
- [156:50]
B
You're Canadian?
- [156:51]
D
American.
- [156:51]
A
That's a bit of a. Yeah, no, sorry, Grok. Known for hosting the Tech Guy radio show and founding the Twitt podcast network. Anyway, it's kind of fun. Are you in the weights? Well, find out.
- [157:04]
B
Cool.
- [157:05]
A
Yeah. Little fun thing. It's in the weights.
- [157:08]
B
Calm.
- [157:09]
A
Mr. Jarvis, few things.
- [157:12]
B
One, I didn't know this has been known. Did you know that the UK is going to turn off terrestrial TV signals? What, in 2034 or now? They're thinking about 2040.
- [157:23]
A
No antennas.
- [157:24]
B
Yeah, they're just going to turn it off because they'll need inexpensive Internet access for all. But then they will just turn off broadcast.
- [157:33]
D
Wait, so the spectrum is just going to be WI fi? The spectrum is just going to become WI fi, yeah.
- [157:39]
A
Or Internet TV or hardwired, but it'll all be over the top. So that's interesting because they have a kind of weird relationship to broadcast. You know you have to buy a license, right? Broadcast TV license. And that funds the BBC, which is a weird thing to do. And they actually have little vans that go around to see if anybody's watching TV without.
- [158:00]
B
But that was. That's the difference in our model is that that's what they decided to make it a public good. Instead of ads in the 20s, instead of AD supported was because the US Navy created, as I said last week, insisted on the creation of rca. And that set in motion our model versus theirs.
- [158:16]
A
I wish we'd had time with Olivier to get into that because I think he would have been.
- [158:20]
B
We should have back. That was a fun. That was a fun conversation.
- [158:22]
A
Really fun to talk about that.
- [158:23]
B
The Computer History Museum is hiring someone to start their new AI archive, which is great news.
- [158:28]
A
That's interesting. So kind of like Internet archive.
- [158:34]
B
No, I think more like a museum is what do they need to. How do you save an archive of the AI age? So they're going to hire one person who's going to work alone first to
- [158:43]
A
capture the liberty, the history of AI and robotics. What a great job that was. This is, if you're in the San Jose area, highly recommend to visit the Computer History Museum.
- [158:54]
B
And they do other great events. I'm about to write to them because they did a great event which was key to my book. Hot Type on sale now on the creation of desktop publishing. And they had in the key people who did that to reminisce. And it's an invaluable historical document.
- [159:11]
A
Everything they do is great, and the exhibits are fantastic. And if you're a listener to our shows, you'll recognize so much of the stuff in there. There's an Apple one. I mean, it is really a wonderful museum.
- [159:25]
B
And then my whole family sends this to me regularly. The onions. Dad suggests arriving at airport 14 hours early. So that's me. That's been the case. So I found a new TikTok account, which is Airport Dad.
- [159:42]
A
All right, let's see. Why are all dads like this? It says airport dad arriving at the airport.
- [159:49]
B
Guardian of all bags. Must have all the passports. Checks flight status every five minutes.
- [159:55]
A
I guess I am that too.
- [159:56]
B
Airport.
- [159:57]
A
I do do that. Yeah.
- [159:59]
B
Annoyed when you stop at every shop. Triple checks everything. Checks is the plane is at the gate. Very important. I do that, too. Although first Airport. Every time.
- [160:06]
A
Currently, Lisa is much more of a. I am more like, yeah, we can leave two hours before the flight. We'll get there in plenty of time. I know. I don't like sitting in an airport.
- [160:19]
D
Yeah, that's standard Filipino behavior. We're always there four hours before our flight.
- [160:23]
B
Really.
- [160:24]
A
Bill Gates was famous. Famous for cutting it as close as possible.
- [160:31]
B
That's what I did when he flew commercial.
- [160:32]
A
Back when he flew commercial. So this is in the very early days of Microsoft. He would arrive. He wanted to arrive just as the gate was closing.
- [160:41]
D
Yeah, I used to be on the road. I used to be on the road like every other week. So I figured out how to get to the airport when I needed to. So now I can leave, like a nice time.
- [160:51]
A
You know exactly.
- [160:52]
D
Yeah, I know exactly how to do it now.
- [160:54]
A
Yeah, I know exactly how long it's going to take to get to SS. No, no, no, no, no. It's an hour and 15 minutes. The problem is you get there nowadays and the TSA is the. Is the problem. You don't know how long that line's going to be. It's very unpredictable. Right. Although there are ways.
- [161:11]
B
Do you do the. The. What you call it the clear?
- [161:14]
A
No clear.
- [161:14]
B
Oh, I pay for clear.
- [161:16]
A
I did clear when it first came out, and I was so embarrassed because I walked up and they go, here. They take your luggage your. In your bin and they push ahead to the front of the line.
- [161:28]
B
Oh, they don't. Well, I do that now.
- [161:32]
D
Yeah. No, they have their own line now. Right. They have their own.
- [161:34]
B
Their own line now? Yeah.
- [161:36]
A
They still have to go through the tsa.
- [161:38]
B
Yeah, but you have your own separate line for the tsa.
- [161:42]
A
You don't have your own separate air x ray machine.
- [161:45]
B
Kind of.
- [161:46]
D
You do.
- [161:46]
A
Oh, really? Okay. Not at sfo. At sfo, you have to be wedged somehow into the line for taking off your shoes and putting your laptop on.
- [161:56]
B
You don't take our shoes anymore either.
- [161:58]
A
Well, I know. I guess it's a little. I'm old hat now. No. So I didn't do that. I was embarrassing. Every time we get. And the other thing is often the line for clear is longer because everybody does it now. So I, you know, I have a global entry. I have TSA pre. That's plenty. I don't. I don't even do that usually. I just.
- [162:21]
B
I used to be United Global Services, which is the highest secret level. I got to kick old ladies out of the Jetway, but I don't have that anymore.
- [162:30]
A
Out of my way, lady. Get out of that wheelchair.
- [162:33]
B
Now. However, I will travel with my cane.
- [162:36]
A
Oh, that's good. What do they call that? Johnny Jett. This had a name for it. The Miracle. They call them the Miracle flights.
- [162:43]
B
Yeah.
- [162:44]
A
Where when you're getting on the flight, there's 40 or 50 people in wheelchairs to get on early, and then they all walk off at the end of the flight. It's like they're healed. It's amazing. I was on a miracle flight. I was like, that was the weirdest. I would be again. I'd be embarrassed. I don't want to. I don't want to be. I just. I'll get in line with everybody and be a normal human. That concludes the old man version of
- [163:13]
B
Even with only two of us, we
- [163:14]
A
still went along Intelligent Machines. Thank you so much to Olivier Sylvain, our guest. He was fantastic.
- [163:21]
B
Yes.
- [163:22]
A
Look forward to reading his book. Or you should look forward. I read it. But you should look forward to reading his book. Reclaiming the How Big Tech Took Control on how we can take it back from Columbia Global Reports. Next week we will talk about AI Hallucination. That should be interesting. Paris will be back in two weeks.
- [163:44]
B
With a cowboy hat.
- [163:45]
A
With a cowboy hat Cowgirl hat She better have a cowboy cowgirl hat and snakeskin boots. We thank you all for joining us. We do Intelligent Machines every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly. That's 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us do the show live in the club to Discord. I hope you're a club Twit member. If you're not, please join the club. Support our efforts. Unlike Salzburger, I. I do not have a. A trust fund to run this on. We just. We rely on the kindness of strangers. You for almost 30% of our operating expenses. Twit TV. Club Twit.
- [164:23]
B
It's filled for 50, folks. Come on, Come on.
- [164:25]
A
Yeah, come on. Actually, you do get one benefit, a new benefit. You add free versions of the show. But we now have chapter markers in all our shows which allows you to skip over the old men talking about their ailments segment. So that's a real benefit.
- [164:39]
B
Poor Bonito has to mark that out.
- [164:41]
A
Club Twit.
- [164:42]
B
Here's the Aldrich.
- [164:44]
D
No, AI does that now.
- [164:46]
A
AI does it. So it's not hard to do. We do do it, but the problem is because of ad insertion after the fact, we don't know the lengths of the shows with ads and so we can't really do it reliably. So join the club. That way you get that benefit. You can watch Club or not. And YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kik. We stream on all those platforms as we're doing the show after the fact. You can get audio or video from our website, Twit TV IM. There is an Intelligent Machines YouTube channel. You can go there and get the video of the show. Great way to share clips or subscribe on your favorite podcast client. And you'll get it automatically as soon as it's done. Thanks to Benito Gonzalez, the world famous Benito Gonzalez, our producer and editor. Thanks to all of you for joining us.
- [165:31]
B
A boxer and politician who knew Benito.
- [165:34]
A
Yes, so many things. Jazz musician as well. We will see you next week on Intelligent Machines. Bye bye. Hey everybody, it's Leo Laporte. You know about MacBreak weekly, right? You don't? Oh, if you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with Apple, this is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inocco, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell and I get together and talk about the week's Apple news. It's an easy subscription. Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for Mac Break Weekly. Or visit our website, Twitter, TV mbw. You don't want to miss a week of Mac Break Weekly. I'm not a human being.
- [166:15]
B
Not into this animal scene.
- [166:18]
A
I'm an intelligent machine.
- [166:21]
E
Have no fear. Chosen Foods is here to defend your favorite foods from the forces of seedy oils and sketchy ingredients. With cooking oils, salad dressings and mayo, all powered by the good fats from 100% pure avocado oil and simple delicious ingredients.
- [166:35]
A
Chosen Foods Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying
- [166:40]
B
Big Wireless Way Too much. Please, for the love of everything good
- [166:43]
C
in this world, stop with Mint.
- [166:45]
B
You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month, of course, if you enjoy overpaying.
- [166:50]
D
No judgments.
- [166:50]
A
But that's weird.
- [166:52]
B
Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [166:59]
E
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