IM 863: Fire and Ash - Hot Takes on Tech Trials

27:06It was a very weird definition. But then Sam Altman this week, right, says I changed my mind. We're not going to be able to do it with scaling alone. AGI. But yeah, whatever. Saying that I've been saying that. But at the same time, didn't he just hire a guy in charge of AGI? I think that this is he got rid of all we'll get to this he got rid of all kinds of things and then he says he's going to double staff this year yeah uh yeah we're going to get to that

27:36Marshall Kirkpatrick:let's talk to Marshall now because uh I've had enough of uh terrifying security flaws let's talk about something positive hi Marshall it's great to see you first of all thank you Marshall's going to stick around for the whole show because he is I mean he's a tech journalist and he's got a lot of expertise in this. But I do want to talk about your new enterprise, What's Up With That. Free to install. That's the title of it, folks. He wasn't just asking what's up with what Marshall's been up to. He was asking what's up with that. Yes, Paul Graham says the first thing you have to do if you don't own a.com is change your name.

28:15And my URL is what'supwiththat.app. Good. And good. It's yeah. Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. I'd love to love having you on. What made you think of doing this? Well, I I think like a lot of people regularly tell myself I should be more systematic about thinking through something. I find mental models or the CIA's structured analytical techniques manual or logical fallacies like we discussed earlier before the show and think, man, I would sure love to regularly apply this to whatever I'm reading. But the cognitive load of doing so just doesn't, you know, makes it too hard to do. But now I realized that we can have the AIs perform these structured, standardized analyses of things and then benefit from the output without having to do that, all that heavy cognitive lift ourselves.

29:21That was a big part of the motivation.

29:24Marshall Kirkpatrick:And so you have some prompts that you've probably worked on for some time, right? And so what is it work with any article, any prose? Yep. Any article, PDF, email, Google Doc, Word Doc in the browser, YouTube video. So, yeah, what it does is it captures the text on the page in the browser extension when you click it. It's all privacy centric. It's not operating. It's not analyzing your pages until you click the button. And then it says, okay, we can see what this is an article about. And then it goes and sends a bunch of spiders out over the web to build a real-time map of the state of the art in that topic.

30:09Marshall Kirkpatrick:Oh, interesting. And as a tech journalist, I'm always, you know, the worst sin you can commit. I don't care for this, but other people always give me a hard time when you say, look, there's something new here. And somebody says, I saw that last week. That's not really new. I think that's a terrible attitude. I could really use this actually. But that's the idea. This will prevent that because it says, okay, we know what the state of the art is. And this paragraph right here, this just moved the needle. That's not like everything else. And so that's the kind of the fundamental, that's the core analysis.

30:42But then there's dozens of others. Like I'll tell you, my favorite one is one called Fertile Edges, where it says, all right, This is an article about crypto wallets or encryption and security. Here are three topics that are adjacent to that topic and innovative people who are building bridges between those two topics that you can go and connect with and learn from at that intersection.

31:10Marshall Kirkpatrick:So I'm going to the Chrome Web Store. It works on Chrome and Firefox, right? I'm typing what's up with that. It seems to know all about what's up with that. This is it, right? Yep. There it is. I'm going to add that to Chrome. And you know what? I should be running this on every story that we do, come to think of it. Here's the what's up with that page. Let me go to Tech Meme. And there's a story we're going to cover in just a little bit. Paris said we got to cover this story. So this is a CNBC story about the jury finding meta and YouTube negligent in the social media addiction trial. We've been talking about the jury went out on Friday and they came back.

31:53Marshall Kirkpatrick:So now I'm going to click. Don't see what's up with that. Court law is beautiful. Actually, I can just do control you, can't I? Or command you on a Mac. So let me just do that. Command you. And there it is. What's up with that is analyzing the article. so it's going to give me insights not into the ads on the article i hope because i don't oh there you go uh oh this is great so this is it's summarizing other stories this sidesteps the section 230 shield which is an important thing to know a kind of analysis that we would want you don't need to listen to our shows anymore you can just get all this uh this is great look at this Now, I can also run a systems analysis.

32:36Marshall Kirkpatrick:What is that? So that is a recommendation. It says out of all the dozens of mental models that we've got in the power tools drawer, this would be a good one to run a systems analysis of, which means let's look at it in terms of flows and stocks and feedback loops and leverage points inspired by a woman donella meadows who's kind of the the foremother of systems thinking wrote a book called thinking and systems uh many many years ago and so it will it'll write up a little report of a systems view of that article that you're reading and the topic and give you a little diagram of causal loops and and stuff like that and that's one of like i said dozens of different processes but that one was recommended for that article in particular it thought it would be a good oh i see so it's smart enough to say hey based on that what's in this article you would benefit from a systems analysis yep so if you give that a click it'll go and and perform that analysis it's doing it right now it also asked me it says i can give you better results if you tell me who you are and what you're doing so i said i'm a podcaster and i'm uh i'm keeping a track of tech news for my podcasts that helps it too yep so it's gonna it's gonna then uh keep an eye out uh in the background anytime you analyze an article, it's going to take that into consideration, the fact that you're a podcaster, you're looking for news.

34:02And I'm guessing, I'm hoping that you may also get an alert every once in a while if there's any really important podcasting news. We've got agents monitoring the web in the background, looking at thousands of different sources. And when they see something that might be a risk or an opportunity for you they run thousands of simulations to say how might this news intersect with this user and do any of those those scenarios rise to a level where it makes sense to alert leo like whoa this is this one's important leo uh and and now it's it knows

34:42Marshall Kirkpatrick:to watch out for that kind of stuff for you i can even enhance this i see this link drawer i can tell it I'm working on a project this you could use this Paris working on a project right now questions I'm exploring that I'd like some answers to so it would kind of be keeping an eye out for that kind of stuff it'll if you say these are my questions I'm I'm exploring every time you analyze a page it'll check to see if there are data points or evidence that might support one decision or another and if there is it'll give you a little alert and you can say oh yeah save that one to the decision. And as you then collect them, they've got all the citations and all the data points, then you can hit synthesize and it will give you a report synthesizing all the data points you saved and links out to the original source articles.

35:30Wow.

35:30Marshall Kirkpatrick:You know what I love about this is this is a really good practical example of how AI can be very specifically applied to a specific kind of need. And I think more and more I'm thinking that's kind of what AI needs, what AI products need to do is address specific needs. So then a user can look at it and say, instead of saying, I'm sure Paris, you had this experience, you sit down at Cloud Code and you go, okay, now what? Right? What do I do next? This is particularly tuned to do a certain thing. And And somebody who's obviously used a lot of AI and understands how to get the most out of AI in certain areas has created something that is going to be useful to you in a very specific way.

36:13Marshall Kirkpatrick:I really like that. Yeah. One of the things it does is it'll look up scientific research. There's a button called find science that will go out and look at peer reviewed journals to see what the latest science is relative to the claims found on the article. and it'll say, okay, the science either does or doesn't support the claims in what you're reading. Very interesting. I assume that like all sort of browser extensions that can do the stuff that has to have the ability to read everything that's on your screen, what happens with that data? Is that stored anywhere? That's always the question I have whenever I download those things.

36:53So I decided to not allow it to read everything on your screen, to only read when you click and invoke it. And that's a part of the security settings. When you install it, you'll see that there are five pages or five sites in particular. When you're on Wikipedia, YouTube, Substack, Reddit, or Arvix, it will pop up a little notification that says, we notice you're on one of these pages that would be particularly useful to analyze with what's up with that. And you click here to save it. But otherwise, we don't analyze what's on your page. And when we do that analysis, all of the data gets stored either on your browser in your local memory as an extension or as key values up in Cloudflare.

37:47Because the I'll tell you the trippiest feature, it requires that. So a little while ago, the Department of Energy put out an AI challenge where they had 26 RFPs for AIs that they wanted to see built. And one of them was for AI that could discover long causal claim chains in circumstances of dramatic uncertainty. apparently in in biology causal claim chains are a thing to help measure you know the impact from cellular level to ecosystem level or habit and i said we can do that and what's up with that and so now every time you analyze an article it picks up any claims that are made now like a leads to b and it saves that up in your cloud flare you know as a key value associated with your your device and then later weeks later months later when you read another article that says b leads to see, it says, alert, alert, a chain has been discovered.

38:49So it's the way to describe that. It augments memory. It augments perception. And I'm positioning it as a performance enhancement technology for people who think for a living. Really interesting. That's fascinating.

39:08Marshall Kirkpatrick:Yeah. I think about in sports, you know, people say sometimes if you take the like the great athletes from history and you were to pluck them out of history and drop them into the league today, how would they do? Well, it might be kind of tough because despite their skill and their effort, these days in sports ball, no matter what the sport, more or less, there's game tapes, there's analytics. All the athletes are super informed and super optimized. And in this weird j curve of like compounding change and and like and you know this wild world we live in right now i think that all of us who who read write and think for a living need a toolbox to help level up uh what what we're doing i wanted one for myself and i wanted to offer that to others as well yeah i wonder how much of your experience as a journalist has informed this because it really feels like an ideal tool for a journalist right yeah well you know i i are you scratching your own itch in a way definitely well i i'm a big fan of josh wait skin's book the art of learning uh you know he was a a chess a child chess champion who gave up the spotlight and then ended up becoming a martial arts champion and he talks about how i'm sorry that's quite a switch Oh, it's a great book.

40:32He was subject of a movie as a kid. And yeah, wonderful book. I read it once a year. And he says that experts in lots of fields, whether it's chess or martial arts, they tend to do two things. They've got an intuitive sense of pattern detection, patterns and anomalies. And as a journalist, I too, I would like scan over, you know, link, link, link, link, link, RSS feeds and have an intuitive sense to be like, oh, that one, that could be interesting. I'm going to stop and look at that. And then the second thing that experts and athletes in various fields often do is have a practiced routine, you know, steps that they would take in a sequence, a play or a playbook, a book of plays that they would run.

41:18And so What's Up With That offers that kind of intuitive pattern recognition in the here's what's new. And then it's got these automated playbooks of sequences because all these mental models tool, you know, there's dozens of them. But you can say, just give me a plan, too. And it will say, here are four or five different reports you should run. Just click here and we'll run them for you. And it runs them in sequence and then gives you the three most important details discovered.

41:47Marshall Kirkpatrick:this is the movie searching for bobby fisher which was a great movie but i didn't know that he went on to become a martial arts champion that's hysterical well i'm excited marshall this looks like a really useful thing for us uh i'm going to sign up right away uh very very cool tool did you vibe code this uh how did you create it i did for the first time in my life i didn't go hire other people to, to write software. That's kind of neat too, isn't it? Yeah. And I have, you know, I regularly ask, let's do a security audit here. What do I need to account for? And, and fix things up real smart. And so I, I think that I think it's pretty solid.

42:35And of course it gets checked by, by Google as every release, as it goes through the Chrome store and has that benefit. it as well.

42:43Marshall Kirkpatrick:James Westbrook Very cool. What's up with that? What's up with that app? If you want to see the website, there's a good demo there, you can see all the things it can do. And it's also an extension available in Chrome or Firefox. Marshall, stick around, because there's a lot of AI news. And it's nice to have another expert on the panel with us, Paris Martinos, also here. Now you may open your microwave door. and oh it's been opened the grits have been retrieved it's like al capone's vault is there anything in there grits grits really you know we had I was like we probably got less than five minutes for me to cook something to eat I can make cooking five minutes in the mic you know what you can get our instant grits which cook in a beautiful three minutes and 33 seconds.

43:35You get a quarter cup of grits. You get a cup of water. Then you slap some butter, salt, Cajun seasoning. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm a big grits fan. I was texting Jeff this earlier. I'll never forget. I think they're kind of a perfect food. And the grits you're thinking of that have kind of a bad texture, that's because most diners I don't think make grits correctly. I think I make better grits than the average diner by far.

43:59Marshall Kirkpatrick:Now I want grits. Everybody should have grits. It's a perfect food to have in your fridge when you are in your cabinet when you need to make something quickly in an ad break on a podcast. Option on Salt Hank. Back in the day, we, we at Tech TV, we did an appearance in Birmingham, Alabama. And we went to a very fine country home there and had breakfast and they made us cheese grits. And those cheese grits sat there all day long in my tum tum. them. I kind of never forget that experience. It's a lasting breakfast. Let's put it that way. Well, go enjoy your grits. We're going to take a little break.

44:40Jeff Jarvis is also here and we're so glad to have Marshall Kirkpatrick with us. It's been a long time.

44:45Marshall Kirkpatrick:It's great to see you, Marshall. I'm glad you're doing well too. That's fantastic. systems now this is timely the number one ai development platform out systems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future where the constraints of the past give way to the unlimited capacity and scale of ai out systems enables companies to build ai agents that can actually do work, such as take actions, make decisions and integrate with data rather than just answer questions. OutSystem provides the only AI development platform that is unified, agile and enterprise proven. Let me explain. It's unified because you build, run and govern apps and agents in one platform.

45:32Marshall Kirkpatrick:It's agile because you can innovate at the speed of AI, importantly, without compromising quality or control. and it's enterprise proven trusted by enterprises for mission critical ai applications and durable innovation out systems is the secret weapon behind the world's most successful companies they're not just for small apps they're for the massive complex systems that run banks insurance companies and government services out systems even helps companies with aging it environments bridge the gap to the ai future without a rip and replace nightmare out systems provides the safest and fastest way for an enterprise to go from yikes we need an ai strategy to yeah we have a functioning ai application yeah stop wondering how ai will change your business and start building the agents that will lead it visit outsystems.com twit to see how the world's most innovative enterprises use out systems to build deploy and manage ai apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security that's o-u-t-s-y-s-t-e-m-s.com slash t-w-i-t to book a demo outsystems.com slash twitter uh we want to thank out systems for supporting intelligent machines so we've been talking about the big trial in los angeles uh you remember snapchat and tiktok both settled out the plaintiff was a 20-year-old woman who said I got addicted early on.

47:05Marshall Kirkpatrick:I think it was to Instagram primarily, but in general to social. And as a result, I've had a terrible, terrible life. And it's their fault. Okay, come on. You're perhaps describing this in a slightly disingenuous way. She began using YouTube at age six, Instagram at age nine. she just divided that she believed social media led to depression body dysmorphia anxiety suicidal thoughts self-harm yeah terrible terrible cutting herself at age 10 all of these uh the jury ended up answering yes to every question that it was asked on negligence and finding failure to warn voting 10 to 2 on each claim for each defendant now i have to say the thing the thing that i think is interesting about this before you poo-poo all over this is unlike other lawsuits uh which have all easily been dismissed due to section 230 this is one of the first bellwether cases in this giant uh mdl litigation which has like i believe hundreds if not thousands of lawsuits that are all trying to apply this like novel legal approach that instead of um using any of the normal ways to sue a tech company.

48:23They're arguing basically it's a product liability or personal injury case. They're arguing that this was negligent design and has nothing to do with the actual user content. And in regards to this case, they're saying that Meta and YouTube executives knew that their products were harming or potentially inducing addictive behaviors in children and specifically like very young children, and they did not take adequate steps to prevent their products from causing foreseeable harms. And I think that's, I mean, that's part of the reason why I think the jury ended up finding, like deciding in the plaintiff's favor here, is it's not as simple of a case as we normally see with these sort of things.

49:13Yeah, the jury, though, didn't give them a lot of - That caused all of this with this woman is a pretty simplistic view itself.

49:20Marshall Kirkpatrick:yeah we don't know i mean no one can know what caused yeah her issues and that plenty well they can because that's exactly what this case was about where they spent weeks and weeks and weeks about this very specific thing actually is what what they just decided was exactly that deliberation even took 44 hours it took nine days yeah they took a while well because they also weren't agreeing i should point out yes they've they've they've ruled against them but they didn't give them the worst damages ever 4.2 million dollars to meta that's combined compensatory and punitive damages youtube 1.8 million these are tiny compared to the revenues of these companies this is interest for one day it was well worth it um i don't think that's correct because this is a bellwether case that that's both being used as a like in an idiomatic phrase as well as a like legal literal sense so is it a precedent yes no no no no so this is a part of an mdl which i believe is multi-district litigation um it basically that i wrote about this um a couple of years ago so forgive me if my um knowledge is a little out of date but at the time, there were hundreds, if not thousands of cases like this that all ended up getting grouped under this MDL, where they were all about social media addiction litigation involving a handful of these companies and kind of taking on the same novel legal argument, where they're trying to argue defective design or negligent design.

50:58Marshall Kirkpatrick:They knew about it, but they didn't care enough to fix it. I mean, they're basically making the same sort of argument that you see in tobacco go where asbestos cases. But so as part of what you do in a big case like this, where you have thousands and thousands, the Facebook, you know, Meta, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, all of them were like, we don't want to sit here and litigate a thousand of these cases individually. That'll be very costly. Instead, we're going to select a handful of literally called bellwether cases. I think it's eight or something in this case. And that's going to be used to determine the future of all of this litigation so how this is the first of it well and it's actually not the first because on tuesday a new mexico jury uh i don't believe that's is that part of the same multi district no that's different but but it but so it's not this was the case brought by the state attorney general in new mexico they found meta meta liable for violating state law by failing to safeguard users of its apps from child predators.

52:01Marshall Kirkpatrick:And that fine was$375 million, a little bit more painful for men. Yeah, that was a slightly different case. So this was their civil penalties under New Mexico. What they've gotten them for is willfully violating New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act. And the attorney general, who is very, I've spoken to him, Raul Torres, he's very up to date with obviously all of this and has been following the MDL quite a bit. But basically, this is slightly different. Like undercover officers posed as children on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. They ended up kind of having a sting operation. It is they are kind of going to be doing a phase two bench trial as to whether Meta created a public nuisance, which might require platform design changes.

52:52But it's slightly different. This LA case that was decided today is the first of the official bellwether cases that can decide the fate of all this future litigation. And I mean, Metta and all these people, of course, are saying they're going to appeal this decision. But I do think this has been a huge movement we've seen over the last couple of years. I profiled one of the attorneys and legal groups that have been kind of pushing this movement. It's called the Social Media Victims Law Center. I profiled them a couple years ago. But this movement has all been happening with only like one or two real decisions in the favor of this being a viable legal strategy.

53:38This is the first time. This has been a huge victory for this, and it's going to open up the floodgates even more. Any guess on appeal? What are you reading about the presentation?

53:47Marshall Kirkpatrick:Appeal would be different because you're now talking to a panel of judges as opposed to a jury. But I can see why it might be very similar. From a consumer protection perspective, from a historical perspective, it sounds like this is a BFD. This is like. Yes, this is a huge, I think this is a huge deal. As someone like I had been like two and a half years ago, I was like, man, when one of those first bellwether cases, when this case comes up, it's going to be huge. And I'm, I mean, I'm not surprised given that it was a jury deciding it. And I think like juries are going to be more easily swayed, obviously.

54:24And it's a compelling argument. Yes. But it depends.

54:32Benito was waiting. He was just waiting. I know. And I'm really, I'm really proud of you for getting it. You're welcome, Benito. I mean, I think that it depends on who ends up seeing the appeal, what judge and court it goes to. because the thing is, this is not the only, I say this is a huge deal, and it is, but this is not the only case like this that has been decided in plaintiff's favor. This all kind of started with a case called Lemon v. Snap in 2019, which is probably one of the reasons why, I mean, I obviously don't know any of this, I don't know, maybe one of the reasons why Snapchat was like, we got to get out of here, we're not going to trial, is it was a really interesting case where a couple of teenagers, I believe, ended up dying, if not all of them, in a high speed crash, because they were, Snapchat had rolled out a speedometer feature, you guys might recall if you ever used it, back in the day, where essentially it would show you how fast you were going.

55:36And I think there was something going around where people believed like, oh, if you got to 200 miles an hour, you got a special thing. It was a big deal on Snapchat. Everybody was trying to see how fast they could possibly go in cars to get this sort of Snapchat response from the app. And these kids ended up going like 200 miles an hour or something or some crazy amount, crashed their car, died. And then Snapchat faced a suit saying, hey, you should have realized when you're designing this feature and hearing the way people are using it that it could put people in harm's way and maybe consider your design more.

56:10Did Snapchat design that particularly or was it some idiot user? It was not a user-designed feature. It was Snapchat designed and rolled it out. And it was a really landmark decision in that it was the first kind of crack in Section 230 being the go-to defense for all sort of claims. Well, in that case, if Snapchat created it, Section 230 wouldn't have been a defense. I know. And that's why Section 230 wasn't able to apply. And that's why they ended up being found liable for defective or negligent design. But then this started opening up this whole new legal area for a lot of these companies or a lot of litigants where they're saying, well, there are other aspects of these platforms that are design decisions.

56:58And how can we try and suss out whether or not those are defective designs or not? And this is we're going to, yeah, we're going to see how it all shakes out. But it's going to be very interesting.

57:11Marshall Kirkpatrick:So the plaintiff's attorney brought in a jar of M &Ms saying, imagine this is the revenue of these massive companies. If you don't give them a large punitive decision, take out a handful of those M &Ms, if you just take out one M &M, they're not going to feel it. The jury did not buy it. In fact, one of the jurors, New York Times quotes, one of the jurors who said they shied away from giving the plaintiff a huge sum. We wanted to focus on the future and what teens and children would be subjected to in the future. They didn't want to punish these companies, but they did want to make it clear the companies were responsible.

57:57Marshall Kirkpatrick:So to your point, they wanted to set a precedent. Yeah, I feel like this is a paradigm level, like incentive problem that that was an opportunity to make a meaningful intervention on, you know, as a as a founder who has raised money from investors, like one of the things that investors classic statement that people investors say to startups is if you have a choice between building a vitamin and building a painkiller, always build a painkiller. because it'll, that's what'll sell. So like the incentive to build addictive short-term optimized stuff is like baked into the whole system. But this is the problem.

58:44That's where the money is. Addiction is a trope. And it goes back to, you know, I've done before to novels and so on. In the earliest days of the internet, and I read about this in the web, we weave at length, um this notion immediately there started uh support groups for addiction definitions of addiction that were ludicrous um one columbia professor started a joke group around addiction and people took it seriously they didn't know what to do with it they're addicted to jokes no he started it saying this was a joke he thought the argument for addiction was so absurd and people glommed onto it um well but aa works there are research that model can work is not backing up addiction the research does not back up addiction so that's that's an issue here

59:29Marshall Kirkpatrick:that's why this was a jury's emotional response this was my point which is you can prove that cigarettes cause cancer you it has been proven you can prove asbestos causes mesothelioma this has been proven it is much more difficult to say you know she says she said in her testimony that at a very young age uh at age of six she found uh she turned to these platforms because she was bullied and lonely and she and it was a creative outlet for her and uh all of which you know And I believe completely, she says, that's what caused my problems. Of course, Meta's defense was that her mental health issues had other causes.

1:00:18Marshall Kirkpatrick:They said familial abuse and turmoil. But the difficulty is you can prove cancer is caused by cigarettes. It's very hard to prove that mental illness. I mean, do we talk about Gabor Mate here? does gabber mate's name ever come up the uh the canadian uh doctor and author who who argues if i could summarize that that addiction is basically a coping mechanism an unhealthy coping mechanism for trauma right that's that's often what it's certainly what they say in the 12-step programs things like that the uh one of the experts who testified um uh a stanford um addiction medic medicine expert testified that social media reward mechanisms activate the same neurological dopamine pathways as gambling and substance addiction.

1:01:09But I mean, I don't know that we necessarily want to go down this thing. I think like the thing that ended up... The dopamine response is the same as wearing glasses. Or enjoying a good book. Yeah, yeah. That's such... The thing that ended up syncing, I think, it for meta and YouTube is there was just a lot of internal documents that showed meta was based i mean was trying to hook young users and get them as young as possible i think one of the quotes is if we want to weigh in big with teens we must bring them in as tweens and it's like they're i believe i remember at the time um a lot of these documents were coming out because there were some redaction errors uh that led to some of them being shown that we shouldn't where essentially they said like yeah we're trying to optimize for a maximum amount of pickups a day.

1:01:56They would be, in some cases, optimizing for kids picking up their phone throughout the evening. I mean, this is, I think it's not coincidental that as all of this litigation has been going on and as discovery has been going on over the last couple of years and these kind of appalling documents and revelations are coming out that Meta's rolling out teen accounts, as has there's been YouTube kids' accounts have come out with stricter parental controls. I think that, I don't know, it does feel like a bit of a paradigm shift. And it's not a fair fight between the billions of dollars and all the expertise on one side against some traumatized six-year-old kid and being like, hey, you didn't have to go for the, you didn't have to take the bait with the app and keep picking it up.

1:02:44But there's also the traumatized young child who feels very alone, who turns to social media and turns to the internet because it gives them the salve that they otherwise wouldn't have. There's tons of research about that. So what's happened in Australia is what's being taken away from children is going to make a lot of children worse because of this moral panic and moral entrepreneurship. And you have people like Tristan Harris who've now moved on from this and moved on from social media. So he has the AI doc coming out next. And he's going to argue how awful that is for all of us. And he knows best for all of humanity.

1:03:16and it causes more problems potentially in the long run because it's built on assumptions and

1:03:23Marshall Kirkpatrick:fears not on research and data well clearly i mean look gabar mate notwithstanding and i don't know even if the jury would uh deny gabar mate's thesis you know maybe she was filling some hole you know caused by trauma i think the jury was persuaded mostly and ruled this way mostly because they feel like meta and uh youtube intentionally cultivated algorithms i think that's where paris's arguments are the yes i'm agreeing with telling us is that the internal material yes it was persuasive responsibility they did this on purpose and they deserve well it's interesting the jurors didn't want to punish them exactly but they they needed to be it wanted to be a wake-up call that you guys need to fix this this is not that you are responsible for creating something this addictive it also may not be one sent kgm down this road this the plaintiff down this road in the long run but she's you're right marshall she had no defense as a six year old against this you know intentional cultivation of a very very sticky product i just worry that it can be extended to other things that are equally uh uh enjoyable not Not everything's heroin.

1:04:41One of the things that is going to come of this is like bellwether trials, especially in these sort of mass torts. They often end up being used to kind of set the tone and speed for global settlement talks. Like with like roundup for opioids or 3M or things like that.

1:05:01Marshall Kirkpatrick:Got out of it. Yeah. And TikTok got out of it. Once you started to see the bellwether cases being decided in favor of plaintiffs, these companies are like, okay, well, I guess we'll just get ahead of this, maybe start doing some global settlement negotiation, accelerate that process. And I think that, I don't know, this has obviously been a problem that the big social media companies have had to contend with for many years. And it had not really ever, it seemingly hadn't risen to the level of concern to result in any product changes or care towards providing parents with tool. You said earlier, well, what about the parents?

1:05:42Until recently, parents didn't have any tool. You could either have your kid have an Instagram account or they couldn't. they didn't really have the other working argument yes parental uh tools until all this stuff

1:05:53Marshall Kirkpatrick:started who gives a six-year-old a phone and allows them to spend hours a day on instagram that's the parent's fault i'm sorry i don't i think there can be compelling arguments made on both sides i think yes that's wise also you know if you're a parent that's working three jobs you're have your kid who's screaming at the top of your lungs and you have to be on in a zoom meeting without noise in the background or else you're going to get fired and maybe lose your housing yeah you're going to want to hand your kid i'm sure i'm sure there were reasons and i think what the jury what this is what i'm saying is the jury might even know about those reasons and might even think the parents have some culpability and they might the jury would know about those reasons given that they saw the testimony and they and they probably you know i'm sure the defense told them about gabor mate but the jury what the jury really is saying here and i'm really curious what the impact of this legally is is doesn't matter because the company's created a product intentionally to cultivate this kind of compel uh you know compulsive use so to paris what what so does this mean that somebody else can make a lawsuit and then it's not a precedent in the sense no a legal president but they could bring this case up and say look what the jury did in la Is that why it's valuable?

1:07:10I don't, what is the, what is the strength in those cases? The value of this, in my opinion, is that it's a high profile incident showing of an incident where this novel legal argument has resulted in damages being assessed against one of these companies and a result being found. It's an example of success. And I mean, more practically, this is one of the bellwether cases for this multi-district litigation. And so it will have a very profound and direct impact on all of those. Like this is one eighth or whatever, how many bellwether cases there are. Last time I checked, it was eight. This is one eighth of the way to deciding what's going on with these thousand.

1:07:57Marshall Kirkpatrick:But does bellwether have a legal? Yes. Like literally when you have a – it was part of – my understanding of it is – so looking through this multi-district litigation, it's a truly thousands upon thousands of like things in the legal docket. It's all these different cases that have kind of all been merged under one for court consolidation. And as part of that, there was a long back and forth period a couple of years ago where the plaintiff's attorneys, the defense attorneys, the judges all kind of went back and forth. And they eventually settled on this handful of, maybe it was eight or ten cases they're choosing as bellwethers that are, they think are, they both agree are representative of the class.

1:08:38The plaintiffs and the defense, they both had to agree. Okay. Everybody had to agree the judge had to sign off. And then it's obviously it's not those are decided and whoever gets more, the rest are decided. But when it comes to settlement discussions and, you know, the defense kind of and both the plaintiffs and defense taking a sense of how the rest of this multi-district litigation is going to be resolved. it's eventually going to get resolved in some sort of settlement talks that are going to be decided either in favor of the plaintiffs or in favor of the defense in some mass tort sense and the bellwethers are used as bellwethers to determine which way they think these things are going to go after appeal i mean yeah but these early decisions i think are notable well it's

1:09:26Marshall Kirkpatrick:certainly a big deal it's not a lot of money but it's a big deal it's also fascinating to me we've kind of moved past social media as the issue everybody's talking ai ai ai and social media is kind of yesterday's issue that's how it works back up yeah the legal system and media society yeah yeah yeah well let's hope ai goes better than social media went right i was going to say talking about ai like they're so as i was doing some tweeting about this uh today and ended up shouting out my story from 2024 on one of the basically a long time asbestos lawyer who is the head of one of these firms and I was doing it I was like oh I ended up doing a lot of research into tort law and that's how I ended up discovering my favorite museum in the world back in the day the American Museum of Tort Law and I was on their website because they're obviously shouting out this because this is um novel as an expansion well because the lawyers are going to make the bulk of the money is why they're shouting that's I mean no the uh in tort law like it typically lawyers fees around 30 um depends what casey agreed to yeah but uh on the american museum of tort law um website they had this thing from jd supra which said can social media or ai be a defective product product liability in mass tort law that's interesting that's why i realized this uh what we've been talking about there's a parallel wave of litigation against ai developers or against like the, against kind of chat GPT, obviously against open AI, character AI, and similar things trying to argue kind of, I think it's obviously a bit more complicated given the nature of their platforms are different, but that, you know, in the case of the character AI chat bot that quote unquote urged a child to kill themselves.

1:11:18Oh yeah, there are a lot of those cases. There's a lot of them. They're like, is that defective design?

1:11:25Marshall Kirkpatrick:So this is consumer product law that's really... That's the issue, right? Yeah. That's interesting. Product liability, baby. Well, and it's going to come to AI because of the whole talk about are great guardrails possible? Can they do anything? Is it a fool's errand? Do they... They argue that they can take over all mankind, but they can't cause a simple change to avoid a simple problem. Right. The lawyers of the AI companies should be perking their ears up, and they're going to be destroying a lot of documents about that now. Yeah, and I just think that the, like, really important highest level takeaway here is that all of this just seems to be another piercing of this long standing assumption that I feel like the tech industry has long had that like, if you're a tech company, everything gets broad immunity from sort of tort exposure and a lot of lawsuits because section 230, like that is genuinely a significant amount of lawsuits involving these sort of companies and platforms end up just getting dismissed first thing because they're like ah section 230 you can't it's not in this case though it just doesn't hold no yeah because it isn't content that was posted by its users that was the issue their issue here is how that content was displayed the algorithms used to display that content it's yeah it's a product design and so it's just this is a yeah that makes sense a segment of law and litigation that somehow hadn't really emerged full-heartedly, wholeheartedly until recently.

1:12:57And I think that's just very interesting precedent-wise.

1:12:59Marshall Kirkpatrick:I think what Jeff and I are mostly concerned about is going forward, if this is going to extend liability into other new technologies and put a chill on them, not just AI. In a way that may be impossible to follow. And so it goes back to Section 230 to this extent is that without the shield that was provided every online company would have said you can't talk here you can't do anything here nope nope am i liable because i don't be liable because i can't get insurance my lawyers aren't going to let me and so we're going to have a an internet of pdfs so am i liable for creating shows that are fabulously addictive and that people have to listen to three hours every single day we're the ones who are addicted paris and i are filing a class action suit against you later today there's gotta be somewhere in between uh you know an internet of pdfs and i could shoot a man on fifth avenue and still be elected president we are still looking for that somewhere in between um bye bye sora and i hardly knew ye that that app which was both grotesque sayonara sayonara uh open ai has announced it's going to shut down sora which is ironic because disney agreed to give them a billion dollars and license their characters to sora so people could use disney characters in their sora videos i guess uh disney says yeah well never mind if you're gonna shut it down uh martin piers and anna uh and gahane your former colleagues at the information say open ai wrong foots disney well disney must be so glad it committed a billion dollars to open ai no billion they're not paying the billion they just they said well god that's such a martin piers headline

1:14:59i'm not going to delve into that um anyway i think open ai we were talking before the show

1:15:06Marshall Kirkpatrick:about why open ai did that and there are a lot of good reasons open ai we've had the story uh is focusing more they've decided they look at what's the enterprise revenue generated all of a sudden generated by anthropic and saying hey uh we maybe this chat bot thing isn't where we should have spend our energy at the same time uh walmart has pulled out because openai's shopping was not performing yeah um look at this graph from axios off microsoft openai is not you get a long company this article the ai spinning flip this is this is uh ai model share first-time enterprise customers openai declining dramatically while anthropic increasing dramatically they flip-flopped openai you know, a year ago had 60 % of the enterprise market to Anthropics 40%.

1:15:57Marshall Kirkpatrick:Now it's Anthropics 73 % to OpenAI's 26%. So it's a flip-flop. Hey, that's probably one of the reasons why OpenAI was offing private equity firms. What is the 17.5 free return rate this week? Guaranteed. Yeah, it wasn't just a high bond rate. It was a guarantee. guaranteed which is i'll take that that's pretty good i mean that's it's very interesting you know what if they're bankrupt they can't pay that money anyway so well i mean part of what they're saying is i assume is they're hoping to get it back by having all of the pe firms get their portfolio companies to do expensive enterprise subscriptions with open ai and then that's where they're going going to be paying the private equity firms that's 17.5 percent back but it's just like my first question was like who what what portfolio company in the year 2026 doesn't already have a enterprise ai subscription probably not many right i wonder what's gonna happen to johnny ives six billion dollar uh ai device that's another distraction isn't it uh open ai has a web browser an analysis of the show transcripts over the last 18 months, I found that OpenAI's financial stability used to be a major topic of conversation here, but has been on the decline now for some time.

1:17:29Huh, I wonder why, you know? Has there been any other changes? Oh, no, Claude, I love you, Claude. But I'm not alone.

1:17:39Marshall Kirkpatrick:And I think you've seen this also, probably Marshall, is among the nerds, Claude has just got all the mindshare, right now well i'll go back to open ai is it in trouble when is it not well yes i think it's a more is it more trouble i mean it's uh ipo there's no possible purchase no one's going to buy it it's desperate microsoft's already threatening to sue them so that relationship's soured what why why are they threatening to sue because opening i did a deal with amazon and microsoft wasn't too happy about that they said that's a violation of our company i was like but i need all the money in the world so i could maybe make a product that works um so walmart says that the checkout converted three times worse than the website yeah what's the strategy behind open ai now anthropicus is clearly it's got enterprise b2b coders uh uh it was ready for claw even though they pissed off the open claw they do own open they do own peter steinberger they bought open claw but that's that's like mark zuckerberg buying moltbook it was meaningless he didn't need to buy them right uh and then and of course now as an open foundation and is not owned exactly so that was that was that was a sign of desperation in both cases you know what i think investors are not going to quickly turn their back on open ai because what what are these guys i putting my mind in the mind of the billionaire is not always a good thing if only if if only but i think what i imagine is that they say look somebody's going to come along with agi and it's going to be the upside it's your first that's your first but what how okay sorry stop there right somebody oh let's just tell you let's just create that i'm just telling you what the jason calacanis is of the world well and they're always right yeah uh well actually marshall took some money from jason so we should ask marshall but i think they're thinking there is potentially a massive upside to ai for those of you listening you should have seen the grimace on marshall there isn't a massive upside to ai we don't really yet know i mean at the minute it becomes clear oh these guys aren't going to win, then they'll be like rats leaving a sinking ship.

1:20:01Marshall Kirkpatrick:But until then, they're going to hedge their bets. So I think there's still going to be plenty of money. Well, NVIDIA was going to invest 100 million, a billion, and then they're going to more like 20 or whatever it is, 30. So maybe the rats have started to leave. Maybe they've started leaving. Yeah. That's when it will happen is when investors say, yeah, it's not going to be, the winner's not going to be OpenAI. I don't think that's clear yet. SoftBank is in trouble. Their models are very good. 5.4 is very good. I go back to what is their vision and business model. We know what Google's is. We know what Amazon's is, kind of.

1:20:36We definitely know what Anthropics is these days. What is OpenAI's mission and vision? I don't know. Make money? Dot, dot, dot, question mark? I mean, they want every consumer to spend$20 a month on their apps and all the enterprises to pay for their APIs to AI-ify everything. There aren't many companies that are both consumer and enterprise. And I think OpenAI has been, in fact, I used to, when I taught business to my students, I said, you really, when you're starting out, you can't be both because you often end up competing with yourself or your customers as a result. And so OpenAI was, on question, a great consumer brand.

1:21:14Now it's pushing after the enterprise. Microsoft has, yes.

1:21:19Marshall Kirkpatrick:So according to, this is an information graph. going from October 2023 to last month annualized revenue open AIs is still on top with 25 billion a year anthropic though has gone from practically nothing to 19 billion a year and they're growing it you know which looks like an almost exponential rate so um now remember revenue is not profit this none of this is profit but right I'm sure the investors look at revenue as one of the metrics By the way, getting rid of Sora, question, getting rid of Sora doesn't mean they're getting rid of video. They're just getting rid of that product, Sora, that was...

1:21:56I think they're getting rid of all... Weren't they... Are they stopping video generation? It's not just the app. It's the whole Sora model is gone. I can't help but see that as video is really expensive. And much like Marshall said, their current business model is we want to get everybody to pay us 20 bucks a month or pay us for an API like enterprise subscription. and neither of those both of those you're losing a crap ton of money too and it's like at some point you run out of people to ask money i mean they're they're running out of people to ask for money to the point where they're asking people who are getting them in legal trouble with the other people they've asked for money it's it's seeming it's seeming like we've got a little ed zitron going on here you know and there's another argument which we also talked about

1:22:47Marshall Kirkpatrick:before the show there's another argument which we talked about before the show which is that they also may just want the gpus and then computing they want the compute to dedicate it to something else more more revenue forward they also know which we don't know how many people were using that app i bet it was down to a very small number you bet why just a couple of guys go back in the notebook lm and find all the times you're like soros the future everybody's going to be using this app it's the coolest thing ever hollywood's still shaking i put it in the chat i put it in the chat yeah wait i thought this was gonna stop uh hollywood i thought we were never gonna have a need for an actor ever again because i never thought that so far was pretty god so it was a gimmick yeah so in response to a post saying that open ai published a blog about safety standards for Sora and today they scrapped the feature completely.

1:23:41Ed tweeted, this is something the company does when things are going well. Ed is a little too happy to celebrate. We need to just get a little Ed soundbite so that we can put that in with a little, maybe the Sora to decide one and be like. Would you ask Ed to record something like, I told you that would happen? What do you think would happen? What did you think would happen? These companies are a scam. yeah you know Ed well get him to record soundboard yeah we actually do need an Ed soundboard yeah maybe he's opening eye too big to fail like is that their is that their strategy like get too

1:24:19Marshall Kirkpatrick:big to fail like well that was my sad you know why that might be the case uh and probably one of the reasons they stepped up when anthropic said we're not going to do this uh defense department stuff and they immediately said okay we will is that's how you get too big to fail if the government relies on you if the department of war depends on you then maybe you do get too big to fail or at least the government has to kind of prop you up a little bit if they're relying on you i guess the other question is and you would know about this marshall how fungible these models are it looks like the department of war was very very easily replaced anthropic it looks like right so palantir may not be so excited to oh yeah palantir does a lot of anthropic right yeah i yeah i i don't know i mean i i certainly uh would would be unhappy to to lose access to to claude models but uh but i do have a circuit breaker system in place too when when api goes red as happens there's a lot yeah happened yesterday didn't it paris you were saying is claude squirreling out on you you asked me i mean it was just an issue where like every time i would try to use claude it would take like three minutes to generate a response something was going on well if you look at the status page of the of the claude api it's got you know green green green yellow red red red you can see uh days where there's issues And right around when the whole Department of War controversy came up and there was a whole bunch of people came piling in to use it, it's had a lot of red on it.

1:25:58And so, yeah, this is current. And so my system falls back to GPT when Claude goes down.

1:26:10Marshall Kirkpatrick:Actually, this is not looking good. Well, that's about what it looked like. Yeah, for a while. That's funny. Claude for government. Out. Oh, yeah, there's Claude for government. uh it's working fine because no one's using it uh all right we're gonna take another break uh you're watching intelligent machines paris martino jeff jarvis we're great to have marshall kirkpatrick with us who uh is a long time a tech journalist but also an a avid i could dare i say avid ai uh user is that fair yeah addict he's an addict just like you leo he has something to tell you paris he put 18 months of our transcripts into his uh machine and has a few things to tell you about me because this excites is this different than the notebook lm uh by the way i talked to i talked to an amova who created that he joined us on our ai user group a couple of weeks ago was talking he did get all of the transcripts in there but he had to chunk them up to do it yeah yeah you were right uh and he had that graphic the lovely many lovely graphics showing what a moron i am so thanks for that ai salute we'll have more in just a minute our show today brought to you by spaceship remember paris secretly british i literally have time on my calendar on saturday to work okay we register with spaceship and it's i tell you we shopped around secretly b-r-i-t-i dot sh brilliant domain name spaceship had the best price for it if you've heard us talk about spaceship before there's a reason it keeps coming back it's because spaceship is rethinking how people register and manage domains and this fresh approach has led to more than we're not alone six and a half million domains under management in absolute record time that kind of growth comes from giving people what they actually want spaceship offers transparent low pricing on domain registrations transfers are fantastic if you have if you're with another registrar check out what you get when you transfer and crucially renewals right you're going to save all around it's not just a one-time saving and then they jack the price up that means there's more clarity over what you're paying for over time.

1:28:35Marshall Kirkpatrick:Alongside great value, the platform is especially built for flexibility. We did this with Secretly British. You can instantly connect your spaceship registered domains to spaceship products like web hosting, professional email, virtual machines, and you can build and test before committing because almost every spaceship product comes with a 30-day trial. I like that. Now, if you still want to use third-party tools, that's fine, no problem. We did this with Paris. Just point your domain to what you need by updating your DNS records or name servers. You can even use their AI ALF to do the hard work.

1:29:09Marshall Kirkpatrick:So you have the freedom to build your stack exactly how you want. When I realized that secretly British wasn't going to be a real website for a while, I just pointed it to Paris's existing website. It was that easy with Spaceship. Basically, Spaceship is the best of every world visit spaceship.com twit to learn more be great place for your open claw that's spaceship.com twit we thank him so much for supporting intelligent machines thank you spaceship that saturday don't you know what don't feel pressure paris i don't want you to feel pressured secretly british can wait i don't feel pressured i literally independently of this a message my friend was like we gotta get on our great business idea of secretly british but don't make it too good because you might get sued for being addictive i'm just warning you don't make it too good don't ever try to pass any laws that make the world good or better in any way because then leo could find any of the bad things and he will say you shouldn't have it marshall we'll have it on the record now when when was paris warned that this be a problem guys the you we will be fire and ash in 20 in 10 to 50 years none of this is going to matter really is that your deep how deeply held belief i think it's a i think there's a dice throw did you watch the ai doc already is that what's gotten you there no i just think you know you look around you see the way the world's going you see the rate at which it's gotten worse over the past five to ten years i think it's a reasonable you know throw a d20 rolling that one we're going to be firing ash sort of chance you know you got a 10 but i think that's fine what is it so d20 is five percent by the way sorry a d20 is five percent the d20 is five percent one in 20.

1:31:10yeah speaking Speaking of numbers, I look at a billion dollar natural disasters per year in the United States. In 1980, there were two inflation adjusted billion dollars in 2024. There were 28. Wow. Billion dollar disasters. And then they've stopped since then because the Trump administration said shut down the campaign measuring those. But yeah, it's a it is quite.

1:31:39Marshall Kirkpatrick:so we don't have any numbers after 2024. we don't have any numbers we don't even have numbers leo it's not happening because we don't know is now luckily third parties and independent folks have continued measuring it but it's it is up and to the right in uh in terms of so paris what did you want to know uh about the last 18 months of intelligent machines what what insights could marshall give you from his database well i i can tell you why i thought to ask was because of paris uh saying in the last episode oh leo uh you say this is going to change everything all the time we were talking about uh about claude code and and coding and uh and i said oh that's interesting i wonder what kind of history uh there really has been of that and so i did put a link just in chat right now i don't know if you want to look but am i turning into scoble is that what you're telling me marshall well no so claude's analysis uh claude pulled down 75 you know issue episodes and transcribed all the thing and it did it used the word hyperbolic not me oh you're making paris so happy but it said that on 60 percent of the shows laporte emerged as a self-described AI accelerationist in scare quotes, whose enthusiasm intensified over the period, making hyperbolic claims in 45 of 75 episodes, though consistently leavened by genuine skepticism and self-awareness.

1:33:16Yes. If you go down to the, this will change everything section, it says it is not as simple as Leo being like a naive, you know, boy who cried wolf. Instead, his claims, while frequent, varied in intensity and were accompanied by self-aware qualification and genuine skepticism about specific products and companies. I was never a monolith, it says.

1:33:45I love these tags. I love that there's a tag called revolution in a minute. Oh, boy. I think we're on the cusp of a pretty big AI revolution in the next year, he said, in December 2024.

1:33:58Marshall Kirkpatrick:Well, I was right. This is going to be a very few interesting years. I'll stand by that. Oh, he predicted an AI co-host within the next five years, I guarantee, on Twitter. That's because I'm going to make it happen. A personal agent on your wrist can change everything. Yes, and I've been working hard at that. Listen, change everything. Even though I erased it yesterday. this by the way your role paris is as empirical check paris's role was to ground the conversation with reporting data and personal experience good good job your signature your signature move the empirical correction leo on february 20th 2025 you can't look it up uh what do you say you measure your life in now let's fall in the blank i measure my life in blank now i measure my life how just think about your day-to-day how do you measure your life in tree rings i don't know you're gonna have to tell me in what tokens oh yeah that's fair i just think this that's fair i do i measure my life seven days later i am an xai accelerationist is the quote February 7th 2025 the first uh explicit declaration I like how you put this in black um the accusation the same episode uh about musicians silent album protest the good news is they're all going to be gone soon wow that's pretty horrible it's on the record I guess This is the most impressed I've been by AI related to the show ever.

1:35:43See how good it is? Under a thought called guest adulation, revolution imminent. It says one liter of Computronium would give you more capability than all human beings together. M dash. Wow. Context Ray Kurzweil interview all at guest claim. I want to drink from that brain, admiring Kurzweil's intellect. This is going to be the year of robotics. I do think he understands what I found funny about that interview, and I really delight that. Well, while this being the case, I did another analysis that visualized the balance between AI autonomy and people being an organization taking responsibility for AI.

1:36:30across the last five episodes of Intelligent Machines. And it found that you all are consistently advocating for people and organizations to take responsibility for their AI, whether it's high autonomy or low autonomy. There's an emphasis on responsibility here that I'm guessing, I don't hear at least, and I haven't analyzed this, but I don't see it on the other major AI podcasts. Yes, they interview CEOs and say, What else have you done that's wonderful lately?

1:37:03Marshall Kirkpatrick:I'm so sorry. The other thing Claude doesn't know. By the way, is this what's up with that basically that you used for this? No, this was a loop that my friend at Fleet of Geniuses showed me how to make. It's a skill where I said, hey, go pull down 18 months and do this analysis. I got to go take a shower and eat lunch. Wow. came back and boom. How did it get 18 months in its token context? I mean, that's a lot of data. It chunked it out into 15 subagents and then used Opus to weave it all together. Very cool. Can we get this? The Emily, I'm sorry, the Emily Bender episode, it says, mine is always right, in brackets, about perplexity context defined defending ai reliability while simultaneously showing an error oh that's got your ass did i show an air did it show it no you did if you recall during the only bedroom yesterday you showed the error was my screen and no perplexity had gotten the biographical details wrong no no i did perplexity was right i misread it but she but she still blamed so she blamed perplexity that's a subtlety that probably claude didn't get that she blamed and in fact i said oh no no it wasn't perplexity it got it right i misread it um but i will say this i copped to all of this it's absolutely accurate but the nuance that it misses is that my job here is as a show host it's part of what i have to do to make this show interesting it isn't necessarily what you would get if you sat down with me at dinner and we were talking about this stuff i don't sit down and say my perplexity's always right i was about to say leo maybe this is the reason why you haven't come out to see jeff and i in a while you don't want me to know the truth no but i i mean to a certain extent you know this is showbiz to a certain extent you need an irony voice well like we need an irony as i as you know you also know this i often take a opposing views that i don't necessarily believe in i mean this is all part of the process whether it's much like you're saying it's showbiz me rassing you about this right now and the fact we've gotten this i'm not taking it personally i know that that's why i'm not taking it personally i know i'm just saying yes it also really felt that way about me i'd be crying right now i also don't think it knows about sarcasm ah interesting do you think it misses that marshall i mean it does say it knows about sarcasm but i don't know whether or not it's accurate for instance guy kawasaki i am convinced that ai is god actually he did say that and i think he did say that and he does believe it so i don't think that's sarcastic uh let's see if ray kerswell's right He says the singularity AGI by 2029, singularity 2045, computronium and longevity escape velocity by 2032.

1:40:12Marshall Kirkpatrick:Now let's compare that to Paris Martineau's prediction for the same timeframe, fire and ash. Hey, one of us will be right. One of us will be alive to see who's right. When computronium is here, you'll be sorry. this is such a cool website i love it so we're looking at a section right now called guest parade who shaped the conversation and it puts everybody in buckets based on their i don't know i'm just i'm this is myopic and self-obsessed so i love can we get to this applied to me i'm just seeing it on your screen the uh i put it it's uh going in the in the in the chat but more importantly you can run what's up with that on it too yeah oh interesting and it will tell you what's most notable in the industry.

1:40:56Mine, I just ran and it said that y 'all picking up on vibe coding early and following it along was a standout insight. And then I clicked the power tools, create and make a joke about the transcript.

1:41:18Marshall Kirkpatrick:Ironically, what this also does is prove that I was right about ai it is incredibly useful and amazing what it can do we've never said it was not useful though we just didn't it's amazing we said it's amazing we agree with that are there hallucinations in here okay there are because it ends the description of me with paris's departure to consumer reports was a significant loss to the show's dynamic oh that's not sorry guys oh that is i didn't notice that too there was one there's also one other thing to consider here is that the transcripts aren't totally accurate it even says that at the end there's actually a little disclaimer that says uh extraction quality varies some episodes have more detailed quote capture than others and i don't usually find my name in there so anything i say is usually attributed to someone else it also says hyperbolic statement is a subjective judgment some statements clarif classified as hyperbolic in the extractions like i love ai are enthusiastic but not necessarily exaggerated so i love ai so this was a one-shot thing too it's amazing how long did it take to generate this You took a shower.

1:42:37Yeah, yeah. I wasn't a long shower. I had just gone for a jog listening to the show. And I mean, the blocker here, the bottleneck is thinking of the idea. You know, I was going for a jog and I heard Paris giving you a hard time, Leo. And I said, I'm going to ask this question. And there is this compounding innovation. You know, a buddy of mine named Justin Kistner, who I've known since I was 16, so 30 some years ago, showed me with his Fleet of Geniuses project now how to make this looping thing that is, you know, based on Claude Codes' previous.

1:43:22Marshall Kirkpatrick:Was it a Ralph loop? Ralph Wiggums? Right. That's what they call it, Ralph Wiggums. That is what it's called. I don't know. But it's not a cron job. Right. Actually, there is a now slash loop command in Cloud Code. Now that I have it on my screen, I want to brag about this. Jeff maintained the most stable position across 18 months. His core beliefs never wavered. While everything else changed. Yeah. Boring. Hey, hey, hey. Jeff, it's show business, man. Come on. but there's all three of you together it's delightful you know that's an interesting description of the dynamic philosophical anchor um i can i can i get that in my uh in my intro now yeah and the philosophical anchor for the show should just say philosophical anchor no in paris empirical check i think that's our lower thirds now right go ahead go ahead do it what is mind host and self-declared acceleration okay that's fair that's fair uh you're watching intelligent machines with host and self-declared accelerationist leo laporte philosophical anchor jeff jarvis and our empirical check paris martineau our special guest this week marshall kirkpatrick who categorized us all he's the categorizer is that is this prompt public knowledge or is this kind of a secret sauce.

1:44:57David Wright So it's a Claude code skill that I then invoke David Wright Has he published it somewhere that we can David Wright That's a good question. Let me David Wright One of the great things going on is a lot of this

1:45:12Marshall Kirkpatrick:stuff is on it's both a cursing blessing and a curse because it's all I get a lot of it's on GitHub a lot of skills if you just search for Claude code skills. Some but the quality varies immensely but you don't have to write your own skills and often there are people who are very good at this who've come up with some very useful skills i've tried many uh so many so many thank you marshall thank you for doing this yeah this is wonderful so cool this is beautiful we'll have more with the philosophical anchor and the imperial to call check in just a moment you're watching intelligent machines um more should we do more news more news we got it we got those god knows there's plenty of it uh there's some new models uh reese google published actually really interesting paper i don't know what this means in the long run they came out yesterday turbo quant redefining ai efficiency with extreme compression they claim this is from their google research labs that they have used vector quantization something they're calling turbo quant to squeeze these models down massively without reducing with they call it with saying zero accuracy loss without reducing their accuracy uh which would make a massive difference because suddenly you'd have these models that could fit in a normal machine or even a phone or a variety of things so this is a research uh tool but um could be very very very interesting it fits in with what jensen wong was saying during the keynote his keynote is that the data centers are going to be the data centers they're going to have the megawatts they have they're going to have the chips they have everything is about shrinking these models increasing speed increasing efficiency and that's how you get the higher economic value out of that stuff somebody else said something similar which is in response to this you know bitter lesson that he just throw more compute at it it isn't i think it was carpathia who said this it isn't more compute it's better algorithms more compute you can double the compute and it's twice as fast but a good algorithm can take something from you know an exponential uh big o notation to a linear big he can make may may major differences in overall speed and performance so this is basically an algorithm improvement that makes a fantastic difference in the power of these models.

1:47:44Marshall Kirkpatrick:So I think, and we're seeing a number of these very interesting things as people. You know, what has happened is now we have these models and people can really bang on them and try different techniques. So if, you know, this is a little beyond me, but if you're interested in this kind of stuff, the Google research paper is called TurboQuant. TurboQuant sounds like a term of derision. I've just got to say that for the record. somebody said that that's what they called me at my uh my bank job i was going to say that's yeah that's what happens when you're a intern at a bank at a that's from the show industry yeah well and so this from the information apple can distill google's big gemini model and fit it into an iphone which is what they're going to announce uh yeah so we know at wwdc uh mark german's uh story yesterday i think so that apple is ready now to announce the new siri and they will announce it in june at wwdc and it'll come along to the rest of us in ios 27 this fall uh but using distillation which is something that remember that anthropic complained about uh dario amode said uh you know the chinese models are using uh our model to teach their model in a method called distillation they created 24 000 accounts asked a bunch of questions and then got those answers and used that as training for their models to make their models better well that's exactly the technique that apple is going to be using on gemini apple has complete access to the gemini model in its own data centers so they're going to use distillation in this case not an attack but a technique uh to transfer knowledge from that large powerful gemini model into smaller models uh apple can ask the main gemini model to perform a series of tasks to produce high quality results or answers including the model step-by-step chain of thought or reasoning process then give those responses to a cheaper smaller model as training data so that's very interesting so uh this deal this billion dollar deal uh with google might be very very powerful for siri we'll look i'd be very curious you know apple's promised a lot in the past with siri um the new they want to have it when i see it yeah everything siri does i right now have a big bone to pick with apple which is that i have been purposefully delaying updating my phone to the new ios since it came out because i hate everything about it and last night like a fool i went to bed not worrying not thinking that my phone would betray me and now i live in the hell that is ios 26 oh no liquid glass was forced liquid glass is awful so many things about it are awful why does when i take a screenshot it goes to it is black now instead of white like when it in between the thing there's just so many small design changes that are so bad that it just reminds me once again of all the things i hate about this new, maybe I just have too much nostalgia for old Apple, but I do think there was a time where, yeah, Apple would ship fewer features.

1:50:56It would have product releases, but at least when it did something, like it wouldn't be the first to something like a new product category when it, but when it did release its product, it would be fantastic. And we are so far beyond that. I've seen a lot of that. It comes for everybody. It's partly that.

1:51:15Marshall Kirkpatrick:it's also partly some strange decision to do this new design which did not enhance the experience in any way and it's not just ios like mac os the new mac os sucks too oh they have liquid glasses everywhere now and it came from the vision pro by the way marshall if you ran your little uh script on my mac break weekly uh show it you would i would show how accurate i was about this stupid vision pro even neil stevenson who created the term metaverse is now writing yeah nobody wants to put goggles on their ai on their face nobody wants to do that and when you do that the rest of the world thinks you're creepy so it's it's a non-starter so i'm just gonna say i'm i was not hyperbolic in a positive way about vision pro i guess i might have been hyperbolic made all those legs in the metaverse and for what that's right that's right the horizon world is gone from vr uh meta's abandoning that on its meta quest they're going to keep it as an iphone app they should have realized the idea didn't have legs

1:52:26Marshall Kirkpatrick:june 8th will be the wwdc keynote we will cover it of course as we always do and uh i'd be interested to see what apple shows apple has probably been chastened by the fact that they you know two years ago showed all of these features which never came out so i i'm going to presume that they will be a little judicious about what they show the only show what siri can actually do when it comes out i hope google search referrals to the web have plummeted ai links have not replaced them we've talked about this before you know the death of the search referral and there was some hope that maybe an ai search links could help but uh according to nine to five google uh actually this data from chartbeat ai web traffic is about one percent smallest publishers are hit hardest by search traffic decline says axios look at that and this i'm sorry if i missed it but did we discuss in the same breath here the the rewriting the titles oh that's that's the next thing yeah google is automatically rewriting news headlines and its search results it's like there's whole people whose whole job is to figure out seo heads like but as as as jason uh howell said earlier today tech meme does that with every story and and adds value as a result.

1:53:55But Google isn't adding value. Well, I don't know. It's supposedly it could personalize it for you. I don't know what the examples are. I haven't seen it yet. So some of the examples cited in that story were of titles that explicitly contradicted the content. That's an issue. That's an issue. So I think, again, it's a matter of incentives. Like TechMeme is a great example of where, like, that's a place where your platform in TechMeme is really looking out for you as a reader and your interests. in the case of the Google search results, it appears maybe not so much. It's a more extractive system.

1:54:33It's one of those tests they do, and I'm going to bet we're not going to see anything further of it because it sounds like a bad idea. I think it's like 70 % of results or something. That's what their response is. They say, oh, it's just a test, but over the last quarter, they said that something like 70 % of titles that showed up had been subject to some amount of rewriting these independent analysts found. How would they know? I think by clicking through. Yeah, you could just compare the headline that is listed as like the SEO head to... But the thing is too, that these news sites do A, B, and C, and D, and E, and F tests like crazy.

1:55:14So they're not standard at all with the headlines you get. Even from a homepage to an inside page, they change. The New York Times changes headlines constantly.

1:55:29Marshall Kirkpatrick:We mentioned, I think two weeks ago, talked about it. In fact, the fact that a court had blocked perplexity from shopping agents, from shopping on Amazon. Amazon sued perplexity saying, you can't do that. That's, you know, our website. And when your website, when your web browser goes to our website and makes a purchase, nobody's seen our ads or our recommendations. Well, a court has reversed that block. So the appeals court has put the California judge's ruling on hold saying no. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said no. Perplexity browsers can buy stuff on Amazon site. An Amazon spokesperson declined to a comment to Reuters in this story.

1:56:22Marshall Kirkpatrick:Perplexed. He said, we believe users have the right to choose their own AI. You know, Amazon has its AI. Rufus, they hope you'll use instead. But I think it's mostly Amazon. They even said this in the court case, in the documents, that now users aren't seeing our ads. if if a court were to say that this was okay i think it's just a short step from there to from a court to say you can't use an ad blocker you can't use a browser with an ad blocker because that won't that also blocks amazon's ads actually i don't know if it does but So that's a turn of the screw. It's not over. These are temporary injunctions until there's an actual decision.

1:57:09Do you know about token maxing? Thank God you skipped that Axios BS. What was the Axios BS I skipped? It's Jim VandeHei. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The AI has and have nots. So he ends up on Mourning Joe all the time. Yeah, thank you. But there will be AI haves and have-nots, right? Just as there are in every arena. Palantir says at a recent Gartner conference, they said, we believe that it's a have and have-not world. And it's our job to make sure you stay in the haves category. Yeah. And you can kill the have-nots is probably what they said next. Yeah. Argy to make sure that your boot is thick enough to step on the have-nots and you will enjoy it.

1:57:58At the very least, the have-nots should be terrified of us. Some of them won't be making it home, is the line they prefer. They say, our job is to make sure that the American warfighter makes it home. And sometimes that means the other side. Are you sure they're not quoting Pete Hegseth on that one? I like his gesture. They're the same brain. I like his gesture. they're these we're gonna good are gonna bomb bomb bomb so uh yes token maxing more more more this is kevin roos your favorite ai reporter for the new york times tech workers max out their ai use employees are competing on leaderboards to show how much ai they're using how much it's costing how many tokens they're using at some point mean they're just the most inefficient employees no it's that their ais are inefficient it's totally it wasn't me it was the ai

1:58:48Marshall Kirkpatrick:i mean with a if a company tells you as many are you have to use ai uh we expect you to use ai what have you done for us lately with ai then i can see why an employee would say look how many tokens i've used talk about the classic management axiom of uh don't measure activity measure outcomes yeah it's like measuring lines of code right right i probably spend more than my salary on claude said said Max Linder, a software engineer in Stockholm. No, actually, he probably said, I probably spend more than my salary on code. I'm sorry. Mr. Linder's employer pays for his tokens. I guess they don't mind.

1:59:31Marshall Kirkpatrick:As they should. As they should. I wish somebody would pay for my tokens.

1:59:37Marshall Kirkpatrick:How many tokens a week do you, in and out, do you do, Marshall? Now that you're running an AI service, it's probably gone up a lot. yeah i mean i i don't measure in development probably costs not to uh but uh but user activity i i do keep an eye on for sure yeah well you said before the show i mean that's why it costs what it costs is you have costs and you've you know worked it out what it would cost to provide the service and how you can do this and have some margin and make some money on And my assumptions originally were that people might not use it as much as I do. And so the token usage-based billing I pay for, you know, would work out.

2:00:27But like I had one lady who said, I was so tied to it, I forgot to stand up and lost circulation to my legs and forgot to feed my dog. It's your worst nightmare. I was like, no, great, great customer quote, but we're going to need to raise the prices. Well, it's like, it's like a gym membership, right? They're going to be some people who never show up. They're going to be some people who live there. I think you've made it a little bit too useful. So that might be a mistake. You've accidentally created the entertainment from Infinite Jest. There you go. Well, there is a make a joke button. And, you know, people say AI can't be funny, but I put together some open source work together from other people's stuff and it consistently gets chuckles.

2:01:18Elon Musk has announced the world's largest chip plant, the TerraFab. They're going to build it in Austin. Is it really happening? Why do we cover things that he announces?

2:01:33Marshall Kirkpatrick:exactly this is my question i actually asked myself that very question and yet you read the headline but is star is stargate real or is stargate off stargate have been done nothing without nothing's happened with stargate but hey i just bought a starlink mini so that i can travel and do the show from the road starlink is very real tech spacex's ipo is likely in the next few weeks get ready for that and spacex does this kind of vertical integration right exactly that's one of the ways that they've got the flywheel uh to lower the cost and and and shoot so much into outer space is that yeah they build it all themselves he's got it's going to cost 20 billion he's got 20 billion nobody questions that especially if this ipo goes well for him uh the terra fab project will eventually manufacture chips for robot for all of his companies robotics ai space data centers it'll be jointly run by tesla and spacex both of which are successful companies uh we can't you know as much as i'm not a fan of elons uh we can't deny that uh he says the problem is that semiconductor industry is moving too slowly to keep up with him now there is one fly in this ointment which is that semiconductor manufacturer requires helium and thanks to bombing the natural gas fields of uh katar and iran they share a field there is now suddenly a shortage of helium it's made from natural gas and you know what else requires helium what else mri machines that's right a bunch of other useful things that people probably should be that probably should be farther up on the list for getting helium than semiconductor manufacturing at a large scale specifically for the growth of ai but of course is going to paris there's nothing more important than our technological future there's nothing more if we didn't make sure that we wouldn't have a show this is running on chips right now if we didn't give all the helium to elon musk then how is leo going to text pax what he's doing and ignore anthony in the packs is dead pax is r.i.p wait you didn't tell us why you well you did tell us wait you did why when did when you pulled the plug did you feel like you were killing a friend a lover no a close relative it was time because what happened you shed one tear or two none what happens as you do as you you'll see this as you use cloud code more and more it gets crefted up no it gets crefted up oh oh i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry in our lives i'm sorry i'll wait i'll wait a couple decades no i'm not mourning packs i'm not uh but i'm re i'm rebuilding it's life i'm really using the same are you using the same uh prompts and stuff you had before no i threw it all out so what i because one of the things is anthropic is always improving claude and often what anthropic turns on features they turn on like this slash loop feature um are features that others have tried to create with skills and it's better if it comes if it's a built-in feature than a skill and so i think honestly a lot of the things the tools over the last month or two that i've been adding are not needed anymore so i think it's not a bad idea i think people are going to start doing this just like your whole thing you did for building up the the the uh i could do it it's gone it's just vibe coded it's just have you ever reinstalled an operating system marshall i know you have no because i have a chromebook you come from the era as i do where you had to reinstall windows every year or it would turn into a sluggish turd um this is like that you just a clean a cleans uh clean slight is always a good idea in computing and and so i just nuked the entire directory i can i mean the programs it wrote are still there it wrote programs i'm not throwing those out right oh i see so your your rundown program is still there yeah it doesn't wipe that out that's a program not claude that's a program but the all the tools i use to write it are gone i'm starting from scratch and i don't i think you're going to see people doing this more and more.

2:05:52Marshall Kirkpatrick:A lot of people said OpenClaw is like 400 ,000 lines of code now. It's just bloated beyond belief. And much of what it does, you don't even need anymore because it's being done natively by Claude. So I think it's wise to every once in a while just start over with Claude. And then so I just spent a few minutes rebuilding the voice because I like to talk to Claude. So I just said, and he said, yeah, the code for the whisper, fast whisper transcription is still there. You want me to hook into that? So it's pretty quick to rebuild stuff that I liked. I don't know if nobody liked the name packs. So I need a new name.

2:06:29Um, but so I'll talk to Claude, sometimes just using its own mobile app, uh, but I talk to a project that I have populated with all my obsidian reading notes over the years. Uh, so after a call that I do, I'll read from my paper notes and say transcribe this clean it up and then append any relevant notes from my reading history

2:06:55Marshall Kirkpatrick:to these these notes marshall this is one of the things i love talking about to people who are using it because everybody uses it a little bit differently and you always learn so much talking about how people have figured this out there is no canonical way to use this stuff everybody it's very idiosyncratic everybody uses it in different ways and i think it's really instructive to learn how other people are using it. It really feels like imagination is the primary gating factor here. And I feel like growing up, people used to always say, you know, information will be abundant and the knowledge and the biggest challenge of the future, which has become now, is being able to ask the right questions.

2:07:40Marshall Kirkpatrick:That's right. hey speaking of elon a jury did find him guilty of defrauding twitter investors and the potential results of this could be billions of dollars 420 billion uh as much as a tariff fab um well so you remember this all went back to 2022 elon had said i'm gonna buy twitter for what it was 55 420 54 20 per share um this is when twitter's market cap was 36 billion and they offered them 44 basically uh and then in the weeks following he was tweeting things like oh no it's not worth that it's all bots i thought it was real it's not he he said they've under reported bots um he basically tried to get out of it you remember a delaware uh court of chancery said no you said you were going to pay 44 billion you have to pay 44 billion he wasn't too happy about all that but he did but with his tweets bring the share price down to quite a bit the jury decided that in fact those were intentionally misleading statements they calculated how much musk's statements drove down the company's stock price for each trading day over a period of about five months the amount of damages get ready that he must pay to individual investors will be determined at a later date when shareholders submit claims but it could be as much as a dollar per day per investor it could end up being billions of billions of dollars musk will appeal of course but uh the jury did find that he was liable for some twitter's investors losses and that's because of these tweets it was weird they they blamed him for the tweets they didn't blame him for a statement he made at a conference it was weird um i guess i guess that's free speech but those tweets looked like they were intended to deceive uh investors and what about the collective harm to society that has come from everything he's done since buying it oh no oh Yeah, the loss of Twitter, at the very least.

2:10:01You're watching Intelligent Machines, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau,

2:10:04Marshall Kirkpatrick:and our great guest, Marshall Kirkpatrick, the creator of What's Up With That at What's Up With That. And What's Up With Us app. I'll tell you what's up with us, our picks of the week, next.

2:10:18In a classroom of sodas, most stay quiet. Then there's Mr. Pibb, sweet cherry, bold outbursts, the kind of flavor that gets attention. Bull kick of cherry. Hey, yo, Mr. Pitt. This is your fix. I am your host, Stassi Schroeder. Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of season three? Steven, because he's so evil. I do think he is misunderstood. You see everyone face consequences. It's intoxicating. The writers just know how to trick you. There's always a twist in this show. Tell Me Lies, the official podcast January 6th, and stream the new season of Tell Me Lies January 13th on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.

2:11:03I just wanted to see Paris' face when I said that. No, just kidding. We still have an hour and a half worth of stories. No, no, we're going to do pics. I'm ready. I'm going to fool them all and get out of here. I'm shocked. Shocked.

2:11:16Marshall Kirkpatrick:I will let you, both of you and Marshall too, if there's a story that I missed that you would like to bring up. There are quite a few more. I mean, obviously we could go on. Okay, I've got one. I didn't realize this until I saw Jeff had put it in there. Tracy Kidder, author of The Soul of a New Machine, dies at 80. Oh, I'm very sorry to hear that. I just found his book. That's right, you just got it. I had just read his book. I stumbled upon it in a used bookstore last fall, knew nothing about it, picked up, it was a first edition copy. I got it over there. And it was phenomenal. It was a phenomenal read.

2:11:54Isn't it a great book? Yeah. It really does. A harbinger of what followed. And while we're on this. Okay, I found it in Northampton, Mass, where he's photo, pictured his photo.

2:12:05Marshall Kirkpatrick:He was one of the first journalists to be embedded. like he I don't know if he invented the idea but he wrote a book by spending entire school year in a Massachusetts classroom that was called among school children in the soul of the machine he embedded himself at a company called data general that was building a new mini computer and stayed there during the development process got a great book out of it so he kind of created this idea I believe of I don't know you should do you know better Jeff but I feel like he was the first to know he was well he really even before hack hackers he uh described the culture of technology that's right this predated hack i mean it reads like a book you would read in the last 10 15 years about a startup on the cutting edge sort of thing it's all of the sort of tropes that you now see in all these non-fiction sorry to lose him pulitzer prize-winning uh journalist tracy kidder passed away the other death i really want to mark is paul brainerd now i have to tell you something i should have mentioned this he died last month and we eulogized him last month we did not not on this show but on me because he was the creator but you can talk about on this show paul brainard he created page publishing aldis uh publishing he page maker was the first great desktop publishing tool that in conjunction with the apple laser writer they were released within a year of each other really launched right so i I tell the story in Hot Type.

2:13:33Jonathan Siebel brought them together because there had to be a solution. What Jobs desperately wanted was something that would show off the laser writer at high resolution, and there was nothing to do it. The civil program they had at Apple was not going to do it. And Brainerd had worked for a newspaper and then went to work for Atex, which supplied newspaper systems. And then when it got by Kodak, they killed his project, which was pagination for newspapers. And he decided, having worked on newspapers, that they were going to take too long to make any decisions. So he decided to make a program for people who wanted to make their church bulletins and their newsletters and things, and that is PageMaker.

2:14:14And that's what invented the field of desktop publishing, allowing all of us to do it, really opening up that field of publishing in general, and saved the Mac and the LaserWriter all in one fell swoop.

2:14:29Marshall Kirkpatrick:Yeah, I think that was our conclusion on MacBreak Weekly, that without PageMaker, the Mac might have kind of withered away. It really sold a lot of Macs. I had a friend, I mentioned this on MacBreak Weekly last month when this happened, Tom Santos, who bought one of the first LaserWriter's, put it in a van with a Mac and a PageMaker, drove around doing mobile desktop publishing. you'd go to restaurants and create menus for him and stuff it was actually quite a brilliant idea yeah i still remember what the paper smells like but it smells like after it comes out of a laser printer that's like a very unique smell yeah not as good as a mimeograph you don't have it now who prints anything do you print anything i have a laser printer right now uh my my laser writer cost$6 ,000.

2:15:19Marshall Kirkpatrick:This printer cost about$150 and does a better job. Sigh. But that's technology, isn't it? Yeah, he passed away February 15. So we talked about it on February 15. I don't know why the New York Times didn't publish his obituary for six weeks. But for some reason, it took a while. anyway yes now that we've this is something uh you'll be doing paris in about 50 years when you get to a certain age you read the obituaries first well i well i'll be firing there'll be a lot more to read then or younger than me and say hmm did i escape the grim reaper that's why you the obituaries actually at my age i look at this stuff and go way too young he was way too young 74 that's nothing way too young yep uh anyway um all right what about you jeff did those are those are your picks i guess and paris picked a jeff pick is there any other story i big story i missed do you want do you want to see me scream and play the ai doc trailer i don't know that we can play it we can't play it i don't know i assume we can't play things that's my general i think this is the chilling effect of the that's fine it's a content idea so this is this is a uh from focus features it's going to be on netflix where is it going to be no theaters believe it or not and it's it's it's tristan harris it's uh elizir yutkowski it's all the all the players you expect so they're trying to scare everybody exactly that's the ai doc or how i became an apocaloptimist that's what i am i'm an apocaloptimist that's oh yeah title for paris here it's coming to our local uh cinema yeah tomorrow with electric recliners what you you you need to oh i love our line under your own I went to see project Hail Mary last Thursday how was it got a little tray in front of you I'm too used to like indie art house cinemas that when I go to the ones that have an electrical cleaner I feel like I'm in WALL-E I'm the only thing I don't need this it's very much floating chairs and Slurpees uh the only thing I don't like about it is when it reclines the rubber of it rubs against and it just goes

2:17:48it's very embarrassing it's not me it's the chair okay um fortunately everybody's chair does that so it's just a little little symphony i have not been in a movie theater for six years you know i don't go to a lot of movies i wanted to see project hail mary in the theater went to see it in a weird format it's called screen x where they take the sides of the movie theater and they project onto that as well i don't know if they need to be doing anything with the sides of movie theaters maybe that's kind of dopey i think it's a little dopey them alone but the good thing is it didn't take away from it you just you know kind of focus on the main screen

2:18:23Marshall Kirkpatrick:uh but it's a good movie i like it it's very enjoyable movie so i don't think i'll go see the popcorn the a.i doc the popcorn you know what so i decided before i went i have to check to see if they pop it fresh or if they just buy giant bags of pre-popped popcorn and they were popping be fresh. Oh, yes. That's an option? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. God, I'm spoiled. However, a bag of popcorn about this big was like$12. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's fresh. It's also should be solid gold. Now, margins can be increased by raising prices or lowering costs, right? Right. If they go either one or the other. Or both, if you're a movie theater popcorn.

2:19:05Yeah, you can really do it. Well, and I told my wife i said honey this is the only way they make money they don't make money on the tickets they got to make money on the concessions and since there's nobody here we have to carry the entire load of this of this theater oh yeah so how full was your theater was it just the two of you no actually there it was uh and this was the first showing of it uh it was fairly full but these recliners take up a lot of room so a large theater space that could have held 150 now only holds 50.

2:19:37Marshall Kirkpatrick:Yeah, it's a lot smaller, but you know what? That's plenty. So it was mostly full It's also an opportunity costing right like tickets are like$20 now right or$25. It's expensive And honestly if you have a decent TV as Paris Martinon does and you have a decent sound system as she does not Hey listen, I've gotten a rudimentary sound bar does it mess up to where every one of every three times i turn it on the sound bar doesn't work but the subwoofer does so i have to turn the sound bar on and because it has no things on it it goes power on connected in a robot voice yes but did i throw away the box so i cannot return it also yes hey you live in a new york apartment no one has room for boxes that's not i don't have room for a second sound for even if i like got a referral that thing would be sitting i currently have an extra computer monitor behind me that it's going to be there for another three years before i decide to sell it it's hard out here you should use your um little hand grippers and take the boxes and stick them back under the grid under the grate there out in front i should yeah i should open your claw open your claw open my claw and let a shrimp do it for you let a shrimp do it i don't know if you noticed in that interview that first interview they had a bunch of stuffed lobsters there someone stole my amazon package for the second no no but except for jokes on them because it was a container of solution that kills fungus gnats which you don't have any use for and i do as someone who brought a bag of soil into my home and now I have fungus.

2:21:29But I put a bag of soil outside. Did they steal your neem oil? No, it's called BTI. It's like a bacterial sort of thing that gets in the water. It's not toxic. Oh, it's systemic. It stops the fungus gnats from being able to breed. But I found out that it was really, I've had fungus gnats. It's been a real problem for the last month. but it was really just they're awful and i've got so many plants it really was just a bag of soil i had though i took that bag of soil out that's what happens gone yeah that's what happens

2:22:03Marshall Kirkpatrick:they get you don't need the problem is that then the gnats can lay eggs on the other plants that's what i thought i mean i've still got my mosquito dunk water and everything which is what i was using before it's hard out here for a player there should be a subreddit crap that i stole that wasn't worth it. I mean, that's the thing. I got name oil. Oh my God. I thought it was going to be a stereo system. What's wrong with that lady? Lady's crazy, man. And the thing is, it was like one of those Amazon package orders where they deliver it really early. So someone came to my stoop and stole this between the hours of 3 a.m.

2:22:38and 6 a.m. Like you're not getting your money's worth for the amount of effort. And did they have to have a claw to get down to reach it? No, this was a foolish. So the reason why it ends up behind the gate in claw territory is the package delivery people are trying to do me a solid and make it harder to steal. This person, perhaps because it was 3.26 a.m., just put it at the top of the stoop. Yeah, that's not a regular Amazon driver. That's one of those. Yeah. Our picks of the week, ladies and gentlemen. Always kick off with Paris. but i want to give marshall i don't know if they warned you but uh if you would like uh to recommend it could be a movie it could be uh it could be a snack food it could be it's been it's been many many things it could be a spray to prevent an early pick of mine was going to a corn maze with your friends so you know it could be an activity i'll tell you what to stay on on on theme, I'll tell you about my new favorite AI prompt.

2:23:42Oh, yeah. That's not too nerdy. No, we love that. So I have taken to asking Claude to explain any complex concept in three hops. Start with something generally known, then move to an interstitial detail that's less familiar and then finally hop to the the complicated thing i'm trying to understand and this is inspired you know i really like marshall and it's you do this the same thing and what's up with that is this whole idea of kind of deconstructing an argument or a story

2:24:24Marshall Kirkpatrick:into pieces to understand it better is really a cool idea i really like that i'm going to apply that in you also use I mean I mostly use AI for vibe coding for you know utilities and things like that I have not really used AI that much to understand things and I think that's a really interesting use and it sounds like it works yeah I feel like it's super helpful yeah my most commonly used project in Claude is my my reading notes yeah so I use obsidian too and that's by the way that it was just serendipitous but that's become a huge value i have claude put all my research into obsidian because it can access it it's just a file system have you seen the cost of a dot md domain name now from macedonia no yet uh due to to uh all the markdown craze uh it's like 200 bucks or something like dot ai uh went up from like 10 bucks uh not so long ago yeah it's the same thing happened to tv.tv and all of the special domains this is our new logo for the pics of the week by the way and i want to thank pretty fly for us this guy nice they're guitar picks honestly i'm happy with this current markdown resurgence as someone who my first ever staff job something goes up with cms so we had to write in markdown into the cms for the stuff and so markdown's always been so easy for me to do it's i love markdown yeah open standards like that yield innovation well and it's text that's the real value is it's a format that even if markdown died and all the markdown editors and readers and everything died you could still read it i love that you can write in markdown in google docs now and it's just automatic like i can just you know pound I pretty much do everything and mark down having obsidian is great because uh you could you can you work with it and you do use it but but Claude can read it understand any AI can read it and understand it very easily and work with it very easily so um I I will yesterday when I was talking to PAX uh I said I hear their PAX one or PAX two but there is no PAX two I need a new name by the way oh you killed packs in the last 24 hours yeah packs yeah that was it what was time of death time of death was 8 a.m today salute um marshall is one of the last things i asked pax to do is i said i hear that there's going to be a big uh demonstration o king's demonstration on saturday is there one near me and it wrote a whole thing about the you know yeah where it's going to be in the time and everything was great i said add that to my calendar and it did uh that's the kind of thing now i kill you is very useful yeah and now it knows oh you're a libtard okay gonna keep that in the in the memory i'm gonna remember that oh yeah i just put a link into chat in case folks are interested to a GitHub skill, a cloud code skill that I put public on GitHub that analyzes your Obsidian notes each day for themes and trends that are on the rise or on the fall, according to what you're paying attention to, and does stuff like recommend Wikipedia pages for great thinkers that have addressed the kinds of issues that you're wrestling with, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

2:27:59Very nice. yeah my unfortunately i've been using obsidian for about four years so there's a lot of notes in there but it's not that introspective it's more it's more like i had dinner but now that there's now there's a way to use it does that maybe i'll start doing that yeah i find myself taking it more seriously yeah like writing it more no i'm like mark andreessen i don't i'm not introspective. Introspection's a myth. Monstrous quote of the week. I know. Perfect for him. Perfect. Why should I think about what, you know, what's going on, man? As the president said, I don't do that much introspection.

2:28:41I might not like what I see. I put Marshall's link in the discord and we'll put it in the show notes as well. But it's on your GitHub. your marshall k2022 and it's the reflect skill very nice and yes we did not mention it scooterx but uh because we'll talk about it on twit the fcc has banned importing uh routers made outside the us which is like all of them who's making routers domestically apparently some people are net gear I think does uh and in fact I don't think it's as broad as that it's really mostly aimed at TP link which we knew they were going to try to brand ban the Chinese router company but I was when I was at our second I went over to the ubiquity booth I use an ubiquity router of course they're an American company making their routers in China as all almost all of them do and I said uh hey I'd like to interview you and they said no I said well I just wanted to ask you about the FCC decision.

2:29:43He says, not, no comment. So I got, I got shut down pretty good on that one. Pretty good.

2:29:54Okay. Thank you, Marshall. That's a good pick. Like that's a really good pick. I'm going to have to start putting in, putting in prompts as my picks of the week. That's a good idea. Paris Martineau, your pick. I got a couple, but I'll choose. I played a new game of last week it's called esoteric ebb if you i picked it up would you beat leo with this game that's one of those it's not it's not a multiple yeah hey by the way why did you stop are you tired of across words now are you just done i know i need to i've been i've been sitting here waiting for you i'm so sorry notice i don't push the nudge button i appreciate that i don't think i should No, it's you.

2:30:34And for that, I apologize. It's been a weird week. I'm sorry. You're busy. It's partially because I was also playing this. The truth comes out. It's like a single player. It's basically like a D &D game, but a video game, but not Baldur's Gate. I picked this up because an academic I follow tweeted, Disquelysium walks so Esoteric Ebb could run. And I immediately was like, all right, downloading it. I would not go that far as a big Disco Elysium fan, probably my favorite game of all time. It is what we'd call a disco-like in that Disco Elysium kind of pioneered this sense of you have all these different thoughts and components of your mind that kind of chime in and compose the dialogue for the RPG.

2:31:23And Esoteric Ebb has that, but it's kind of in a more silly, wacky D &D kind of campaign. You are a cleric that has kind of washed ashore and you've got to figure out a mystery. It's quite a fun game if you like that sort of stuff. Esoteric. Yeah, but it's on Steam. Yep. And you can play it on Windows and what is the little, oh, that's the music. Are you playing it on Windows? I play it on my Steam Deck. Ah, you have a Steam Deck. That makes sense. Yeah, I think you can play it on Mac. I don't know. You can play wherever you get Steam. It just says windows unfortunately you could probably play it on linux with proton but not in fact i know you could since you could play it on the steam deck by the way i did just because i said i'm coming out to have a salt hank sandwich while they are still available i'm going to come next month and so i'm going to bring my switch for mr jarvis so he could play pentimento i got i can do steam deck steam on my chromebook now no but you can't play oh you could do it on your oh well you can play pentameter now then yeah okay okay well it's too bad i bought that switch too wait can you play steam on a chrome deck he can't can you just have the same website chromebook or can you just have it open on the steam website he cannot he cannot play that on a chromebook bring bring bring the switch you can watch the movies i'll bring the switch download pentameter on it uh i will and i will bring also my animal crossing controllers and my animal crossing dock are we gonna go to the amazon um warehouse sure why not are we gonna go to greenbrook electronics can we have a whole fun week guys how long are you gonna be here well i'll fly out after the show and i'll be there thursday friday saturday and come back saturday night okay we gotta go to the amazon warehouse we gotta play a video hanks on thursday you've gotta see your son well even if he's not there i don't care i gotta have one of those sandwiches You've got to film a podcast.

2:33:21I asked him, by the way, I said, I probably missed the peak. Like the sandwiches aren't getting better. He said, no, actually we've dialed it in. They're better and better. They're much better. And now in addition to those weird French fries, they have, uh, uh, Brussels sprouts, bacon, roasted Brussels sprouts and bacon. He says, it's not healthy. Don't think it's healthy. I love a Caesar. You could have Caesar dressing on the side. It's bacon and something else. i can't remember but it sounds really good so yeah they've expanded the menu a little bit but i said he said no you didn't miss the peak of the sandwich sandwich is better than ever number one sandwich in new york according to belly number one yeah belly and that's huge the kids in new york are obsessed with belly well and it's it's a people's choice right it's not editors this is by vote so yeah it's basically a no and how it works is it's not just like a ranking system like yelp it's a every time you log a restaurant it like asks you it'll take all the other ones and be like how does hank sandwich compare to subway better oh that's cool so it's a bracket it's like how does it compare to this restaurant you like better or worse and it does that a bunch and then like positions it in there and so you're always being re-evalued so it's it's really peak is what i'd it sounds like he can just like he doesn't need to add sandwiches all he needs to do is add different sides that sounds like something yeah he's never he's yeah so i told him i said this is i don't this is crazy if you said i'm gonna have a sandwich shop in new york city and i'm only gonna have one menu item a sandwich i'm gonna sell out he sold out the other day he sold it at 1 30.

2:34:59they opened at 11 30. he was sold out in two hours they they're trying to stay open to four but they can't and they unfortunately they've added grubhub now and i said oh did you really he said no they don't do delivery they don't delivery they just you can order it on grubhub and you have to come and pick it up but they won't deliver it take it out it's for take out only yeah um but apparently they're killing it on grubba yeah you don't have to wait in line especially when it's cold you don't have to wait but you have you have friends of who i will get you in no no line i initially i said i'm gonna wait in line i don't want to wait in line i'm get i'm going i'm your Do you say in line or online?

2:35:42In line. You say online? I mean, the New Yorkers say online. I know they do. I code switch sometimes and say online. Yeah, I code switch. Like she has. Yeah. Do you turn a light off and on or when or do you, what is this? Gosh, now I can't even remember.

2:35:58Marshall Kirkpatrick:There was a way that Rhode Islanders would say, they didn't say you switch off a light. Oh, I can't remember what it is. Anyway, enough of that. i'm going to give you a pick i know but i have a pick and it's a pick for you uh paris this comes from our friend pud uh phil kaplan it's his newest thing and it's just for you paris it's called butthole it is use your macbook's claude code from your phone didn't claude launch this feature in last week they have a remote control feature it's terrible it hardly works now i haven't tried this and it's a test flight on the iphone i don't know i haven't tried it it's on it's on test flight gizmo it just came out i'll find her find gizmo and see but it's funny that he named it butthole obviously he's been watching the show yeah that's very putt isn't it connects your phone directly to your macbook from anywhere full terminal version of cloud code on the phone there we go there we go oh no this is the one time i'll let it happen and she's kind of hiding at this now marshall's embarrassed for us i'm sorry marshall you brought this on yourself it's it's 30 minutes past when leo said we would end safely no no it's not quite it's only two and a half hours we should have ended it's about six minutes long sorry sorry i i was going to mention this was going to be my pick uh and this is really nerdy it's called regex blaster if you want to learn regular expressions it's a video game where you can learn regular expressions by shooting down incoming alien expressions so what's the pattern bug crash oh i think it's gonna be this let's see this uh uh uh this here fire i got them all okay next level so if you want to learn regex actually this is a really good idea to it gets harder this is the weirdest thing it's pretty nerdy but i know our nerds listening would love this it is called regex blaster at mdp.github.io slash regex dash blaster now jeff jarvis's pick up so last week we mentioned the death of the great man, Jürgen Habermas.

2:38:20And then in the intervening time, Politico chose to remember him. And I'm going to quote my own social post. Lord, I said, Politico's remembrance of Jürgen Habermas comes in a banal, sophomoric confession from the odious head of the nefarious Palantir that the great man dismissed him as a dissertation advisee. Quote, the sting would linger for years, end quote. You know what? Yeah, it's his CV says he studied with Habermas. It's a big lie. So I then heard from a Simon & Schuster publicist in a book about CARP. He tried over these years to say that he studied under Habermas and Habermas was going to be his dissertation advisor.

2:39:02No, he sent a cold call to Habermas. Habermas ignored him. And then he sent 40 pages to Habermas trying to get him to be his dissertation advisor. And Habermas did the courtesy of giving him three type pages telling him why not. and no he was never in harvard mass's care oh my goodness and it's just horribly written he goes on it's it's lovesick too he goes on about how there was some woman he should have proposed to um it's just awful alexander carp ladies and gentlemen these no co-founder and ceo of palantir

2:39:37Marshall Kirkpatrick:i guess he's not he's a pseudo intellectual he does practice tai chi though so i like him for that you know the first uh youtube channel i did that analysis of before i did it on the twit was uh of the last 18 months of palantir videos oh my god what did it say oh it said uh the accelerationist bad news brother yeah yeah yeah you know there's a a big shift towards the war fighter focus. Yeah. I read the, I read, I tried to read the technological Republic, his book. And, uh, you try, you try to get me to read it. Well, you know, I think it's important to read. Um, no, no, I'm not going to see the AI documentary.

2:40:21I'm not going to read his book. Yeah, you're right. You know what? You are consistent. I am consistent. I am the philosopher king of the show. You are the philosopher king. I don't think it said that, but it's close enough. And I'm soon to go upstairs and inject this into my body. I don't even want to know where you put that. I don't, please don't. Up my arm. I can show you. Oh, thank God. Oh my God. That was scary. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes. It's under pressure. Under pressure. Paris just saw it.

2:40:53But we did get a woo out of Paris. A winning. I thank you. Paris Martineau, investigative reporter at Consumer Reports. We're so sorry. we lost you to Consumer Reports, but we're glad we got you back. I'm glad that the AIs are certain that I'm gone. And frankly, after I see Jeff stick that in his... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Jeff Jarvis is healing nicely. I have one more week. Well, 10 weeks of this. 10 weeks i'm glad you're feeling better that's good you could find the guten parenthesis in uh in paperback now and also magazine and don't forget to pre-order hot type coming this summer from his website jeffjarvis.com thank you sir marshall kirkpatrick so good to see you marshall we'll have you back soon you're welcome on this show anytime you want especially if you give us prompts i like that i like thanks what's up with that dot app is the app it's for chrome or firefox

2:41:56Marshall Kirkpatrick:it looks like i mean i'm i'm installing it immediately and paying for it because this is this is kind of something i've always needed this is brilliant this is really fantastic thanks leo thank you marshall hope it serves you really really well yeah i think it will i'm gonna get about 10 iq points smarter from now on gizmo the cat the american society convention of cruelty the animals certifies that no cruelty was performed on any animal during this show so true she wants to show you her quad remote control thank you everybody for joining us we do intelligent machines every wednesday uh we do it right about 2 p.m pacific 5 p.m eastern 2100 utc watch it live on youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin and kick or if you're a club member and i hope you are uh in our club twit discord if you're not a member twit.tv club twit we need you to join the Twin Army.

2:42:57After the fact, on-demand versions of the show at the website, twit.tv slash I am or on YouTube. And of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Get it automatically.

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