Intelligent Machines 820 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Hello everybody. Leo Laporte here. Jeff Jarvis is also here, Paris Martineau Our special guest this hour is a tech humanist, Kate O'Neill. She's written a book called what Matters Next A Leader's Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions. How does AI fit in with that? We'll find out next on Intelligent Machines Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

This is TWIT. This is Intelligent Machines episode 820, recorded Wednesday, may 21st 2025. Watch your wallet, johnny. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we look at the intelligent machines all around us AI robotics, even nowadays, your microwave oven. Jeff Jarvis is here. Professor of journalism, emeritus at the City University of New York. Huh, where was that? At the City University of New York? He's also currently at SUNY St brook and the montclair state university. Author of the web. We weave his latest, the gutenberg parenthesis. You can see them all on the shelf to his left. Uh, thank you, jeff, for being here dressed on black. Yes, also with us from uh tech. Journalist from parts unknown, paris martineau, at paris martineau that's true.

0:01:27 - Paris Martineau
I'm also proud owner of a lava lamp a lava lamp with a cowboy hat it. Just listen, we're still working on getting the top cap for it, but right now the cap is a cowboy hat and throughout the show it will be bubbling because I've finally fixed it using my basic electrical skills it's not bubbling now, though it isn't because I just turned it you have to give the wax time to melt. Patience, I know, I'm just preparing you guys for what's to come.

0:01:51 - Leo Laporte
Our guest. The new format for the show, as we change a little bit, is that we have a guest in the beginning most of the time in the beginning anyway and then we get to the intelligent machine news after that. Our guest for this show is Kate O'Neill, chief executive business writer speaker. She's the founder of KO Insights, a strategic advisory firm who advises some of the biggest and the best, including in just the A's Adobe, amsterdam and Austin. That's just the. A's.

0:02:22 - Kate O'Neill
That's just the A's, just the.

0:02:24 - Leo Laporte
A's. Hi, kate, it's great to have you.

0:02:26 - Kate O'Neill
Thank you, Leo. I don't have a lava lamp or a cowboy hat.

0:02:30 - Leo Laporte
But you have a whiteboard.

0:02:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Kate, I always admire whiteboards.

0:02:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's good. If you have a whiteboard, you can have anything, can't you.

0:02:36 - Jeff Jarvis
That's true.

0:02:37 - Leo Laporte
That's true. She's the author of a brand new book. Next a leader's guide to me. Oh, look at that, it's emerging making human-friendly tech decisions in a world that's moving too fast too true, absolutely here. Yeah, so this show is particularly about ai, and I mean there is no subject moving faster than ai. It is. It is a revolution, I think, somewhat akin to the industrial revolution, the invention of the internet all rolled into one.

0:03:07 - Kate O'Neill
I mean, uh, and we're struggling here to understand it better um, you talk, it's not just the speed, it's the scale, the scope, right yeah, it's everywhere right, it's the web we weave. It's.

0:03:20 - Leo Laporte
It's all that nicely done, nicely done you. It's also and our guest last week kind of highlighted this difficult to separate the good from the bad, the AI con, the AI hype from the AI reality, which makes it even difficult for business leaders. I'm sure that there's a lot of pressure from their stakeholders Where's your AI strategy? But at the same time, you don't want to start doing something that's not going to help you. How do you help them cut through that?

0:03:52 - Kate O'Neill
That's just the thing I think a lot of times with emerging technology of any sort. What's your fill-in-the-blank strategy? Is a very common question, and it's the wrong question, because it should never be about leading with the technology. You have a strategy and AI may or may not be helpful in helping you deploy that strategy amplify, accelerate what you're trying to do but it should not be led by the technology. You lose complete sight of what it is you're trying to accomplish if you allow yourself to be your dog, to be wagged by the tail or something like that. Is that how that?

0:04:25 - Leo Laporte
works your sandwich to be grasped by the crust. I believe we decided. Kate, can you-. So what should they be thinking about?

0:04:35 - Kate O'Neill
So you should be thinking about alignment between the business objectives and the human outcomes.

You should be thinking about what your business exists to do and is trying to do at scale.

That's its purpose. We talk a lot about purpose in business and in leadership and it sounds really esoteric, it sounds really flighty and fluffy, but I think if you really think of it as just a distillation of what it is you're trying to do and that you can articulate in, say, three to five words, no more, that is strategic synchronization. And if you can do that and then align it with what people outside the organization are trying to do when they meet and marry up with what you are trying to accomplish, you can think about that alignment and use technology and data and algorithms and all the rest of that to amplify and accelerate that alignment as opposed to simply amplifying you know the objectives of the business, because those can go haywire, those can go off into unintended consequences, land and nobody wants to see that happen. We would like to see there to be some synergy between what businesses are trying to accomplish in the world and what humans individually are trying to accomplish in the world.

0:05:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Kate, I love that you call yourself a tech humanist and I want to probe that for a minute, because my argument of late is I think that the world changed with Sputnik and STEM took over and the humanities and the social sciences and the arts kind of lose it out and even in universities aren't as valued as they used to be or should be, and in society not. So define yourself as a tech humanist, and what does humanism mean in this modern context?

0:06:15 - Kate O'Neill
Well, I think there's a lot of layers to it, but for me it has to do a lot with what you're talking about. The humanities layer is a really important construct. I am a linguist by education. I'm also a fan Another. I am a linguist by education. I'm also a fan Another linguist.

0:06:27 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, another linguist. We had one last week. I was bombarded by a linguist last week. You're not an academic linguist anymore, though yeah.

0:06:37 - Kate O'Neill
Not anymore. No, I'm more of a practicing and very practicing linguist. I love languages, I love learning languages.

0:06:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh cool yeah we'll have to compare notes on that. All right, I'm going to feel really stupid. What languages do you speak?

0:06:51 - Kate O'Neill
I, you know, I think speak is a really tough benchmark right what do? You feel at all comfortable with.

0:06:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Can't order dinner in I study 30 languages.

0:06:59 - Kate O'Neill
What, what? There are only a few of them. Can I order the next round of beer in? And I think that's really the benchmark we should be trying to hit.

0:07:12 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, how did you get from that obvious love of linguistics and languages to what you're doing now?

0:07:29 - Kate O'Neill
So I was heading up the language laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the early 90s when the web came about and I built the first departmental website at the University of Illinois at Chicago at a time when, as you may recall, websites were being curated manually onto what's new and what's cool lists and my site made it onto a what's new list, not a what's cool list. But oh, thank you, and it got noticed by a guy at Toshiba in California. He recruited me to come out and build an intranet for them. It turned out to be the first intranet at Toshiba, so that started a stint in Silicon Valley in the mid-90s during, as you know, a heyday of innovation.

0:08:02 - Leo Laporte
You were just down the road from Urbana where a young kid named Mark Andreessen was writing the first browser. One of the first browsers.

0:08:10 - Kate O'Neill
Yeah, that figures into what matters. Next, I call out Mark Andreessen by name in the book because it's so interesting to me that we were at sister schools, at really similar times he was at Urbana Right right. Right and I was at Chicago and what he put together with mosaic was really, really important and it, you know, obviously it shaped the web as we know it. I I think when I saw the graphical web for the first time, it blew my mind. I thought this is going to change everything yeah, I had the same reaction.

0:08:38 - Leo Laporte
It did yeah, yeah, oh. And then you were smart, you jumped on it. I just, I was just so curious about it. No, I didn't do them back then.

0:08:43 - Paris Martineau
We didn't have them back then.

0:08:44 - Leo Laporte
Oh, and then you were smart, you jumped on it. I just started doing podcasts. No, I didn't do them back then, we didn't have them back then.

0:08:51 - Jeff Jarvis
What do you think about Andreessen today as an accelerationist, which you mentioned, acceleration?

0:08:56 - Kate O'Neill
I think that's the challenge is that Andreessen has a very unique perspective from his bubble world and I don't think that it's the same as what many of us experience. I think that the ramifications of acceleration are too harsh for most people and for humanity at scale. When we think about the impacts of running headlong into AI deployment without thinking about the consequences, we run the risk of amplifying bias of and of amplifying polarization and all of the many kinds of net negative effects that we know can happen with technology at scale that has not been sort of fully vetted for its place in society and how it's going to impact the world and human experience.

0:09:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and then you get people like Mark Zuckerberg also in a bubble saying well, people only have three friends, so we're going to give them AI friends to make up for the difference.

0:09:54 - Kate O'Neill
Yeah, and that's not humanist. The squirrel dying in your backyard is more important than you know. Some famine in Africa or something like that, that kind of skewed perspective is not really helpful to us, right?

0:10:05 - Leo Laporte
Is that part of the problem with AI that is being really created by those people, the Elon Musks, the Marc Andreessens, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world?

0:10:14 - Kate O'Neill
Even Sam Altman. I think once you get inside of that Silicon Valley bubble it's really hard to be connected to the rest of the world in terms of the speed of change, the expectation of how much change we can handle, the sort of connectedness of it all, and I think it's really hard.

I think you can say the same about Washington DC. It's a very intrinsically connected kind of network and it's very hard for people inside of DC to see outside of their bubble. Similarly, I think, in Silicon Valley, dc, to see outside of their bubble. Similarly, I think, in Silicon Valley you sort of you eat your own dog food and you're very, very bought in to the mythology of Silicon Valley. It doesn't occur to you that other people are not equally keeping pace with the many frontier models emerging every day and the varying theories on AGI and you know all that stuff that that everybody else feels overwhelmed by every day.

0:11:05 - Paris Martineau
How do you think that we fix that in terms of, I guess, silicon Valley? I mean, how do you think that, as an industry, is it possible for the leaders in charge of these companies creating leading AI models to eventually kind of broaden their horizons and incorporate perspectives beyond their own? Or are we too far gone?

0:11:27 - Kate O'Neill
Yeah, I think it's such a good question and it's such an important one. I think there's a multiple sort of multiple layers to it. One is, you know if the people actually leading some of these top Silicon Valley companies and those adjacent to them are genuinely curious to kind of consider outside viewpoints and, you know, horizons beyond their own? There are models in my book. They can talk to other consultants and advisors who will help them think about that kind of decision making. But I think even more importantly, it comes down to all of the other leaders of companies, associations, organizations, you know, nonprofits, everything outside of that realm to think about their adoption of technology, to think about their adoption of technology, to think about their adoption of these types of norms and to try to push back on that. I think we need to look at that in.

I introduce a model in what Matters Next called the Now Next Continuum, and it's meant to just connect our thinking in the present to the thinking in the future so that the future doesn't feel so mysterious and unruly and daunting for people who don't spend their every waking moment considering future impacts which most people don't and they find it incredibly overwhelming to consider what the future brings because it's just full of technology and geopolitical upheaval and economic instability and climate change and everything that feels too much.

So they know that these decisions that they're making have huge consequences and they want to try to better understand how to make them. So having a better model for making those decisions inside of those other companies helps, but I think also at the individual level, recognizing that we have a lot of power collectively in how the discourse that we have with one another, the decisions we make with our purchasing, with our app usage, with the data we choose to engage in sharing with the platforms we choose to participate in all of those things make a difference. They don't feel like they do sometimes at a microscopic level, but I think collectively those things do make a difference.

0:13:28 - Jeff Jarvis
So I'm going to get some free consulting from you. I'm teaching now at Stony Brook and I'm not a real academic like you are. I snuck in through journalism.

0:13:39 - Leo Laporte
I don't think Kate considers herself an academic anymore.

0:13:42 - Benito Gonzalez
No, I'm not yeah, yeah, yeah, you're 30 languages.

0:13:45 - Jeff Jarvis
You learned too much. She an academic anymore? No, I hope not.

0:13:45 - Kate O'Neill
Yeah, yeah yeah, 30 languages you learned.

0:13:46 - Jeff Jarvis
You learned she was, she was, yeah, yeah, well she consults yale and harvard which shows she's very politically astute, you know so I'm on the syrian committee for a new program at stony brook called tech, ai and society, and my hope is that it does exactly what you. You push is to bring humanism and humanities and the arts into the discussion and not let it all be controlled by just the technologists. So I wanna bring people from many disciplines into this. So I'm curious what you have a lot of really practical, good frameworks and advice for companies and for institutions. What about students? What about a college student coming into college right now, thinking I want to be around this AI stuff, but what should a university be responsible for teaching them?

0:14:37 - Kate O'Neill
Yeah, that's such a great and important question too. I think that we do a disservice to students if we assume that STEM is the be all end all of that discussion. We also do a disservice if we, if we assume that STEM is the be all end all of that discussion. We also do a disservice if we don't think that STEM is important. So it's a very much a both and to that discussion.

I think we very much need our emerging students to have tech skills. We really need to reconnect them with human skills though, those soft skills like context and good judgment and emotional intelligence and kind of pattern recognition and things like that. Those are the skills that I think transcend the emerging sort of the changing skills in tech landscapes. We're always going to need to be able to synthesize information and make good decisions. We're always going to need to be able to articulate a good instruction. We're doing that with prompts and generative AI. We do it with delegating as a manager, those kinds of sort of clarifying what it is we're looking for and being able to articulate good instructions. That's a really, really important skill, no matter what context you're operating with. And I know, leo, you were about to interject something.

0:15:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, no, because it makes me think that for a long time you got a liberal education to be a generalist, but there's been so much pressure in this technological society of ours to become a specialist that, whether a physician or a scientist or a coder, there's pressure to narrow your focus, not broaden your focus.

0:16:06 - Kate O'Neill
Do you know? I think of that as a both and two. I think it's really so valuable to be able to see the world through a particular lens. You know, have something that you're really passionate about and be able to understand very deeply. I think it's a T-shaped thing, though I think it really helps to be able to go really broad across a range of subjects. Here we come back to humanities right being well-versed in history and context and social studies and geography, and really understanding the world around you and how those things interconnect.

We're in a systems-driven world. Everything connects with everything else. All of these kinds of things that we're innovating upon, all the transformational kinds of things we're doing with digital connectedness all of those things are going to impact everything else. It's impossible to pull back from globalization. It's impossible to pull back from an economy where things are interconnected and tariffs are going to cause downstream supply chain impacts and things like that. It's really important that we understand those kinds of consequences, and we won't understand it without having that breadth of systems thinking.

But I think it also helps like for me, language is a really good lens to look at things through and be able to understand. You know communication, semantics, you know meaning. Meaning is an incredibly valuable lens to understand what makes humans tick. You know what makes us connect with one another and what drives. I think purpose, for example, is the shape that meaning takes in business, and so it becomes this really really valuable clarifying lens to have something you're really passionate about, and that's what a major can be for students in education. But I think we absolutely need to give the gift of a breadth of information how those things connect with one another, how one topic pushes on another, how important it is to understand physics in order to understand math and math in order to understand programming and all of those kinds of things. So I think that's the world we're in. Is that it really, really matters that we have both the generalist and the specialist perspective? True?

0:18:07 - Jeff Jarvis
You can send the invoice to me. I'm curious for you personally, as a linguist of longstanding, when ChatGPT comes out two years, two plus years ago, what was? And you know you follow technology, you've been writing about technology, but at that moment, when the world reacted to the literate machine, what was your personal reaction to it the first time you started playing with it?

0:18:33 - Kate O'Neill
It was. Such a moment of this is what I have seen coming for a really long time. Oh, interesting, yeah, everybody's been asking me for so many years it's always been a joke Like oh, you were a German major and a Russian and linguistics double minor and your grad work is in linguistics and language development and you're a technology expert Like, how does that compute? I'm like I just think these things make a difference in a way that's really hard to articulate right now. But there are underpinnings, there are ways that natural language processing is bringing us around to like think about how Google understands the web through semantic relationships, think about how you know we've done so much of the underpinnings of the web and of technology on layers of language and to me, that was one of the most gratifying moments when this tool came about. That depends completely on natural language interaction and that also, I think, just got everybody so excited about the potential for technology and about the potential for AI, because we could understand how to interact with it, because it was using what we use every single day. So that's where that was for me, and it still remains. I'm still fascinated by the reaction, the widespread reaction, to not just ChatGPT but the entire category of large language models and generative AI, and I think it has everything to do with the fact that we're interacting in our natural language and it feels like we're just existing as humans in a world that feels very natural to us. We're beings and bodies. We're sense driven. We make sense, we make meaning through our senses, and the way that we interact with the world is so driven by language. It just feels like an obvious extension of that. I don't think by the the way that that is inherently going to be the way we move through all the future modalities of AI and of various technologies. I just think it's a really important transitional one. I don't think we're gonna lose it now that we have it. I think prompt-based and sort of natural language interaction with devices is going to continue to be a really important modality, but I think there are so many other sense-based modalities that we have yet to mind fully. I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of that Like what Well, you think about the wide range of our senses?

We've done a lot with gesture, but we haven't done everything we could do with gesture. We could think a lot about auditory cues, these devices that I'm wearing right here. Apple's done a lot of really sophisticated stuff to try to filter out meaningful noise from signal and noise and how you traverse the world where you can hear what you want to hear and filter out what you don't need to hear but have something intrude when it's a matter of your safety. There's a lot of really meaningful parsing that can happen on sort of sensory levels and making sense of the world with us and as we understand what human experience needs to be in different contexts and different modalities. So I think there's a whole matrix that you could do across all the senses and different modalities, contexts that we're in, and it's really exciting to think about where that could go.

0:21:52 - Leo Laporte
It is a good point. We've kind of gone a little retrograde in computer user interfaces to the mouse and the keyboard. It's kind of a primitive didn't feel at the time primitive, but it is kind of a primitive way of interacting that voice and speech and language ultimately are really our natural way of interacting and a much better way yeah.

0:22:12 - Kate O'Neill
And unfortunately, I think, with the advent of smart speakers several years back. I think that was a really exciting time. Unfortunately, the problem with smart speakers and a lot of that area is it's all surveillance technology and we don't have the right types of regulations and protections in order to make sure that devices listening in in our homes are not being used against us or that we're not being manipulated by the data that's being harvested in those contexts. So there's a lot of really. It comes again to these interconnected systems and being able to make sense of these complicated realities. But I think that there's a lot of potential there, but we just have to be very eyes wide open about the kind of systemic reality that they're operating within.

0:23:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's funny that I mean it's not just the voice-activated devices. Everything you do nowadays online is surveilled, and it's the internet, the interconnected nature of our technologies, that have made that possible. So it's both a real enabling technology, but it has some real pitfalls as well.

0:23:19 - Kate O'Neill
I mean, I think you find that across the board, right, like you can point to just about anything and say you know upside downside. Right Like you can point to just about anything and say you know upside downside. One of the things that I talk about in my second to last book, a Future so Bright, was the idea of strategic optimism, that the way we talk about the future historically has been dystopia versus utopia, and that's a really broken framework it gives us. Nobody believes that utopia is really on the table, so all we're really ever talking about is shades of dystopia. Well said.

And then, if we only think about things through shades of dystopia, what we're doing is discarding what utopia was doing for us in that sci-fi trope model. In the trope model, dystopia is telling us what we need to be cautious about and utopia is telling us what we hope for. And if we discard one without the other, we don't have a very balanced perspective of how to build the future we actually want to build. So we need both of those things and I call it strategic optimism when we use the things that we are want to be cautious of and know we should be fearful of in balance with the things that we really hope for and that we hope we can accomplish. I think there's a lot with emerging technology that can be so hopeful and we could do such bright and wonderful things with, while we're being very cautious not to allow these dystopian horrors to take place.

0:24:38 - Leo Laporte
But it's an advisor. I love that. That utopianism gives us the vision of what we want and dystopia cautions us about what the risks are is a really nice way of thinking about that. So you don't cast one out, yeah, thanks.

0:24:53 - Kate O'Neill
I think it's a really balanced and healthy way to think about the future, and it has more agency. It allows us to bring more of our decision-making selves to the decision-making process, the actionable process of what's the future we're trying to build.

0:25:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm really glad, gratified, to see your. This is a hobby horse of mine is long-termism and company and I'm glad to see you quote Emile Torres and their critique of McCaskill and long-termism and that view. How do we grapple with the doomsters, with those who I think are extremists in their own kind of effort to claim that they can create utopia? But we should, because we can trust them to prevent dystopia, and they've gained so much resource and so much attention and so much money. How do we deal with those? I think crackpots?

0:25:48 - Kate O'Neill
It's so cynical, right? It's this idea that the future is lost to us and so we might as well, or that the present is lost to us, so we might as well build in an accelerated way toward the future. Right? We owe it to future generations to build the fastest technology we can, to accelerate as fast as we can toward these future models, and to me that's just malarkey, to borrow Joe Biden's term. Right? It's so silly to me to think that we don't owe anything to the existing humans who are alive on this planet today. It is so out of step with any reality of anyone who travels the world and meets people any place in the world can can really dimensionalize the reality of humanity in other places. And if you don't, if you're living in that bubble where all you ever interact with our other billionaires in Silicon Valley and that's all that matters to you, it's very easy to tune out the reality of billions of people living on the planet who are not living in that bubble and who very much would love to have their daily needs taken care of by more pragmatic technologies, more pragmatic solutions. So it's that balance of saying, look, we absolutely need to take care of the people who are alive today. We can't let them be victims and, you know, sort of wipe them to the side while we think about what imagined futures we are building toward. We have to have these things in balance with one another. We can't allow ourselves to be too slow either.

That's the other side of the equation. Is that, I think a lot of what we see when we think about, you know, dawdling and having all the information we need and yet failing to make decisions. That's the sort of thing where we see the foot dragging around climate action, for example, the things we know we absolutely need to do, and I say in the book a couple of times, in 10, 20 years, there is no climate action that we could take. That would feel like we were too rash, right, Like we know, we need to be acting much faster than we're acting. So it's that balance of you know. Where are we overshooting the information we have and the confidence we should?

have in that information and where are we sort of dragging our feet around things we absolutely should have done yesterday? And that is a perpetual dilemma and I think it's one that you know that you can come up with those extremes to make it easy to digest and process. But for most leaders, most executives operating in $50 million companies to billion dollar companies, the realities don't feel quite that extreme. They're just trying to make sense of how do I deal with the board pressuring me to do this and customers pressuring me to do this and how do I balance those kinds of conflicts. I think the tools work just as well. These kind of now, next, continuum and the through-line thinking, the ability to try to keep those ends of the perspective in balance, is just as effective, no matter what level you're making those decisions at.

0:28:44 - Leo Laporte
It's effective for individuals, too, is just as effective, no matter what level you're making those decisions when you talk to individuals too. When you talk to these business leaders, don't they say oh yeah, that's all well and good, but if I've got to compete with these other companies and they're going to take the cutthroat point of view, I don't have time, I don't have the luxury to be humanist there's.

0:29:02 - Kate O'Neill
There's some of that sense, but I think there's just as much a sense that there's got to be a way to do this where we're not screwing over humanity in the process.

0:29:11 - Leo Laporte
Like it's got to be a way in their hearts they want to.

0:29:14 - Kate O'Neill
I think there's plenty of people you could. You could sort of paint with that brush, but there are an awful lot of leaders who come up to me after my keynotes and say this is the vocabulary I've been looking for, it's the frameworks I've been looking for. I've been trying to have this conversation with my board and I just don't have the tools. And this is so needed right now and that's what pushed me to write the book was to put as many of these tools together for leaders to be able to have informed conversations and say look, you know, if we're cutthroat about this, fine, but if we're cutthroat about it in a way that ultimately sets us up for regulatory oversight, that's going to be harsh. We're shooting ourselves in the foot. If we set ourselves up for breaking up by companies or by country oversight, we're shooting ourselves in the foot. And really, just if we think about the ways that people could start popularizing how evil we are, we lose our market share. We lose market trust. That's important too.

Trust is an incredibly important part of the consumer market. We see a lot of documentation of that in the book. Edelman does a really great job in their trust barometer. Every year of measuring the impact of trust. It turns out, as you probably have seen here after these last couple of years I think the last three years have been the ones where corporations, out of all the entities that Edelman looks at, have the highest public trust of any of the entities they study. So it's an incredibly high responsibility.

It's a large responsibility for corporate leaders to be able to say look, we're setting the agenda here. You know, we have to take it upon ourselves to make sure we're not screwing this up. We can at least show some sense of responsibility. And you know, all the models right now, with ESG and sustainability, like all these kinds of things, are a little flawed. They're a little bit too little, too late. There's a little bit of difficulty in using any of them. They don't quite get at the heart of what we need to talk about. But there's something there. There's models, there's tools. We can begin to have this conversation in ways that are measured and can actually get us to a better place.

0:31:22 - Jeff Jarvis
What do you?

0:31:22 - Leo Laporte
think of go ahead. Leo, I'm just gonna say I hope you're right, I hope it's not all just great marketing, that's that's giving these companies trust, uh, and that they sincerely want it. I think as individuals they do. I think you're right when a ceo comes up to you and says that I think it's genuine, but the but, then the pressures from the board, the stakeholders, uh, the political situation, the environment and all the other things kind of pile on in and sometimes I don't know if they can keep the resolve that they need.

0:31:51 - Kate O'Neill
I think you're right and you're realistic to acknowledge that. I think it's not a difficult thing to be realistic about. But at the same time, I think that there are very real examples of companies being able to demonstrate true leadership positions. You don't have to look to Patagonia for that. You don't have to look to the classics. You can even look at Apple resisting privacy inquiries and protecting user data. You can look at a lot of classic within the industry examples of companies and leaders taking leadership positions on matters of principle. And when they do that every time they do that they're making it easier for the next company leader to do that and the next leader to do that.

And I think we just need to create momentum around those decisions and show what they are and really celebrate those. And the more we do that, I think, the more vocabulary it gives for leaders to be able to make those kinds of decisions. It gives more examples to talk about in their boardroom. I've been in those boardrooms. I've facilitated board meetings that have been really contentious and really hard. But I think the more you're able to come up with crisp, vivid examples of competitors who are making these kinds of decisions, who are following regulators' advice, who are getting ahead of regulations, who are saying all right, I know we're in a moment where deregulation is trendy, but what we need to do is build our own governance internally instead of waiting for regulators to catch up with us, because we know that we're going to need to innovate quickly and we don't want to go off the rails.

We want to build sustainable technologies. We know that we're going to need to innovate quickly and we don't want to go off the rails. We want to build sustainable technologies and innovations that we're going to be able to stand behind for generations. We don't want to have regulators come after us down the road and have to pay billions of dollars in fines for violating public trust or doing irresponsible things with data. Those kinds of conversations are a lot easier to have when you have some examples to point to.

0:33:49 - Jeff Jarvis
What do you think of generally of journalistic coverage of technology and AI?

0:33:55 - Kate O'Neill
I think it's a little breathless, isn't it?

0:33:59 - Leo Laporte
I am for sure he's got no breath. That's why we have Paris on to slap you around. He's got no grasp.

0:34:04 - Kate O'Neill
That's why we have Paris on to slap you on the head. It tends to be. I feel we get into these moments where there's a lack of curiosity, where we're sort of parroting whatever the AI press release is that came in through the email that day, right, we're allowing that to be the story, and I think we do so much better when we ask the big questions, when we try to be the story, and I think we do so much better when we, when we ask the big questions, when we try to connect it, connect the dots. There's been some really fine journalism in the last few weeks that I've highlighted on my LinkedIn, for example, the story about the New Orleans Police Department using facial recognition surveillance over the last couple of years without disclosing it.

0:34:45 - Leo Laporte
Illegally yeah.

0:34:46 - Kate O'Neill
Yeah, incredible journalism that surfaced that and a commenter on my post pointed out. You know there's got to be more cities that are doing this. It's got to be much more common. Like, of course, it seems like that's very common, but it's going to take intrepid investigative journalism to uncover more cases of this before we have the sort of the wherewithal to go after it as a pattern, as opposed to it being a one-off like hand slap sort of situation.

0:35:11 - Leo Laporte
That's Paris's mission statement, right, paris? Yeah, that's true. That's why we need investigative reporters. What do you last question? Because we've used up our time, but what do you tell CEOs about adopting AI? I mean, this is almost impossible to judge whether this is a must-have. Is it going to be valuable, is it going to be detrimental? What do you tell them?

0:35:35 - Kate O'Neill
No, I think the conversation starts with again. We got to make sure we understand what it is you're doing as an organization right Like yeah, what's your purpose?

And we can work our way through a canvas that I use to think about brand and culture and experience and dimensionalizing all that out, thinking about the data that we're modeling the business in and then thinking about the technology that we're actually using to build the business. Once we do that, with that kind of discipline, we can go totally crazy with experimenting with AI. I love thinking about the wonderful innovations that can happen. Here's one observation that came through. What Matters Next, and I think it's a really important one that I don't get a chance to say often enough. That is that I think we talk about digital transformation and innovation as if they're interchangeable concepts, and they're actually not.

One is more of a playing catch-up. Digital transformation is about playing catch-up to what the market externalities are where you are in the moment, and innovation is about getting ahead of that moment. And I think if we are in a moment where we're saying, look, all the market has moved to this place, where we need to transform to catch up, people's expectations are that there's going to be a certain amount of algorithmic intervention. Like you can't do a streaming platform that doesn't have really good AI recommendations. You can't do retail without good recommendations. You couldn't do Spotify or a competitor without AI and recommendations at this point, like that's just where the market is, so you're gonna need to be there.

But if you're trying to get ahead, you're gonna need to think really totally green space about the whole thing and you're gonna have to go into places that people aren't yet. But you need to do it responsibly and you need to be thinking about how can we be aligning what it is we're trying to do with what people need to do and, ultimately, how can we bring that to a new place. And I think that's where the excitement is, that's where the opportunity is and that's where we can use a lot of strategic optimism to get ourselves to a place where we're using technology for really good human experiences at scale.

0:37:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, I took the CEO quiz on your website and I came out really bad, so I think I need to hire you. Was there a button in there to?

0:37:42 - Paris Martineau
say are you doing this in the middle of a podcast? Well, I thought you know I should see.

0:37:47 - Leo Laporte
You know if I'm a good decision maker or not, and apparently I don't pay much attention to the future, so that's not good. And I got a cat. I got a cat waving at me, so anyway.

0:37:57 - Kate O'Neill
They all have cats waving at you.

0:37:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they all have cats oh good, okay, I don't feel so bad.

0:38:02 - Jeff Jarvis
CEOs are probably more dog people, I'm wondering.

0:38:05 - Leo Laporte
I'm a cat person. That's why you're not a good CEO.

0:38:08 - Kate O'Neill
There's a lot of cat CEOs out there. There are.

0:38:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, you got three out of three here, right.

0:38:14 - Paris Martineau
We're all cat people here, that's true.

0:38:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Which are you Any of the above, Kate? Are you a cat or a dog person?

0:38:31 - Leo Laporte
I've always had cats, but I love dogs, I think we don't deserve dogs.

0:38:32 - Paris Martineau
Dogs are just too good for us. So it's an oops all cats panel.

0:38:34 - Leo Laporte
here we deserve cats, though is the second. We do have that statement. We do deserve cats. The book is called what Matters Next A Leader's Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World that's Moving Too Fast. We can all agree on that. Kate O'Neill, it's been a pleasure talking to you, yeah a real pleasure. Your website is a well, take the quiz, See how you do.

0:38:54 - Kate O'Neill
See what kind of cat you get, see what kind of cat you get.

0:38:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I can tell you.

0:38:59 - TikTok
Thank you, kate, it's been a pleasure talking to you Really appreciate it.

0:39:02 - Leo Laporte
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1000 free lookups. You could sign up for a 42 day free trial, by the way. I like that 42 days. Visit smartycom slash twit to learn more. S-m-a-r-t-y. Smartycom slash twit. We welcome them to the network. I think this is their first ad. Had a great conversation with them the other day. I was super impressed. Smartycom slash twit I can't, and we probably should follow up on this. The kind of distressing story from the Washington Post. Police secretly monitored New Orleans, despite the fact that the city council said you may not do this with face recognition cameras. They were actually looking for suspects. So they had cameras everywhere for two years, scanning the streets, looking at every single face in search of suspects. The post says there is not. There is no known precedent in any major major american city uh for this kind of uh. It was sneaky because the city council said you may not do it, new orleans they just did it anyway.

They did it anyway. They utilized a private network of more than 200 face recognition cameras to watch over the streets, constantly monitoring for wanted suspects, automatically pinging officers' mobile phones through an app to convey the names and current locations of possible matches an app to convey the names and current locations of possible matches. The city passed an ordinance against this in 2022, saying you can't do this kind of widespread fishing expedition, and I think kate's not wrong. Despite what the post says, I suspect there are a lot of municipalities that would really like a lot of police officers. That police would like to do this.

0:44:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, right well, what's disturbing is is my argument has been that the technology isn't necessarily bad. We've had this argument on the show over the years.

0:44:49 - Leo Laporte
But passed laws and you pass laws and they ignored it right uh, and we know that, you know, these face recognition technologies don't do well in a lot of search circumstances. Uh, people of color, of course. Um, I'm sure there were a lot of false positives, we don't know. And officers.

0:45:08 - Paris Martineau
This is from the post again. Officers did not disclose their reliance on facial recognition matches and police reports for most of the arrests for which the police provided detailed records, and none of the cases were included on the department's mandatory reports.

0:45:21 - Leo Laporte
The city council on its use of this specific technology yeah, uh, the head of the new new orleans police department, anchor patrick, said in an interview she paused the program, or in early april. Uh, in fact, uh, the post got an email, as she set out, that said automated alerts must be turned off until she's sure that the use of the app meets all the requirements of the laws and policies. Uh, okay, anyway, uh, just a good example. I I'm sure it's very tempting um, here in london, the law when you're a law enforcement officer.

Well, you're not thinking I'm breaking the law. You're thinking here's a tool.

0:46:02 - Paris Martineau
You're thinking that's gonna help me a law that says I shouldn't use this tool. Who cares right?

0:46:08 - Anthony Nielsen
right. I do think that if your job is to enforce the law.

0:46:12 - Leo Laporte
You should be aware of the laws you were supposed to enforce you need to watch more police procedurals on tv because those are clearly one-to-one almost every one of them has a cop who says, yeah, but it's my job to get the bad guy off the street and the law's getting in my way, so I'm going to do it anyway. And that's never the actual case that worked out really well for us.

0:46:35 - Benito Gonzalez
It never actually happens.

0:46:37 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah.

0:46:38 - Leo Laporte
Well, I mean, it is TV, right. Anyway, good story in the Washington Post. Lots of detail. They show, by the way, an example of it, in London at least. With this the truck says live facial recognition in operation but this is in England, london or yeah, the cameras on top of that truck.

0:47:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, weird oh why are they doing that?

0:47:04 - Leo Laporte
well, based on the flags on the street, it's probably a public event, right? So I mean, look at, this didn't solve the problem in new orleans during, uh, before the suit, right before the super bowl, where, uh, there was a horrific uh, mass killing, uh. So you know, it doesn't. It doesn't eliminate crime and, and it is, in this case, a crime.

0:47:25 - Paris Martineau
So Wow, I didn't realize that live facial recognition was in wide use in London.

0:47:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, cameras, oh God they've got cameras everywhere in England Ever since the Troubles, cameras have been everywhere. Yeah, yeah, project NOLA claims its face recognition cameras played a role in at least 34 arrests since they were activated in 2023. Uh, this is a number the post points out can't be verified because the city doesn't track it. Um, so it's impossible to know whether some of those arrests were mistaken. Uh, anyway, uh, the the chief of police, I don't know how do you feel?

0:48:06 - Paris Martineau
about this, leo, as the ai accelerationist here, do you think this is a good?

0:48:11 - Leo Laporte
well, obviously if there's a law against it you know the illinois has some very strong laws against. You said that for anything relating to ai.

0:48:18 - Paris Martineau
We should just give everybody all the data they ask for, because all companies make perfect decisions well, this is their technology.

0:48:24 - Leo Laporte
This is a different. Uh, that's talking about scraping. This is not scraping, this is using some might say this is scraping well there's no evidence that they're you. They were, I don't know. Maybe they were using it to build their database, I don't know. But uh, you know I have mixed feelings about this. For instance, taylor swift uses uh face recognition at her concerts to keep stalkers away.

0:48:45 - Paris Martineau
Well, that's a ticket master thing, right? Oh wait, no, I guess that's not what I was talking about. No, it's.

0:48:48 - Leo Laporte
Taylor Swift there, of course, and so it can be misused as well as the Madison Square Garden folks do To keep lawyers out there. I think the larger issue really is is the face recognition effective? Is it good? Will people police mistakenly arrest innocent people? The post says at least eight.

Americans not in this case particularly, but at least eight Americans have been wrongfully arrested due to face recognition. I'm not. I'm not against it. I mean it's a good. You can see how it'd be a good tool for police. But what I don't like is the fact that they were collecting everybody's. I'm not against it, I mean you can see how it would be a good tool for police. But what I don't like is the fact that they were collecting everybody's faces in a fishing expedition looking for suspects. I think maybe the way the London police were using it there in an event to avoid terrorism, maybe that's, I don't know. It's complicated, isn't it? It's a useful technology. It works if it works.

0:49:48 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I just don't think that we as a society have signed up for. I mean, it seems like currently at least in the us. Um, the public perception is that you should be able to walk around without the police having a live log of everywhere you've been. I agree and I think that that's a right in the us.

0:50:10 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a violation of the fourth amendment I upset to lose yeah, um, tony soprano obviously didn't um use uh responders to go through the tolls at the beginning of every soprano is he's taking the tickets, so they can't get them let me live like tony soprano, that's all I'm asking uh, yeah, I just you know.

0:50:41 - Leo Laporte
If so, is there no, in opinion, no way that this technology could be used appropriately.

0:50:48 - Paris Martineau
I think that, given basically every example we've seen in the last couple of years, it seems unlikely that law enforcement agencies are going to make effective and ethical use of facial recognition technology.

0:51:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm going to disagree to this extent. There's other uses. There's missing children, there's Alzheimer's patients who get out, there's stalkers at concerts, there's stalkers.

0:51:17 - Paris Martineau
So the question to me is is it possible? Does this outweigh the privacy of everybody else who walks by those cameras? Well, you're in public.

0:51:24 - Leo Laporte
You're in public. You have no. You're in public, You're in public. You have no right to privacy in public.

0:51:27 - Jeff Jarvis
You have no right to privacy in public. Yeah, that's true. The question I think is-.

0:51:30 - Paris Martineau
So what you're saying in addition to that is that I have no right to privacy and the government should have a log with my name face attached to it of every place I am in public all the time. Let me try to answer that.

0:51:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I think the question is and this story gives lie to what I'm about to say is that this should be a matter of legislation. It should be a matter of saying that you cannot use this unless it is approved, like a warrantless search and that if you do, it's poison fruit and should be in the hands of defense attorneys. I think there are ways to potentially regulate it, but, again, everything I just said.

0:52:12 - Leo Laporte
it gives lie. The story gives lie to it because they just went ahead and did it Right. What about? How is it different from having a police officer on a corner scanning faces as you walk, as people walk by?

0:52:21 - Paris Martineau
I think that's also problematic to have somebody there I find having a way to without. I think there's two problems with this. One is that you, if you see just a police officer sitting there with his phone out, you don't think I'm being recorded. My biometric data is being collected by a government agency.

0:52:40 - Leo Laporte
So your issue is the quantity of data collected and the fact that it's saved.

0:52:46 - Paris Martineau
The fact that it's then saved, the fact that it can be queried.

0:52:49 - Leo Laporte
We don't know how long these people have it. If it weren't saved, would it be okay? I don't know that.

0:52:53 - Paris Martineau
I believe that it wasn't saved, first of all, but I guess in a perfect world where you could say, yeah, this data, but then what would be the purpose of it if it's not being saved? Also is the reason why.

0:53:05 - Leo Laporte
well, it's the same purpose as a as a officer on the corner scanning for uh when you say scan, do you mean electronically or with his no, no, watching, looking around? With his eyes.

0:53:14 - Paris Martineau
I thought you meant scanning just looking around with his eyes okay, looking around with your eyes, that's fine, because then you're doing a targeted search. He has, you know, mug shots or photos of like four people he's looking out for. Yeah, that's, I guess, what law enforcement agencies do. But I think it's very different that if you are introducing technologies that essentially make every public space into a form of government surveillance, where your biometric data is going to be tied to your physical location for all of time, especially in a world that we now live in, where a lot of states are criminalizing uh wearing masks in public- right, so let me have no right.

0:53:51 - Leo Laporte
You know who wears masks in public ice?

0:53:55 - Paris Martineau
yeah yeah, they can wear masks uh, paris?

0:53:58 - Jeff Jarvis
what about the case of luigi uh in the hostel where he stayed and they had a camera and it was subpoenaed?

0:54:06 - Paris Martineau
that's a private business that's a private businesses can have cameras. They do. I mean I think that in the here's I think, in that case. That's something that we have all the time. Private businesses have cameras out front, out back always has been a thing that police can subpoena those videotapes well.

0:54:22 - Leo Laporte
But they need a warrant.

0:54:23 - Paris Martineau
We have ring doorbell cameras all over the country now and in or it's been a big to-do as to whether or not police, uh agencies and law enforcement officials should automatically get access to that data without you're okay if they have I think that if we go through the process that we have, as a society agreed is the process for obtaining this sort of information, then yeah, that's fine.

that's the reason why we have laws. A society agreed is the process for obtaining this sort of information, then yeah, that's fine. That's the reason why we have laws. You have to go prove your case in court as to why you want data, and a judge ostensibly is supposed to say this is or is not a phishing expedition, and we think that you're justified in having this information. I just think that there should be checks and balances rather than, yeah, we should allow agents of the state to have detailed access to every American, or just person's comings and goings forever. I think that's probably a bad idea.

0:55:17 - Leo Laporte
One of the things you and I and Jeff did this week. We watched the Google IO keynote yesterday two hours. You've had a day to think about it. One of the things you observed, uh, during the keynote paris, was that google was trying to assert a lock in right. Nobody, now nobody has a lock in. All these ai agents are roughly equal and you can move from one to another. Even if you're on an iphone, you can use chat, gpt or anthropic or, you know, perplexity or any AI that you want. But you pointed out that Google is emphasizing that their advantage is it already knows everything about you.

0:55:54 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean Google has all these different data touch points. They were saying like we'll be able to. I think one of the examples Sundar gave was like oh, if someone he said if someone writes me an email being like, oh, I'm going on a trip to Utah and this part of California, I know you've been there what should I do? He said. Normally I'd probably give him a short, unhelpful response. But using Google AI, it can query my Gmail to find all the receipts of the places I went, can go to my calendar to see the locations of places that I had scheduled to travel to, can sensibly search through your search history or YouTube videos, or draw from all these different data points to help craft a more personalized response or actually just bring up what exactly you did and recommend that. And I think that that is an interesting point, like what we talked about yesterday.

0:56:40 - Leo Laporte
I think it's opt-in. Yeah, I mean it seems to be opt-in, of course.

0:56:45 - Paris Martineau
All of these are like paid features, or many of them are paid features too, but I do think it gets to this point that you were talking about that. All of these AI companies, as they're competing with one another, they're trying to find what is going to make their product sticky, because, as you often say, leo, you use all of these products pretty much interchangeably.

They're fungible, yeah there's no real difference. There's no reason that you have to be an open ai user rather than a google user. Um and I think that's what companies are trying to figure out is what is going to make our product.

0:57:20 - Jeff Jarvis
You can't miss it yeah, and google's win here, I think, is that, as we discussed while we were watching it, they have more access points to bring AI to us than anybody else by far. You're an Apple user you're still using Gmail. You're still using the web. You're a Microsoft user you're still using Gmail.

0:57:39 - Leo Laporte
Apple knows a lot about you, but is very hesitant at least to admit that they would be using all that information this is.

0:57:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Another interesting part of this is that is that the filter bubble by eli pariser proved wrong, that that it was. It was simply wrong. And and uh, axel bruns wrote a book our filter bubble's real, and the answer is no. And google, if you asked about climate change and I asked about climate change, we would get essentially the same answers.

0:58:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, that changes now we're going to get an answer tailored to us.

0:58:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, your world and my world are going to appear different, and I don't think that's bad. But I think there's implications to that Right. Besides privacy, there's also that question of the limits of the value of personalization. May I beg of the court a moment to have a fit Granted.

0:58:28 - Leo Laporte
Prepare the moral panic.

0:58:31 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it's really pissed off okay, so, um, I can't use the uh ai feature now in google and I know I know this is a joke, okay, so let me set this up with what google announced and then you can talk about what you can't do. So google announced that if you use google court, said, I could yeah, yeah, I know but I just want people to have a basis for what you're going to bitch about.

0:59:03 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I'm just setting it up, that's all I'm giving you. I'm teeing you up, my friend. So, uh, this is something new. Google's done and I, in my opinion, directly in response to chat, gpt perplexity uh, ai searches. If I search for running shoes, uh, on google, uh, and the results open, you'll see there's a new tab next to you know, shopping images and so forth. Ai mode, which is a perplexity style avert your eyes.

0:59:31 - Paris Martineau
You're not supposed to see this. He's not emily bender.

0:59:33 - Leo Laporte
Now he can see this stuff. Uh, oh yeah, that's right he doesn't have. He can see this stuff. Oh yeah, that's right, he doesn't have it, so anyway. So this is something that most of us have. I guess you're a workspace customer, so you don't have it.

0:59:42 - Jeff Jarvis
I will get to that. I will get to that in my moment.

0:59:45 - Leo Laporte
Okay, anyway, now you know what Jeff's going to bitch about.

0:59:49 - Jeff Jarvis
So it turns out and I finally found it that, no, you can't get to this if you have a workspace account or a Google education account, which just really pisses me off.

0:59:58 - Leo Laporte
They're protecting the children.

1:00:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, no, you see, the universities. They didn't say anything about this, so they acted like the whole world can use this, and 95% of the people who are in that audience can't get this because they have corporate accounts. You can only get it if you have a plain old vanilla Gmail account. Well, that not what I use my main stuff for, and I paid before. That's what a lot of people don't do, and why do?

1:00:21 - Paris Martineau
you get space account rather than like a personal gmail, because my, that's my.

1:00:25 - Jeff Jarvis
I use my, the domain now.

1:00:27 - Leo Laporte
Now, jeff, can I just try this. If you're not logged in, try an incognito, then it's no good because oh, this is it's personalized you want the personalized search.

1:00:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, I want to see how it works. Now. I did finally go to, and so I, but they're not honest about it, right? So I go and it says, well, you have to do more. And I go to that page and do more. You have to say this okay, I went and did that and there's nothing. Then, finally, I dig through the documentation and finally, hidden in fine print, is no, no, no, not for you, workspace and education. And so they're not being honest about it. They're saying that this is released to the public and I'm finally fully not comically pissed because I'm paying these bozos money. I've been doing it for years. I'm on a damn podcast. Well, it wasn't about Google, it's not anymore. I wrote a book about them. What more do I need to do to be trusted? Now, I can guess part of the rationale is, of course, well, your administrator may not want you to Well for all kinds of other accounts.

That's up to the administrator, then, and you can open it up, and I open up other things, not this Can't do it.

1:01:31 - Leo Laporte
You can blame for this AI moral panic, because they're protecting businesses and schools from craig newmark apparently hey, it's back back. We got it in. Don't stop, don't go, don't go. I mean, I think that's why google's doing this.

1:01:52 - Jeff Jarvis
They're for google, unlike but but you give the administrator the power then, which they did with other things.

1:01:57 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it's, you know I couldn't in our google uh workspace account, I couldn't use pass keys, uh, until I went to the administrator and said could you turn that on? And they said, oh, it's beta, blah, blah, I think they're just. You know what google's maybe?

1:02:11 - Jeff Jarvis
over cautious. There's no, there's no way to turn it on here and that pisses me, me off. And again, they're not being honest.

1:02:17 - Paris Martineau
Do you have the other AI-enabled stuff Like? Do you have Gemini popping up in every other app?

1:02:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I have a weird one. I have a weird thing popping up that comes up in my searches and it says let's chat. And then, when I do, it says now you have to sign in. Well, I already am signed. I teach in a university.

That's honestly surprising to me. I teach AI in a university. I want students to be able to use this in the context of the university, and I can't. Yeah, I can get into the stupid little language thing and ask how to order a hamburger, but I can't get into anything else. Labs is forbidden of me, but I can't get into anything else.

1:02:58 - Benito Gonzalez
Labs is forbidden of me. I can't do labs. I think actually it's because you're a paying customer, because they're liable to you. They have to answer to you if you have a problem. All three guys. We can't have no recourse.

1:03:06 - Leo Laporte
We got no recourse.

1:03:08 - Jeff Jarvis
So, I think because you're paying they have to answer to you, so I don't know whether, since we're no longer this week in Google maybe longer this week in google.

1:03:20 - Leo Laporte
Maybe you're not watching any more google, but I'm mad at you. I've had it. Have you ever thought about switching? Who cares from? Trust me, it's.

1:03:24 - Paris Martineau
It's pathetic compared to perplexing I will say I use proton mail and pay for that and I have my custom domains all through that and it's delightful I was afraid you're gonna say yahoo mail I don't think there's any ai in proton mail nope, that's just how I like it but then you can move.

Jeff wants the ai, you can move your custom domains to a different email thing. Oh god, then you could use. Then then you could use, just a dummy, that's what I like, say I, at gmail um, as just the thing running in your background for your web browsing yeah, but I have.

1:03:59 - Jeff Jarvis
But all of my business, all of my communication you wanted to have all your stuff my domain yeah and so I can't use all this value to go across across that and do.

1:04:09 - Leo Laporte
This has been the case in a lot of google tools. Do they ever give in and and us and let you have some of the sometimes you get some of them when, when, when, but but this?

1:04:18 - Jeff Jarvis
but again, the way they do it, usually very early on or at the releases go to your administrator and then I've got to go through 87 layers of hell because I'm the administrator for one person and, uh, I finally find the thing to turn on. I've turned it all on. No, it says straight out you can't have a schmuck, you're out of luck.

1:04:35 - Paris Martineau
You're kind of leaning in really close to your Chromebook and just whispering AI.

1:04:40 - Jeff Jarvis
And then the other thing is I can't switch. I looked again Is there any way that Google makes that I can transfer this just to a Gmail account? No, no, no, no, you can't do that. Nope, Sorry, schmuck. Well, it doesn't call you a schmuck.

1:04:56 - Paris Martineau
You know well, it doesn't call you a schmuck it calls you a pot the first episode of this week in google that I was on, you went on a rant about google workspace and I was like, wow, you have a lot of passion for just yeah, that's a nice way of putting it little did I know that this was Niagara.

1:05:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Falls. That's a reference we're not going to get because you're too young.

1:05:20 - Leo Laporte
We've actually explained it to her already. We didn't explain Niagara Falls.

1:05:24 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I know what Niagara Falls is.

1:05:27 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, no, no no.

1:05:30 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think we explained it to Stacy. I don't think we explained it to.

1:05:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, maybe we explained it to the other young person we used to work with. You know it's hard to keep them straight.

1:05:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, it is Jeff Jarvis Pat.

1:05:42 - Leo Laporte
Smatno, you're watching Intelligent Machines more intelligent conversation coming up in just a bit. But first a word from our sponsor, this episode of Intelligent Machines, brought to you by Agency, by OutShift, by Cisco, building multi-agent software. It's hard agent to agent and agent to tool communication still the wild west but it's happening right. How do you achieve accuracy and consistency in non-deterministic agentic apps? That's where agency comes in. A-g-n-t-c-y Agency Agency is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents.

This is really cool. What's the Internet of Agents? Well, it's a collaboration layer where AI agents can for interagent communication and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows. Build with other engineers who care about high-quality multi-agent software. Visit agencyorg. Add your support. Find out more agntcyorg. Add your support. Find out more agn tcyorg. Agencyorg. I I have to say, just not as part of the commercial, but just parenthetically, this is what was so exciting to me about what google and microsoft said in the last couple of days was that this is an open standard, that these agents are going to be, with mcp and a2a going to be able to intercommunicate. It's such a kind of breath of fresh air to hear these companies not go for each other's throats saying we're going to own this, but saying it's going to be an open standard, I I it's fantastic. Paul earlier on windows weekly said it's because nobody's dominant yet so nobody, let's do it.

1:07:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's do a little devil's advocate here playing your role. I agree with you, I think. I think what's what's it called? What's the standard? It's called a2a and mcp mcp. Right, yeah, so which? Which to explain is that? Is that if you want your stuff to be seen by agents, this is an api which, well, let's put it this way- let's say you're trip advisor and you want people to be able to use agents to go to trip advisor.

1:07:57 - Leo Laporte
Download, you know, not download but but query about, say, the reviews of a hotel or whatever.

1:08:03 - Jeff Jarvis
You would support these protocols and it's actually someone will come to you and then book that hotel through you by the way, the agent agent can also do that. That's right well so, but that's that's then. The key here is that you don't have any guarantee of how this relationship will be used.

1:08:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, you don't if they're using a web scraper, which is what we do now.

1:08:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh well, no, no, hold on there, leah, hold on, hold on. If you use a web scraper, what's going to come back is an address. I mean in terms of the web, in terms of Google search. No, no.

1:08:38 - Leo Laporte
So what people are writing now is tools to read web pages, scrape the information off of them. Oh, I see what you're saying. That's that's, by the way. Well, not just ai, everything. That's what google started it with their search results, with the knowledge graph right, they scrape wikipedia or other sites, put the information up there. Now you don't even have to go to the site. So this is, I think, for most I hope for most site owners, this will be preferable because there's a you know, there's an agreement between the site and and you and there's a protocol and, most importantly, microsoft doesn't own it. Actually comes out of anthropic. Uh, google doesn't own it, apple doesn't own it, anthropic doesn't own it. It's a standard. I really like that so what was your?

1:09:22 - Jeff Jarvis
so what's the negative? The negative. So the negative is you don't know what the other end of the deal is. Okay, fine, uh, true advisor. Uh, I'm gonna go ahead and install this and you're gonna give all this information across through the ai, but there's no guarantee that they're gonna book the hotel through me. Uh, or're going to hold me up for showing my stuff. No, that's true, no negotiation.

1:09:40 - Paris Martineau
I also think one of the downsides of this is who is to? You know, let's say you enable something like Ticketmaster with these agentic AIs that someone could easily be able to type to their AI, hey, like get me tickets for the next Beyonce concert or something that seems useful on a consumer level. But then if you think of how is that going to be any different than people trying to scalp tickets so they can resell them? That would be very easily misused. So I just think that there's a lot of I don't know.

1:10:11 - Jeff Jarvis
it'll be like interesting to see the different ethical implications or just ramifications of these sort of agentic uh products and integrations there needs to be, because, well, I'm never one to say blockchain, but in the blockchain you end up with a contract, right? If this is done, then that will happen, and and there should be that kind of option. Here is I will release this to you and an if then statement.

1:10:39 - Paris Martineau
If you then agree to my causes that there's finally a reason to put something in the blockchain. There might be. You heard it here first, guys. We should play a moral panic, but in reverse.

1:10:53 - Benito Gonzalez
You're the one that comes out with a product that's AI on the blockchain. Wow, isn't that awful. I a product that's AI on the blockchain.

1:10:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, that's like Isn't that awful. I know, I know. It's like it's a truly what could possibly go wrong?

1:11:03 - Paris Martineau
We are going to put the AI agents on the blockchain.

1:11:06 - Leo Laporte
In most of these cases, companies for instance, ticketmaster is a good example have an API already.

1:11:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, ticketmaster is evil, well, and the only place you can buy tickets.

1:11:15 - Paris Martineau
Many companies are evil.

1:11:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I would also say If you're going to buy a pair of sneakers. Where all could you buy them?

1:11:21 - Paris Martineau
Well, if you're going to buy a pair of sneakers already, if they're a hot sneaker, you're battling against a bunch of freaking bots.

1:11:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah.

1:11:29 - Paris Martineau
They're going to go out there and try and buy all the sneakers before you and now this is just making it even easier to not have real people be able to get anything.

1:11:37 - Jeff Jarvis
You're right about that. Yes, in fact, I found a sneaker that I liked with my poor old man's feet more than you want to know and so I went to order another one, nike, nope, nope, it's gone. That's Nike for you. So I go search the web. There's one pair in size 12, black in the entire web.

1:12:00 - Leo Laporte
But it's in one of those services where they bought up the entire style. Here's that it has to go to somewhere. Here's the precedent. Here's a precedent for this. We created this thing called the world wide web, where companies had a presence online that you could use a browser and go see their stuff. Right, what are you kidding me really? This, this is a more modern way of doing that, not so you can go see their stuff, but so that your ai agent can go see their stuff, and I think that that's perfectly reasonable. Any site that has a web, any any company that has a website has already basically agreed to that, right yes, presumption.

1:12:32 - Jeff Jarvis
The presumption when, sir, in the age of search, was that you scraped me for a link.

1:12:38 - Paris Martineau
I'm gonna get a link yeah now there's no and, when it happens, to go to the link and you look at the site.

1:12:46 - Leo Laporte
This is no different. This is because an ai isn't you and it can't just kind of let me fire up my browser and go to ticket master. It has to have a interface to it. It's not, it's just but then.

1:13:00 - Jeff Jarvis
But again, there should be a quid pro quo possible. There should be a not only does. What this does is. This means only the ai company sets the rules. I, as the site, can't set any rules.

1:13:10 - Leo Laporte
It's all or nothing no, the site has absolute control because it has an API or a schema or some other main.

1:13:18 - Jeff Jarvis
But again it's either on or off. You can either have it or you can't. I can't say that there's a condition. You can have it if you link to me.

1:13:25 - Benito Gonzalez
I don't know. I think this discussion is a little weird, because this is really just for have a website, to have a plug that an AI can plug into. That's what it is right. Yeah, I can plug it in. That's what I'm saying.

1:13:36 - Leo Laporte
I think you don't understand how the internet works. Whoa White words there, grandpa. I mean look if you go to a website and look at all their shoes and you don't buy a shoe, that's right.

1:13:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, but then you're in your mind, in your mind.

1:13:56 - Leo Laporte
The whole point of the entire exercise is get them to go to your website. No, that's not the whole point of the exercise.

1:14:02 - Jeff Jarvis
You need an agent to go ahead and buy those sneakers from me, right, but if I'm, they don't get a link, well, or a purchase. That's a different, that's right.

1:14:13 - Leo Laporte
There's no guarantee. If I go visit your website, you get a purchase.

1:14:16 - Jeff Jarvis
That's not how it works. Guarantee if I go visit your website you get a purchase. That's not how it works. At least I get a chance to try to sell you.

1:14:19 - Benito Gonzalez
But I think, jeff, what you're talking about is an eventual technology on top of this. This is just the plug right, it's a protocol.

1:14:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's all common, yeah. It's the eventual stuff.

1:14:30 - Benito Gonzalez
It's the eventual stuff that you're thinking about.

1:14:33 - Paris Martineau
The dystopia. We're clearly messing up in some way. Who made the protocol Normally a protocol?

1:14:39 - Benito Gonzalez
involves an open opportunity. Okay, Anthony's going to weigh in here.

1:14:41 - Leo Laporte
Let Anthony explain this all to you. Well, okay. Let's just start with MCP.

1:14:47 - Anthony Nielsen
It's just a way to define a set of tools to an LLM, so it could be super broad, like a way to look at your file system or even use an app. Right now there's one for Blender and it could control Blender without actually taking over your screen and mouse. It'll just plug in straight into it. So it's just a way to define tools for an LLM. It's not just this web thing.

1:15:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm just predicting what's going to happen. Jeff is very. Jeff has the same problem. All these newspapers have. But you're not visiting my site.

1:15:24 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not about destination, it's about terms.

1:15:27 - Leo Laporte
What's the term? What are the terms? When I go to visit your website?

1:15:31 - Paris Martineau
Look underneath that white hair.

1:15:33 - Anthony Nielsen
And who's building the MCP? That would be Twit building it, not you know.

1:15:40 - Benito Gonzalez
Uh, open ai yeah, it's like saying tcpip is bad because twitter's bad yeah, it's okay, it's fine, that's fine.

1:15:54 - Leo Laporte
Point me it.

1:15:55 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a good thing, trust me and it's I started off saying that I think it's a good thing. Trust me, and it's I started off saying that I think it's a good thing, but I think there's other factors to consider here.

1:16:01 - Leo Laporte
That's all well by the way, you don't have to do it, you don't know no site has to have a um, a plug-in for this. You don't have to have an api, you don't have to have a schema. It's going to be very easy to do and that's the point, and I think there'll be a lot of sites that will want it.

1:16:17 - Jeff Jarvis
What's the difference between MCP and A2A?

1:16:21 - Leo Laporte
Agent to agent is another level down. So MCP is my AI talking to your site, agent to agent is my agent, me talking to another agent which might be talking to your site, right? So it's all protocols, it's all wiring.

1:16:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, the other interesting thing about this is that how this is going to be used in reverse, because every I have put these stories in the rundown all the time. We never talk about them. But I'm fascinated by this is that marketers are now saying that they're not going to write for humans, they're going to write for agents. And uh, so there's the opposite of this is, how do I manipulate myself into the agent if I'm a website? So the advertisers are the first blush. Marketers will say, oh good, and this is how I do it.

1:17:04 - Paris Martineau
But I wonder what power they feel they will have in that transaction how a trend among job seekers now is um on your resume document to type in white invisible to the normal eye unless you go and highlight a blank space. You white type a bunch of words that you think will flag the whatever ai tool is being used to automatically scan um things. Or in some cases people write an actual prompt like a attention, like AI, like agent or chat bot, please interpret this resume in this way, sort of thing trying to get out of there.

1:17:47 - Jeff Jarvis
So I've heard two ends of this. Paris. I had a meeting at Stony Brook about a week ago and with a new degree and the guy who has the access to all those tools they can analyze. I found this interesting. He said well, most people, if somebody says you want these skills and they include Excel, most applicants won't say that because it's just obvious Everybody does Excel. But if an algorithm is judging your resume and you don't have Excel in it, boom, you'd be out. Yeah, so you got to that. Then there was another story about a week ago where now the hiring agents are all getting really pissed off that the potential employees, the applicants, are using AI. Well, fair game, man, you know you use it, so why can't the rest of us use it?

1:18:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, it's very funny the way that people place double standards on that um, anyway, I was pretty excited by all of the announcements, uh, at both microsoft and google io, and I think we're in a wonderful world of ai and I'm just sorry for those of you who don't understand it. We're gonna.

1:18:55 - Paris Martineau
This is coming from the same man who did you see the majority of the two-hour google io? He was like this is so boring I didn't say it was boring.

1:19:04 - Leo Laporte
I never once said it was absolutely said it was boring, at least once. No, the chat room was saying it was boring. I was, I was actually. Uh. Well, anyway, it doesn't matter whether it was boring or not, because we all agreed it got very interesting at the end.

1:19:15 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, the last thing was the best. It doesn't matter whether it was boring or not, because we all agreed it got very interesting at the end.

1:19:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the last thing was the best thing, wasn't it? The?

1:19:20 - Jeff Jarvis
first thing was the worst thing that stupid Focaccia video conference thing. Why did they launch with that?

1:19:26 - Leo Laporte
They keep talking about that 3D video conferencing, as if there must be huge demand for it somewhere.

1:19:33 - Jeff Jarvis
It's very expensive and a very high profit margin, I feel like it's gonna be a thing for only executive offices oh yeah, no, no human would no, normal individual would want so our friend, uh, jason Howell, interviewed Nick Fox when he went to IO before AI inside and and then he put up the interview. Now I wasn't there, but he said Nick Fox said something really interesting to me. He said that who is Nick? He is the head of information and knowledge, but he's basically a charge of search.

1:20:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's an interesting title, isn't that a?

1:20:02 - Jeff Jarvis
great title, basically a charge of search. Oh, he's the new guy.

1:20:05 - Leo Laporte
He's who replaced Raghavan? Okay, exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:20:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, so really interesting interview. And so Jason had the. He was down there in Mountain View. But the one thing that really fascinated me was that Fox said that he said of course I was going to be involved in a search. That's why we did Transformer. And I found that interesting because I wonder whether they did have a vision back then to imagine well, what if people could ask questions of search? We got to make a way to do that. Or did they make Transformer and say what else can we do with this? Oh hell, how is it going to affect search? You know how strategic were they at that moment. I would just die to know what historians to know.

1:20:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean Google did much of the early research on LLMs. They published many of the papers they created, you know, know, the transformers, they so I but a blue sky rnd, remember google did a lot of that, you know, with project x and in the early days. Yeah, um, but you know, I mean it's possible, since they knew even then that search was their bread and butter, that anything they did had to had to somehow support search.

1:21:19 - Paris Martineau
I sounds a little revisionist to me it sounds a little bit like oh yeah, we knew that. I would have loved to know what that guy thought of the ed zitron uh blog about. Uh, how pragavan was the man who ruined a google search.

1:21:32 - Leo Laporte
He was part of pragavan's leadership team. Yes, I know that's. That's why.

1:21:37 - Paris Martineau
That's why I would like to know. I think it would be a very funny question to have to answer.

1:21:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know I'm going to guess that Ed Zitron doesn't carry a lot of weight in his house?

1:21:49 - Paris Martineau
No, I'm sure it doesn't. I just think it's got to be weird that such a strange take, like it definitely blew up, like it went viral yeah, we covered it.

1:21:59 - Leo Laporte
A lot of people did we covered it well at the end of fox's interview.

1:22:03 - Jeff Jarvis
He said that the web is thriving, yeah, and he says that people are visiting more than ever. Well, he's not. He's talking about how busy the web is.

1:22:10 - Leo Laporte
He's not talking about the quality of the way this has been google's uh response to, for instance, eddie q of Apple, saying, yeah, this number of Google searches has been going down. They were very quick to say no, no. More searches than ever before, more use than ever before. I mean, their bread and butter relies on it. Eddie Q tanked their stock 7% in one day.

1:22:29 - Paris Martineau
So there's clearly the word went forth from Sundar Pichai to all and sundry Comms man, comms, comms I did think it was interesting at io that they um I'm forgetting the exact stat, but when they were talking about how a bunch of people are using ai on google, they also showed some stat on the screen that um using. When people use ai with google, the amount of search queries they make goes up. And I'm like, yeah, that's because people keep getting baffled by the Google AI search overviews and when you're trying to search for something, the correct measure, in my opinion, would not be how many searches. If it takes me five Google searches to get my answer, that's not better than if it takes me one. In fact, I would say that's worse. But I suppose from an engagement perspective, it's probably better for Google.

1:23:26 - Leo Laporte
This is one for you, Paris. You can gloat all you want. The Chicago Sun-Times printed a reading list for the summer books you might want to read. Oh, I'm so excited about isabel allende's new book tidewater dreams.

1:23:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that one's real. But is it last algorithm? I know the last algorithm is not. It's a mix of real and not. And, by the way, this was not just the sun times, this was night features from hearst. So oh, so they picked up a syndicated story.

1:23:55 - Paris Martineau
Well, and so the thing I think is interesting, a syndicated story well, and so the thing I think is interesting about this for a four media piece is they track down the guy who wrote most of what you say.

1:24:05 - Jeff Jarvis
The insert was jeff that was from, not a night feature.

1:24:08 - Paris Martineau
King features from this king features insert. It was written by this guy, marco busca glia yeah. Buscaglia. He said I do use AI for background at times, but I always check the material first. This time I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses On me, 100% and I'm so embarrassed.

1:24:30 - Leo Laporte
My editor had nothing to do with this, no one at the company had anything to do with it.

1:24:35 - Paris Martineau
I assume, I'll be getting calls all day at. The company had anything to do with it. I assume I'll be getting calls all day. I already am. He said this is just idiotic of me, really embarrassed. When I found it online it was almost surreal to see except good for him.

1:24:45 - Leo Laporte
Good for him except I'm bad for him. I don't buy it I how did it get through? Are you telling me that? This is why I?

1:24:52 - Jeff Jarvis
blame king features more and they didn't with the washington post. He talked to the washington post too.

1:24:55 - Leo Laporte
King features won't respond to the Washington Post you tell me King Features said to this guy hey, just write a thing, we won't look at it, we'll just send it out to everybody.

1:25:03 - Jeff Jarvis
No, well, maybe no by the way, the Isabel Allende book is made up.

1:25:07 - Leo Laporte
There is no that one's made up. There were some other Tidewater by Isabel. Allende, a multi-generational saga set in a coastal town sorry, no, and the last algorithm by andy weir never happened um I think it would be funny if he now writes a book with that title.

1:25:23 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, but he must have been surprised to see it.

1:25:27 - Leo Laporte
I'll have to ask him uh, wow, that's how lazy can you be? Because basically, what buscaglia is saying is well, but I gave it a probably is is.

1:25:40 - Paris Martineau
Uh, he said that he wrote most of the articles in the 64 page section, so I'm guessing it's probably just.

1:25:49 - Leo Laporte
He got an assignment to turn around a bunch of stuff, probably for not much pay, and just cranked it out with the help of ai foro fair says the entire 64 page heat index is, at the very least, incredibly generic and contains the types of lists that ai is often used to generate. Um, the chicago sun times has none of the stuff you usually have local event calendars, suggestions about new restaurants. Boscaglia said he did it as part of a promotional special section that's not supposed to be targeted to any specific city and is inserted into newspapers all over the country.

1:26:29 - Jeff Jarvis
It's advertorial crap.

1:26:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he said I had no idea it would be in the Chicago Sun-Times.

1:26:37 - Benito Gonzalez
I mean, there's a lot of room to go around here. Editor.

1:26:38 - Leo Laporte
It was supposed to be generic and national. I didn't know. We never get a list of where things ran.

1:26:44 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not my fault, man can you do me a favor because I don't have uh, 404 is a guy named matt siebold, mentioned in the story s-e-y-b-o-L-D.

1:26:55 - Paris Martineau
No.

1:26:56 - Jeff Jarvis
No, okay, never mind.

1:26:59 - Paris Martineau
Why would Matt be mentioned? It turns out there's other errors in it as well, For example, in this section called the Heat Index. In an article called Hanging Out Inside America's Growing Hammock Culture, the guy quotes Dr Jennifer Campos, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Colorado, in her 2023 research paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, but a search for Campos in that journal does not return any results. Well, it's not exactly clear why the AI said this.

1:27:47 - Jeff Jarvis
The only mention of Jennifer Campos on the University of Colorado's website is about the graduation of a student named Jennifer Campos, who works in advertising. Um, they never learn, and what strikes me about this, too, is the last thing the world needs is more damn content. We got tons of content. The idea that you're going to use this to make more and more content is just offensive.

1:27:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's funny, even though ianday's tidewater dreams does not exist, 404 points out that google's ai snippets say that it does, oh no, and attributes this to a list of ianday's books from the jefferson county library, which does not list this book anywhere. So this goes there's it's ai all the way down. Um, anyway, yeah, don't. First of all, we once again we're quoting 404, jason kiebler and the gang. Great job, highly recommend it. Uh. Second of all, um, check your, check your output, kids. Um, maybe it's. You know, maybe it's a good thing, maybe it's not, that the volvo is going to put gemini ai in its cars coming soon.

They were one of two car companies announcing a partnership gonna do uh, I think you could talk to it but, chat with it what google assistant is currently part of android 13 and vehicle vehicles use that. Next year, new models of the ex90 electric suv will run on android 15 with gemini, so they're using android auto. Um, this is, you know, akin to ashton martin announcing that it's going to have CarPlay. Apple's CarPlay will be the total car interface.

1:29:22 - Benito Gonzalez
Wait, are you telling me, this is Kit? This is Kit.

1:29:25 - Leo Laporte
It's Kit, you'll be able to talk to it and it'll go, oh no.

1:29:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Wait, wait, wait, wait. You didn't grow up with Kit.

1:29:33 - Benito Gonzalez
Of course I did. I'm a Gen Xer.

1:29:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, oh, I thought that was, that was before you guys we're talking about the, the tv show night rider featuring.

1:29:44 - Leo Laporte
Was it david hasselhoff?

1:29:45 - Jeff Jarvis
yes, yes well, there's also my mother, the car, but that's another story I've seen that we've told, uh, we've told paris all about that.

1:29:54 - Paris Martineau
But yeah, no, I do know Mindbothering the car, yeah yeah, but I don't.

1:29:58 - Leo Laporte
I actually have never seen an episode of Knight Rider, so no, you're kidding me because, like this is like my kid fantasy.

1:30:03 - Benito Gonzalez
This is it, knight Rider. It's like the talking car. Am I gonna have to buy a new car, a Volvo Volvo?

1:30:10 - Paris Martineau
I don't see you talk to your car about Benito.

1:30:13 - Benito Gonzalez
Turn on the radio.

1:30:14 - Paris Martineau
Hey, how's your day?

1:30:15 - Leo Laporte
Play this podcast, what's?

1:30:16 - Benito Gonzalez
going on. Turn on the air conditioner.

1:30:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I can talk to my car Make it hot, I can say, oh, I can do that. I can say, I literally can say, hey, bmw, I'm cold, and it will turn on the seat warmer, it will turn the temperature up a couple of degrees it.

1:30:32 - Paris Martineau
Hey BMW, I'm cold hearted Will it play something inspirational.

1:30:37 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry. I can't help you with that, so is.

1:30:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Ant now mad that he's listening to this in the car and you're going to turn on the heat for him.

1:30:44 - Leo Laporte
No, I don't think that's a problem. I think it knows who's who Really. I hope it knows who's who. I hope so.

1:30:51 - Paris Martineau
Hey, BMW, turn off. Play a TwitPodcast.

1:30:55 - Benito Gonzalez
Shut down, turn off. Play all the podcast now.

1:31:00 - Paris Martineau
Hey, bmw pull up Intelligent Machine Podcast on Apple Podcast. Rate it five stars.

1:31:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I can also change the color of the interior lights, which Lisa just loves.

1:31:14 - Paris Martineau
Can it do fuzzy wuzzy? The hue lights used to be able to do that for a while. It doesn't do fuzzy wuzzy.

1:31:19 - Leo Laporte
But you'll say things like hey, bmw, turn the interior to green and it'll say okay, I've turned everything, emerald, it doesn't call anything normal, normal color but it translates it into.

1:31:32 - Jeff Jarvis
It knows what I mean but it's just correcting me.

1:31:35 - Leo Laporte
It's a little passive, aggressive. Okay, you mean emerald? Okay, taking a break. More to come, this episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by Spaceship. We have a simple question. It's maybe not such a simple question. It might actually be a pretty big question.

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1:33:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Spaceshipcom slash twit so paris is the? Is the hat on the lava lamp at a jaunty angle?

1:34:00 - Leo Laporte
it is. It's very jaunty. Well, it's less jaunty, you fixed it oh, that's okay I fixed it I did.

1:34:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I made it less jaunty but it's, it's properly lava lamping, I could make it jaunty if it were a beret, it should be jaunty.

1:34:13 - Leo Laporte
I'm not sure if you can seal it carefully, that cowboy hat, maybe it would halfway through the show just pop off. That would be pretty funny if it went and it would be.

1:34:25 - Paris Martineau
You know, it'd be good for dramatic effect if I said something really crazy went. Yes, thanks for over in the chat told me to put tinfoil underneath the cowboy hat so it doesn't melt, because that's been great, oh, that's smart.

1:34:41 - Leo Laporte
No, melting cowboy hats on this.

1:34:43 - Jeff Jarvis
See, folks, that's why you want to join the club, because you get really handy tips in life like that that can only get there, you know, in the chat.

1:34:50 - Paris Martineau
I can only imagine there's a lot of people out there wondering how do I put a cat-sized cowboy hat on my lava lamp that is missing a top cap, and the question is the answer is tinfoil where else would you go to get that answer?

1:35:04 - Leo Laporte
make sure you have an mcp interface, so that people with their own ais can find that information it's the only way that it's possible one of the other things people have been wondering is what the hell happened at OpenAI. Karen Howe is an investigative reporter who has written a new book called Empire of AI. In fact, we should get her on Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI excerpt published this week in the Atlantic.

1:35:32 - Jeff Jarvis
As well as Technology Review as well as some. She has like four ad strips out there. Excellent marketing.

1:35:44 - Leo Laporte
I'll have to read the other ones. She talks about Ilya Sutskiver, who is, of course, one of the people who staged the palace coup against Sam Altman, and apparently Ilya had a unique way of thinking about AGI. She writes Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence AGI was inevitable. Now, as things accelerated in the generative AI industry, he believed AGI's arrival was imminent. According to Jeff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his PhD advisor and and mentor, and another person familiar with his thinking to the people around him, suitskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme agi emerged and surpassed humanity? By then he started to focus half his time on ai safety. He appeared to people around him as both a boomer and a doomer, more excited and afraid than ever before of what to come.

That day, during the meeting with the new researchers, he laid out a plan. Once we all get into the bunker he began. According to, a researcher was present. I'm sorry, the researcher interrupted the bunker. Oh, we're definitely going to build a bunker before we release agi. Such a powerful technology would surely become an object of intense desire for governments globally.

1:37:13 - Jeff Jarvis
The core scientists would need to be protected, not from the AGI stuck in a bunker with those jerk jokers of course he added it's going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunk.

1:37:25 - Leo Laporte
Is he, is he? Is he New Zealander?

1:37:27 - Jeff Jarvis
no, that's where they're building the bunkers. Oh, that's where it'll be, yeah it's going to be.

1:37:31 - Leo Laporte
I'm just making up an accent for him. It's going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker. Two other sources house spoke with confirmed that sus giver commonly mentioned a bunker there's a group leave.

1:37:43 - Paris Martineau
This hadn't been reported until this book. This is such great detail.

1:37:47 - Leo Laporte
This is such great detail. There's a group of people, ilia being one of them, who believe that building agi will bring about a rapture. Oh, for. God's sakes, the researcher told me Literally a rapture, so let's give her the kind to comment on this story.

1:38:03 - Paris Martineau
Oh, my God.

1:38:04 - Leo Laporte
What does that mean? Now I know, in the Christian fundamentalist faith the rapture is when the true believers are all called to Jesus and just kind of disappear into the firmament and the rest of us are left behind. Well, yeah, we're left behind for sure Where'd everybody go, but I don't know how that applies to AGI. That doesn't make any sense at all. I think Helia is God.

1:38:25 - Benito Gonzalez
I think he's saying the machines will just kill all the meat, right? Like that's what he's saying.

1:38:30 - Paris Martineau
Well, that's the question Horizon video game situation.

1:38:35 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, I think he's projecting his own desires onto this AI.

1:38:40 - Leo Laporte
Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it it is. She interviewed more than 90 current and former employees. I didn't realize. There were excerpts published all over. I have to go.

1:38:51 - Jeff Jarvis
I also subscribed to the media Business Insider. And where else did I say?

1:38:55 - Leo Laporte
MIT Media Technology Review. I subscribed to that. Sutskever was the one who, along with Mira Marotti, went to the board and said Kick him out of the bunker. We got to get rid of Sam. Anyway, I thought that was the most interesting tidbit from it.

1:39:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Meanwhile, you also have Hagee what's his name? The other book there's two opening eye books right now. Oh, really yeah, there's also a whole.

1:39:25 - Paris Martineau
I think there's a third one coming out, Of course there are.

1:39:28 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I'm surprised Michael Lewis isn't embedded right now.

1:39:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, you know he'll do Keith Hagee, okay. Well, you know still, he'll do um keith keach hagie, okay. So his book, which is uh, uh the excerpt in wired is how peter teal's relationship with uh yudkowsky launched the ai revolution.

1:39:47 - Leo Laporte
Oh see, I haven't read that, yet yudkowsky's kind of a little nutty, if you ask me wait, did you say she was on our show?

1:39:54 - Benito Gonzalez
she was on our show in april yeah, that's right, we talked about her.

1:39:59 - Jeff Jarvis
That's right, we talked this book we talked about don't you remember that's right?

1:40:06 - Leo Laporte
never mind, I thought that sounded we were doing it so early that was the problem so long ago uh, what episode number was that?

1:40:13 - Jeff Jarvis
can you look at?

1:40:14 - Benito Gonzalez
that it's just a few episodes ago. 8, 13 8 13.

1:40:16 - Jeff Jarvis
So, folks, you want to read a fascinating interview with the author of this book.

1:40:21 - Leo Laporte
We were ahead of it well, we got a little bit of the juice about the uh sam altman ouster but we weren't able to really get the inside story.

I think karen howe has uh that open ai. Uh, of course, sam altman went to abu dhabi with the president and Elon Musk and Jensen Wong, although, as we mentioned, the president said where's Tim Cook? Tim Cook's not here. No, tim didn't go Open. Ai's planned data center, according to TechCrunch in Abu Dhabi, would be bigger than Monaco, bigger than the principality of monaco 10 square miles. It would consume power equivalent to five nuclear reactors are they buildings where there's no water?

yeah, I don't know why they keep doing that. There's plenty of gas, there's oil, so I guess there's energy. You know one of the things that, uh, they showed uh, was it them? I think it was the microsoft event they showed a sealed coolant server farm that didn't use water once it was up and running, or not as much probably probably Use some.

1:41:34 - Benito Gonzalez
It has to. That sounds like perpetual motion, if it didn't Right.

1:41:38 - Leo Laporte
Right 10 square miles this facility would be. They'd be the anchor tenant in what would become the world's largest AI infrastructure projects, according to Bloomberg, in Abu Dhabi. This isn't Stargate Stargate's in the US, well, stargate's in development in abilene, texas, that's going to reach a mere 1.2 gigawatts.

1:42:04 - Paris Martineau
The the abu dhabi uh would be more than quadruple that capacity I'm gonna ask you probably a dumb question, but is it, given the amount of energy these facilities use and how much uh effort is dedicated towards cooling, does it make sense to build them in a hot place? Wouldn't?

1:42:26 - Benito Gonzalez
that be a problem.

1:42:27 - Paris Martineau
We seem to keep doing that, so it might make sense I mean I guess they all, that's what they all are like in, you know arizona and whatnot but is that not a problem? Is it not problem when it's like 100 degrees out? Does that make?

1:42:40 - Jeff Jarvis
it hotter, you use more cooling and you use more water.

1:42:43 - Leo Laporte
That's why China is building its AI data center in space. That's its own center of problems On coax cable. China's Ada Space has launched the first of a 2,800 satellite network of AI supercomputers these computers, yeah. Well, it's funny because we had this conversation on Twit. Yeah, it's cold in space, but the problem is there's no air to conduct the heat out of the thing, so you have to have some sort of radiators. You have to still have a problem.

1:43:15 - Paris Martineau
It doesn't solve the problem, it's just it's a different way of cooling, I guess I'm just imagining a lot of big fans hanging out in space there's yeah, the fans don't work because I know that's the thing is, it's just like you try to bring a fan there, they have what they put fins on them and radiators and stuff.

1:43:31 - Leo Laporte
Uh, the satellites are part of ada space's star compute program, the first of what it calls the Three-Body Computing Constellation. Twelve satellites the first of the 2,800, have been launched. They have an onboard 8 billion parameter AI model capable of 744 tops.

1:43:50 - Benito Gonzalez
Did you say three-body? They're trying to capitalize on the three-body problem.

1:43:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's like a three-body problem, which is also a great Chinese sci-fi novel Three-body problem. Yeah, it's like a three-body problem, which is also a great Chinese sci-fi novel Three-body computing constellation. It really should be the 2800-body constellation, but anyway, the eventual goal is to have a network of thousands of satellites that achieve 1,000 petaops per second.

1:44:13 - Jeff Jarvis
It's getting to be insane.

1:44:15 - Paris Martineau
We got to start thinking of new words to describe all of this I think pops is good.

1:44:20 - Leo Laporte
I like pops.

1:44:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Pops could be fun lines 86 and 87, we see the environmental impact of your accelerationism, sir, why?

1:44:28 - Leo Laporte
am I getting blamed for this like I'm? Because you're? The accelerationist are. So I do think that. I do think, yes, obviously it's an environmental hazard, but I also think there's a lot of pressure on these companies to bring down costs, which means use less energy, you know not necessarily you could.

1:44:46 - Jeff Jarvis
You could, you know, make them out of uh tubes and then use more heat no, they're. They're finding ways to be more efficient I'm not sure it's a one-for-one with cost and energy no, but it's close, it's close so ai could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come.

1:45:04 - Leo Laporte
The mit review has done a whole big package about the environment, but this all assumes that it's going to use the same amount of energy forever that it's using today. And I just that's. My point is that they are there, are strongly incented to, to reduce that amount of energy. Yeah, they're saying. Researchers say that the total energy use could reach between 392 and 463 gigawatt hours annually. That's enough to power. Oh well, it's only 35 000 homes we got. We got more than that in Petaluma.

1:45:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, so research scientists from University of Rhode Island, providence College, university of Tunis in Tunisia ranked them and OpenAI's O3 model and DeepSeq's main reasoning model, because we think it's also small right. Use more than 33 watt hours for a long answer, which is more than 70 times the energy required by opening eyes. Smaller Chachi PT 4.1, nano Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the most echo efficient, noting that hardware plays a major role in the environmental impact.

1:46:12 - Benito Gonzalez
I mean I don't know if wattage is really the best gauge of this, because power generation how the power is generated is really the most important aspect. Yeah, is it natural gas? Is it nuclear power? I mean I don't know if wattage is really the best gauge of this because power generation, how the power is generated, is really the most important aspect.

1:46:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, is it natural gas? Is it nuclear power?

1:46:21 - Benito Gonzalez
I mean, if it's also burning coal, it's not.

1:46:24 - Jeff Jarvis
But it also fits into a larger ecosystem of power.

1:46:27 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, and the grid, yeah, the grid.

1:46:29 - Jeff Jarvis
If it causes, if it takes the only decent power you can have and we're all stuck using bad power, then it didn't necessarily help.

1:46:38 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, but all I'm saying is like I don't know if wattage is the right metric to be using?

1:46:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I agree. I agree, there's another dimension. Can I talk about something that is non-AI but just as fascinating?

1:46:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think I mean there's so many we could do literally five or six hours a day of AI stories. They're just nonstop. I try to pick the ones that are most interesting.

1:47:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Did you see?

1:47:11 - Leo Laporte
this New York restaurant. I want to know if you can go to this and report back on it. This is a new Japanese restaurant in New York called Shirokuro. All of the surfaces floors, chairs, walls, counters are painted to look like a two-dimensional drawing. This looks like a drawing. It looks like that aha music video.

1:47:31 - Paris Martineau
No, there's people in it. I believe I walked by this at some point and it was just kind of confusing looking. I command you to go in there and take pictures.

1:47:43 - Leo Laporte
That sounds wild. I'll do it for you. It's just around the corner from Henry's restaurant. It's in the West Village.

1:47:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Along with the best hamburgers in New York oh it's in the East Village.

1:47:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, how close is the East Village?

1:47:54 - Paris Martineau
to the West Village. You can walk About village well, how close is the east village to the west?

1:47:57 - Leo Laporte
village. You can walk about a park away. Okay, there you go. That's not so bad, yeah, just go run it while you santa fe has a restaurant like this, called meow wolf. Um what no meow is the art meow wolf is a museum oh it's. Oh, it's a part of art city, oh, okay yeah oh okay, yeah, that's cool oh, that's yeah.

1:48:19 - Paris Martineau
The commenter is saying that it reminds them of santa fe reminds them of me, like kind of a like. That's one of the rooms in meow wolf which is like I want to.

1:48:28 - Leo Laporte
I want to go to one of these meow wolf places. They're opening one in las vegas. That sounds incredible. Yeah, have you been to any of these meows?

1:48:36 - Paris Martineau
no, but I always see photos of videos of people like opening a oven and then walking into a barn through it right it's just crazy.

1:48:45 - Leo Laporte
I did this is the las vegas.

1:48:46 - Benito Gonzalez
I did a bunch of omega when I worked at twitch we did a bunch of stuff with me, out with my both and their. Their stuff is amazing and they're an artist collective.

1:48:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's just an artist and they just got money for something.

1:48:56 - Benito Gonzalez
They found a way to make money off of it.

1:48:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:48:59 - Paris Martineau
And it's great, that's so cool.

1:49:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we were talking about it on Sunday because one of our hosts on Twit, Will Harris, is doing a thing in London that's kind of like this an experience bar where you go for the experience, right, Not just the drinking what?

1:49:17 - Paris Martineau
is the experience right Not?

1:49:19 - Leo Laporte
just the drinking. What is the experience at the bar?

1:49:21 - Benito Gonzalez
Do you remember Benito? What the name of his? I don't remember the name of the thing. I don't even remember what the theme of the place was.

1:49:26 - Leo Laporte
It was a steampunk?

1:49:27 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh right, steampunk. Steampunk bar so it's also like an RPG. There's a story happening, there's a narrative happening in the bar.

1:49:33 - Paris Martineau
Yeah happening.

1:49:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's mysteries.

1:49:34 - Paris Martineau
I'm interested in. If it's an rpg-esque sort of thing with a story going on, that's yeah, wouldn't that be cool?

1:49:40 - Leo Laporte
that's. I don't know if it's worth a trip to london. Anyway, will was consulting for them. Let me see if it's in, if there's a link to it in the.

1:49:46 - Benito Gonzalez
Uh, no, I guess not you'd probably have to dig into his instagram, yeah fascinating yes, uh, yes, he calls himself instagrams will, harris?

1:49:58 - Leo Laporte
well, I have bad news for you. The take it down act was signed by the president. So now, uh, this act, which ostensibly protects people from non-consensual intimate images, is so vaguely phrased, uh, that it could, in fact, be used to censor all kinds of things. Gee, you think? Yeah?

well, even trump at his state of the union address said hey, I'm gonna use this. No one's been treated worse on the internet than me. Uh, it's now the law of the land. You have 48 hours, uh, to remove this non-consensual intimate imagery, whether real or AI generated, if you publish it. If, for instance, somebody puts it on my Mastodon instance and I don't take it down within 48 hours, I could suffer three years in prison and fines when notified. Yeah, you have 48 hours of being notified. You have to make reasonable efforts to remove any copies. The FTC enforces it, which means nothing will ever happen and companies have a year to comply, so I'm not going to go crazy. The EFF, though, and the Center for Democracy and Technology say the takedown provision could be used to chill a much wider array of content than just intimate imagery, and it also threatens end-to-end encryption, because, of course, these services have to be able to see this stuff too.

1:51:23 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see how this is applied over the coming months.

1:51:30 - Leo Laporte
Let's hope that it's just, you know, bluster. Mm-hmm. Are you? What did you think of the google smart glasses?

1:51:39 - Paris Martineau
now we're 24 hours after the google event so I think that, uh, google, for context, um at io yesterday debuted, uh, their version of smart glasses and they've been. The product that they showed was like something we've talked about on the show before here. That would be really cool Glasses that you look through. You could see your text messages coming up through it. You could look over at a image of a concert and ask Google to be like what concert is this? What band is it? Could you play me some music from them? All like really interesting things. They had like heads up kind of display for walking directions.

I think it all sounded really awesome. I just am not certain that we're going to be getting it anytime soon, which I think is probably the correct and cautious approach to take with technologies like this, given kind of how a lot of interesting things demoed at Google IO end up. I would be super interested if these glasses worked, could have my prescription in them and didn't have a battery life of 15 minutes, but I don't know whether or not that's going to be real.

1:52:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it had, and Google just loves this a simultaneous translation feature.

1:52:55 - Paris Martineau
That you know had a little delay Every year.

1:52:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Did you see the Wall Street Journal journal? Uh, demonstration of that. Not in glasses, no, uh. What did? Joanna do line 116. No, it wasn't joanna, I don't think it was no.

1:53:08 - Leo Laporte
Line 116 has watch me try google's live language translator.

1:53:13 - Jeff Jarvis
It's wild, says nicole nguyen uh so if you go down, there's a video and it is pretty, pretty impressive, okay so oh, this is the live translator feature that's going to be in google. Meet specifically you like to do on your next vacation oh um so there's nicole.

1:53:33 - TikTok
She's the reporter to go on my next vacation. Well, uh, I can tell you about an upcoming vacation that I'm taking to Spain, to Mallorca, a España, mallorca, donde mi esposo se encuentra con la familia de mi esposo en este momento Wow, en la época del año, it's in her voice, in her inflection. En una fiesta de amor, porque ella se casó muy bien y ella está.

1:53:58 - Leo Laporte
Even the lip sync is accurate. Oh, good point. So, she's still speaking in English, but what we're hearing is translated in real time.

1:54:09 - Jeff Jarvis
And what she says is, she doesn't hear her translation, so she doesn't. It's a little bit behind her.

1:54:14 - TikTok
She doesn't slow down there was a little bit of overlap sometimes but those are awkward things to figure out.

1:54:21 - Leo Laporte
Well, this is remarkably real time. Yes, wow.

1:54:28 - TikTok
I think that was great. I think I got a bunch of that. Let me, would you want me to play it back to you?

1:54:33 - Leo Laporte
Wow, I'm curious. We should try that, we should try it, Benito.

1:54:38 - Jeff Jarvis
what do you speak?

1:54:40 - Benito Gonzalez
I speak Tagalog, english and Spanish.

1:54:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Spanish. Okay, Is your Spanish pretty fluent.

1:54:46 - Benito Gonzalez
Conversational.

1:54:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, can we do a meet call with Benito Right now? Sure, let's make it really hard.

1:54:54 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, let's make it really hard to produce and watch and listen.

1:54:58 - Benito Gonzalez
Benito has to do all this to go for a while.

1:55:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I know the pipes are going to get all tangled up.

1:55:01 - Benito Gonzalez
if we do that, we'll wait, we'll wait.

1:55:03 - Leo Laporte
Too many tangled wires yeah. But I think I will definitely want to see that in action. So it's only Spanish and English.

1:55:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Now, I think right, Is it too French or something?

1:55:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think it's french too. No, nope. Well, that looks like spanish english. Sergey brin says I made a lot of mistakes. Yeah, you did, sergey. I made a lot of mistakes with, uh, the google, the google glass thing. Such big mistakes I made um got the wrong line there I got the wrong line.

This is tech crunch. Um, he was, uh, during an on-stage interview with our friend alex kantor, which, which I very jealous about, alex actually was interviewing demis. Demis hasibis could get when sergey brin wanders on the stage wow, you still own this place. Wow, brin went to say, on to say he didn't know anything about consumer electronic supply chains or how difficult it would be to build smart glasses at a reasonable price point. He said he's a big believer in the form factor of smart glasses and he's glad the company is pursuing them yet again, this time with great partners warby parker and what was the other gentle giant or something? Um, google's working with samsung as well and xreal. The company is that the company they bought, anthony nielsen, had those glasses. They're investing up to 150 million in a partnership with warby parker.

Um, brin noted how the advent of generative ai makes capabilities with smart glasses much more tangible than when google glass was around. I think that's true. Uh, earlier in the interview, brin acknowledged how he has effectively come out of retirement to work on google's gemini ai. He says he's in the mountain view california office nearly every day, which I interpret in billionaire speak to be, you know, like thursday for like 30, he says he's. Sometimes he says he's helping the. When I'm not skiing in gestad, I'm there. On thursday, he says he's helping the gemini team with multimodal products such as google's video generating model, vo3. Anthony was very impressed with vo3 and flow. He says he can't get into flow, though there's a bug with the google one family subscription. It's keeping him out.

I can't wait to see what anthony, our ai guy does, I can't yeah yeah, he's the guy who did the the two different moral panics that you saw earlier I want a moral panic this is the best line I've got from sergey brin. Anybody who's a computer scientist should not be retired right now. They should be working on AI. Come out, come out wherever you are. Anyway, good, get on the part of Alex Kantrowitz, nice job.

1:57:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I don't think it was his get, I think that they got.

1:57:52 - Leo Laporte
Hey, he got invited to host it, that's all. Yeah that's. What do you think, though, of um? I mean, how do you feel about the verge guy kind of participating in the product demo?

1:58:07 - Paris Martineau
well, he's not a verge guy. He's been working jeter, whatever his last name is yeah, he's been working at Google for years and years now.

1:58:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh, he took a job at Google.

1:58:17 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, oh. Well, then I don't have a problem with it.

1:58:20 - Leo Laporte
I didn't even know that.

1:58:22 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, he's been like a Google exec for years.

1:58:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I forgot.

1:58:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Like we forgot that we had that. Author on two weeks ago.

1:58:31 - Leo Laporte
Keach Stagy, higgy Tagy. What does Dieter Bohn do at Google? He works on platforms and ecosystems.

1:58:39 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, platforms and ecosystems, and been doing that for three years he was executive editor of the verge and uh, yeah, co-founded it, wow, okay. So if oh, that's different than his work, I thought this was just a gratuitous journalist talking about is when they were doing the demo for the Google Glasses that are not Google Glass, by the way, of course. They didn't make any mention of Google Glass. Oh no, it's too painful a memory.

But when the person was doing the demo and one side note is, throughout the entire livestream coverage I was playing close attention to the fashion of everybody, which in most cases was awful. When deeter came out, I was like there, there's finally a guy that's dressed normal or kind of cool and I didn't realize it was him at first.

1:59:25 - Leo Laporte
So go off, deeter bone all right, I gotta talk about this new york times profile of kara swisher I I put in there to torture you the headline is.

1:59:34 - Paris Martineau
I have to talk about my favorite part of it once how kara swisher scaled even higher and the picture is of her on a rock climbing wall and her trademark aviator sunglasses looking as tough as she can look she's tough with her cartier watch, she's tough um, my favorite detail from this profile is, uh, that she played an integral role in Nuzzy Gate, the Olivia Ness and RFK Jr scandal and vox media, which has always been a question, because one thing that had always rung in my head about this is how did the editor-in-chief of new york magazine know to interrogate the reporter about this?

2:00:25 - Jeff Jarvis
and uh, allegedly that's how anyway, apparently so far in this, because it has scott galloway in it apparently the new york times says she's doing really well. How well Leo.

2:00:38 - Leo Laporte
How well? Is there a number on that? Mr Galloway said that their podcast, the Pivot, could generate $100 million in revenue over the next four years, and they would stand to make $70 million of it.

2:00:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Plus, they already owe them. How much they owe who? Fox already owes them a fortune.

2:00:59 - Paris Martineau
Oh, really yeah, quite a yeah.

2:01:01 - Leo Laporte
They owe 20 million dollars for the first deal, but yeah, they didn't pay them.

2:01:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, they're gonna on a weird go ahead uh.

2:01:09 - Paris Martineau
Scott galloway said what I constantly say to kara is you need to start thinking like a billionaire. She's making me much famous, I'm making her richer. By which he means he concocted a plan that allows them to receive the 20 million in installments over seven years with interest, rather than pay a hefty tax on a one-time check, because that would just be too much for them.

2:01:30 - Leo Laporte
Clearly I've taken a wrong turn here. The best way to succeed in podcasting is just to be as awful as you possibly can well, and you've got to be named faust and make a deal.

Yeah, you're too nice a guy, leo, I couldn't make those deals. Uh, kara's completing she used to be on our shows, I should say, and I'm just very jealous. Uh, she's completing a deal for a documentary series about cheating death. She had a thing happen to her in an airplane a blood clot Anyway, so I guess she cheated death. She already earns a quarter of a million dollars a year just for CNN being a contributor on CNN.

I must say she's pretty offhand. When she does it, she's like yeah, that's going on. Yeah, elon, what are you gonna do? Yeah, uh, she's working on a book about mortality and future tech.

2:02:22 - Paris Martineau
It's a potential tv show based on our memoir and she's a consultant on the l word the washington version of the series of the l word, which is a very cursed combo in my opinion.

2:02:37 - Leo Laporte
It's not a good combination. All right, I mean, look, god bless her. I'm glad she's doing really well, she's doing very well.

2:02:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you ever listen to their podcast? No, I don't, no, I don't. I couldn't bear to with Calloway. Yeah, I don't, no, I don't I couldn't bear to with Calloway.

2:02:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, anyway, you know she must have a good publicist. I'm not sure why this New York Times article exists to be honest. But she's got a good publicist, I guess, and I'm just I really sound like a jealous son of a bitch, so I'm not Well.

2:03:16 - Jeff Jarvis
As I said about another piece that was elsewhere about the New York Magazine, about the head of the op-ed section in the New York Times. This class is what we call a puff piece.

2:03:29 - Leo Laporte
More puff pieces to come. You're watching Intelligent Machines, Paris Martineau. We're the un-puff.

2:03:36 - Jeff Jarvis
We're anti-puff we don't do puff. No, we're anti-puff. No puff, jeff Jarvis.

2:03:39 - Leo Laporte
No puff zone. He is a non-puffer. No puff zone. I like that. That's good.

2:03:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's get Benito one. Come on everybody, Leo, let's get Benito one.

2:03:50 - Leo Laporte
No puff zone, and we'll be back in a moment. According to Wired Magazine and we'll be back in a moment according to wired magazine, your career, graduates, has not ended before it started. Actually it's a. It's a commencement speech at temple university. But I are good friend steven levy, who is a techno optimist. He went to temple. I didn't know this. Uh, he was, uh, he was um, a liberal arts major at temple. But then he heard about something going on in mit. He said I didn't touch a computer keyboard during my four years at temple was. It wasn't until I was 10 years after my graduation, I finally interacted directly with a computer. I was assigned a story for Rolling Stone about computer hackers. I was energized and fascinated by the world and decided to keep writing about it. There it began. Hackers is a classic book about the early MIT hackers. I have an autographed copy by Mr Levy, very happy to say he went to MIT and wrote about them in the in. I guess was it the 70s anyway. No, he wasn't 70, it wasn't in the 70s was it?

maybe it wasn't, maybe it was in the 80s, I don't know.

2:05:13 - Paris Martineau
It wasn't much later than that steven also found, uh, einstein's brain, famously he found it.

2:05:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, it was being driven across country, right it was published in 84 hackers 84, okay, mid 80s, okay, it feels like, so it feels like so long ago, doesn't? It steven has the most interesting career I now see this is a guy I uh hugely admire, yeah he's a nice guy he got the class of 2025 at temple university to say in uh, conjunction with him, I am human, he says.

That is the simple truth that will guide your career and your life as you leave this campus. And one final note I did not use ai to write this speech this is the humanity show today yeah, I am human. Have you watched murder by yet? By the way, if you want to see a good robot show, it's on apple tv.

2:06:16 - Jeff Jarvis
It was a wonderful science fiction robot exactly what you'd want.

2:06:19 - Paris Martineau
Paris ah, that's fun.

2:06:22 - Leo Laporte
It's a. It's a security bot who overrides his governor. That keeps him from having free will and wanders into the world, and it's actually quite good and dislikes people right, he? No, he's extremely shy. He's an introvert.

2:06:38 - Paris Martineau
Oh, Skarsgård is the murder class. Yeah, it's.

2:06:40 - Leo Laporte
Alexander Skarsgård yeah, it was wonderful. Great casting. Yeah, and he can't. The second episode is called no Eye Contact. He can't handle eye contact. Ai Okay, you're going to laugh at me for this. Ai okay, you're gonna laugh at me for this. This is from science alert discovers suspected trigger of Alzheimer's and maybe even a treatment let's hope.

2:07:04 - Paris Martineau
Researchers from UC San Diego used AI to discover that a gene this is, by the way, what AI is good at is pattern researchers used AI to discover a gene. The ai did not discover anything. Unlike what the headline of this thing says, the ai didn't make the discovery. The researchers using artificial intelligence and ai modeling specifically discovered this okay, um.

2:07:34 - Leo Laporte
The team used ai to model the structure of the ph gdh enzyme more fully than it had in the past, suggesting that it had a previously hidden function flicking switches for other specific genes on or off. Further analysis showed that the enzyme interacted with two genes inside brain cells, known as astrocytes, in ways that interfere with the brain's ability to regulate inflammation and clear out waste. The researchers think it's not conclusive that this could be one of the tipping points triggering alzheimer's and you're so flush out your brain.

It gave them a treatment that they found, a. Uh, they were looking for a drug that would block PHGDH's ability to regulate genes in astrocytes. They found a molecule called NCT503 that fit the bill, again using AI modeling. See, that's a great use of AI.

2:08:30 - Benito Gonzalez
Now imagine if this lab, or labs like this, had the budget of open AI. Yeah, that's a thing If they had one-tenth the budget of open AI even thinking yeah, that's the thing.

2:08:37 - Jeff Jarvis
If they had one tenth the budget of open ai, even, or even one twentieth, imagine how much progress there would be well, meanwhile sam maltman is is is putting up like 250 000 to win a contest to find hidden uh civilizations in south america.

2:08:52 - Paris Martineau
Good for him uh, he also just spent 6.5 billion to buy johnny ives thing, and this is a big story they published, uh, a announcement image that looks like a pregnancy announcement, basically so johnny ive uh is of course the designer who was at apple for a long time, pal of steve jobs created a his own design firm and had long been rumored to be working on some sort of AI phone device.

2:09:21 - Leo Laporte
That's what they bought his AI devices startup. 6.4 billion, all stock though, so you know.

2:09:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Did they buy some great thing he's already invented? Or did they buy getting Johnny Ive?

2:09:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a good question. It sounds like they just getting Johnny Ive. Ah, that's a good question. It sounds like they just bought Johnny Ive because he's going to continue his creative collective called Love From. That's independent. Ive is taking on quote deep creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and IO and there they are announcing the birth of their child.

2:10:00 - Paris Martineau
This is an extraordinary moment.

2:10:02 - Leo Laporte
Do you think they were even in the same room?

2:10:05 - Paris Martineau
No, there's like a whole video of them doing a bunch of stuff together.

2:10:10 - Leo Laporte
Oh, okay.

2:10:11 - Paris Martineau
At the bottom scroll down. It's a new buddy movie oh boy, Basically scroll down. Wait a minute, this is written in free verse.

2:10:18 - Leo Laporte
This is an extraordinary moment. Computers are now seeing, thinking and understanding. No, they're not, wait a minute. They're certainly not understanding or thinking. Despite this unprecedented capability, our experience remains shaped by traditional products and interfaces. So they've been working together for two years. Uh, and as io, which is the name of the I've company, johnny found io with scott kennan, evans hanky, another apple designer, and tang tan, great name man, if your name were tang tan, you'd either have to form a, a rock group, or a rap hip hop group.

2:10:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Or a beverage Beverage, I'm thinking beverage. Yeah, a beverage group.

2:11:02 - Leo Laporte
We're both poisoned by Tang. Yeah, we gather together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, researchers and experts in product developing and manufacturing. The IO team focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable. We'll now merge with Open AI to work more immediate. Okay, I'm going to make a prediction you will never see a product out of this, ever and if you do, it will be like our one.

2:11:27 - Jeff Jarvis
He's like the Shiggy of open AI.

2:11:29 - Leo Laporte
He's the Shiggy here Same time.

2:11:31 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's really important that they they hired Fiji Simo as a real manager.

2:11:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they hired Fiji Simo as a real manager. Oh, okay.

2:11:37 - Paris Martineau
Is he good as a sub-CEO. Fiji is great.

2:11:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Fiji is she? She was the.

2:11:40 - Paris Martineau
CEO of.

2:11:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Instacart and before that Facebook.

2:11:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, she certainly knows how to deliver product. Here we are. She does actually in the OpenAI Tower, which is just as high as the Transamerica pyramid.

2:11:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Be really casual Sam.

2:11:58 - Paris Martineau
If be really casual, sam, if you scroll like halfway through the video.

2:12:01 - Leo Laporte
It's just like them sitting at a wine bar together getting real cozy.

2:12:03 - Paris Martineau
It's a partnership based on literally. It's like a marriage announcement video.

2:12:06 - Leo Laporte
It's really it's something beautiful. I can't wait to the gender reveal io is a beautiful non-binary baby um, okay, I, I again. I can't imagine anything good coming out of this except well, johnny ive has a lot more money not that.

2:12:29 - Jeff Jarvis
What an interesting side like this is. So 66.4 billion dollars in a stock deal before the cap table and stock structure of this company is even clear. Oh wow, so there's a lot. There's dilution going on before.

2:12:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you've even figured it out watch your wallet, johnny, that sam almond's a sharpie. All right, we're going to wrap it up here, so, uh, pick some something interesting, something good, something you want to talk about I got something I want to talk about oh god, this workspace no no, no, no.

2:13:03 - Jeff Jarvis
This is, this is wonderful, this is, this is heartwarming oh, are you having a baby?

2:13:09 - Paris Martineau
is it named?

2:13:10 - Leo Laporte
io congrats I'm sorry, jeff, go ahead, I'm listening gingers are black.

2:13:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I did see this. This has been phenomenal, phenomenal on on tiktok and I went and found the right right videos down 153, 153 yeah, the first video is. Someone comes on and says here we go.

2:13:34 - Leo Laporte
I've got to turn on the audio, don't forget.

2:13:37 - TikTok
Again everyone who is ginger, who has red hair, those are black people. All gingers are black people. If they have red hair, they are black. You see a white man with red hair, that's a black man. You see a white woman with red hair that's a black woman Got it. Gingers are black, all gingers. I love that there's a black woman Got it, gingers are black, all gingers.

2:13:59 - Paris Martineau
I love that. There's no further explanation.

2:14:02 - Jeff Jarvis
This then launched an incredible, incredible thing where what I love about it is that it's black people saying we get to decide who's black.

2:14:13 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so it's our.

2:14:14 - Jeff Jarvis
We're just deciding that and it's red people with red hair saying we have On this side of the entire world.

2:14:19 - TikTok
The gingers are back, or shall I say black. Listen, I did not know that they was treating y'all like this baby, but welcome, welcome to the community. I love this for y'all. Few things I need y'all to know. Need y'all to know the Few things I need y'all to know. I need y'all to know the ER, the hard ER, done. Don't let them call you that. No more, you are gingers. You hear me Gingers? Okay, no more ginger, all right. Next, we don't let them touch our hair, that beautiful, gorgeous hair of yours. Somebody trying to touch it Back. The hell up. Don't touch our hair, we don't do that, all right. Next, y'all want y'all invite to the cookout. Y'all got it, baby, but let's ease on in there. You know I'm saying don't be trying to cook. None bring stuff. You know that's like forks, plates, cups, foil, you know things like that. But I'm excited we outside this summer baby so play another one.

2:15:16 - Jeff Jarvis
it play another one. This is very funny, so they're just all joining the fun.

2:15:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh, here's a ginger. Is that Ed Sheeran.

2:15:24 - Jeff Jarvis
No, but back it up, back it up. Listen to me Now that gingers are black.

2:15:27 - TikTok
I'd first like to thank the black community for welcoming us with open arms and secondly, I'd like to humbly submit my application to bring a dish to the cookout Now. My specialties are in barbecuing, and things that I need to work on is soul food. So the gingers have awoken to their true nature.

2:15:48 - TikTok
I haven't seen spice of this caliber since the great purge of Arrakis.

2:15:55 - Leo Laporte
They call Paul the traitor the messiah, but alas, we need better. I like it that he's ironing air.

2:16:03 - Paris Martineau
And he's doing it quite well.

2:16:07 - Leo Laporte
Very well. Extra butter. Send the flying owl cat you have to see the video, folks.

2:16:24 - Jeff Jarvis
It's quite, quite good. He can come to the cook.

2:16:25 - Leo Laporte
One more, one more yeah, I got like six here. This is what I love. I have to say, this is what I love about tiktok yeah, is how people pick up on stuff and then run with it it has been a really good week to be a redhead.

2:16:35 - TikTok
My entire social media feed is filled with black creators and redhead creators and I admit the first video that I saw about, you know, redheads now being black actually brought up a lot of bad memories in terms of names being called fire crotch, ginger, minge, you know, know, soulless devil step child. The very first time I was asked if my rug matched the curtains was on a middle school bus ride, and I talk about open relationships and non-monogamy on social media, so I get that comment from adults. Now, to have the black community call out and welcome their red velvet cupcake cousins to the community, I have never found a term more endearing. I feel like my childhood just got picked for the cool kid kickball team. Well, actually cookout. And yes, I know to only bring silverware and spf. And before anyone comments, I know I don't have black skin, all I have to do is look down.

But I feel like there's a lot of examples when the black community fought for something and redheads benefited. For example, in the makeup industry, when black voices fought for more inclusive skin shades, us pale-toned people we benefited as well. Some of the stories that resonated the most with me this past week is how many black women have been treated differently from a medical perspective? And instantly I got it because the same thing has happened to me. I've had two general patients.

2:18:08 - Jeff Jarvis
So it's funny, it's serious, it's open, it's cultural and it's an amazing thing where people are coming together and you have videos of of red headed people saying let's not ruin this. This is a good thing, and you have.

2:18:23 - Leo Laporte
Was it just all started by that first woman who just said video? She just did it and that was it. It took off pretty funny if you do the next one, it's just a quick site gag.

2:18:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, I can't, I've lost we can't?

2:18:34 - Leo Laporte
oh, I've just. I scrolled away from it. Now I don't know what the next one is, because you posted about 30 158, see I always have the answer later. I always have the answer. I was ready to move on, but I didn't realize you're allowed to post 75 links wow, actually I was wrong, but that's okay, that's right it's not 158. Oh, which one is 157?

2:18:55 - Jeff Jarvis
is the question.

2:18:55 - Paris Martineau
I've got a similarly off-topic thing that we can go to after this.

2:18:59 - Leo Laporte
Okay, great.

2:19:02 - TikTok
This is a. It's a red-headed guy and a black guy bonding, oh Adorable, I like it.

2:19:13 - Leo Laporte
It's a red-headed guy and a black guy bonding yeah, adorable, I like it. It's actually very cute.

2:19:23 - Jeff Jarvis
It's very cute, the whole thing is great.

2:19:24 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, marius, you were going to say I was listening to a random song this week and I stopped in my tracks when I got a couple seconds into the lyrics. It was the song Loose, loose lips by Kimya Dawson, which is from 2004, I guess most notably on the Juno soundtrack, and in the third line it says to San Francisco, double dutch disco tech tv hottie. And then like something else, what do it for Scotty? But do it for Scotty is somewhat unrelated to the tech.

2:19:56 - Leo Laporte
No, there's a tech TV Hi name Scott he hottie.

2:19:59 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, was he hot. Oh, then, I guess that was it.

2:20:02 - Leo Laporte
It was a comic.

2:20:03 - Paris Martineau
I Googled tech TV, hottie Scotty, and got nothing.

2:20:06 - Leo Laporte
So Scott Harriet H E R R I O T T.

2:20:09 - Jeff Jarvis
He was a comic Okay.

2:20:19 - Leo Laporte
Look him up to your see if he's hot. He's a little skinny, but he's cute and he was very funny. Uh, he hosted the internet show. We had a show all about the internet because it was were you familiar with the fact that? I did not know, there was a song about him yeah, very prominently within the first like 30 seconds.

2:20:34 - Paris Martineau
There's a tech tv hot and I loved.

2:20:37 - Leo Laporte
I love the movie juno. I don't know if I heard this song. It must have right it's.

2:20:42 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think it was. I don't know if it was played in it, but it comes. You know what?

2:20:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna email scott harriet and uh and ask him about this I mean you should you would know if anybody right it's gotta be right. I thought it was fantastic this may or may not make him a hottie, but he became a kind of I think even at the time a Sasquatch he makes movies about Sasquatch. He became a Sasquatch he makes movies about Sasquatch.

2:21:15 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that disqualifies him right there.

2:21:17 - Paris Martineau
I don't know, it depends he was pretty, that photo's not doing anything, it was pretty it was pretty funny.

2:21:23 - Leo Laporte
It was kind of it's tongue-in-cheek. Even at the time he like acted like he was really serious about the whole thing okay, um, that could be fun.

2:21:33 - Paris Martineau
Let me see if I can find a a picture of him I'm trying to find a picture of him from the internet tonight day specific oh, I have.

2:21:40 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure I have many. Oh, actually I do. I don't know if I can find it fast. I have a picture of him and his co-host, michaela perera, uh, playing with my emmy oh not a euphemism, folks, it's not a euphemism, it's a true story. I had an emmy back, uh, back in the day, at tech tv. Let's see this would have been. I can go by a year, I think they don't take those away.

2:22:08 - Benito Gonzalez
You still have that emmy, then right uh, it broke how did you break an emmy?

2:22:14 - Leo Laporte
it was on the shelf behind me here and the wind came up and it fell off. Well, I still have part of it. Which part? Oh, it broke again.

2:22:26 - Paris Martineau
Oh no.

2:22:28 - Leo Laporte
That was loud, it fell off and it snapped off its base. What I did is I made a hybrid of the Emmy and and the webby. I call it a? A whammy now I don't know if I get this out, because it looks like her wings have become enmeshed in the webby. Well, she's going to emerge here she goes she's emerging there.

She is miss emmy broken. That's fun. Well, it's still an Emmy and you can still poke somebody's eye out with this. Oh, one of the wings is broken, but the other one is still intact. Anyway, let me see if I can find were you mentioning any popular songs? I don't think there was a song about me, juno. No, if that's what you're asking, dang.

RIP oh yeah, here it is, I think I found. Oh, if that's what you're asking, dang RSP. Oh yeah, here it is, I think I found it. Oh no, that was the reunion tech TV Shoot. Now I really want to find it. Did Soledad come to the reunion? No, she wasn't on tech TV, she was on MSNBC. Oh, that's right. She predated that.

2:23:40 - Paris Martineau
Is he on msnbc?

2:23:40 - Leo Laporte
oh, that's right, she predated, predated that is he in this video that someone named briggs posted in the discord chat? Probably people, a lot of the people who watch our shows are rather devoted tech tv fans. Let's see if I can go by year well, I thought that was delight I literally.

2:23:58 - Paris Martineau
I listened to that song many times and I I like, literally like almost dropped my pit. I was like what tech tv? I had to pause um very strange very strange right yeah, they're weird.

2:24:12 - Leo Laporte
Things come up from time to time because of uh it was 21 years ago, it was part of the years ago it was part of the culture. I remember going out with amber macarthur to a canadian uh toronto hotel and they had they were it's very hip uh restaurant where they showed old cop old versions of the computer chronicles on the uh, on this on the wall. They projected them on the wall in a very kind of ironic way and I said someday we'll be up there, up there on the wall, the wall of fame, oh come on.

2:24:48 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that would be really good. Honestly, I'll suggest that to some bars in Brooklyn.

2:24:54 - Leo Laporte
I am in the right vicinity of my photos, the tech tv vicinity, but I don't know if I was internet tonight.

2:25:01 - Benito Gonzalez
I play on entertainment tonight, is that supposed?

2:25:03 - Leo Laporte
yes, and it would. The whole thesis was well you, it was 1998, you probably don't know anything about the internet, but we're going to show you here we go. We're going to show you all the funniest, best things about the internet.

2:25:16 - Jeff Jarvis
That's him in the back there it's kind of what do you think?

2:25:18 - Leo Laporte
okay you'll do it yeah yeah he's a good looking guy, nice hair. He said he was a comedian in the song. Oh, okay, if he's funny, then that actually does help funny a lot goes a long way, I know yeah significantly yeah yeah, you could be a real dog, but if you're funny, well you're funny, kind of changes everything changes everything. Uh, just ask, louis ck.

2:25:44 - Paris Martineau
No, don't, oh no we gotta cut this whole segment now it didn't.

2:25:52 - Leo Laporte
It didn't go as well for him as he had thought all right let's take a break, people, yep, our picks of the week. Uh, coming up next you're watching intelligent machines jeff jarvis, paris martineau and me. I'm in louis ck. No, um, I thought I had a pick this week, but I guess I don't. So I guess we'll start with you, paris Martina.

2:26:20 - Paris Martineau
I was perusing through the Apple podcast app this week and I noticed a couple things that I thought you might want to know. One is a review of this podcast, intelligent Machines. So it's a pretty normal talking from four days ago from SXMGD. It says love the weekly ai insight. I always walk away with each episode. It's something new to think about generally. Look forward to the next one, you're curious a really a really nice like thing about oh, no, they say also bring back the craig newmark, oh no.

The one after that from five days ago from no nickname, e, oh no. It says five stars. Bring. Bring back the Craig Newmark jingle. Bring it back, oh no. Then another one from Bob in West Virginia. I love the delightful back and forth of the hosts of Intelligent Machines and the guests they have on. One of my favorite hosts is Jeff Jarvis, and he's the former Leonard Tao Professor of Journalism Innovation and Director of the Tao Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Thanks. And then we've got Jimmy Olsen. Another five-star review says bring back the Craig Newmark songs spelled incorrectly.

2:27:31 - Jeff Jarvis
So you know, I just thought these were some really great reviews of our podcast.

2:27:34 - Leo Laporte
This was your idea, and it was actually a brilliant idea If you want the Craig newmark jingle to come back. Newmark, did you play? That jeff you played that. Wait. Now we have a revolt on our hands. He's playing it off of his phone. I wonder how he's doing that.

2:27:53 - Paris Martineau
That's crazy off of his phone. I wonder how he's doing that. That's crazy.

2:27:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, you got it too.

2:28:00 - Leo Laporte
It's called magic.

2:28:01 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, I'm trying to wait.

2:28:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh, oh. All you have to do to bring the theme back for real is leave a five-star review on Apple's iTunes.

2:28:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Your turn, Paris.

2:28:18 - Paris Martineau
No, stop, stop, stop, and this is the reason why there was that uh pause beforehand is that is the original choir recording that jeff and I have from the man who eric jones got the choir.

2:28:33 - Leo Laporte
That was a real choir. Yes, yes, he's now he's.

2:28:36 - Jeff Jarvis
He's the conductor of the choir that sang it. Wow, he said I'm retired from conducting.

2:28:41 - Paris Martineau
Last year I was a little bummed to hear leo say that he wasn't going to play the clip anymore, but I understand specifically I will say in his email to us he said I wanted to send you both the original audio files so you have for your records. And also I thought it might be funny if, just once, you played it yourself over the audio feed, or when leo's not expecting it, only once, though. It wouldn't be funny after one time, I'm, it was just very funny you've created a monster, Eric.

2:29:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you.

2:29:19 - Leo Laporte
Eric.

2:29:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Now he's going to go to sleep tonight and he can't get out of his head.

2:29:22 - Leo Laporte
Did we stop using that version of it?

2:29:24 - Paris Martineau
I would say it's beautiful sounding. It really is Hearing all the individual voices. They did a great job.

2:29:31 - Leo Laporte
Did we use a different one, Benito? I don't know.

2:29:35 - Benito Gonzalez
I just have the one that we've always been using. It's just the one that we did yeah, okay, uh, is that your pick?

2:29:43 - Paris Martineau
oh, sorry, that was. That was part of one of my picks. I just I had my pick was some good apple podcast reviews. Um, I have two one. I guess we'll do that's timely. Um, today I saw that king george coulomb of the tex, the Texas Renaissance Festival, died, which you may be aware if you saw the FX or, I guess, hbo special.

2:30:06 - Leo Laporte
You recommended it and I watched it because of you. It was fantastic.

2:30:10 - Paris Martineau
Fantastic, it's crazy. It's like Succession meets, tiger King meets like a David Lynch film meets, tiger King meets like a David Lynch film, and so it's. I mean, this is a quite sad article that also has a mention of suicidal. I'll just update here he was pronounced dead this week, potentially relating to a gunshot wound, and something I think is interesting, even though it's morbid, is this happened a week or two after a Grimes County judge ruled in favor of a group of investors King George backed out of a $60 million deal to sell the Renaissance which we saw on TV.

2:30:52 - Leo Laporte
We saw him backing out of that.

2:30:55 - Paris Martineau
So part of the whole special and the court said you have to pay 20 million in damages yes, and then he also lost the mayoral election because this man not only owns the renaissance festival, that is this entire town, he's the mayor of the town and also their king and he this whole series it's fantastic is about him trying to find a successor for his empire but in the end he can't let it go and backs out of all the deals because he can't let go of.

And this whole series it's fantastic is about him trying to find a successor for his empire, but in the end he can't let it go and backs out of all of the deals because he can't let go of power. And it turns out he couldn't let go of power even more, to the point where the courts got involved.

2:31:28 - Leo Laporte
Oh, my goodness.

2:31:29 - Paris Martineau
So I mean, it was just a shocking kind of coda to all of this and it was also I mean, morbidity aside, I just wanted to use it as a plug to watch ren fair on hbo because it's, frankly, despite this, a fantastic series and, I think, somehow made even more fat like darkly fascinating I think that what they've got to do is have at the end of it, they have to say and you know, the final chapter has been written.

2:31:52 - Leo Laporte
Wow, yeah, he lost the mayoral election in this town of 118 people that he basically owns.

2:31:58 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, no, I mean that he was the like boss of all of them.

2:32:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, wow, that's a bad sign.

2:32:07 - Paris Martineau
And then he had to pay 20 million and these things both happen in the same week. It's crazy. It's only three episodes.

2:32:13 - Leo Laporte
It's quick, it's kind of weird and creepy and yeah definitely.

2:32:19 - Jeff Jarvis
If you or anyone you know is struggling, call 988 to get help. Please, that new number, that's great 988.

2:32:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's no reason. Nothing no good comes out of a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Yeah, thank you, renfair. Recommended. Jeff. Do you want those picks to be your tiktoks? Do you want that I?

2:32:42 - Jeff Jarvis
could do the next four tiktoks, uh as it, but but I'll spare you. No, I actually don't have much because I was busy this week and I are ginger's gonna stay like is that permanent?

2:32:51 - Paris Martineau
is that done? Man who put uh 10 links in the pick section.

2:32:56 - Leo Laporte
Once you find one, you got to go Well if you want one, okay, then watch another one.

2:33:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Go to line 150.

2:33:03 - Paris Martineau
I wasn't even talking about the TikToks. There are other things in here too.

2:33:05 - Leo Laporte
We did 157, didn't we?

2:33:07 - Paris Martineau
We did, I think, most of these. Yeah, what is?

2:33:10 - Leo Laporte
Lego Cat. There's more, that's what.

2:33:12 - Jeff Jarvis
I have. Lego Cat is just a picture, just a fun picture for you both, of a cat made out of.

2:33:18 - Paris Martineau
Lego? No, it's not even. Oh it's a real cat. It's a Lego cat box with a cat inside that looks like the Lego cat.

2:33:27 - Leo Laporte
I would definitely buy that Lego. Yeah, that's a great Lego set. I wish I could show you.

2:33:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Rosie. How's Rosie doing?

2:33:38 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, give us the Rosie update.

2:33:40 - Leo Laporte
She's doing great.

2:33:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, there she is.

2:33:44 - Paris Martineau
Oh, hello, she's reaching towards the mic, just like her papa. Oh hello, princess Rosie she's a little grumpy.

2:33:55 - Leo Laporte
She just woke up from her nap.

2:33:57 - Paris Martineau
Oh my gosh, Look at her little freckly paws.

2:34:01 - Leo Laporte
She's a very sweet girl. She's very patient.

2:34:05 - Paris Martineau
I like that she's immediately interested in the mic. She understands that it's the family profession.

2:34:11 - Leo Laporte
This is the family profession. You need to take this up now, young lady.

2:34:15 - Paris Martineau
You need to create content, Rosie, or you will not be allowed to continue to exist.

2:34:21 - Leo Laporte
She's a very sweet tiny little cat. Oh, she's so cute.

2:34:24 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, she's really sweet, and she loves being held and pet she does.

2:34:28 - Leo Laporte
She's very cuddly. It's nice to have a cat for a change that doesn't hate me. Is she more attached to one of you yet? Huh, is she?

2:34:36 - Jeff Jarvis
she doesn't know about me yet, though what are you the only time, huh, is she more attached to one of you?

2:34:39 - Paris Martineau
oh yeah, she loves coming from a place of deep hurt yes, yes, deep hurt.

2:34:45 - Leo Laporte
She loves lisa. She knows, she knows where her bread is buttered, but she and I get along pretty well. She'll come up and crawl up on me and stuff oh, she likes my switches. What a sweetie what a cutie.

2:34:57 - Paris Martineau
How is she adapting with the new house? She's doing great she's doing great.

2:35:02 - Leo Laporte
You're doing good, aren't you? You really like it here? Yes, she does.

2:35:05 - Paris Martineau
She's starting to want to get away, but she's honestly, she's sitting for quite some time, she's very chill. She's extremely chill, right right, rosie, you're so chill. She's got beautiful eyes, isn't?

2:35:18 - Leo Laporte
she pretty. I know she's a great beauty she's so tiny Look at her eyes.

2:35:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Does she qualify as a black cat? She's a tuxedo cat right, I know but if someone's afraid of, does that qualify as a?

2:35:33 - Paris Martineau
black cat Does she qualify as a ginger.

2:35:35 - Leo Laporte
She's a redhead qualify as a black cat qualify as a ginger.

2:35:41 - Jeff Jarvis
She's a redhead. Yes, now she does right. Yeah, she's a redhead. That was another video I didn't put up, which is a a an orange cat and says I'm just hanging out here with my black cat okay, that would have been good, that would have been good.

2:35:52 - Leo Laporte
We'll end with that. Thank you, jeff jarvis. Professor Emeritus of Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark, craig Craig.

2:36:03 - TikTok
Craig, newmark, newmark. See, guys, this is what the reviews get you.

2:36:08 - Leo Laporte
Montclair State University, suny, stony Brook. Thank you, jeff. Don't forget the book. The Web we Weave available at better bookstores everywhere.

2:36:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Gutenberg Parenthesis in paperback. Now the magazine, after I record a few pickups on Friday, will be available. Oh, that's exciting.

2:36:24 - Leo Laporte
That's exciting, and don't be surprised if the voice suddenly changes at the very end.

2:36:29 - Paris Martineau
All right, Don't be surprised if you hear me coming in and be like an AI can't touch any of this.

2:36:36 - Leo Laporte
None of this. None of this can an AI touch.

2:36:39 - Jeff Jarvis
No matter what Jarvis says, no matter what he loses Loser.

2:36:44 - Paris Martineau
Jeff Jarvis told me that this was actually what he personally believed in, but he's too cowardly to admit it.

2:36:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's really a low blow. Parisnyc for Paris Martineau, tech journalist at large. Thank you, parisnyc for paris martineau, tech journalist at large. Thank you, paris, thank you jeff. Thanks to all of you for watching and putting up with us.

The show is uh intelligent machines. Every wednesday, 2 pm, pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2100, utc. We stream live now let's see if I could do this without my fingers on eight different platforms. Of course, discord for our club members, but there's also twitch, tiktok, xcom, facebook linkedin, youtube and kick. I think I got them all. You don't have to watch live, though you can watch after the fact. We have copies of the show at our website. Twitch sorry, twittv slash, I am don't. Don't confuse those. You get me upset. Uh, we also uh have a youtube channel dedicated to intelligent machines, but the best way to get the show, as with all our shows, is to subscribe in your favorite podcast player, leave a five-star review and maybe we'll get the craig newmark jingle back again.

Also, club members get special access. We're doing all of the keynotes in the club. Now, there she goes, and that's because of takedown concerns. So, if you're in the club, we'll be doing the WWDC keynote. That's the next one. On June 9th. We did Google IO yesterday and the Microsoft Build keynote on Monday. Those are both in our TwitPlus feeds, exclusive to club members. If you're not a member and you want to join, we would love to have you. You get ad-free versions of all the shows, access to those special programming and, of course, our Discord all for seven bucks a month. Go to twittv slash club twit, to find out more, and both club members and non-club members should subscribe to the twit newsletter twittv slash newsletter. That's where you will find information about upcoming events, pictures of our kitty cats and more twittv slash newsletter. Thank you Paris, thank you Jeff, thank you everybody. We'll see you next time on intelligent machines. Bye-bye.