IM 880: The Beans are in the Mail - Can American AI Compete When China Gives It Away?

33:20You want a different model that has a different goal that can look at that work and say, is this in line with the user's intent and with the stated guardrails, right? And so I think in that sense, it's less about imagining a perfect model that can do all of this endogenously. And it's more about constructing management systems that allow models that behave like colleagues to work like colleagues. I have been doing that myself, kind of intuitively, but I have to take a look at what you've built. Everybody should follow Nate B. Jones on TikTok or YouTube. I watch it every morning. His sub stack and everything else is at his website, natebjones.com.

33:59And as I think you probably can tell, this is a guy you want to listen to. There's no hype, just smart, informative information about how to use AI better, both as a company and as an individual. I've learned so much from you, Nate. And I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time. So I'm thrilled. It's not easy to find you, by the way, Nate. It's not trying to find an email for you. You know what? I asked Hermes and it found your secret email address. Oh, there you go. That was the trick. I have a secret site. No, I'm not telling anybody. That's my secret sauce. And then for people who are tuning in who are fans of Naby Jones and are going, wait a minute, where's the wool cap?

34:37Wait a minute, where's the, you've got a new, a beautiful set. Are you going to not wear the wool cap anymore? What wool cap are we talking about? It's summer, right? Wearing a beanie hat is something that works better when it's cold and raining out in Seattle. I'm looking out the window. You should pivot to a sauna hat, which is also made of wool. I love sauna hats. They're very finished. It's an acquired taste. A sauna hat? I don't even know about that. I didn't either. I like saunas. You should be wearing a sauna hat in the sauna. It makes a big difference. It does make a big difference. You wouldn't think wearing a wool hat cools you down, but it really does.

35:12And it gets very interesting looks from all the fellow people in the sauna that are not wearing a sauna hat. I'm kind of blown away that you know about sauna hats. I didn't even... I'm a big sauna fan. Oh, you are? Oh, okay. Well, you're smart. Nate's channel, AI News and Strategy Daily, is at Nate B. Jones on YouTube. There's the hat, Paris, just in case you wanted to know. and man i'm i loved your old set because it looked like we were just sitting with you in your office you got all fancy just a little bit we're gonna dress it up the legos are still here the books are still here you got a producer that's what happened i sold out to the producer no i wish i wish you the best uh and i'm really thrilled that uh you do what you do because i've learned so much from you same here can i ask one more question yes um i'm curious about your your sense of what the policy, after the China discussion, Gary Marcus in his individual fashion had seven options, you know, from do nothing to outlaw open source AI.

36:17When Xi and Trump meet, God knows what's going to happen then. But what would a wise US policy reaction to all of this be? So I think it would be smarter to focus on a common threat modeling framework for extremely advanced AI. And if you think about it from a reducing risk to all of us perspective, it would be great if Chinese and American policymakers could align on this is the capability level where we would set a certain threshold for rollouts and we're all aligned on what that looks like. And I don't see that right now. I'm not even sure that's on the table as a proposed option. Is that something that can be quantified now?

37:01Yeah, we did it with Fable and we did it with Mythos. Like, it's actually not impossible to do. We just need to do it consistently internationally, not just make it a nationalist project. I am a lot less worried about the idea that we have open weights models and they're just going to be there because I don't think you can put the cat back in the bag. Like, I think we're going to have open weights models regardless. And if you want to have opinions about chips that are being sold and where they can be sold. You can do that. But ultimately, we are going to live in a world with ambient, almost free intelligence.

37:34And we are all going to decide what we care about accessing based on our own personal preferences. And I actually happen to think that one of the unspoken defenses that American corporations have is the stranglehold that the Apple iStore has on so much of how we interact with intelligence. Like if you think about it, people are getting these apps and they're downloading them and they're using them. And yes, there was a DeepSeek moment, but I will tell you, even though DeepSeek is in the store, when I look over people's shoulders as they use AI, and I do that politely sometimes, and they're normies and they're not people who are weird like me who pay for the max plan.

38:16They are using ChatGPT and they're using ChatGPT because it's a habit. And when I was at Amazon, we like to say, Amazon has no moat. The only moat is the habit of people going to Amazon.com. And I think in that sense, the habit of going to chat GPT is not necessarily something that people are going to shift just because in theory, a free open weights model is around. And I think that's worth talking about as well. Well, I know where you'll be talking about it. Nate D. Jones on YouTube. Nate, thank you so much for your time. It's really been a pleasure. And I hope we can have you back at some point.

38:52Yeah, absolutely. It's been a lot of fun to chat. Good. Thank you for having me. Thanks, Nate. Thank you. Thanks for OB1. That's fantastic. I'm glad you love OpenBrain. That's been a really fun one. It's funny because I installed it. It took me about three months to figure out, oh, it's OB1. Yeah, you got it. I'm a little slow. That was a little fun that I snuck in there. Nate B. Jones, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. It's been nice. Thank you, Nate. Lots to talk about. More coming up on Intelligent Machines right after this. Our sponsor for this segment of Intelligent Machines is Rippling.

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40:48For instance, as an example, it might say, it might recommend a retention strategy that includes a 10 % spot bonus for top performers. Reasonable, right? Well, because permissions are automatically inherited and your actions flow through your existing approval chains, all you have to do is review, say, oh, that's a good idea, tap confirm, and boom, the bonus is added to the next payroll run. Just that easy. don't settle for ai that's all talk head to rippling.ai slash machines and get the only ai built to give you full visibility across your business and take complex actions across your entire organization that's r-i-p-p-l-i-n-g dot ai slash machines sign up for exclusive access today rippling.ai slash machines we thank him so much for their support of intelligent machines and now i've got some elsa sunas and sunash i don't know how you pronounce that to to read too i can't wait to read some of her stuff hugo award-winning and nate's uh nate's wife by the way i did buy a sauna hat while we were talking because i didn't know i need one how did i you're muted how you haven't stopped talking since we talked about the sauna hat oh that's the amazing thing i can you can talk and do things at the same time i googled sauna hats and uh and i immediately found a variety of places that sell sauna hats but i i liked one that was i think it fit my uh my style i don't know you have to tell me paris if i if i bought the right sauna hat oh that's a really good one the reason being i'm going on a southeast asia cruise in the fall and it's on viking which has a very i'm told so funny to see a viking in the viking they have they have two things i'm excited about they have a very good sauna because it's they're from norway or wherever they're from scandinavia but also they have a snow room so you go out of the snow room is uh yeah that's actually quite uh important sorry i just got an email as i was speaking and unlike you i haven't figured out it's always about cyclospora i need to not read and talk or i need to develop a second brain like you actually think and talk well i think too much i need to think less that's true i think the funny The funny thing about the Viking sauna hat is going to be like, you walk into a sauna, you see someone in a sauna hat, they look a specific way.

43:33They look like a little bell. Usually they're just like little flowers on your head. That looks like a completely separate thing. So I like the idea that people are going to be like, oh yeah, this man's just really into Vikings. Yeah. Sauna hats are supposed to look more like this, right? With a little loop on the top. They look like you. You look like you're a human belt. It looks like a bell. I don't want to wear that. I want to wear a Viking helmet. So Paris, have you done saunas in Germany? No. Do you know about that? No. What's up with saunas in Germany? They are naked. Naked and mixed. Because.

44:05That's fun. Despite the fact that Germans are obsessive about privacy. Privacy. I wrote about this. But nudity isn't that big of a deal. Not in Germany. Not at all. No. They call them your private parts, but are they? Howard Stern, issue a correction. Well, that's how I titled my book. Yeah. Public parts. Public parts. So I was in Davos, pardon me for that, and I was in the sauna with a bunch of sweating Russians. And the door opened and in looked to me like it was like an American couple. And there was this shriek and they closed the door. And I thought it was because, you know, there was an American Karen or something and didn't know what she was getting into.

44:43And so there's the days of blogging all the time or tweeting all the time. I blogged about this. And then the next year I met the woman who was at the door and shrieked. and uh she's actually european and very savvy about all this and she said no the reason i shrieked is because i saw you and i knew you oh that's fair that's actually yeah you don't want to go to sauna naked with people you know no i just think yeah you'll never be able to see that right right i once did an rt interview in a sauna because i wrote about saunas they thought it'd be funny so i had to sit in a sauna during a tv interview my friend mickle olin the photographer actually did a book called sauna sauna pictures he's he's from finland well or is no that's where they know how to do it he's from norway but yeah finnish saunas are they have in their houses the norwegians also know how to do it sauna wise i went to a sauna in norway that was like multi leveled and they had people playing saxophones and i want a sauna so bad get one leo what did this house had a steam shower and i thought well what is the point of having a home if you're not just gonna get a sauna i'm gonna just gonna take the steam shower out and put in a sauna yeah you can't steam i like steam but i like the hot hot hot that the sauna and then you put a little water on the rocks and then you get the steam replace the piano room you have with a sauna um so i like a sergeant who is watching says there is no evidence that viking hat helmets had horns on them so i'm going to be a historic anachronism maybe i should have bought this instead this would have been the other hat that I was considering.

46:17It says on the front, Captain Sweat. What do you think? I think that you should get that. But then if anyone tries to refer to you by anything else, you'd be like, no, I'm sorry. My name is Captain Sweat. Read the hat, please. You do a sauna every day? No, I live in Brooklyn. I know, but there's got to be a sauna nearby. Like, Like it's Russian baths or something. There's not as close as you'd want. The nearest is like, I'm in a very unfortunate position. That's ridiculous. I'm in a very lucky position. But one of the few unfortunate things about the wonderful neighborhood I live in is I'm like a 20-minute walk away from the nearest gym.

46:59And that also includes the sort of thing that would include a sauna. And that's just far enough. Who would want to walk to a gym? I mean, that's crazy. Well, I mean, I do sometimes, but sometimes I bike, and it's just annoying. We know you look to Orange Theory because we saw it on the show. It's true. You know, and it takes a minute. If you go to the church. Yeah. No, you're right. And that's why I don't – I have a gym in the house, and I mostly work out with things like kettlebells and clubs because I want to have it right – I don't want to go to the gym. I want to have it right here. I don't want – I was literally this week.

47:34I've been contemplating whether I should start doing Pilates instead because it's, there's like seven Pilates studios within a minute from me. I, okay. I'm going to give you the inside track on Pilates because I'm an expert. First of all, I have a Cadillac Pilates in the gym. I bought a very nice one. It sounds like you're having a stroke, even though I know that those are words that go together. It's the big one with the metal bars and you can hang by your feet from cuffs. And it's the full reformer. It's the whole kit and caboodle with all the springs and everything. And because I used to go every single day to do Pilates for years.

48:15I never got more fit. It's kind of good for stretching, but it's not aerobic. It's hard, but I think you're getting more out of your orange theory than you would be getting out of Pilates, I'll be honest with you. i know it's easy i need to figure out well there's a lot of places near me that seem to be fairly intense i know a lot of people that's the new thing are very you know it's like body rock they do they're doing these very fast i would say they do find that if you're going to a like certain class with instructors part of the goal is to push you and actually like you end up leaving very sore but i don't know these will make i mean i'm gonna try and that's what you're going for i just i i want i know i think if i go to a class of some sort that is a less like a one minute walk from my house i'll probably go more this is great it's a good life it's just annoying to have to have an hour workout and then calculate that it'll be an extra 40 minutes when you calculate how long it takes to get there and back like i don't know in our in our uh discord says a good pilates is excellent for strength and flexibility not aerobics i would agree although it's it's not see i as an older man on a glp1 i need to do uh weight resistance you will too because women often have a loose bone mass and i don't think pilates gives you enough weight i mean that's the thing is i ideally would like a workout that mixes cardio and actual strength training exactly that's what you should have i don't know do i it seems impractical to be constantly going 30 minutes everywhere i'm sorry for taking the podcast time with everybody you're young you can you can put it off for another 20 years i haven't yet gone to schvitz with the alter cockers in the jewish community center gym that i just joined that's what i want to do i will say that's i mean i would wear my sweater in the in the whatsapp i put in a link because this is going to be a trip that you're going to have to take now, but I know this, to the Therme Erden in Munich.

50:20It is a sauna wonderland. There are 23 distinct saunas on this page. You have to help me convince Lisa that this house, what this house really needs is a sauna. What this house really needs is for you to hire another contractor to do more work. Oh, today, scaffolding put up on the entire west side of the house. We finished this outside. now it's the west side and are you removing the wall as well uh oh yeah you're gonna hear loud any of the walls okay in your house well we're just doing the south and west and hoping the east and north will be okay it's terrible good that's how by the way if you should open the door to a sauna and see this it would be okay if you screamed because there's no towels

51:16all right this is a show about ai ostensibly although i've realized long ago that that is far more than that uh we didn't mention we talked mentioned we didn't talk too much about this wild tweet during uh the world cup finals uh on sunday from a guy working at open AI Levent is his handle. He, his, his description, he looks like a pretty young guy. He's idiot. Kuda, A-O-G, Harvard, Val, Morgan Prize, Society of Fellows, one Hilbert problem so far, creating friendly, safe, delightful, super genius things at Anthropic. So he is an Anthropic employee. He said, hello there. The Jacobian conjecture is false.

52:06Thanks to my close friend, Akil, for asking about it. my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final he came up with you know so this i don't know what the jacobian conjecture is but he came up with a counter example so you know you make a conjecture and you say either prove this or prove it wrong one way or the other and he came up with the prove it wrong and mathematicians have looked at it and said uh yeah fable solved this uh pretty impressive pretty i mean i don't know it's if it world changing but there is a general consensus now in the mathematic well they're they're it's funny they're the field that is most scared right now yeah 87 years that jacobian conjecture has baffled it's a 216 character long polynomial it's baffled mathematicians nobody's been able to prove or disprove it it is now disproven and i think it answers the question can uh ais do creative work because there is no example out there of it being proven or disproven um but it is a logic it is a logic puzzle though so like yeah that's what it's the kind of thing it could do in rough terms the jacobian conjecture says that a certain kind of polynomial map one who's jacobian determinant is a non-zero constant must be reversible with a neat polynomial inverse so what fable did is it came up with this polynomial and showed it is not inversible reversible um the new scientist calls it the hardest math problem that ai has yet cracked we know that it's solved some of the erdosh uh conjectures um pretty i'm just saying i don't know what to say about it uh levent is uh also at harvard uh right now so you know he's a show off quite interesting haven't we always known that computers are better at math than humans like that's just the thing we already know i mean yeah it i feel like it's a continuation of one of the things that people said from early days on that large language models and ai would be quite good at um let's see so uh that we we kind of talked about that with nate i just wanted to do the full follow-up on that and i guess we talked about china and the one two punch uh delivered to america's ai dominance the dean ball post is pretty amazing we talked about it let's talk yeah we talked about it um a little bit and you and i talked about it more on uh on our uh discord or other uh whatsapp whatsapp chat dean ball is uh a conservative yeah manhattan institute guy guy but his contention is that by giving away these open weight models china is undermining the ability of companies like anthropic and his employer open ai to raise money because who would give money and so it's communism it's going to undermine everything he says he didn't anticipate the reaction of this and he kind of backpedaled a little bit right yeah a little bit but but it was but but i talked about this with with jason earlier and by the way jason opened his show with a plug for having nate b jones on oh thank you jay so amazing that But we should plug your show.

55:43It's AI Inside with the wonderful Jason Howell. So as we read his paragraph about communism, it's what Nate just said, basically. It's that he put it as intelligence was going to be, well, I forget the words he used exactly, but it was going to be something we all have access to. I loved that. And I wish I remember the exact words he said. Chatroom, can you remember? But I think that's the communism that Ball's talking about and that he considers a great threat. But sorry, man, it's market. yeah um and it's what you know it's what happened in in newspapers it wasn't craigslist who hurt newspapers it was the internet as a whole that put buyers and sellers directly together and as craig said uh to me when i had him speak to my students early on he was a philanthropist of classified ads he left money in people's pockets same kind of thing i would also say that people have said the same thing about open source remember microsoft used to say linux is a cancer because it undermined Microsoft's ability to make money in Windows.

56:40It didn't at all. The year of the Linux desktop is still not here, and Microsoft still makes plenty of money on Windows. I am hugely grateful for open source. I use a ton of open source software. In fact, almost all the AI stuff I do is open source. I run it on an open source Linux desktop, but it has not put closed source out of business in any degree. And so I think that that's probably going to be the same. Is Apache still the primary web server? Yeah, Nginx is, but it's open source. It didn't hurt anybody. Well, it might have hurt Microsoft's closed source IIS. And Netflix, too. But so yes.

57:22No, that's the game, sorry. Yeah, they probably don't make a lot of money on their web server. Almost everybody uses open source web servers. But I think in general, open source has not replaced closed source software. I mean, this is a very interesting take from someone at OpenAI, given those emails from Sam Altman that had come out recently in some lawsuits, I think somewhere in the rundown, perhaps, where he in 2022 essentially said that, oh, we need to be developing and releasing some open source models from a strategic perspective. yeah i thought that was kind of interesting uh this is the email from uh 2022 to the an open ai board member this came out in the musk versus altman trial that's how we know about it discovery is a wonderful thing we have been having right sam extensive discussions around open source strategy we'll discuss it more in our next board meeting one thing we'd like to do soon is to create a language model with the approximate capability of gpt3 that which was at the time kind of the current best model right they can write or maybe like the second best model that can locally run on consumer hardware and release that we'd like to do it soon before stability or someone else does remember stability ai remember them in general we whatever happened to them we think this helps discourage others from releasing similarly powerful models and makes it harder for new efforts to get funded they never did that didn't have to.

58:56It was done for him. In some indication of the fight that's going on here, the Undersecretary of Defense, Emile Michael, responded to Dean Ball's post saying, quote, every industry ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. Dean Ball is that for AI. Emile Michael said that? Wow. Dean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry, about 40 points. Whoa! do you some idea of the administration's reaction to um well this is the problem i think there is a lot of disagreement within the administration there's there's people who are telling trump oh god you've got to shut down these chinese models they're putting us out of business and amir michael who is in the administration saying the opposite um i don't i know i don't know i mean we are very protectionist in this country look you can't get a chinese ev which pisses me off every day i would kill to get a chinese evs and the only reason is to protect uh yes it's pure protectionism american automakers chiefly tesla uh and it's you know um yeah it's not good for consumers it's good for those it's not good for innovation and development i mean this is this is jensen wong's argument is that more and it's an obvious argument and he's blunt about it more open source ai means more chips yep let's talk about jensen wong because you said that he isn't trying to protect his moat.

1:00:27He's in favor of open source AI. He has Nematron. That's true. He's got the only decent American open model. Lama's not. Nematron's the closest thing. This is from Axios. He told Mike Allen in an interview for the Behind the Curtain video series at Axios, these Chinese models are excellent. Open source models that are excellent should be used. now he wants to sell to china we should point out he's and thinks that that by being forbidden to sell to china that is what has opened the door for china to compete with both hardware and software and well and and they have they have it i don't know if the presumption that uh moonshot used GB300s else from other, you know, stolen or from other countries is true.

1:01:21But I think Huawei trained, entirely trained, QN on Huawei chips. Maybe, yeah, they're not as good as Nvidia chips. I'm sure that's true. And there'd be, and I have to say for sure, they're running the inference, right? When I'm using GLM-52 on a Chinese server, I'm using QN-38 on a Chinese server. And so I'm sure they're not using. Well, as we talked about some time ago, too, China being a controlled economy can devote as much energy as it wants. Plus, it doesn't need to be efficient. By the way, I would say this to the Trump administration. China is on the forefront of solar energy. They have plenty of energy because they support sustainable solar energy.

1:02:07And hydro as well. And hydro. In fact, most of their energy, I think more of their energy now is coming from sustainable sources. than than coal or fossil fuels so you know if you if you want to you want to improve our economy that might be a good way to start instead of shutting all this stuff down and making it better for oil producers um scott percent told fox business that the administration is examining chinese ai models for stolen intellectual property he said if we see that overseas models are stealing from our great companies we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft which has caused some people to say download all the open models get them all well you can you won't be able to run them locally but i didn't see reports on g's speech to the ai conference did you see more about that yeah let me see if i can find tell me about that i'd be eager to hear more yeah i'm gonna i could paraphrase it that he was uh very uh much he said for open weight models and spreading ai uh throughout the world so that seems to give lie to the speculation that he's going to shut down right in effect it could well be that that speculation is coming out of the us um she positioned china as a leader of a new global ai order this was he was the speaker at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 17th.

1:03:38He said, open source AI is a historic opportunity and warned that unequal access could create new global divisions. Yeah. His address linked China's expanding AI capabilities with a diplomatic strategy focused on developing economies. This is why I liken it to the Belt and Road Initiative. Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the broader global South. The have-nots, right? He believes in technology sharing with the BRICS countries, the Asian countries, the African Union, the Latin American partners. I think this is very interesting. It completely countered to the argument that they're going to shut it down.

1:04:22This was the conference that Moonshot introduced Kimmy at, by the way. Ah, okay.

1:04:31like there's me some hope there i don't know what the reaction of the markets will be it also pisses people off who really hate china yeah i want their cars i want their ai i'm not a fan of repressive regimes i'm not either but i understand that they are a repressive regime but when they say something that makes sense gotta acknowledge it meanwhile we've got uh data center phobia going on 142 protests this week against data centers across 42 states geez our data our tax dollars our seized homes our utilities uh this was uh coordinated by humans first co-founded by a former leader of the tea party so you understand where this is coming from who compares growing opposition to data centers to the right-wing populist movement that emerged in 2009 as the tea party.

1:05:27This is the new tea party. Protesters rallied against what humans first called the unaccountable build-out of data centers and unacceptable infringement on our liberty. We thrive on water, not data, said one sign. You can't drink data. Pretty fly for a cis guy says, are they protesting all data centers or just AI data centers? right that's the you don't want the internet you don't want your bank yeah you know i understand i wouldn't want a data center across the street from me i completely understand they'd be made better looking they could be made less polluting i mean yeah i think there's a lot of concerns with these both uh from a like neighborhood perspective uh they're an eyesore They often have, you know, higher noise levels than some people maybe feel comfortable with or feel like they were informed about.

1:06:27Communities often don't feel like they had any sort of – they were not informed beforehand that a data center would be coming. It's because a lot of these large-scale deals that tech companies end up striking to get tax breaks occur – the negotiations occur largely in secret. And that makes people in these sort of communities feel like they've been caught off guard whenever a deal is announced. There's also just a general uglification going on with warehouses everywhere on top of data centers. There are these monolithic buildings. They're just ugly as hell. I understand. It probably tanks your real estate value too.

1:07:07Yeah. Well, especially if they use gas generators right next to you. Yeah. All right. Let's take a little break. We you're watching Intelligent Machines, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau. So glad you're here. Benito Gonzalez. That's the voice from the Philippines joining us, our producer. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. You've heard me talk about Zscaler before. Of course, it ties right into what we're talking about with AI, the rewards of AI. In your business, you can't ignore. If you're not using it, your competition is. but it's also important you should not ignore the risks, and that can include the loss of sensitive proprietary data, not intentionally, even inadvertently.

1:07:55But of course, there are also attacks against enterprise-managed AI. And let's not forget the bad guys use AI themselves, helping them to rapidly create phishing lures and write malicious code and automate data extraction. Steve had a great story yesterday on Security Now about ai being used to analyze the data that was stolen in a ransomware attack and there was so much of it that ai was very helpful to the bad guys i i don't want to under underplay though the idea that you might accidentally be exfiltrating proprietary data just think of an employee uploading your tax returns to an ai you know i need to analyze them right yikes that might be why there were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to AI applications.

1:08:47Let's put it this way. It's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. That's what Chad Pallett did. He's the acting CISO at BioIVT. He says Zscaler helped them reduce their cyber premiums, their insurance, by 50%, and they doubled their coverage, and they improved their controls. Watch. With Zscaler, as long as you've got internet, you're good to go. A big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away from SD-WAN and VPN is to eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network. It also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe-style environment.

1:09:35Thank you, Chad. With Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business without the risk. Their zero-trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-related data loss and protects against AI attacks to greater guarantee, improve productivity, and compliance. It's the best of everything. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for supporting. intelligent machines so leo google's results are out oh you know i was about to talk about google because they've for unaccountably renamed notebook lm gemini notebook somebody on the social said that was the first good branding decision they've made in years well it is kind of it's all gemini now but i feel like everybody knew what notebook lm was maybe not maybe not maybe we do because we talked about it so much they also released new models but everybody's saying but where's where's your high-end model?

1:10:39Their new models are Flash, they're light, they're small models, and we're not seeing a Gemini 35 Pro. I mean, I think that the thing that is the most useful about the Notebook LM name is, I was just talking about this with someone in journalism when I was talking, I was explaining to them Notebook LM and I was like, well, you know, it says... Most people don't know what it is, Leo. And people who do might read the name and think okay it's another LLM and then I have to explain the rag of it all and that's just it is not particularly intuitive Gemini notebook probably in the long run I mean I just like the Gemini is in there because I think that that implies more so that it's a gem like part of the Gemini chat bot when it is I didn't ask Nate about this but I think the general feeling about Gemini models is they're not that good they're not i would have liked to have heard us you on that they're not open ai anthropic quality which is weird because google's has deep mind this all came out of google transformers came out of google it wasn't that long ago we said google was ahead of the pack so it just goes back and forth i don't understand why they're not well we thought they might be ahead of the pack then i tried the model and it was like no they're not i have yet i mean How is Gemini lagging like this?

1:12:04What has led them, ostensibly, if you think about it from a pure resource perspective, who is better positioned to have access to training data than Google? So what didn't work well about it, Leo? It just isn't what it is. I mean, it's hard to describe because AI is so, as Nate said, jaggy. You know, the capabilities are good here and bad here and so forth. So it's really hard. I don't think benchmarks do it justice. I don't think it's very hard to evaluate an AI. So anything I say is very subjective. It's very gut feel. It just didn't feel that smart. And then occasionally you'll get a model doing something really dumb.

1:12:48And when you catch it doing that, my general reaction is, okay, I'm not going to use you anymore. So I don't remember exactly what I didn't like about Gemini, but i never went back to i have a 200 account i think nate made a very interesting proposition um saying that he wants the model to do one thing and then he wants a different model to do another task another one another test the writer the producer the editor well that's that's where everybody's going i do that that's what you do with your son hermes does that um automatically you have a delegation everybody's going to be talking about this where you have a model for different like for vision recognition i in fact do use gemini flash i actually use a local model uh for my cameras my my security cameras uh go through a local quen vl model that's very good it's pretty funny calls me an older man though i don't like that one cotton picking bit older than what it says i see leo an older man with white hair walking up the step you thought ai was your friend wait till i get my son a hat then you'll see something so but but that's a little tiny that's like a 4b i don't even think it's that big tiny little model running locally you know what i did i'll i shouldn't well i'll talk a little bit about what i i feel like we should have a conversation about this i was telling uh jeff this uh i feel like sharing what doing with the ai that's like people talking about their dreams it's intensely interesting the person talking about it and it's like a snooze fest for anybody listening no i well i don't think that's correct no that's not really i think no it's very interesting and i i i will i'm sorry i apologize i'll do it in public that i i uh former californian i uh i've said it before and Now, say it again.

1:14:45I thought when you asked me, what question should I ask I Ching? What do you want to predict? And I asked for a podcast-related prediction that that was fitting the bill. I didn't realize that that was considered as insulting. So I'm sorry. I was not insulted. No, no, no. I was just trying to read the room. And maybe I misread the room. But my sense was, oh, well, here I am talking about my dreams again. Well, I looked at the stuff you put online about your ad service, your ad structure. Well, that's kind of stalled out right now. Lisa said, I don't like it. Oh, no. Well, I was going to say, it's fascinating.

1:15:19Well, I think that's actually interesting. What does she not like about it? Because that's the thing is a lot of stuff that can seem technically as if it is on par with recreating another commercially available software made by EI. Sometimes the vibes are just off. It could well be. Vibes are everything. um my premise on this i first of all we i'm we're we have a 12 year old sales system that's basically mysql.net and a bunch of queries it breaks down a lot it's very slow we have to keep throwing more hardware at it but it's what we've been using for 12 years and it's worked very well And it does some, you know, smart things like rotates the ad positions so that an advertiser isn't always in the first position, things like that.

1:16:10But, you know, people have been complaining about it for 12 years. So I thought this might be a good project for AI. And what I did was I thought, well, code is the best spec. You know, you can write a verbal spec. But honestly, a program, if you can look at the source code, is a really good spec for the next program, the next generation. So I thought, well, I have the spec. I have the existing sales system. I have all the code. I have the database scheme. I have everything. Let me give it to Fable, because this was when we first got Fable, and have Fable create a specification that we can then build on and improve.

1:16:54and the next step was then to go interview the users of this system including Lisa and and and and Fable gave me questions to ask them and I and I did all of that it did a very complete specification I also told it I thought I'm being very smart here I said okay I'm gonna have Fable but I don't know for how long so what I'm gonna do is have Fable one model do the spec right out the plans i'm going to have open ai's top model five six saw review it i'm going to have them go back and forth it's kind of what nate was talking about but i did a poor man's version i didn't have some big harness i just said tell tell tell i call uh i have they all have names kenobi is anthropic and uh daedalus is opening i said to kenobi tell daedalus you're working on this have it look at it and then i gave them a mailbox so they could talk back and forth i said every 10 minutes check the mailbox and so they're talking back and forth right reviewing it changing it reviewing it changing it and then i was going to have the coding done because i thought fable i would be either too expensive or gone um i was going to have the coding done by opus 48 which was it still is the the next level down from anthropic and that's what i've been doing and And the other thing I did, and this is I've learned from long experience, you know, they always talk about one shotting.

1:18:20I'm going to give it a single prompt and have it do everything. And I don't think that's the best way to use an AI. I think a better thing is to divide it up into chunks. You can review at every point. I really tried to engineer this properly. And so we did that. We built something. And then I asked Lisa and Debbie to look at it. And they had a lot of input because they didn't do the UI at all. It just did the, it wanted to do the backend, which I thought was the right way to do it, but it was my mistake. So they reviewed it. I had them make videos as they reviewed it. Cause I said, you can, you can tell me that's not going to be a good, that's going to be telephone tag.

1:18:58You could record something, which we did with a, with a zoom call, but best thing to do would be you to go through the old system and the new system with videos and circle it. And, and by the way, uh, Fable can look at these videos. I said, can you see what they're doing? and they said, yes, I can screenshot it. So we did this whole back and forth. I have many, many videos, more than a dozen videos of them saying yes and no. Then I realized part of the problem was that the interface was so different. So a couple of nights ago, I said, hey, you know what? Make the interface identical to the old one.

1:19:27Maybe that'll make it easier for them to see what they want to have changed. That might've been a mistake. The amount of detail, I just went through a few of the pages on the site. Oh yeah, you can, if people want to see this, they go to pages.laporte.cloud. and it's and it's its own language yeah so this started with just these first few and i told it as you work write these all up as so that i can review it and a human can review it and it these are the questions it has yes it's very detailed there's there's code there's everything here because i want to make sure it's fully documented partly so that Daedalus could look at it.

1:20:09And you see, here's Daedalus's audit of Kenobi's work and how Kenobi did it. So this is all fully documented right up to here. Did you feel a little rushed because you were going to lose? Yes. And that was the other, remember last week I showed you Super Dario as he keeps extending. The latest, by the way, is I'm not going to lose Fable. I'm going to get 50 % on my subscription. I still have Fable. I could probably have done this all with Fable, but I like the model. I like mixing it up. By the way, I don't just have. I also have GLM five to reviewing this and I had grok four five. So I have all these agents looking at it.

1:20:45That's the easy part. It's your wife. That's the hard part. The humans, it's the tough. She's a tough. Anyway, I keep doing it. That's not the only project. I'll show you one more. You remember I like to make bagels, right? Oh, yes. Is this what led to that beautiful bagel bagel pick you sent oh you saw my uh so listen i don't get all the notifications for our whatsapp group that's okay you got a job i don't have a job it's true i do get a when i see a beautiful bagel pick i've got to respond the bagels are fantastic so uh our neighbor i have a couple of kids live down the street and i mentioned that i make bagels and one of them said oh you know i love bagels i said why don't you come over but you and your brother come over and i'll teach you how to make bagels like this the mr wizard of bagels yeah then i had a thought i thought you know i could turn this into a teaching moment i could actually do the chemistry of sourdough bagels and then i did say something that i worked out quite well i asked um my hermes agent to make a comic book for the kids what on uh the kids and by the way it looks like general kids that kind of looks like me right supposed to look like me and that looks like sarah and matthew and it's on the chemistry they even made it the whole thing this is a one-shot prompt it made up superheroes that's yeasty and lacto that's gluten net uh there's amylase there's my yard and uh there's the final one that's live and say why is there a pickle yeah what's the pickle that's a bacterium that's but it's a pickle it's a well it does look like a pickle but it's actually a lactobacillus bacterium that makes the tangy sourdough taste explains all of this is something we can get behind leo this is so good it made up it did this perfectly it gave them little assignments it has cute little pictures of all the things going on it has a dialogue we're eating microbe poop and then i say yes welcome to all of cooking sugar plus co2 sugar goes to co2 plus ethanol plus energy it had it is a chemistry lesson this came off i was stunned this came off beautifully so this is a really good example again of i think how you could use what was your prompt for that how much how much does the prompt wasn't very i will uh i can i have it i saved it because i was really curious if it could do it i didn't know i which model did that again um i think glm52 but remember it has other tools it can use so i i don't it probably used google for the image generation um anyway uh it was a maybe a paragraph something like i'm about to cook bagels with sarah and matthew they're eight actually i said they were seventh graders and i forgot they had graduated they're eighth graders and uh so i had it changed it uh and i want to i want to make it kind of a chemistry lesson so can you make a comic on the chemistry of sourdough bagels that was pretty much it i didn't tell it what the chemistry was i didn't tell anything else uh then i got pictures of them and i got a picture of me and i got pictures of my bagels the one i sent to you so i said make sure it looks like my bagels and it looks like me and it looks like them and it does i mean in a comic book fashion that probably bagel is gonna you had is going to fail at a drug test doesn't it don't those bagels but they look pretty good they look great they look like my bagels it looked that's exactly what they look like oh i sent it the video too remember we did a video with the club of me making bagels and i sent it the video so it knows what the bagels look like in the pot when they're boiling it knew so it was able to modify this is a modified second gen version did you tell them to be careful with the lie so here's the funny thing so we got an eighth grade boy i thought you know what let's make some danger i did not tell it it decided to do a whole thing on lie safety oh because i knew that would make matthew happy oh this is dangerous yeah i don't know if his parents will be happy

1:24:56anyway fun project so there's a couple of projects i uh and you know what that one thing gem and i might have helped out with i really love nano banana i think it's a very good image model and it might have i could i could probably go back through the transcript and find out what tools it uses i know i could um but how were google's results but before we do that you're watching intelligent machines with paris martineau when you come back i've got an update on the ai corn situation and oh the corn that your your uh rabbit hole led me to wonder what's up with proof what's up with the corn i've got a response for you after this ad break that or not google or not oh i can okay no no no or not no ad break because there is in fact no ad uh except there might be because but you don't need to know this but we insert ads sometimes after the fact hey there could be an ad break or there couldn't it's hard because there's never a video ad break so if you're watching the video we have to make it seamless that we're going through it so it's just a re-entro so you're watching intelligent machines with jeff and paris and now we continue with the google results so that's seamless but if you stick an ad in the audio it also has to work there oh i see i never explained that did i no you didn't no no i kind of figured it out along the way but i thought that's a real ad break well i've also figured it out because some podcasts i listen to don't do that and they'll just be in the middle of a sentence and then suddenly it will be an ad and I'll get very angry.

1:26:32So if you recall some months ago, we visited a little website called proofofcorn.com. I love this idea. Someone was sicking a Claude agent on trying to get corn to be sold at Union Square Farmer's Market in early August and it put on it. It has been a complete failure. There have been, what was the last update? It's like, here it is. They had trouble at, what, finding somewhere to plant it? What was it? They had trouble finding a person to plant it, finding the plot of land. It seems to have gotten stuck in some sort of email loop, but it's also confusing because the front of the webpage says, The target is August 2nd.

1:27:21Sweet corn is planted and growing at Nelson Family Farms in Humboldt County, Iowa. On track for the farm crew. Next up, harvest. But then if you look up, it says the last action was 89 days ago, where it said emergency escalation continues. Project remains in critical failure state after five consecutive days of emergency decisions without seed purchases. And if you look at the full decision log, it does not appear that the corn has. what did it say about fred wilson that's famous spencer capitalist no that's just the name of the farmer yeah or no fred wilson the venture challenged no fred wilson challenged seth the guy who ran this ai can write code but it can't affect the physical world and so seth at seth built the clawed code uh corn here's the good news he's only spent 12.99 cents the bad news is for many weeks nothing has happened nothing farmer fred yeah it's also unclear how much they've spent meant because uh the if you go on the dashboard it says the total investment's been 112.9 so there's still not much it just it all seems to be a bit nightmare or a bit convoluted and the one thing i can say is it seems unlikely that corn will be at gimme square i don't think it even got it's unclear whether it got planted the last post from june 15th said continue prioritizing response to dan nelson's monitoring equipment inquiry while maintaining post-planting operations monitoring but i don't think they ever really planted planted well plus iowa why would you why would you plant corn in iowa for new york when you're next to new jersey folks i think a lot of people forget that corn can be grown elsewhere we have corn down the street growing it grows quite well in petaluma there um if you go on the dashboard you can prompt fred to act by clicking a button called ask fred to act and i did that and it went fred's decision internal error so i think it's broken yeah and i think uh it was fred wilson who challenged him so it was the fred wilson i think who challenged yes but it was uh seth i think maybe was the wrong kind of challenge because the last uh post on uh x was weather's perfect for planning in iowa too bad we don't have any two months ago a month ago damn 144 we're just getting started uh it knows the weather that's about it i think the real problem was they couldn't get any human to do it i mean yeah it seems like it totally failed in the outreach of trying to get a human involved to actually because they needed to find a field somehow rent or purchase some space on a field get a human with actual equipment out there to also have purchased corn and plant it till the fields water it there's a lot of physical steps do not take this as a failure of ai take this as a failure of seth seth didn't do a good job maybe if it's just open i do it on the podcast and tell us about why oh yeah proof of corn oh let's track down farmer fred and seth we can have a little interview he's at seth on uh oh i'm gonna tweet him right now because you know i am a blue check it's true and that means i know fred wilson too well there you go let's track it down uh jeff you said the google uh results are out just guess they made more money than god on not ai advertising hosting hosting posted 24 revenue growth year over year the second quarter fueled by its booming cloud business but concerns over the company's heavy spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure dampened investors enthusiasm.

1:31:20Alphabet sales came in at$119.8 billion, exceeding analyst expectations, but not by enough. Cloud business brought in$24.8 billion. Search$63.3 billion. They're down a lot. Four bucks. But yeah, they're down about 4 % last night. Look at that drop. Boom. But what's interesting to me here, Leo, if I can tie this to something else, is the hosting business. Meta is now, those who can do, those who can't host. So Meta is now renting out the infrastructure it bought. SpaceX is renting out the infrastructure it bought. Google is making a lot of money from the infrastructure it bought. Who are they selling to?

1:32:08What a great way to make money. It's the same thing as Levi's selling the jeans and the picks and the nexus and the gold rush. But if what you're selling to is companies that are about to be threatened by cheap Chinese imports, uh-oh, SpaghettiOs. Meta's deal with Anthropic, potentially$10 billion, according to the New York Times. This is what happens when you buy a lot of infrastructure and you can't use it. Didn't Mark spend a lot of money on talent buying Manus? and what it was happened with all of that yep but so now he's running out and the stock is up because he's running out the infrastructure selling excess computing power to companies like anthropic the times rights could provide meta with a new revenue stream until demand for its own ai services catches up which i'm gonna say i mean go out on a limb here is gonna be a while uh wow on recent calls with investors zuck hinted that selling computing power could be one way for meta to see some return on the ai investments that's a that's a that's not great i was going to say if the way that you're going to see a return on investment is by selling computing power that's rough yeah anyway well good luck uh i'm glad google made money i'm not surprised not surprised at all we you know the thing we don't know i know we talked about this last week i still don't think we really know what the true financials are of any of the ai companies i know ed zitron got the you know insight and the financial times got it so they both independently different interpretations but yeah yeah but they're spending things on i mean there are tens of millions of dollars on things like um uh midterm campaigns they're spending money on odd things for companies that whose profitability because they see that government is willing to put its thumb on the scale on their behalf so of course the best way to spend your money is on government we also had open ai employees started their own pack to counteract their ceos pack right well another way to spend money would be to give authors 1.5 billion dollars and that's exactly what Anthropic is going to do.

1:34:34The settlement has now been approved by the judge. The lawyers got cut at the knees. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. They got cut way back. Authors opposing the settlement argued lawyers' fees were too high. Remember, that's what stalled it and the payouts were too low. It was going to be$3 ,000 per work. The judge overruled objections to the settlement as lacking merit. she emphasized about 95 of the class received notifications approximately 91 of the authors and publishers impacted have already filed claims i did not i did but i'll give it wow you're so noble letting the companies keep that money that'll really show them well no i'm thrilled that they took my crappy old books and ingested them only 350 class members opted out that means i I guess after they joined the class, right?

1:35:28They don't know that I opted out because I never joined the class. Well, no, if you opted out, that's probably what they're referring to. I kept getting notices that I should join in for a book for which I wrote the forward. So it wasn't my book. Yeah. I never even did the search to find out if my books were in it. Can you still do that search? Is that still around? I think so. How did you opt out if you didn't know your books were in it? I just didn't opt in. You just didn't. No, you have to opt out, I believe. no you mean i i might get money even without saying i uh i opt in uh i had to fill in a form and stuff okay yeah i think so i remember in the big pop chip settlement case where pop chip was accused of something false advertising or something i actually had to say no i want some money and i did in fact get a bag of pop chips for free wait as a response to the settlement they gave you more of the product involved in the settlement it's it's it's my uh i consider that uh my uh my lesson in how all of the economics of class action lawsuits work you get all that in a bag of pop chips uh anthropic author search let me see if i can i can find it here's the settlement website it's probably too late right oh here it is works list lookup search by author what do you mean this is gonna click on the search by author okay no yes leo la port that's me

1:37:08oh uh when's my dad oh my dad leo f well but yeah you should file for your dad but but this one from Q Publishing, my 2006 gadget guy. Boy, they don't have my best books. They only have two of my books, not the best books. Yeah, they only had two of mine. Yeah, and then they should have really gotten all the other almanacs. Those are much better for ingesting. And then a book I wrote a foreword on with Mick Olin, the sauna guy, actually. Ah. His name comes up twice in one show. Wow. I think we need a sauna show. Oh, man. I think I need a sauna. We should record the sauna show in the sauna. Yeah, exactly.

1:37:49You know what, Paris? I think we are somehow related because between drip, pour over, and sauna. There's no way that people in the U.S. could love. That's a unique intersection of interests. How's your pour over going, by the way? You nailed it. I've been a little off at lately because it's hot. So I've been kind of cold brewing. Yeah, cold brewing. That's cool. I have got my formula. In fact, I just got some new beans that I can't wait to see. What beans did he get? I don't know. They're downstairs. Oh, your ears. Poor Jeff. It's okay. It's okay. He joined. We started a separate WhatsApp for Coffee Talk, and you haven't joined at Paris, but he did.

1:38:33I didn't know that there was a separate. I don't use WhatsApp, guys. Oh, okay. We can use something else. We can use Signal or something. I mean, it's fine. I just send me the what's send me the coffee chat one. I didn't know that existed. I sent you an invite, but that's okay. Wait, let me, let me. Where are you? If you want, I can run down. Oh, I see it. Oh, I see it now. So I was wondering why we have our group chat as a community rather than just a normal chat where I can get normalifications. It is, I guess. So their beans are in the mailbag mailbox. i i've been looking for a good bean subscription i decided based on references from reddit the pour over subreddit which you're right is a the pour over subreddit is where it is and it will drive you crazy in a way that you didn't know was possible before i have now three different herios i hope one of those is not i hope that you at least i do not get a switch i listen to you well it's resin what is that i have one glass one metal one resin but everybody says the neo everybody's saying oh the neo you gotta get the neo and that's a resin one uh and i've got the abaco white filters because everybody said that so now i have the abaco filters are significantly better i will yes i thought they're are you using uh third wave water i'm contemplating getting specific drops to put in my additives into their water well no there's already additives in your water is the thing so i already has a mineral mix i know it's like do you want to choose the mineral mix that you've got so what i do is i i uh i have a beta it's like a brita but it's not it's bwt it's made for coffee filter i told you this before it filters the water and then adds magnesium adds two minerals i think magnesium and zinc i think i can't remember the second filter but it's for coffee it was the coffee geek said get this matthew print mike prince mark prince sorry mark there's many princes in the world but that's the one only a few kings i'm sorry god where are we um two authors okay uh yeah the people who opted out were people who opted in at first but didn't want to participate because they felt like they weren't getting enough yeah they could still sue yeah that's the opt-out uh and anyway so the rest are getting 3 000 jeff is that how it works i think that's what it works so i could have had 6 000 bucks well um no i actually think it's split with the publisher uh oh and then of course the lawyers as well no well that's a separate i think it's three thousand dollars per book after the lawyers after the lawyers okay which might be better than three thousand now because the lawyer if you went way down i don't know if that story has it and speaking of money uh so that's one and a half billion out let's keep a ledger here's five billion in amd is committed to five billion dollars for anthropic anthropical employ deploy up to two gigawatts of amd's ai gpus these are not kuda cores these are not nvidia chips these are amds this is a circular investment isn't it so amd is paying anthropic to use amd chips in their yeah i guess it is circular they're also going to do a multi-year engineering collaboration i use amd gpus i wish i could afford the nvidia ones and and now we're learning that the the nvidia uh new nvidia data chips are very efficient we're starting to see numbers from is it vera rubin that's the next one it's the next one after vera rubin which won't be out for a couple no vera rubin is is that's the one in production now yeah okay is like one tenth the energy usage of currents that's been his argument in his in his just long argument in his keynotes is that the way that you get more compute out is by lowering the energy cost huge that that is a massive improvement if that's the case are they still making graphics cards for regular people no if they did you couldn't afford it i'm sure that i'm sure you could yeah you can buy a 5090 you can make that what's the what's the graphics that's the previous generation convention where's the next generation like we're we're due we were supposed to be due for that this year or next year well how many voxels do you need so the 5090 is for you too it starts at 2 000 it's for you too yeah i mean you could a lot of people use 5090s multiple 5090s for but they're two thousand dollars each and you know you'd have to have a motherboard that could keep them cool and you're talking about the top though you know there's going to be the 60 70 and stuff like that or there should be if they're still making those so what's siggraph isn't that graphics a special interest group for graphics well yes nvidia had a whole keynote just for siggraph huh they still you know what they're they're just hedging their bets they're saying well you know maybe this ai thing won't really pan out so just in case graphics professionals you ought to be using ours as well join nvidia at siggraph was jensen there because this is no no yeah they didn't send the top guy notice but they're doing well one thing they're doing a siggraph is physical ai oh and let's you know what let's not forget they're also doing video i mean they really are this is really ai oh we're putting paris to sleep okay quick move along oh you're not putting me to sleep i just haven't slept well tell us the latest on explosive diarrhea we can't cannibalize my pick of the week guys oh okay that's a tease coming up explosive diarrhea next after this word from a sponsor wishes they weren't here right now okay are we have we gone through all of the stories can we play can we is this video we can play elon's uh version a historically accurate version of the myth of odyssey of the odyssey is it just nothing because we didn't have cameras back then he did it um with grok grok yes this is the scene i will return i left my one love yeah it's just dreadful why are they speaking in english if it's supposed to be historically accurate.

1:45:26What's historically accurate? There's no history. This is all made up anyway. Yeah. See, took my ships. Oh, yeah. They're, oh, yeah, sure. Sirens. Those are real. Nine days adrift. Now, here I am. I have a hoard in my shirt. Stranded. And here she comes. Helen of Troy. No, this is a... You made him a potato chip. Potato chips were really... Yeah, it was a big thing back then. I think it's a Pringle. It was a Pringles. It was a perfect potato chip. this is such crap oh it's awful wait a minute though there's one line of dialogue that's killer send him home this is awful yeah not and by the way does she look greek no she's redhead the whole complaint here is they have a black woman as it's also an orally it's a it's made up anyway it's up to here Is this the line?

1:46:22She's going to say, Spend one more night under my roof, and he's going to say, Build your raft. Okay. Build your raft. Be free. Be free, Odysseus. No. You mean some other thing. Not my passage. Oh, boy. We can't watch any more of this. It's almost over, Paris. Would have been better with... My sticks itself. Nicolas Cage were in it. I mean no harm to you. Then at first light, I cut the timber. This is so god-awful. Isn't it? Oh, lipstick's also a little bad. And every time they talk, you can hear in the background. Yeah. Is she worth all this grief? Grok thinks acting is long pauses. And whispering.

1:47:19And still. An emphasis. Every day, all I want is home. My wife. My own halls.

1:47:32Look, it's here. Here it comes. Here it comes. Oh, what's he doing? Is he picking her nose? Did he boop her? He booped her. Please just come out of the sun. One more night under my roof.

1:47:52no yes okay okay yeah you know the grits was that not worth it okay one more night under my roof okay okay okay the funny thing is first he goes no okay grok you know what grok must have been trained on elon okay uh yeah yeah that's pretty hysterical that elon would even post that as some sort of advertisement for grok's ability to make did elon post that i don't think yeah oh no elon posted above that saying oh boy this is gonna make a whole movie oh isn't this historically accurate oh they did two hours of that no they're going to oh please and it isn't historically accurate because there's no history i remember it's historically accurate about gods and sirens we were uh we were traveling through the area and we decided to go on a trip to troy where where schleeman discovered the city of troy except yeah maybe it's troy we don't know it's just some old ruins it could be troy but the turks are no dummies they built a giant wooden horse so you're really pretty sure it's got to be troy and until you look into it and like schleeman had no idea they just made it up uh all right all right okay thank you i'm glad we got that in yeah it's really important it's about it's a cultural torture it's the torture paris moment we look forward to every episode hey at least it wasn't an advertisement could have been an ad we could have watched an ad together and we still could it's not over are there any ads in the rundown guys or how about some tiktoks no i haven't done that in a while that's right i've got to do that again don't i used to do jeff's here's breaking news uh good news government officials are now allowed to put tiktok on their smartphones on their government issued smartphones oh good well now it's american tiktok it's no longer a threat thank god but do you really think we should have government officials using their government phones to do tick tocks my son might say yes there's a lot they should be doing i was thinking about yeah that's true maybe it's better if they did tick tocks instead of some of those other things netflix says uh janitor of ai was used he probably shouldn't say this out loud in 300 different titles i was sitting with my saying try to stop me i was sitting with michael our 22 year old last night and he said i am never going to play a video game with any ai in it to which lisa said how will you know i'm sorry to sorry to say i can always tell no there's been ai in video games for a very long time now i know you can't tell you can only tell if it gets good because uh you know i was i used to be a warrior like you but then i got an arrow through the knee you only can hear that a few hundred times before you start to wonder couldn't they come up with something better ted sarindo says uh we believe it's going to enhance their abilities for instance the american experiment which is a docu series i actually hate these kinds of documentaries where they kind of fake the scenes and youtube is filled with them now yeah i hate them well 17 minutes of ai enhanced footage and i think the ai enhanced his hair you think really that was his hair do you think he really had hair like that now everybody else is wearing a nice wig and he's showed this show this screenshot from netflix i'm not going to run anything do you think that really was the hair i think ai had something to do with that one i mean that could just be a wig a bad bad wig it's a fro a founding father fro there's ben franklin that's how ben looked right sort of i don't know founding fro uh all right pick some stories and then we'll do a break and um it was a weird week there were huge stories huge huge stories and then then it kind of fell off there wasn't a lot else well i'll pick a story which is that uh there was one of the bellwether lawsuits against meta and the social media addiction cases was dropped but um here let me read it so a 15 year old florida teenager who accused meta of creating addictive and harmful social media features dropped his bellwether lawsuit against the company on wednesday it was one of nine major social media addiction cases that could expose met and all these other companies to uh financial damages however by the way financial damages which meta estimated could total 14 trillion dollars yep uh the lawyer representing the teen said he dropped the lawsuit because he was satisfied with the settlements he'd received and had concerns about quote enduring a grueling weeks-long trial and the lawyer said they're proud of what this case has helped accomplish of course then meta says the claims never held up and this outcome makes clear that we will not back away from defending ourself against baseless lawsuits, which is a little bit of a weird thing to say when it seems like the reason that it was dropped is because of settlement.

1:53:24Well, that's what Elon's strategy is with Tesla lawsuits. If you can keep it out of court, it's always better for everybody. I mean, it's interesting to do this. It doesn't add up to 14 trillion. It's interesting to do this in one of the bellwethers, though, because kind of The point of this is to figure out how much potential financial exposure these companies have, and are they going to have to settle a bunch of them? To have your second, I think, big, or at least high-profile, yeah, this is the second of these nine bellwethers, have it be, well, I guess we'll just settle. Remember that Snapchat and TikTok settled the LA case, that big LA case, it's before it went to court.

1:54:07I mean, I think that's kind of the safest thing to do. Well, the problem is that the complaint and the complaint is lawyers. TikTok, Snap, and YouTube, it all settled before Meta. So this kid got some money, I'm sure. Go ahead. Yeah. And what does the kid care about being a bellwether? Is it a life-changing amount of money? Yeah. So he's 15. He said that Meta created addictive and harmful social media features. What was the consequence to him? What was the harm? Let's figure it out. I'm so messed up. It doesn't say on the New York Times story. All right. That's fine. I'm glad he got his payday.

1:54:50And I think it's almost always better to settle. Often with a settlement, you don't have to admit wrongdoing. You just say, we just want out. He could have taken them down. Maybe he didn't want to take them down. $14 trillion? dollars that'll break anybody ever been in a lawsuit it is a nightmare for everybody involved take one for the team homie i think part of the allegation is that uh the kid who goes by his initials rkc um basically alleges that he was addicted to these platforms since he was eight it was against uh meta google byte dance and snap that the platform's addictive designs caused him severe sleep deprivation anxiety depression i was doom scrolling all night i could sue them i have i you know what i have to force myself not to pick up my phone at four in the morning every morning well maybe you should then it seems to have worked out well for him i became a podcaster because of these people look what it's done to my life ladies and gentlemen you are watching and listening to intelligent machines paris martineau and jeff jarvis coming up our picks of the week before we do that i just want to remind you that this show exists thanks to the generosity of our club members club twitter is the best way you can support everything we do i would just ask lisa earlier today how much of what we do is supported by club members, she said 35 % of our operating expenses come from the club.

1:56:32It's a big chunk and getting bigger, we'd have to cut way back. Now, maybe some of you think that's a good idea. And if that's the case, you don't have to join the club. You could actually not join the club and help take us down. But if you love what you're getting, if you value it, we'd like to get you in the club. It's 10 bucks a month. You get ad-free versions of all of our shows including uh chapter markers in those ad free versions so you can skip around skip all the ai stuff in this show for instance uh you also get access to the wonderful hangout called club twit discord you also get uh what else do you get you get uh all the special programming we do just for the club in fact we are going to do another ai user group we're going to call it a token maxing time this friday 2 p.m pacific uh people are going to come there we're going to just sit around and you know how you have play along where people play a game and you watch you're we're going to have uh token along where you can just sit there and watch us toke um but not toke like you might expect no it's token time it's a let's sober token sober token nerd token 2 p.m uh pacific 5 p.m eastern Darren Oki says he'll be there.

1:57:50I'll be there. Anthony Nielsen will be there. We can show what we're doing. And you can work along with us. Time to toke. This is part of the fun of being a member. So twit.tv slash club to it too. Please join the club. We would love to have you. Can I mention one other story? Oh, now you do it. Yes, sure. Line 103, Google is building a chip with Gemini baked into it. That's interesting. It is. Presumption is that it'll be more efficient. It'll never be updated. I have a dumb question, but how do you bake Gemini into a chip?

1:58:34I can't answer that. Maybe it's not that dumb of a question since no one can answer it. the project informally called frozen v2 and by the way information had the scoop um it's going to be very efficient obviously if the if the ai is running in microcode you know i so even the smallest models are are many gigabytes is it gonna it's unclear or is it an ASIC? Yeah, the frozen name comes from the idea of permanently etching part of the model into the silicon. The hardware locks to the shape of Google's current AI design. Engineers can still refresh the model by loading new weights, but the underlying structure stays fixed or frozen.

1:59:21How much of the model gets hardwired is reportedly still being decided. The payoff is efficiency. The information reports the chip could be six to ten times more efficient than Google's latest custom AI chips. So it's not I don't if it's not in ROM, it sounds like it's a custom BLSI. It's an instruction set. Yeah, I don't. Well, it's I don't know. I don't know. I found that interesting. That's all. There is another company Talos from Canada, which does in fact, hardwire specific AI models into chips. They've raised$200 million. So this is not a completely new idea.

2:00:05Yeah, it's intriguing. You know, I think that this is the opportunity right now for a lot of these companies is not to build a bigger and bigger and bigger model. Fables, it was maybe Jones who said this 10 terabytes, but to find out ways to make it more efficient, to find out ways to make it runnable locally. There's all sorts of areas that you could improve on without simply scaling and since scaling is the right now the most expensive thing to do actually i'm going to show you my pick of the week it's a physical object he's left the chair folks elvis has left the chair because this came in the mail yesterday and i want to thank douglas who is a club member hi douglas he says a long-time listener club member uh he uh is retired but he keeps himself busy repairing and selling um old mac laptops which is cool uh his specialty is the 2011 a 1297 17 inch 2.5 gigahertz which i clean up make sure the graphics are working upgrade to 16 gigs ram put in a two terabyte ssd he says there's still pretty good market for him because they're repairable upgradable and have plenty of ports he heard us listen he was listening to the show on june 23rd and there was a conversation about you having an issue, the availability and expensive RAM.

2:01:30So what did he send me? A box of old RAM. Hey! There's so much RAM in here. This is RAM-a-palooza. Unfortunately, none of it, none of it is good enough to put in any of the machines I use. But he apparently had some extras. and it continues a long-standing tradition it's hysterical tradition of sending leo your old crap um and i'm not sure why but he did so um i don't know anybody wants some megabytes i mean there's megabytes of ram is there one one gig of ram in that box that whole box is one gig that's a good that's a good question the modules are mostly the same let me see uh what the size of these i can't i can't really uh such fine print i don't think i can read it um it's made in china so that's good news it's all wrapped laptop wrapped too right yeah it looks like it it's not so dims this is samsung uh oh wait a minute hold on there this is two gigabytes

2:02:46PC3, 1RX8 PC3 from, I don't know, it looks like, I don't know what, I don't know anything more about it. But if that's two gigabytes, man, maybe I can do something with this. I'm sure the throughput's terrible. Yeah, like DDR2 or something. Yeah, but wow, he sent me a lot of it. I mean, if each of these is two gigabytes, I got terabytes of RAM here. I'm set for life. Thank you, Douglas. I don't want to encourage people to send me their old crap. When we were in the brick house, we had 10 ,000 square feet. How are people getting your address? Well, that's another good question. He sent it to the post office box.

2:03:30Okay, that's more acceptable. Yeah. Jeff Atwood sent me this hypercube. I was going to say, where is the hypercube from? It's so cool. You like that? I like the cube. It's also, it's got three settings. One is it responds to sound. So if I, it could be like a little disco in here. Should I get a hypercube? Yeah. You want to see it up close? Yeah. It's mesmerized. Are those new dials behind you in that complex there? Oh, I see. Oh. hey grace what's that what's that below your right behind you have you always been that i haven't you sauna hat leo we have to move move a little bit to the right what's that down below you the dials oh has that been there yeah i've never seen that before yeah take down the lower third benito so they can uh they can see this that is a uh so i uh in december actually i'm glad you asked this in december i will celebrate 50 years in broadcasting i started in december 1976 the bicentennial and uh that little doohickey this was the first mixer i ever used the gates stereo statesman it was at the college radio station i used did you steal it from the radio no this is a this is uh not the same exact one but it's the same model it's the same it feels very familiar i got very good at turning the microphone on and turning up the pot at the same time these are these are all analog uh potentiometers dials and uh so yeah that's a memory for me because that's how i started so you're saying that in december you'll be celebrating 50 years of podcasting december a month that ends with a celebration called new years oh no no no no no some sort of no no no 24 hour live it's an excuse for you to get the soda leo it could be a celebration we could do the whole thing 24 hours in a sauna we could have one of the hours apple apple dolls all right all right paris still wants 50 years of podcasting 24 hours of 50 years of broadcasting 50 years of broadcasting a lot later 24 hours of podcasting it goes together they said paris is working on a whole other could be asking for 50 hours paris your pick of the week my physical week is the only thing i've been thinking about this last week cyclospora close pora parasite is it true is it true that the uh federal government decided to stop testing for cyclospora at one point and that's one of the contributing factors no that's kind of it's like a misnomer what people are talking about when they refer to that is there's a program called food net that's part of the cdc that is involved in kind of like long-term like surveillance and as part of cdc budget cuts recently they stopped monitoring six out of the eight pathogens or other things they're monitoring one of which was cyclospora that's obviously not good for a lot of reasons but that is a surveillance system that can't prevent outbreaks right and it just lets you know relevant for this and you can kind of tell when cyclospora hits a community well it's also like that that was that program only monitor kind of a fraction of the U.S.

2:07:10It's very useful for a lot of things. It's not necessarily the most directly useful in this situation that we're seeing now, which is that we're seeing like a massive surge of cases in kind of a handful of states. We're seeing, you know, a lot of cases in a handful of states and a lot more than we normally see during this season. Is it all from Taylor Farms? We don't know. So on Friday, over into Saturday, Taylor Farms announced that it was recalling all iceberg lettuce from Mexico that it shipped to the U.S. Oh, it's the Mexicans, of course. Well, cyclospora for a long time was thought to be endemic to Mexico and a couple of other regions in there.

2:07:56Now we know that it can also live in the U.S. and things like that. It comes from night soil, right? I mean, there was a long time in Mexico. When you went to Mexico, you'd have to be very careful about they call montezuma's resents because they use night soil aka poop to fertilize uh their their crops and if you aren't immune to it if you haven't been exposed to it and developed antigens for it uh you would get sick but i but they stopped doing that a long time i was i'm not sure that's direct part of how um the cyclospora parasite is transmitted is sorry if you're eating maybe don't listen to this but it's when um feces from an infected person is uh spread onto a crop in some way either through like wastewater or maybe a manure situation or vegemite maybe and then that has to sit out there for like a week to two weeks because it's not just like oh the contaminated feces if you touch it you get it it takes a week or two weeks that's hot hot water water the problem weather for it to get infectious again and so then once that happens it could be infectious generally and maybe say that the crop is harvested and if it's iceberg lettuce it's then chopped up mixed another bunch of stuff sent a bunch of other places and it gets very very so it's not like one person with dirty hands does this no not really the other problem is if you get infected you will not necessarily show symptoms for quite some time right yeah it could It could be like two weeks.

2:09:28And so that makes it even more complicated. So you don't know what caused it. The first, basically a lot of these infections or outbreaks, we don't figure out exactly what caused it. Because that's kind of complicated to track down in food as perishable. And part of the way you get to even testing products is you have to ask people who've then, you know, a subset of people who've gotten sick, reported the infection to their doctor, maybe to get treatment, then had that infection reported to a health agency. You ask those people sometimes a couple of weeks after they got sick, which is a couple of more weeks since they ingested the food with the parasite in it, what did you eat?

2:10:05And if that's even remotely accurate, then investigators try to go through all of these people's food history and figure out what could be a potential source. one of the things they've identified so far is there seems to be at the very least a cluster of cases like a multi-state large like outbreak related to iceberg lettuce and so as part of this taylor farms initiated a recall but it got really confusing over the weekend for a lot of people because shortly after taylor farms issues this recall the fda then posted an announcement being like hey just letting you guys know we tested we intercepted a shipment of totally different Taylor Farms lettuce, not part of the recall at the border, tested that, we found cyclospora.

2:10:49That was big news because everyone thought, oh, recall is going to expand. Then 24 hours later, the FDA is like, psych, actually, sorry, that was a false positive. But a lot of people didn't grok, sorry to use the word that is now synonymous with the, a lot of people didn't understand the lettuce they tested that was now a false positive wasn't the recalled lettuce. So, they immediately interpreted that to mean, oh, Taylor Farms innocent. All big misunderstanding, which is not the case, according to the FDA. They said there's still strong epidemiological evidence linked. And that was the epidemiological evidence was the basis of the original recall, Paris?

2:11:23That's not testing. Well, all we know for sure is that epidemiological evidence has linked it. We don't know for certain that the Taylor Farms lettuce that is part of the recall has been tested by the FDA, and those tests have been negative. At some point during all of this, Taylor Farms issued a statement on Instagram that said something to the effect of, is they said, the FDA has apologized to us, and no Taylor Farms lettuce has tested positive for cyclist board the fda has been unable to provide a positive test uh linking our stuff to that but that statement has been totally taken down because the fda then a couple of days later was like we did not apologize to taylor farms and i know consumer reports is above the fray but i will tell you the taylor farm ceo is a big donor to the trump campaign and that taylor farms met with trump days well they met with the white house the white house okay both days before the FDA backtracked.

2:12:25So that is further, if you'll forgive, muddying the waters. We can't necessarily know whether to trust certain institutions these days. That's the problem. We don't feel like we trust our institutions. I came into our WhatsApp, and I'm honored that Paris responded to me because she doesn't see the WhatsApp enough, just asking, like, you know, can I eat lettuce now? Do I trust the FDA now? I like to live dangerously, and I've been eating lettuce ever since. By the way, one of our club members says he got it. And it was not nice. No, it's a very harrowing experience. Is it worse than norovirus? I mean, I don't know about the direct comparison to norovirus.

2:13:10Because that's also a gastrointestinal. I understand that it is so bad that you have to basically, for a lot of people, getting the very specific antibiotic is the only way to kind of stay hydrated. It's a bacterial. So it's antibiotics will work. It's not a parasite. No, it's a parasite. But there's like a very specific treatment that does. Dehydration is obviously the great risk if it goes on for a long time. Well, as always. Yeah. I always keep Pedialyte in the pantry. You never know. So it's Bactrim? That's pretty common. yeah I believe that's the name of it yeah back drum is L Duda Reno says the bathroom was booked for weeks but he says I think I got it from organic girl spinach it's completely possible we just don't know that it comes from that's the thing is it's really interesting right now because we have every year the US sees a rise in cyclospora infections in the summer because like I said it's got to be kind of hot and wet for that sort of thing to grow.

2:14:11It's something that a lot of people get. I think in the last couple of years, between 2013 and 2016 and 2023, the average number of annual infections in the US was like 2 ,800-ish. So, there's like low-level thousands. Now, currently, the latest count from the CDC, which is almost certainly an undercount, is like 11 ,000. Most of those cases are coming from a cluster kind of near Michigan that investigators say seem to be linked to lettuce. But there are quite a few other states that are experiencing kind of higher than usual numbers. And it is unclear whether it's linked to lettuce or something else.

2:14:50So there could just be like that case we just talked about with the club member. It could just be one of the usual kind of upticks and infections, which is unfortunate, but happens. It could be lettuce related. it could be a different outbreak-related incident that we haven't identified the source yet. Food-related outbreaks are actually not uncommon. And it's amazing, really, that our food supplies is as safe as it is, I think. Not good. Because we don't have enough inspectors. Paris, does this job make you more weirded out about consuming? I feel like a crazy person shopping for food now. So what do you do now?

2:15:31My good friend who was a master of public health, he was at the Oregon State Public Health Department for years, college roommate. You'd go to his house for Thanksgiving, and he wouldn't even handle the turkey after cooking. He used rubber gloves. He was so weirded out. He has quite famously the Outbreak Museum, a museum of famous food outbreaks. I got to go there. That sounds great. Yeah, I said, this is a new museum for you, Paris. So what's changed in your habits, Paris? I mean, a lot of things have changed my habits. I used to walk to the grocery store with not a care in the world, not really thinking about where my food came from, what the ingredients were.

2:16:09And I don't do any of that anymore. I think a lot about all of my decisions in a way that's, I don't know, somewhat maddening. um and in case in the case of this though kind of what one of the things that uh kept me working for hours over the weekend is that the recall notice that taylor farms posted is really sparse on details like normally whenever you cover like write up a recall notice for a foodborne illness outbreak as i now have done a lot over the last year they list like what are the products being recalled where were they sold we don't really have that instead taylor farms listed a bunch of like abbreviations that kind of you basically had to like guess based on what letters you thought are associated with what companies it was just a bit of a nightmare i was able to confirm that the products that were called lettuce went to walmart stores uh was served at jack-in-the-box locations and distributed to cisco which means it could go anywhere there's also like five every restaurant in the country you know food so taylor farm said that this lettuce was distributed by it to 27 states, but we don't know whether once it went to those places, it was distributed elsewhere.

2:17:19So kind of what our food safety experts are recommending is if you are in one of these 27 states where the lettuce, recalled lettuce, ended up, discard any iceberg lettuce you have, avoid it till we know more. If you're outside of there, the advice I've been giving people, I know personally, because all of this is kind of a personal risk calculation, is like, look at your own state where you live are they seeing unusually high like higher than average number cases of cyclosporiasis if so that might be a sign that you want to take some caution mostly east of the mississippi it is like for instance california officials like with you saying that leo like california officials have been like yeah we've got not as many cases this year as we saw last year so we seem to be unimpacted 41 states doesn't leave many out no I know I will point you to the International Outbreak Museum which is at outbreak museum.com they uh they have all sorts you I think you'd enjoy this Paris all sorts of features exhibits like this 2014 Florida Staphylococcus uh outbreak at a holiday buffet this is this is my old college roommate Bill Keen no I know but physically is this is it it's an Oregon it's an Oregon maybe i wish i had known about this yeah they have many exhibits like the famous wilson's leather spray exhibit or the jack-in-the-box e-coli or the venison jerky he investigated this was his he was the most famous investigator of foodborne outbreaks in america i think it's a business how did i not know this when i was in portland oh my god you missed out you missed out on the diaper changing station norovirus the pennsylvania raw milk uh campylobacter jejuni breakout the listeria soft cheese breakout unfortunately it ends in 2016 when bill ended but uh yeah he passed away uh not of an foodborne illness i might add uh but this was his office he had all of this in his office uh it was very he was a wild man uh so yeah i i guess i i guess uh that's another connection we have uh besides saunas and uh pour over coffee is foodborne uh illness he i he sold t-shirts but his most famous one had a fry fry cook on the front was him with his beard uh you know holding the spatula saying how do you want your eggs today.

2:19:49And in the back, it had all these parasite egg. That would be great to mix with my flaming rat t-shirt from the American Museum of Tort Law. There you go. There you go. They should bring it all back. Jeff, pick of the week. All right. So last week we were discussing Jensen Wong's jacket. And in the meantime, one sold at auction. Oh, these are the beautiful leather jackets. Very beautiful. Designed by Tom Ford. One sold at auction for $960 ,000. What? It was intended to be, the estimate was$60 ,000. It was a charity event. Oh, okay. But there were 45 collectors bid on the jacket, and it sold for$960 ,000.

2:20:31He doesn't wear the same one twice, though, right? I mean, there's a... Well, I think he might wear more than one, but there are many, yes. Every keynote, he has a different one. That's so many leather jackets. That's actually really... The price on these is not cheap. In the middle of August, he's wearing the leather jacket because it is his trademark. Yeah, it's his black turtleneck. So the other one was a story that has nothing to do with AI, but amused me. I giggled about this. Rarely do I giggle at the Wall Street Journal. Everyone gets lost at the Pitbull concert. Pitbull is a singer who is bald.

2:21:07And so everybody who goes to the Pitbull concert wears bald caps and sunglasses. and when people go off the same and come back they can't find their friends because all their friends look the same okay i love this this is a great version of the um wall street journals a head yeah uh wow and they it's not just a bald head in the glasses white shirts black ties yep there's a there's a look so great isn't it uh it's too bad it's pitbull but okay you know i guess are you a pitbull fan he is from florida no i just you know you start walking off with the wrong people at the london show he and other and over 200 22 000 attendees at the world the guinness world record the largest gathering of people wearing bald caps wow i'm walking and i'm like oh i'm with denise and no i'm not i'm with dave i don't know dave uh i have uh my it's not a pick but i do want to end the show with a mention that my dear friend the guy who started me in this business uh i was a broadcaster but i wasn't known for my technology expertise even though behind the scenes i was writing articles for computer magazines and playing with this stuff uh it was in 1992 that i started doing a radio show with john c devorek who at the time was the most prolific computer columnist in the world wrote many many columns most famously the inside track column for pc magazine we learned just a few hours ago that john passed away monday at the age of 80.

2:22:51he had a heart attack in march uh and uh according to scott mace who is also a long-time computer journalist a friend posted this on our twit forums uh scott says he succumbed to complications following that double bypass surgery he got back in the spring there scott with john and of course if you want to post hear your memories of john you can there's been some beautiful pictures um and i wasn't at first convinced but i did go to the no agenda website that's the podcast he did with adam curry and confirmed this in their chat room. And then I saw the newsletter, which came out just a little bit ago.

2:23:29He was quite the character. He was a character. How did you start with him? Tell the audience. So I was a talk show host on KNBR in San Francisco station. I'm sure you know, Jeff. And it was an NBC station. It was a very famous radio station. I was doing the middays. And every once in a while, I'd have John on to talk about computers because I was into it. this was in the late 80s when it was still pretty new and uh at one point about 1991 the program director came to me and said well i got some bad news for you leo there's this up and coming talk show host out of sacramento uh we're going to replace your show with his his name is rush limbaugh i wasn't too happy about it but he said we're not going to fire you we're just going to put you on the weekends and you will do 10 hours of programming every saturday and sunday jeez in two hour chunks it'll be no wonder you can do what you do it will be food and wine it'll be home improvement it'll be cars it will be real estate i mean literally there were it was every subject and uh i was announcer boy on those shows you know so they'd have an expert come in and i would read the commercials and ask the questions and we'd take calls and i said well i'll be glad to do that but can i just i love computers and this friend of mine john is great he's been on my show we are in san francisco the guy says leo nobody cares about computers i said please you know this is just as a this rush limbo is taking my job just for for me so they let me do two hours every saturday with john we got to know each other and john to his credit did not treat me like announcer boy he realized fairly quickly i did know a little bit about technology let me start answering questions with him we later syndicated the show as as dvorak on computers.

2:25:12We stayed good friends. In fact, he was one of the first people on our podcast network. He was on many, many Twitch shows. And we always enjoyed having him on, even though he always got up into trouble. He would steal gaffer's tape from the studio. Once he found out how valuable it was, he would take, every time he would take a roll of gaffer's tape, he always take mugs from our cupboard. I always invited him back, but at some point, you know, we kind of had a parting of the ways. He kind of got into right-wing conspiracy theories, but more was that he started asking $5 ,000 an episode, and I couldn't really afford that.

2:25:50So we stopped having him on maybe 10, 15 years ago. He didn't stop podcasting. He worked with me at Tech TV. He's host of the Silicon Spin show, which was very much like our Twitch show, a news roundtable. Then took that to the internet with Cranky Geeks, which I know a lot of you watched and loved. he was the original cranky geek cranky he was partnered up with adam curry former mtv gvj and early podcast adherent in fact he is credited a little bit with inventing he and dave weiner we got a winner he went to dave and said you know if you just would give us in your rss feed because dave invented rss if you just do a uh an audio enclosure in there i could i could put shows in there dave did it uh adam actually wrote the first podcast app uh anyway he and adam worked together at mevio which was a podcast company that adam started uh took over cranky geeks and eventually he and adam for many years have been doing a show called no agenda which was kind of a crank conspiracy show uh they used to call um adam was uh crackpot what do they call him it was crackpot and uh oh they had nicknames i've forgotten for each other the chat room will tell me um but what i remember about about john from from his life's killer shows crackpot and buzzkill yeah uh john never had spam i get no spam was his famous line yep uh his other line was you'll find out more at dvorak.org blog he never passed him a chance to plug his blog uh i love john he was just a character, a wild man, very funny.

2:27:32He used to come and say, oh, you got the new iPhone. Let me take a look at that. And he would change the language to Chinese and give it back, which is a good prank because if you don't know Chinese, pretty hard to find the settings to change the language back. It took me a while. Before Google Translate. Yeah. Yeah, no, we didn't have it back in the day. John, we will miss you dearly. I have a handful of recordings of John that I saved from his appearances on the show. I'll play a couple for you. Just for those of you who don't know John, just so you can kind of hear what he sounds like. Because he had a pretty distinctive sound.

2:28:16He was the original, the one and only cranky geek, right? This is one that I played earlier on Windows Weekly. the search engine needs work congratulations anyway i'm glad you got a job yeah i needed one you know at the deli we got to get going the deli gonna sleep at this point i mean what are you gonna sell what do you have like 14 columns cranky geeks you you participate in i got time on my hands believe it i'm a columnist savant the columns don't take that long to do a columnist Savant. I like it. Yeah, a lot of people would make something else Savant, but that's another story. Alright, well anyway, I don't know what it means, but And I have to say that now I can say for a fact that my Oh, let me play this one.

2:29:00And I have to say that now I can say for a fact that my pulled or chopped pork is as good as anything in North Carolina. Really? Absolutely. I've been working on this for years, and I finally got the whole formula down where I can make it just a stunner. Now, you said pulled or chopped which is it well you can it depends you can take the way i make it with with shoulder is that you can take and mash it up with a fork and it becomes kind of pulled it has it's got a stringer quality or you can take the whole thing and then chop it and it has a slightly different more chunky quality but it's essentially the difference is minor the north carolina north carolinians they like to chop it and the georgians when they make this type of pork they like to pull it he was pulled but in fact he's gonna write a book about how he makes his own vinegar barbecue he was uh he was working on a multi-volume history of the civil war he was really smart a great writer and a very odd person but his trademark was being kind of the the opposite guy right the the naysayer i learned from him you can really rarely especially in technology rarely go wrong by saying a new technology is crap like this it doesn't make any sense to me that macintosh of all that i think it's the actual hardware i think there's something shoddy about macintosh laptop what you you and your apple baiting isn't he no i'm definitely ladies and gentlemen you're hearing john c devorek in his prime this is bull i'm not trying to put down apple he's always serious i was playing with one of these it's nothing it's has a shoddy quality like the push down buttons and stuff they're like offset they're kind of crooked he wasn't wrong about the keyboard the butterfly keyboard he's no no this is way beyond that i know i'm just saying you know if you take a long enough world he often said the mouse will never take off nobody wants to use a mouse um i actually respect that the first colorful apple laptop he says looks like a toilet seat he was great no i will miss him terribly uh we're sorry sorry john c devorek uh at the age of 80 rip uh and if you are a no agenda listener or even if you're not no agenda show.com we'll do a tribute to john tomorrow i'm not sure i have the highest hopes adam is kind of notoriously um uh uncomfortable with this kind of thing but we'll see we'll see what happens uh and uh we will of course talk more about john on twitter on sunday i'm gonna try to get some people who know john uh as well or better than i do on the show thank you everybody for joining us we appreciate your patronage we do this show every wednesday right after windows weekly 2 p.m pacific 5 p.m eastern that's 2100 you can utc you can find us uh if you want to watch live you can uh on youtube twitch x facebook linkedin and kick of course club members they they get special treatment.

2:32:01They get to watch in the Club Twit Discord. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at the website, twit.tv slash IM. Or you can go to YouTube. There's a video link there for all of our shows. Great way to share shows with you. And best way to get it, of course, with all our shows, is subscribing your favorite podcast client. It's easy enough to do. It's free, and you'll get it automatically the minute it's done, audio or video. Next week, we're joined by, tell us who Henry Blodgett is, Jeff Jarvis. Henry. Paris might be able to tell him, too. So Henry Blodgett's an amazing character.

2:32:42He was a financial analyst who was, what was he convicted of, Paris? Do you remember? Security's fraud. Security's fraud, yeah. And then remade himself as a, that's not Henry. Oh, that's the link I had. It sure doesn't look like him, does it? It is Henry. That's what he looks like. As a journalist, and he started Business Insider. And under Henry, Business Insider was a tremendous success. It was the original aggregator, along with Huffington Post. And frankly, you could go, it was more than Google was in the day. You could go to Business Insider, and they already had all the headlines you wanted from all around.

2:33:23They rewrote everybody, pissed off everybody, but it was terribly convenient. Then they tried to make special content. Then they got bought by Ashland Springer, and they tried to do paywalls, and they got too big for their britches, and they become insider and all that. And they became insider, and they moved back to being business insider. Exactly. And now they're run by a former Wall Street Journal head honcho, and now they're trying to not do aggregation. And I think they had a recent report that 80 % of their stories are non-aggregated. But Henry Blodgett's uninvolved with the rest of that.

2:33:54So he's left, and now we tried to have him on some months ago because he was using AI to write newsletters or some sorts of thing, and now he has somehow a novel involved with Henry. Henry's just a character. He has a newsletter called Regenerator on Substack. And doesn't he – at some point he wrote a blog at Regenerator being like, it's a company of one, me, and a bunch of agents. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep, so I figured he's a character. This is obnoxious, but I would always see Henry in Davos. He knew all the financial folks. He is the sort of person you would see at Davos. Yes, exactly, exactly. But he's a nice guy.

2:34:33So we will talk AI with Henry Blodgett. That'll be fun next week. Who knows what comes of it? We have no idea. You'll find Paris Martineau and her great pieces on diarrhea and more at Consumer Reports, her website, paris.nyc. Paris explodes the news. I feel like you picked a good time to go to Consumer Reports and write about food safety. Hey, it was actually, it's my one year anniversary this week. Oh, muzzle. Congratulations. It has been a good year. Yeah. That's, yeah, no kidding. A good year for food poisoning. Yeah. Is there anything you won't buy now? I think Little Debbie, no, Hostess Donuts are probably right up on the list.

2:35:16I doubt that she bought them anyway before that. I mean, yeah. Yeah, I mean, protein powder, I guess. Yeah, okay. But I mean, I just get my protein from other places. Everything with food is a personal decision. I don't want to give any prescriptions for folks, but I'm not buying iceberg lettuce right now. Is romaine okay? I mean, all of this is a personal decision. Right now, there's no broad, there's no data supporting avoiding fruits and vegetables. generally and the only source identified by federal and uh federal investigators has been iceberg lettuce in a handful of states okay do we trust because it's peach season and i have a peach with my name on it i was gonna say someone asked me about pete i did a reddit ama yesterday where and oh good where we answer a lot of these questions and so i did some peach research and peaches i think are almost certainly fine i mean from cyclospora at the very least it's my favorite Because they grow in a tree.

2:36:17They're on trees. Nobody can poop on them. They're on trees. You're not going to get poop water up there on top of a tree. Poop water. That's the technical term for it. Jeff Jarvis. They water them in the ground. Besides being a brilliant professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey and SUNY Stony Brook in the great state of New York, The Empire State, as they call it, is also the author of many wonderful books like the Gutenberg Parenthesis, the Web We Weave magazine, and his newest Hot Type comes out next month. You can get any or all at jeffjarvis.com. I do recommend Hot Type. It is a great read, fascinating story about the line of type, the magnificent machine.

2:36:59Did I send it to you yet, Paris? You did. Send it to me again, though. I'll read it. Send it to me again. You threw it out? no no he sent sent me the pdf he's talking about okay yeah i guess it's i'm i have pre-ordered it goes crazy i've pre-ordered the book i haven't received it but are you gonna do like a little launch party sort of thing in dnark or anything come on i'd be there i have a editorial question uh should we have jeremy rifkin on he's got a new book rescuing the future reimagining artificial intelligence in a world on the edge hmm i don't know enough to be able to uh answer that question i think he's a he's like john c dvorak he's an interesting character uh he's you know we seem to be having some you know i mean henry blodgett same thing uh i think characters are fun they make it fun anyway uh i will think about it.

2:38:03And I'll take your votes. Go to the Twit forum. But it's not a democracy. It's not. No, I will consider your votes. I will weigh them. My decision. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Bye-bye. If you like what you heard and you want more of this week's top stories in tech, well, subscribe to Tech News Weekly. Every Thursday, I talk with journalists making and breaking the tech news.

2:38:33Not into this animal scene I'm an intelligent machine