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- [00:00]
Susan Ettlinger
The PC gave us computing power at home. The Internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now, generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language, using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift, a new podcast from Microsoft Azure. I'm your host, Susan Ettlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us, listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:34]
Joseph
Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founding company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. People gain access to that content@ 404 Media co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co founders Emmanuel Mayberg.
- [01:05]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Hello.
- [01:05]
Joseph
And Jason Kebler.
- [01:07]
Susan Ettlinger
Hello. Good to be here.
- [01:09]
Joseph
Thank you for having me on your own podcast. I nearly said Sam's name by accident just because my coffee hasn't kicked in. I was just reading the script. Ray. Ray. Straight. Let's get straight into it. One story that Jason wrote and then it'll relate to a story that we haven't actually published yet. And I hope we publish it by the time this comes out. But the first one inside a powerful database ICE uses to identify and deport people. So quick context on what has happened with ICE recently in the US for those who don't know or need a primer. I mean, ICE agents recently arrested a green card holding student at his interview to become a US citizen. There was another case where plainclothes officers picked up a student off the street for deportation despite the State Department finding no evidence she was linked to anti Semitism or Hamas as claimed. And then the American and the El Salvadorian presidents deflected when they were asked who was going to return a man who was mistakenly deported to a foreign megaprison, well, in El Salvador. And Trump has also called for for deporting US citizens to the country as well. That's sort of all of the context that's happening everywhere. We find a way into this story in the best way that we know, and that is by looking sort of the technical infrastructure behind all of this. And Jason, you wrote this piece about a database called Investigative Case Management System, or icm, which serves as the core law enforcement case management tool for ICE and specifically Homeland Security investigations, although, as we discussed, it's a little bit broader than that. So fill us in. What does this database, and more broadly, a search tool do? Exactly.
- [03:09]
Susan Ettlinger
Yeah. So, I mean, I think. I guess I'll just caveat the whole conversation with the discussion around immigration enforcement and the revoking of visas and, you know, actions against universities and protesters and social media searches of college students and things like that. Like, that's the context in which all this is happening. It's very difficult, unless you're an immigration expert, to keep track of everything that is happening right now because there's, like, dozens of ongoing court cases. There's, you know, a recent Supreme Court ruling about Abrego Garcia, who's a Maryland man who's in the El Salvadorian mega prison. And I think, like you said, the. The strategy that we have for covering this is sort of figuring out what technical infrastructure might be powering these, like, the detentions, more or less. Like, how. How is ICE identifying people who it wants to deport, and then what is the technical infrastructure underneath that? And so it's not like Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, and suddenly he built, like, a very powerful surveillance infrastructure. It's like ICE has been doing really advanced surveillance. Customs and Border Patrol has been doing really advanced surveillance. DHS, more broadly, which is the bigger department that both ICE and Customs and Border Patrol and a few other agencies fall underneath, have been building up this surveillance apparatus since DHS was founded after 9, 11. And what we wrote about was this database called the Investigative Case Management System, which I believe was created in maybe 2013, 2014. It's been around for more than a decade, but it has gotten more powerful over the last few years. And what it does is it allows hsis, which is Homeland Security Investigations, sorry, hsi. It allows hsi. There's so many acronyms, but allows HSI acronyms.
- [05:23]
Joseph
And I cover DHS specifically a lot. And there's so many acronyms inside the acronyms here.
- [05:29]
Susan Ettlinger
Right. So it was created for Homeland Security Investigations, which is like an investigative arm of ice, which is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to search, like a bunch of different databases that the government has. And it's like a data warehouse, I guess you'd call it, where, you know, Customs and Border Protection has dozens and dozens of different databases. It pulls all of them in. And if you want to search for, let's say, every blonde person who is in the system, it will show that to you. And then you can filter that so you can say, like, their port of entry was, you know, at the San Diego border crossing. You can say they are on a specific type of visa, for example. There's also filters for different types of body marks, meaning scars or tattoos. And we know that the Trump administration has been looking at, you know, they have, like a scorecard essentially determining whether people who have specific types of tattoos should be deported. And so this is like a mechanism that we know of that would allow for the types of pickups that we have seen over the last few months.
- [06:45]
Joseph
Yeah. And as you said, this has been around for some time. And we'll talk about the Palantir connection shortly. And, you know, other people have covered it. The Intercept has done some really good coverage. I mean, a few years ago at this point, but that was very, very useful for our own article. But what did you see exactly that provided a little bit more insight into what this database is and how it works? And of course, I appreciate you have to be careful here in what you describe. Exactly. But you got some more insight basically into how it functions.
- [07:23]
Susan Ettlinger
Yeah. So the existence of this database is not a secret. And as you mentioned, the Intercept did an article a few years ago that was pretty good. And then when this database was created, they had to do something called a privacy impact assessment, which is where you file a report with, I believe, like a government oversight.
- [07:42]
Joseph
It's internally into dhs. Yeah. Whenever there's like, oh, we're going to start selling location data, I think they have to do a privacy threshold one first, and that determines whether you need to then do a privacy impact assessment. And then you do that. And it's like, oh, this is all of the data that's going to be in here. And is it going to impact people? Is it going to include biometrics and. Yeah, it's like an internal process which is supposed to provide checks and balances. So you don't have agencies just running around buying all of the fancy surveillance tech they could. They want, you know, there's some sort of measure there.
- [08:19]
Susan Ettlinger
Yeah, yeah. They need to determine, like, whether it's constitutional or make an argument as to why this technology is needed. So talk more about that in a second. But basically, I had a source who showed us different parts of this database and sort of how it works. And so we were able to see the types of categories of information that can be filtered by. And to be clear, it's hundreds of different characteristics, including, like, biographical information, but then also, again, like port of entry, where the US Government believes this person may live, you know, automated license plate reader data. So if they have a car registered to them, like and they, they're driving around like where they were last spotted, things like that. I'm just going to read from the article because I think the specifics are probably helpful. So it says 404 Media saw a recent version of the database which allows filtering according to hundreds of different categories, which include things like resident status and entry status, which includes like refugee border crossing card, non immigrant alien refused admission, temporary protective status, alien student visa, things like that. And then it also includes, quote, unique physical characteristics, examples scars, marks, tattoos, criminal affiliation, location data, license plate reader data, country of origin, hair and eye color, race, Social Security number, birthplace, place of employment, driver's license status, bankruptcy filings, and hundreds more. And then I had a source, the original source who talked to me described it as a database that has, quote, tables upon tables of data that can be used to build like really powerful reports. So again, you can imagine wanting, like the Trump administration wanting to filter all student visas who are going to a specific college, who came from a specific country, who have a specific marking or something like that. There's different ways that you can slice and dice the reports up that make it really, really powerful.
- [10:36]
Joseph
Yeah. And the data isn't really being created by icm. It is more pulling all this different stuff together. So it connects, as you say in the piece, to other DHS and federal databases, including one with all the student visas in details about those people who have those visas. Real time maps associated with ICE's location tracking tools, which obviously I found particularly interesting given it could be smartphone location data, but I guess we don't really know the license plate stuff. And then very importantly, and again, this was kind of supported by the Intercept's coverage information from other federal agencies. And the Intercept reported that's the dea, the FBI, the ATF, and potentially even the CIA as well. So this all comes together and it seems like it started for one purpose and then it's merged into another when other parts of ICE have started to get access. What do you know about specifically ICE's enforcement and removal operations, which is the part that deports people? Do they have access? It seems so. Right.
- [11:46]
Susan Ettlinger
They do have access. And again, the tricky thing here is we don't know specifically what database and what tools ICE is using right now to pick people up off the street and to identify people who should, you know, quote, unquote, should be detained. And I spoke to three different experts who said it's really important that we do know which parts of ICE have access to this and exactly how they are identifying people. Because the fundamental, like, underlying bedrock of privacy within the government is if you interact with one part of the government for one purpose, that data sharing across agencies is like a really big potential privacy violation. And soon after we've reported this, or actually the morning that we published this, the IRS announced that it would be sharing data with ice. And so, like, that's a perfect example where you have people who are paying taxes and they're paying taxes under this idea that they're like contributing to society and following the rules. And, you know, they're, they're interacting with this, like, civilian part of the government. And then you have that part of the government sharing that information with a law enforcement, you know, entity that, that then can use it against them. And so again, this was created for hsi, which does, you know, it's. I mean, they do security investigations. They do everything. Exactly. They do. I think that they fashion themselves as like, we do really, like, we're catching like cartels and we're catching like really big time drug traffickers and things like that. And then they can like refer a case to ero, which is Enforcement and Removal Operations. But the Privacy Impact assessments say that Enforcement and Removal Operations also has access to this database, but perhaps under a little bit more limited basis. But then also government lawyers have access to it. And it seems like over the last few years, more and more parts of the government have gotten access to this database and the database has gotten more powerful as more agencies have poured data into it.
- [14:07]
Joseph
Yeah, and of course, the Privacy Impact assessments you're referring to, I mean, one dates from 2016, which is almost ancient history by this point. Like, it lays out the foundation of what this is. But who knows in 2025 exactly who has access? And of course, it'd be very interesting to see a list of that.
- [14:23]
Susan Ettlinger
Well, I also said at the beginning of this, we built this apparatus a long time ago, sort of not knowing exact, exactly what it would be used for, how it would be used. And you know, this was built under either Obama or perhaps even, I think it was built under Obama or maybe Bush. And here we are like 20 years later. And one of the things in the Privacy Impact assessment was like, this data is going to pull information from people who are not suspected as being criminals. And one of the potential privacy impacts is people who are not supposed to be investigated can, could be investigated either mistakenly or on purpose by, you know, an administration that is really hawkish on immigration and that's exactly what we're seeing now. And that that's what the experts I spoke to told me. And then I think this is probably where you're going. But this database is powered by Palantir, which Palantir, you know, is Peter Thiel founded surveillance company that serves it as this very, like, powerful front end, like a search tool that allows people to search through different databases. Palantir has done like, we've done a lot of reporting on Palantir over the years. I think you're more of an expert on what Palantir can and cannot do or whether or what its different tools can do. But yeah, there's like quite a lot of money that goes into this. I think it was like a $95 million contract for five years. So I don't know. That's a pretty big database and a pretty big contract.
- [16:06]
Joseph
Yeah, linking all of that data together in a usable format takes a lot of cash and actually requires a lot of resources as well. So that leads onto my piece, which should be out by the time we air this. Forgive me if the headline has changed because I haven't approved this with you guys yet, but this is the one I have in my Google document. ICE just paid Palantir tens of millions for complete target analysis of known populations. And this is part of the same contract you just mentioned, Jason, the 90. The 95 million. But what you can do if you search through US Procurement databases is you see updates to that contract because, oh, they start doing this and then maybe they add something on or they tweak something and you see the amount of money being exchanged. But also there's sometimes little notes next to whatever that change is. And I was going through the ones for ICE and Palantir and most of them are boring under the Biden administration, they're all just, this is for updates, this is for maintenance, whatever. And then a couple from March and April of this year are much more explicit. And I think this relates to sort of the shifting of the priorities of different administrations that you alluded to. So one of the sections of these contracts says the payment is to, quote, deploy new targeting and enforcement prioritization, self deportation tracking and immigration lifecycle process capabilities. That is a lot of jargon, a lot of corporate speak. But the shifting priorities jumped out to me. And the self deportation stuff as well, which is what the Trump administration is trying to get some people to do. And then another one said modification for data analytics to support complete target analysis of known populations. And again, I'm still writing this, but the experts I've spoken to, that's already very, very concerning to them. And I think why I wanted to write this and why it stood out was that sometimes you have stories where it's like, oh, the tech company provides the underlying infrastructure for a project or a government program or something, and in some ways that can be very passive. Oh, it's run on aws, it's run on Microsoft servers or something like that. And that can still be very newsworthy, but it's not necessarily the most active thing in the world. I think it's pretty clear here from these contract notes that Palantir is actively working on and making updates to the technical infrastructure that's underpinning these mass deportations. It's not just giving them a server to go run their tool on. They are helping them. At least that is what's alluded to in the contracting memos. And they haven't responded to a request for comment yet. But of course if they do, we'll include that in the piece.
- [19:13]
Susan Ettlinger
Yeah, it's also like these things that were built a long time ago that you probably haven't heard about or that just haven't been in the news for a long time because they're from 2012 or they're from 2017 or whatever, still being used, still being updated, still a really big deal in this sort of new context. So I think that's important to note for sure.
- [19:36]
Joseph
All right, we'll leave that there. Keep an eye out for the new piece when it drops and we're definitely going to keep following this. When we come back, we're going to talk about the AI that calls your elderly parents if you can't be bothered. We'll be right back after this.
- [20:05]
Susan Ettlinger
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- [24:45]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Okay, our next story is from Joe and the headline is I tested the AI that calls your elderly parents if you can't be bothered. Great headline, great little stunt story, but also a very interesting story. Tell me about this service.
- [25:03]
Joseph
What is Intouch in touch and yeah, you're right, it's a stunt story. We, we love those. I mean, what, it's.
- [25:11]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Sorry, that's derogatory. It's a good story that includes a stunt and a stunt that includes one of our moms, which I always find funny.
- [25:20]
Joseph
Yeah, I'm fine with it. I know people may get like, they may bristle it having their story described by that, but I'm fine with it. Because it's one thing to write about it, it's another to show people, oh, this is what it's like. So Intouch is a company, I guess, a startup as I think we call it. And what they do is they promise to call your parents with an AI generated voice if you're too busy or you're unable to do. So I framed it as can't be bothered. That is of course my read on it and I think the read of my mum we'll get into as well. But I think the best way to hear about Intouch is just to sort of read the marketing copy on their website. So what they say is busy life, you can't call your parent every day. But we can. In touch is not just a call. It sparks meaningful Mind stimulating conversations with your parent through daily engaging calls. Intouch helps your parent build new habits that stimulate their mind, support their emotional well being and reassure you. I mean it is what delivers what it says, you know, it is an AI calls your pets.
- [26:34]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, that's what it does. What are they pitching as like the result? Like what, what do they hope to accomplish by doing this? If there's anything, aside from the fact that it saves you the time of calling your parents?
- [26:47]
Joseph
Yeah, they don't market it aggressively as this will save you time. It's like much more allegedly empathetic in that it's more, oh, you're helping your parents or your grandparents or whoever. So on the site they say that their tool will support mental fitness and that's through stimulating their memory. You can chat to them about old stories or old events in their life. They may want to talk about engaging discussions. So maybe they'll play a game or it'll ask questions and that sort of thing and potentially sharpen their mind. So there's all of that sort of stuff. And then it even starts to talk about, you know, dementia potentially as well and reducing loneliness. And you know, I spoke to the founder and they said it was a way to connect with some of their, some of their family members. Then they're not able to contact all of the time. So it's sort of an all in one solution for keeping in touch with engaging them as well and potentially actually solving some health issues as well. Although of course that's not proven, it's not like medically approved or anything like that. It's just an AI tool.
- [28:09]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, I think what's interesting about that point is that I believe there are is a lot of research that shows the detrimental impact of loneliness to your health, especially in old age. Like as you say, reduced social connections are associated with more cases of dementia and all that. But I don't believe there is any research that exists that would say that this would be a sufficient replacement for actual connections with human beings and, and community. So that's a really good point. What is the process for signing up like if I want to do this for my parents, what do they need from me?
- [28:51]
Joseph
It's actually pretty simple and I obviously didn't really get into this because it's not really the point of the story, but the signup process is actually pretty smooth in that there is this 14 day free trial and you, you create an account, you give it the phone number you want to dial, you tell it, oh, I'm the son or this Is my grandparent or my parent or whatever. Give it the phone number. You also give it some topics that you may want the automated system to bring up. I think I brought up. Oh yeah, my fictional grandparent called Patrick, loves Mario and hates Sonic. I don't know, I was looking for something inflammatory, you know, obviously. And I think I brought up Mario speed running as well. I kind of. Kind of choked when it asked me, what do you actually want to talk about? So you do all that and then it actually gives you a prompt as well, like, hey, these calls, you should tell your parent beforehand they're going to receive a call from an AI, which is obviously. I mean, duh. Yes, you should absolutely do that. And imagine if you didn't. It gives you a little script like, oh, hey mum, I've signed you up to this service. It will call you between 9am and 12pm and it's just so I can make sure that you're okay. And you do all that and then it places an initial call and it sort of develops from there. And I guess now would actually be a good time to listen to one of those calls, which would last about a minute, I think. I did trim the audio, but this was the first call I received from.
- [30:27]
Jason Kebler
The AI And I am an AI companion. Arrange for us to have a chat from time to time. I assume they have told you about me, Is that right?
- [30:38]
Joseph
Yes.
- [30:43]
Jason Kebler
It's wonderful to meet you. I understand this might feel new or a bit weird, and that's completely okay. Everyone feels like this at the beginning. There's no right or wrong way to chat with me. We can talk about anything. Your memories, hobbies, history, geography, food recipes, or even play word games together. Does that sound good to you? Or do you want to know more about what I do?
- [31:09]
Joseph
I'd like to know more about what you do.
- [31:14]
Jason Kebler
Let me think for a second. I'm part of a friendly service designed to talk to wonderful people like yourself. Our calls usually last around five to 10 minutes. Just for fun, sometimes I can also share messages from your family. They've told me how much they care about you. Oh, and one last thing. Since I'm still learning every day, sometimes I might misunderstand something or make a mistake. If that happens, just let me know. I really appreciate your patience. Does that sound good to you?
- [31:47]
Joseph
That sounds good. So that was the cool. Emmanuel, did you listen to the audio? I think Jason did.
- [31:57]
Emmanuel Mayberg
I don't think I heard an actual call.
- [31:59]
Susan Ettlinger
Dude, the calls are really good. The calls are like. You're very earnest with Them is what I would say, because I really feel like it's the closest thing I've come to hearing you speak to a therapist.
- [32:13]
Joseph
Yeah, you don't hear me talk to anybody apart from you. That's going to be the very, very different context. Well, and then one of our subscribers left a comment that was like, I wish there was a service where Joseph would phone up my parents or something. And I was like, oh, okay. I guess I'm just chatting to an AI. I don't know. What did you make of the call, Jason? Was it unsettling? I mean, the AI bit? Not me, although.
- [32:41]
Susan Ettlinger
So I found it to be sad in that I knew what it was for. I knew what it was. And I think I can see the reason that this tool exists, like, theoretically, where there's a lot of, like, elderly folks who are very lonely and perhaps are beginning to experience something like dementia or Alzheimer's or something like that, where they end up telling the same stories over and over and over again. You know, I've had several grandparents who have had Alzheimer's, and talking to them can be really difficult because you just have to. You have to have, like, endless patience, essentially. And so here's a tool that has endless patience. It will talk to them forever for 29.90amonth.
- [33:35]
Joseph
It has endless patience for.
- [33:37]
Susan Ettlinger
For 29.99amonth. And I don't know if you can, like, leave it on 24. 7 or not. I will also say my grandparents didn't sleep very much as, like, they got older. Like, they were sleeping, like, two, three hours a day. So I don't know, maybe if this robot wants to talk to them for 20 hours a day, that. That is possible. That would be interesting to know. But regardless, it's pretty, like, dystopian because, you know, it's. It's like you're just outsourcing this emotional labor and what is supposed to be, like, a time to bond with your family to a robot. But I guess what I'll say is that I appreciated that the voice in question was not trying to be your voice. Like, it was good. That it was very clearly, to me, like, a robotic voice and not trying to be super, like, warm and human. Like, for some reason, that made it a little bit better for me.
- [34:45]
Emmanuel Mayberg
That was my first question when Joe flagged the service. I was like, does it train on your voice to make it sound like you? Which would be even more black mirrory. But I agree with Jason. Joe, so you actually talked to an expert about aging and technology about this service. What did they think about it?
- [35:06]
Joseph
Yeah. And I'll just read out their quote, really, because it's very succinct, but I am not an expert in aging and technology. I felt like I had to have some outside input on this one. So one person I spoke to, they said, in general, while AI tools may offer supplemental support for older adults, their use must be approached with humility, honesty, and a deep understanding of the symbolic power of human presence and caregiving relationships. Technology may speak, but it cannot yet care in the way that human relationships can. That's a pretty good quote. It comes in via email. I'm like, damn, that's actually really, really well written. Thank you for that. But I think that goes to the point that you make Emmanuel, which is about impersonating voices, because that would be insane. This is already dystopian, but that would be even crazy, right?
- [35:59]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah.
- [35:59]
Susan Ettlinger
And I mean, you could do it with your own voice Today, though, it's like the technology here, with other tool. Yeah, with other tools. And it's like, I don't know what this company plans on doing, but that could easily be like a premium tier that they offer tomorrow. Like, the technology is easily here for sure.
- [36:18]
Emmanuel Mayberg
And when you first filed this piece, I got to the end and I was like, how dare you not include a quote from the only expert I care about hearing from, which is your mom. Mum. Mum. What did she have to say about this service?
- [36:33]
Joseph
Yeah, I don't like doing that. I feel like I've done it once before when it was testing out security tools to see how user friendly they are. And it's like, mum, can you try this to see if you can manage this encrypted email service or something? It's a good sign if she can. But here. Yeah, it was just to ask, how would you feel if your child. And I didn't even say specifically me, I kind of wanted to disassociate myself somehow. But if your child was to hypothetically use this AI service, how would you feel? And she spoke about the coldness of the voice, which on one side, Jason was like, that's kind of a positive. And I think my mum didn't react very well to it. But then at the end of the article, she says, quote, I would feel terrible that they, referring to children, are not bothered about phoning me themselves. And I think that sums it up. Right. And you can have, as the founder of this company, you could have the best intentions in the world. You could really think you found a use case and Maybe for some people you have, you know, but hey, the people in my family are like rejecting this. They don't want anything to do with this. And I think that's an absolutely valid response. Someone has added something to the Google Doc, which is insane.
- [37:55]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Wait, before that, I wanted to ask. I have to ask, because it's like part of the pitch in the marketing copy is like, if you can't find the time to call your parents, which is, I don't know, it can be like 15 minutes, you know what I mean? To call your mom, which I understand it's not everyone, everyone's favorite thing to do all the time, but it's also not hard to do. I call my mom like once a week at least. And I don't know, I think four four Media's position officially is you should call your mom and I'll have a robot do it. Do you guys. Do you guys do it like, I don't know, once a week? Ish.
- [38:32]
Joseph
Yeah, something like that. And I think that's the editorial start. And I would just say that I.
- [38:37]
Susan Ettlinger
Think it's like if you have a good relationship with your parents, where you, where you like them. There we go. If they're monsters, if they're monsters, you don't need to call them, but if you, if you like them, please find time to do so.
- [38:52]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Fifteen minutes, not a big deal. It's like everyone has 15 minutes.
- [38:56]
Susan Ettlinger
I don't, I don't talk to my parents every week on the phone, I would say, but a little more often than that, a little bit less often than that. But they're always very happy when I do. My mom also listens to this podcast, so I consider that to be. I consider that to be me calling her because she gets the updates on my life. She gets.
- [39:14]
Joseph
You can't do that. You feel like, oh, yeah, I called my mum every week and it's because she just listens to the 45 minute.
- [39:20]
Susan Ettlinger
Podcast or whatever in your life. And I'm like, I. I'm reporting about ice. Like, what. What more do you need? Didn't you hear it on the first 20 minutes of the 404 Media Podcast?
- [39:32]
Emmanuel Mayberg
I also bet you guys text, right?
- [39:34]
Susan Ettlinger
Yeah. My dad actually called me right before this, by the way, because he drives a lot for work. And so he calls me while he's bored on the road. And he called me right before this and I was like, I cannot talk. I have to go on the podcast.
- [39:49]
Joseph
So we should have live brought him in, you know?
- [39:53]
Susan Ettlinger
Well, he was telling me about how there's like he was mad about the service fees on a. On some baseball tickets that he purchased.
- [40:00]
Joseph
Oh, okay. Probably best we don't then before we get to this thing in the Google Doc, which I still can't tell as a joke or not. And I'm going to defer to you to punt it or do it. What I would say is that rather than using an AI tool to optimise calling your parents, what about all that time you've saved optimizing your job using ChatGPT or presumably what people do using.
- [40:24]
Susan Ettlinger
You're supposed to use that time to do more work.
- [40:27]
Joseph
Oh, not cool. Because I was gonna say you're saying.
- [40:30]
Susan Ettlinger
10X your output based on what you.
- [40:33]
Joseph
Yeah, and then you.
- [40:34]
Susan Ettlinger
But that is a great point. It's like if you have an AI assistant doing your job for you, you should have more time to call your parents to do more human shit.
- [40:42]
Joseph
Yeah. And then you get the AI to do the human shit. Like, what are you gonna do the rest of your life? All right, somebody do this last page.
- [40:49]
Susan Ettlinger
This is real. This is absolutely real. You don't remember this? The question is more of a statement. Emmanuel, tell us about when you paid a service to break up with your wife for you. Which was very similar to this, I feel.
- [41:02]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, so this is 10 years ago now. But there was something going viral on Twitter, I believe, which was a service you pay to break up with your girlfriend. And with my then girlfriend's consent, I use this service. Then girlfriend, now wife and mother of my child. I paid them $30 to break up with my girlfriend. And I'm looking at the Vice story, unfortunately, just because of like, you know, how bad the Internet is at archiving things. All the images in the story are gone. But I was kind of chatting her at the same time she was getting the call from the service who did it, which by the way, in 2015 was a human, like an actual person. And we have a recording of this somewhere. An actual person called my girlfriend who was like, hey, Emmanuel is no longer interested in seeing you and he's ending the relationship. And today that would be AI probably. Right. Like he could probably relaunch this service as an AI Audio has no one.
- [42:07]
Joseph
I guess it's so low hanging fruit that people are like not even going to make a company for that, you know. But the product didn't work because you got married, so the product sucked.
- [42:21]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, I guess so.
- [42:24]
Susan Ettlinger
All right, leave it there.
- [42:26]
Joseph
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I genuinely couldn't understand if that was a joke or not. Okay, I'm going to go read that in a minute. We will leave that there. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I will now play us out. But if you are a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to talk about the hack of notorious message board 4chan. We're going to bring on our new regular contributor, Matthew Gault. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404 Media co. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404 Media. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really does help us out. This has been 404 Media. We will see you again next week.