Obsolete Sounds and Personal Picks

It's time for intelligent machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Martin Note 2. Our guest, Katie Lee, is the editor-in-chief of a very interesting new newsletter slash AI site called every dot T O . She says, AI and writing go together like cheese and crackers. We'll also talk about new rules from the governor of California. 15% of Americans who say, yeah, I'd work for an AI boss and the big Claude Code Leak. All that coming up next on Intelligent Machines . Podcasts you love. From people you trust this is twit ch this is intelligent machines with paris martineau and jeff jarvis episode 864 recorded wednesday, Ailpr 1st, 2026, and Artemis 2. It's time for Intelligent Machines. Hello, everybody. This is the show where we talk about AI, robotics, all those smart doodads all around us. Let me introduce Paris Martinau, investigative journalist at Consumer Reports. And you're why are you wearing a retro baseball hat? Is it because opening day happened or is just You know, I thought about I thought you were gonna ask me about this when I put on the hat. I just haven't brushed my hair and so I was like, I need to wear some sort of hat. But literally as I was logging on, I was like, is it strange to wear a hat while recording a podcast? And I think no, but I don't know. I'm gonna you'll be the guest P for podcast? What's the P for you? Maybe that's it. You're the podcast. The Pittsburgh podcast. People often ask me, they're like, oh are you a Pittsburgh fan? I'm like, no, someone just bought me this hat because it has a P on it. My name is Paris. Oh, it's the Paris hat. Of course. There you go. Anyway, great to see you as you're trouncing me one more time and cross that cross-play drone. Hey, you thought uh you thought I was gonna win this one. You should have considered yourself lucky when I wasn't responsible for it. That was your time to strategize. Man, you just clobbered me with your last play or two plays ago. Uh also here, Mr. Jeff Jar vis. He is the author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, now in paperback magazine, and of course the new one Hot Type, which is on pre-order at jeffjarvis.com, the story of the line of type. And it is a drama. He' ofs course the emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City and University of New York. Newmark . But you know what? We have a very special guest today because she discovered Jeff back when he was an unknown unsung blogger. Kate Lee is here. Hi, Kate. It's great to see you. Hi, thanks for having me. Uh at the uh very young age of twenty-four you became uh a literary uh agent famed for bringing bloggers and this is what this is early days of blogging, right? Very early days. Uh uh to uh the literary world uh now editor in chief of a very interesting site called every at every dot to Yes. Which is for every two, I guess. Yes? Yes. Uh great to have you. And I really should let your discover, your your uh protege, Mr. Jarvis, uh at hand led this interview because Jeff No no no no no no no no No I'm the protege. No no no He's your you're his he's well age wise you're his protege, but I uh no. Jeff was known beforehand as uh TV critics. Well well it's actually it's because of Kate that this show that I came to you Leo. No really how did you really well because Kate was my agent so so I talked to Kate about about books about this technology thing. And originally the original idea was when I had interviewed or I had heard Mark Zuckerberg say that uh you should bring elegant organization in people's lives. Kate thought, well maybe there's a book in that. And I tried to start writing and I thought, uh and then as we're talking, I said this idea of, you know, what would Google do? And that became the book which Kate sold to um uh Harper. Harper. And then it was because of that book that you Leo Laporte called me and said, Why don't we do a podcast about Google? Because we were going to do a podcast called This Week in Google. Week in Google. And uh well uh clearly the guy who wrote What Would Google Do uh should know a little bit about it. And then Kate went on to other um I'm fascinated by Kate's career because she went on to other things uh that tied culture and technology. She was the editorial hire by Ev Williams at Medium. The very first. The very first . And and dealt with the whiplash of Evs changing ideas every morning. I must be able to do that. And then content at WeWork, which was an effort upon them, and then at um stripe as the publisher of its book uh uh outlet and now at every and so Kate I'm I'm I Rashida I haven't talked about this but I think it's really interesting to see how you've tried to what you're trying to bring culture to technology or technology to culture one way or the other. How well does do they mix? Uh it's an interesting question, especially now where I feel like technology is culture in so many ways, and there is uh and technology occupies a place in popular culture more now uh perhaps than it ever did. Um I always thought of what I was trying to do was was like I loved media, I loved the media world, I loved the tech world. Um how do I bridge those in a way that that worked for me that I found you know interesting and stimulating and satisfying . I think what is, you know, again, where where I I really see it now is, and it's not just that it's, you know, in 2026, but that that, you know, technology is culture and you see uh technology companies knowing that they have a place and they have an audience uh and that they have things that they want to say and feel like they can say and they wanna say it to an audience. Um Let me ask about Every, because Every didn't it just started out as a as newsletters, right? Mm-hmm. Every was founded in 2020 in the the boom let of newsletters starting um with Substack and with the pandemic. And it started as um really business and technology writing, high quality business and technology writing. And the aspiration was to become really an institution for really great writing on these topics. It was never sort of scoop driven, it was never about beat reporting, it was about analysis, um commentary and um insights, first person insights from practitioners and the builders who were who were in tech. But at some point there was a little bit of a pivot which must have been pretty controversial. Uh the focus became AI and your content is AI generated. Well, human plus AI, right? Facilitated. Facilitated. Powered by OpenClaw. Oh wait a minute. That's this is the new product result. Yeah, that's the latest product. Yeah. Oh, are you on the wait are you on the uh did you get on the wait list? Uh I did not get on the wait list, but I am a subscriber to uh every dot two. Um so s there are lots of articles uh chiefly focusing I think on kind of a AI use in enterprise. In fact, you have a consulting business uh doing that. You know, articles like Build Your Own Bloomberg Terminal with the I, which is which is pretty good. so and but the fact that you not only uh have AI uh assist but embrace it and and it's part of your kind of code of ethics and everything, uh is I think for some kind of shocking. Mm-hmm. That's not journalism. How do your writers feel? Well, they must love it, otherwise they wouldn't be there, right? Well, it dep it it's it depends. Um and I think it's it's not necessarily one size fits all. I will say we pivo ted to AI. Um it wasn't at least uh initially it was not, you know, a big business strategy. It was just because our co-founder and CEO Dan Shipper, who you saw before, saw, you know, GPT-3 came out and it was mind-blowing, and he was incredibly fascinated by it, and he is a writer as well as a CEO and founder and and uh you know coder. And a podcaster. And podcaster, he wears many hats. And he just decided for himself that he wanted to spend three months going deep on Chat GPT. That's just what he wanted to write about. And that's also when we started the podcast the podcast that he helms called A and I AI and I. The initial name of the podcast actually for about I don't know the first six months at least was called How do you use chat GPT? And it literally was just talking to people. And it was Tyler Cowan and Jeffrey Litt and you know an amazing array of of guests, but it was, you know, it was just focused on ChatGPT. Um and that so it really stemmed from a personal, a sort of personal obsession and personal interest in like this technology is transformative. I wanna know about it, I wanna understand it, I wanna, I wanna know how it works, I wanna and I can see that it's going to have huge implications for how, for, for technology and how we all work. Um at the same time, we had also and good, this is before I I joined the company, but we had um basically built our our first like AI uh AI-driven product called Lex, which is an AI word processor. And it it was, , you know, Dan and our other other co-founder Nathan, they are, you know, they are they are not, they don't consider themselves engineers, but they they know enough that they could build this product. And it became very clear that there was a future in which you could build stuff with AI. And they were just able to build it. And because every started as a media company, we have built, we have a distribution list. We have we have spent years cultivating a list of subscribers. So when it was time to release that product and to say, hey, who wants to try this out? Get on a wait list , we uh pretty quickly racked up um tens of thousands of of subscribers on that wait list and it became very clear that that was going to be a model going forward. Yeah. Uh so that's one of the things it's a little confusing 'cause it's i it is articles. Uh-hmm. So it's like a it's a newsletter, but it's also a podcast, but it's also produc ts and it's also consulting. So it's a it's a whole bunch of uh different things. I guess this is maybe the new the new way of uh being. It's not just one thing. You have a um so were the products developed in-house for your purposes in-house and then released to the audience? Is that the readers? Is that how you did it or yeah, for the most part, the products kind of sprung from an individual itch that you know that that people internally were feeling. Initially it was was Lex, which was the word processor. I believe the next product was Spiral, which was the which is our writing assistant, which Dan coded out of a on like one of our sort of down weeks at what we call them think weeks, which is where we we don't publish and we aim to think and and and plan. Kate is in the uh West Village and uh that's uh the local fire department rushing over to Salt Hanksburg . Yeah, sorry about the the siren in background. That's quite all right. Um and then Sparkle was our next one, which is a file, an AI file organizer. And again, these kind of sprung out of just individual needs that we and we could prototype them. We did end up then hiring people who, you know, we can't manage all of those products ourselves, but they each essentially have one person managing those products. And we have brought people in um who do that. Uh and so This is so different from the uh AI product culture I'm used to, which is primarily GitHub. So it would drive you to a GitHub page and it would have some GitHub install instructions written by Claude or open chat GPT or someb And and this is beautifully laid out and it's it's it's like a product. You're obviously not aiming at the AI fanboy here . Um why do you say that? I just doesn't f it doesn't look like it is a I mean the the AI geek code. It's not aimed at geeks. It's aimed at geeks. Oh for sure. For sure. I mean, I I I think the way that we think of our audience is that um we really are targeting builders who are on the bleeding edge of AI. And that word builders I know is one that has gotten a lot of play. The Wall Street Journal just did a great article about it. Um and I think the way that we think about it is, you know, typically or the the connotation is you're an engineer, you're a coder. And sure, that's maybe where it started and certainly where these coding, these excuse me, these chat tools, these LLMs have really found product market fit between Cloud Code and Codecs. Clearly, coding is a really foundational use case. Oh yeah. Um but um but really w what we are observing internally and we're really what we share internally out to our audience is that pretty much everyone here is a builder in some way. Um, you know our, head of gro wth has basically like is is all in on Claude Code. He is not an engineer. He is not a coder. He calls himself dumb in that regard, but his ho he has automated dashboards and and agents who help him do his job . You know, our basically like our operations person has done the same thing. Our customer service has done the same thing. So that's really how we think about it. I also think, you know, we are uh when we think about our uh we think of ourselves as the one subscription you need to stay on the edge of AI. And that includes the ideas, which are the content and the pieces, the podcast. It includes the products, we named a few of them, and it includes trainings, which are consulting, and then we also offer courses and camps to our paid subscribers. So you can we are doing a camp with Notion on Friday, and you know, we've done camps with Codex, we do camps on OpenClaw, things like that. Um, and I think we're really trying to uh target those people who are builders and who want to be builders and who ca who are sort of crossing that membrane because uh honestly the way that every operates I'm can't necessarily say in every possible way, but certainly from a AI native perspective, is the way that companies are going to be created and built in the future. And so we feel like we have an opportunity to sort of show what that is, how that works, how we're doing, including, you know, clearly the struggles and all, and bring people along on that journey. So you make and eat the dog food. Yes. Uh uh inside. And but what also because you're an editor, you're you're a cul ture person. Um I'm um and and Kate and I we hadn't seen each other for far too long. We we ended up on a panel of before ghost writers. Ghostwriters. Believe it or not, there's a ghostwriters association. Fairly large. I talked about that when you were there. They were fairly frightened by this, by these prospects. Well ghosts are scary. Mm-hmm. As opposed to a Leo who was a coder who now says, Oh my god, this changes my world of coding. You have people who who didn't code who can call themselves idiots at it and then do it, and then you have writers and readers. And I am gonna confess to something. And maybe it's just me, but there's a bias among coders who are now using these tools that no one else can really use these tools. Right. Really can get it. See, that's the problem. You know? And and so this feelinging Well you're say that coders and techies are being exclusionary self-obsessed? I know that's shocking. I know. For for white guys, it's just so amazing that before. Uh uh so for instance I mean uh the first thing I saw when I went to every.to is is your uh kind of your I guess it's a it's a claw bot. It's an open claw. It's a plus one, yeah. Yeah. Uh and I thought, well, I could just do that myself . So why so uh what's the pitch here? Is it for people who couldn't can't do it themselves or is it what what makes this better than just vibe coding your own thing. Right. Well, first of all, not everyone is gonna vibe code their own thing. Right. Um second ly, it can take some time to get them set up. I mean, I'm in a I'm in a daily conversation with my claw in tellinging train her to do things that I want her to do. Um and I call yes, I call her her her. Um and um and it takes time. It takes time to set that stuff up. It takes it also . It takes a lot of time. It takes also money to provision it and to these these are these are very expensive. They eat a lot of tokens. Um and so we are basically doing that on behalf of our subscribers. The other thing is that we are , you know, plus one doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists among our other apps. It exists among our content. So if we can basically you you get a plus one and you are able to be integrated with Quora, which is our email management service, spiral with writing, Sparkle for file organization, monologue for for voice dictation . I just lost I think I just lost track of the last one. But essentially it's an it's an ecosystem. And so your plus one is sort of coming loaded in with um with the every s with the every products and with and we assent uh uh ultimately want to be having like every skills that it comes sort of preloaded into this plastic. That's of course the thing that scares uh most people about open claw is that it's it's so insecure and they're very worried about not only the insecurity but how much it's gonna cost. It's spiral chorus sparkle monologue and proof. Sleepy dopey grumpy and then plus one is the new is the new thing. Proof is also proof is also new. Um but uh yeah, those are the two most recent. Paris is a journalist who writes uh I'm curious what the what the process is like and and what they find useful and not. Yes. Um well first I should just say, um Leo, I think you said a little earlier that or you may have said that you know all of our writing is is AI uh or or referred to it in some way. That is that is not the case, but we do use AI in our writing and our editing. Um I will say that it's different for everyone. One thing that's just been really interesting to see is that like everyone has a really different process, even if they're using similar tools. Um people are people just people just go about it really differently. Some people write something first and feed it to spiral, or some people would give an idea to spiral and have it do y I can imagine that. And that's fine. That fits , you know, your your style. But it's so it's with a partner. It's yes. We're actually publishing a piece on Monday, I believe, by our writer Katie Parrott, who um is a writer who's basically like figured out and built these tools herself and kind of very extensively goes through her process. She's she's written a lot about her process, but but in particular, um , you know, I think there there's been a discourse pr recently of, you know, is AI writing real writing? Is it and and she sort of is trying to address it. Um, she has a quite an extensive process. Um she, you know, she starts off with with with always with her with her with her agent interviewing her. Um she has a panel, Leo, like the panel you referred to with uh Gilfoyle and Dinesh, she has a panel of ten , I don't even know how many, but ten different agents of like David the Seder is is for humor, you know, Hemingway is for Bremedy. Um she's named all of them and she's basically always sort of pressure testing her ideas. She's never i in the use of AI, we're never just with anything, whether it's writing or or anything else that we do, it's never just like, oh, it spit this thing out and so now we take it. First of all, it everything we you know pr with writing and with editing, it's trained on our stuff. So it's not generic, it's it's been trained. We've trained it on things that have worked. Um and I think then the other, you know, the other thing that I say and that I think Katie really embodies in in what she writes is like your job as an as an editor or writer using AI is as I said not to blindly accept the recommendation, but it is to wrestle with it because again, it's not generic. If it's if you've spent hours training this claw or LLM or whatever it is on your work, on your style guide, on your best stuff , on the things that you're aspiring to. It's not inventing things out of thin air. It doesn't mean you have to accept everything it says, but it is a good thing to be considering. One the thing that ri I find very interesting, all gate with gatekeeping with notwithstanding, is that the that you're coming at it from a different p point of view. Instead of a technologist or a coder coming to it fr from that point of view, you're coming f from a uh humanities point of view into the technology and and and doing vibe coding. And I think in some ways that's ex what's exciting about vibe coding is it it opens the door. It finally opens it up to for anybody to create tools. Uh you have a 400 rule style guide. Yes. Right? Tell me about that. I love a style guide. You know, Paris, you may you may have them in your world too. Uh I have APs over here, but I don't pay too much attention for that I feel like every job uh I've had I've always been so excited to be like, let's set up a style guide. Um tell for people who aren't journalists, what is a style guide, first of all? A style guide is a set of essentially rules and standards of how you are going to use certain language. And it can be anything from grammar, you know, here's how we use commas, here's how we use semicolons, or don't use semicolons, to um here's how we refer to people. Um we always refer to someone with as their full name on first referral and then you know, mister someone on the second referral, things like that. Um there's any number of them words you always use words you never use um you know that the it can it can really encompass an enormous amount um and so i created that um when i started and I mean this was it several years ago, so I I you know this was pre-AI, I wrote this, um, but we basically have fed that into our um into into Claude or into whatever the LLM of your choice to basically be like these are your instructions. We've also had to actually rewrite it because it was initially written as a person is going to be reading this, but it uh you know for an LLM to read things, the format needed to be slightly different. So we did have to um we did have to adjust it in that way. Aaron Powell But interestingly, still kind of prose. I mean it's that's what's kind of interesting about skills for these AIs, is they are English. They're not code. Oh, for sure. This is all natural language, as as they say. Yeah. Um and I think when when you you know for your from what you were saying about coming into it from the humanities perspective, I think the way that we think about it is, you know, we have editorial standards that we aim to meet or exceed ideally. I think we try every day to do that. Um, we're a small team. I'm not I'm not going to be able to hire a a whole raft of people, but I do have um but I do have standards that I want to apply across the board. And I think one thing that became really clear with with AI, and of course with its ability to sort of do pattern recognition and and um automate some things that are that are very repetitive is that like, you know, I I as an editor was sort of constantly coming upon the same mistakes every single time. And it's like, I don't want to have to keep correcting this. And again, I'm not saying this about you know deep thinking about the the the nature of a of a of an argument necessarily, but even just the same things in a piece again and again and again, like I should not be spending my time on that anymore, nor should anyone on my team be spending their time on that anymore. And so that's the kind of thing that it can enable you to um to free you up from from some of that and also then to apply those standards a little bit more evenly across every it essentially raises the floor of of for me of like the quality level of what I was getting back from my editors. You use the word taste though, which is a word I would never use with AI. You can give A and AI can have can tea can have taste Um I don't know. I mean, I I don't know that I it taste is not a word that is necessarily in my vocabulary all the time. It's certainly a word that is in the tech vernacular at this point. Um well spirals it says on your site is your AI writing assistant with taste. I see. Sorry. I appreciate that. I presume you don't mean like flavor. You mean like good taste and bad taste, right? Well essentially it's been trained on like every editorial standards. So it's a way of so you know it's a way of saying like here's what we do, here's how what we do to to get the best writing we hope out of the people that we work with. And it is now imbued in this in this uh in this product. It says spiral rights with natural rhythm, concrete details and clear language, good taste built in from the start. Yes. I guess that's good taste. And AI can do that? You find this reliable? I use Spiral every day. Um again, what the way that I use it is the way that I use it and is probably different because uh in terms of how other people use it. Um I use it for things like if I have to be writing a marketing email or I have to be, you know, doing doing something that is not, you know the the the the highest stakes, but I just want to get it out. That's how I use it. Again, that's the same thing. For me. But I guess you're right. I wouldn't want to write a marketing email. Yeah, I never want to write a marketing email. So I understand that. And what I think is is really useful with Spiral is that it actually returns what it returns is essentially three drafts from three different angles. And it you so it basically allows you to be like, I like that angle or I like I like those two. I want to go in that direction. And then you're sort of constantly pruning and constantly sort of talking to it. Um again, that's not to say that people we ha we know from our data that people are actually using Spiral to write books and to write articles and things. So it is it is it it the use cases are individualized. This is just how I use it. Paris, would you use something like that? No, but you know, I think it to each their own and the assuming. You like to write though, right? I like to write and I also I don't know. I think I there's been a lot of debate over the last week in journalism Twitter about various tech journalists or other journalists kind of coming out to using AI for some or all of their work. I think kind of where I lands on at least for like reporting in journalism where the writing is kind of the output that you are trying to get people to give you money to produce. Like and there's a lot of cases where it's going to y it is something valuable to be able to produce uh authentic and interesting and unique uh piece of writing. Which I think one of the downsides of AI just based in the way that it works is that of course everything's gonna be a bit smoothed. It's going to it's it's something that comes from the result of uh training on a large data set. So of course it's gonna tend towards averages. But I think that's it that's not to say it couldn't be useful for like sending an email. Like I think my the one instance where I have used AI for writing, quote unquote, is like if I have to slap out a bunch of request for comment emails and I don't have like literally do not have the time to write all of the sentences to it, so I'll write a really bad version and then check that. But I'm thinking I'm sure there's a bunch of different kind of examples like that where people's writing output is um more route. Do you get pushback uh over this, Kate? I mean uh I I imagine you do. Um pushback from whom? The reaction to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, uh the reaction to the Yeah, look, there's a good example. The Cleveland Plean Dealer said, we're gonna use AI. Woohoo! And everybody was Yeah, I just I don't really can put I don't really think of ourselves in that discourse or maybe I just, you know, we just worry about ourselves and I don't really worry about what what the others are saying. I think what where in getting adoption for some of these tools across the team, where if there was pushback, it was not again for for every writer, I actually am not would never mandate to a writer you have to use AI to write. It's like if it helps you, if you find it as part of your process, great. If you know some of uh one of our writers always writes first, you know, he writes the draft himself before he does anything with AI, you know, whereas Katie will do an interview with AI first. So it really, really depends individually on each person. What I think was really interesting , you know, about a uh maybe a year to nine months ago was in sort of using our using our editing tools to essentially be like, you know, we had the style guide, we trained it, we we trained the L LM. We have like a whole bunch of examples of like headlines and and leads that really work and all sorts of things. And we it really required um incorporating that check as a part of our process not being optional took some time. Um because it you know you just think like, well, well, okay, I did, you know, I would I would get a draft and I'd be like, well , I read it and I'd be like, I think I see five things that I s in a significant way, you know, would want to change about it. Did you run this through? Did you did you check it at all? And the if the answer was no, I was like, d do that and then send it to me because it's essentially catching the things that I would catch, but now I have to do it. And so that was um that was that just took a little while. So so the style guide in a way could be a a competent editor, at least on the the technical uh side of it. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. When you were at medium, you were recruiting uh known writers to come there and one of the services that you offered, uh this knob that I am, I just want this, was editing help . Um and and and a lot of people took you up on that at the time. Is that kind of the same motif here that that you're offering things that can be helpful to writers if they wish? I'm hearing that from you from your internal writers. What are you seeing for people who are using these tools for things outside of every one what are you hearing pressive feedback from writers elsewhere? Um gosh, I don't know. I mean I don't know. I don't know that I I have a reliable handle on on how others are saying it outside of again I've I've I've read some of the same, you know, the same news reports and and dis uh and and read the discourse that Paris was referring to. Um I don't I mean about using every tools specifically. Oh I'm sorry. These tools aren't used just for every writer's right? They can be used by anybody who's a member. Yeah. So who do you find is the is the target for that? Who finds that useful? Who f and are you speaking specifically about the writing tool or j uh or other tools? Yeah. Well I think they are people you know in general who who have um who productivity is something that they are in general interested in because these are all tools that are meant to help you in some way be more productive or however you might define that. And maybe that's better writing, maybe that's spending less time writing, maybe that's um spending less time on a first draft and instead getting that first draft out and then spending the time refining something. Um so uh we've we've you know again, I think it's a it's very individual and how people use it. Um I do think that there is a lot of so for instance when Spiral started, when Dan built Spiral, it was like, well, you know, we we create podcasts every week. You create a podcast every week, but it's not just the podcast. It's the tweet, it's the LinkedIn post, it's the article, it's the Discord, it's the this, it's the that. And like that all just takes time and time that like we should sh sh we sh we wanted to spend doing other things. And so we certainly know that, you know, in in cases uh again that was the use case that Spiral came out of, but like that's that is one way that like I you know I I I don't want to be spending my time as I said writing these writing you know marketing emails and things like that but we are we're seeing use cases of like all across again the data is showing people are using it for books, people are using it for proposals , people are using it for, you know, LinkedIn posts, which is probably no surprise, just what we all see on LinkedIn. Um, but people are really uh, you know, the use cases are across the board. It's a great question. I actually was just on our podcast a couple of weeks ago talking about it. I I I love to edit. Like I my happy place when I'm like, I have a million things to do, it's like, oh, maybe I can just edit this piece. That is that is where I feel like I can just do my thing and I and I know what I'm doing, and it's a measure of control , and I get a lot of satisfaction out of it. Um so this was this was like a a this was a journey for me as well. Um and I should say I read and edit, top edit every single piece that goes out. So so that is absolutely a core part of my job. But um I also have to spend a lot of time, you know, I have a s a a a small team up until like four months ago I had I had like half a person on my team. You know, I didn't even have like a full-time staffer. How am I gonna get all this stuff done? I had to hire, you know, I was I was hiring a bunch of people, um, had you know, was glad to have to to be able to hire a few people, had a bunch of open roles, and I was essentially um uh, you know, this is this is one case sort of outside of writing. I should just say that I, that I where I really saw the potential. But like I don't want to spend my time wrangling no tion. I don't wanna spend my time in settings, right? You know, setting up pages and connecting databases. Like that's just not where I shine. There are other people for whom that is second nature. It's not for me. And so if I can essentially work with um, you know, whether it's Claude Code or at the time it was OpenAI's Atlas to essentially just tell it to do it, um, that frees up an enormous amount of time for me. From the writing and editing perspective, Jeff, like it definitely is interesting because Dan, our our my our our co-founder and CEO, he's been saying basically since chat since GPT-3 came out that like he really wanted to automate the sort of rote parts of my job, like the copy editing. The he just was like, I just don't want to, you know, to to see you like deleting commas or whatever it is. Like it's just a waste of your time. And he was trying, and this is before you know tools that allowed you to vibe code really came out, uh, but he was really trying to build something like an internal copy editor that would do it. And every time, I mean this was several times over the past couple of years, he'd be like, I built it. I want you to try it. You know, and then I would try it. And I would be like, yeah, it it it didn't catch all of these things. And so we're not using it. And so e uh you know, it's but it it's sort of been like every three to six months there's been a different version of that that he would present to me and I would be like it would get better and better, but I would still I mean I also still am like Google Docs is like my, you know, don't don't don't take Google Docs from me. But um but um but uh but so it was it was for me also like a okay this is getting better this is getting better. It's not great yet. This is getting better. Okay, there there is a point at which, and it really was lat probably last year sometime, and then of course with with uh with um uh anthropic release releasing OPUS. November 24th is when it happened. Yes, I know. It was the big the big moment where it where it was a clear tipping point of like oh if I don't do this, it's actually gonna hold me back. Do you worry about jobs though? I mean, um, I often think I could probably at some point, not yet, automate the entire workflow uh for this podcast network, except for my wife, because you know, but uh everybody else. Uh but those people, first of all, I I really enjoy working with them. I like having them as colleagues. And yeah, maybe I could automate their work, but I it seems like that's kind of a grim future for a lot of people. And uh what what I think it ultimately will enable and what technology has done is opening up new jobs, new jobs that maybe don't even exist yet, different kinds of jobs. I mean the prompt engineer was was not a job of a few years ago. And uh again, I think that I think prompt engineering is more of a skill now that that a lot of people have rather than a job. But but but again, that's just an example of something that that came out. Um I think, you know, I think I don't think it's gonna be easy, but I think that if you embrace these tools in ways that are comfortable to you and are are germane to how you work and your world, um, because I really think it fits it's not just the AI, it's the AI and the human expertise. And that's where you're seeing so much of this, so much of these tools and so much of these gains being made. Um and so I do think that ultimately there will be uh you know new opportunities and new things for people, uh new things for people to be doing. If you know, if I never have to copy paste into different forms again, I will be so happy. I just never want to have to do it again. Every dot two is uh the website we're talking uh to the editor in chief and we're so glad to have you on Kate. Uh and I by the way you see I signed up for uh the wait list for uh plus one. Okay. Um lot of interesting tools on here. This is a very interesting site because it as I mentioned at the beginning, it's a newsletter, yes, it's columns, yes, it's a podcast, but it's also uh products like uh like voice dictation you know uh uh helping you write uh all sorts of stuff including uh someday soon is are you actually are some people set up with plus one now or is it a is it not out yet? So internally we're set up with plus ones and we're just now letting um some people off the wait list. Um but it's it's just the the product wasn't quite ready to to let people off until now. But we're starting to. And we've had some beta testers, and of course that's just been really useful to get feedback. And some of these tools you get with your subscription, I'm gonna download and install monologue for sure, which is the voice dictation and the automatic file organization sounds pretty darn cool. And uh the email assistant, God knows I need that. So there's a lot of interesting. So it's tools. Oh, and I didn't even mention uh you're uh you're doing these events. In fact, there's one coming up in a couple of days, and these are all virtual, so you can uh attend them from wherever you are. This is uh Every and Notion, a custom agents camp. But look at all the events you're gonna do. Claude Code for Finance, uh writing camp, clawed code for beginners, open claw camp. There's a bunch of stuff coming up. And it's it's your team that leads these or do you bring in people or yeah no I mean I basically oversee the camps and I work with a colleague to run the courses as well. So um definitely wear a lot of hats. Um the camps are are free for paid subscribers um and the courses are for a fee, although we have discounts for paid subscribers. But yeah, it's um it's it's it's a lot, but it's it's great. It's a lot of fun. If I were gonna put it under uh a dome, I'd say it's a about community. It sounds like you're building an every dot two community of people who have an interest in this and who want to use these tools. And it sounds like it's a very interactive space to participate in that. And that I love But we've kept it to just kind of a narrow slot. You're you're expanding. Get busy, Leo. Start vod ing. Well, I need twenty assistants. Maybe plus one. will fix that I don't think you can get a few. I do have to ask before you leave what's up with the horse head behind you. That was you know, uh that was came up uh earlier when I just hopped on. Um that was a leftover from Halloween that uh I think we had a little Halloween party and then we very recently in like the past I don't know two to three weeks actually made this into a real podcast studio and so we felt like it needed to have a place of honor. You could donate your log, Paris. I do have a log. It is a story. Yes, it was a log Caitlyn, thank you so much. Thank you for discovering Jeff. Uh appreciate that. Actually really seriously, thank you for introducing us to Jeff kind of in an indirect way, but uh that's been a very uh freeze many, many Kate got rid of me. She left the field. Yeah, but still all these years later, never read. Here we are. He showed up like a bad penny. Kate Lee, thank you so much. I think everybody should check out every dot too. Uh there's a thirty day free trial, I think, so you can uh try it and see what you think. Yep. Um and I'm very interested. It's uh it sounds like a community that we've it's a large one already. It says uh eighty five thousand subscribers. That's I think we're actually up to about 125,000. We haven't updated our uh our our language, but yes. We're thrilled you're there. And I you know you can you have a direct in if you want to send me any feedback. Okay. Good or bad. Okay. I'll wait for my invitation. Thank you, Kate Lee. Good to see you. Bye guys. Take care. We will continue with intelligent machines and don't worry, we're a half an hour away from the Artemis 2 launch. We'll cover that when that happens as well. You're watching uh Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis, our show today, brought to you by Stash. Have you dabbled in investing here and there? But haven't been happy with how things are going? Stash helps turn good intentions into consistent progress. Stash isn't just another investing app, it's a registered investment advisor that combines automated investing with expert personalized guidance. 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Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments LCL and SEC registered investment advisor. Investing involves risk. I just realized you're wearing a corn shirt. I don't know how it fully did not. Because it just seems so nor It really does. At a certain point, you wear so many bombastic shirts that they all kind of blur together. Wait a minute. Did you call my shirts bombastic? I like that. I like that. It's a clothesline. You just start bombastic. Bombastic cloth es for the weirdo in us all. Well, anyway, yeah, you know, uh Paris, did you have an allergic reaction to uh what we were just talking about? Or yes, I mean frankly, my bad for not jumping in. I uh had a I was a little late to the record today because I have had a long and complicated day at work, so I prepared a little less for this than I would normally. And frankly , when it comes to doing a confrontational interview or an interview style where you're heavily disagreeing with someone, I think that you d need to actually come with significantly more prep than usual. That opinion may not be shared by everybody on this panel. No, I agree with you. So I was a little just uh listening and learning. I just thought it was also a very interesting interview because this has been I mean, it doesn't sound like her products are necessarily for journalists or people whose primary output is exclusively writing in the same way that the other thing. Not a technologist, uses uh tools like Grammarly for her writing. Um, and I think it she's taking a class in AI. And I think she's I think this is very common. She's a CEO, she's a uh CFO by training. Uh and I think that there is a lot of interest at the at that level uh of people in AI, but they don't really know where to go or what to s do and what to start with. If you're a writer, you like to write and uh you don't want somebody to write it for you. That's that's a lot of I mean this has been a whole this has been like the topic of discussion on journalist Twitter. Oh I know this guy this past week. Because people feel like it's not real. how they're using AI and a lot of them were like I think Alex Heath had said that he feeds a lot of his s uh sourcing material and stuff to a uh LLM and has it write a first draft for him. And then he kind of goes from there. And he's like, Well, you know, the hardest part about writing is always like going from zero to one on your first draft. And I agree, that's very difficult. But the reason why that is hard is because that's where your thinking happens. It's very difficult to sit our job is to synthesize a large amount of material collected through these interesting ways and highlight the value and report that out and write that out in a way The fact that if you're talking about using AI to produce the core part of your output, you're going to get something that is sanded down at the edges. I agree. It's going to be an output that is by definition not very special or particularly excellent because it is an average of a lot of different things. And that, I don't know, over time I think is going to just result in not the sort of work you want to be doing. I will say, I I think like like we've talked about in this show before, the areas I think are most useful for AI application and journalism are like when I have a folder full of right now, like 20 different PDFs, maybe actually maybe like 50 uh that are all various scientific studies on a crazy amount of things that I've gone and found and know are relevant. And I am now writing and reporting something, and I'm like, God, where's that one that says this about that? Asking Notebook LM to go through it and I have all of my documents in there and it tells me what thing I'm that's phenomenal. Right. It's so helpful. I'll give you two other examples. This this week I I I I was invited to write a blurb for a book by an author I admire tremendously. And I was blocked. I couldn't get started on it. It was weird. And so I asked AI to write one and it was crap and I didn't use it, but it unblocked me. Right. It made me see, okay, oh right, that's true. Kind of laxative. It's like a laxative. It's kind of it's kind of uh you know pleasant. Milk of magnesia for writers. Is that what you're saying? It's like a laxative. Yeah, that's a crazy thing to say, Leo. It's like a cell. You gotta throw a second one in there and it's just for marketing hype. But on the other hand, I had a copy editor uh on my new book. I I don't want to speak too much out of school, but what the hell I will, who spent a lot of time adding P period and P P period to the footnotes and worried about italic commas I wanted this right. But he didn't challenge me. There was only one challenge in the whole thing. And I want a copy editor to challenge me. I wanted one of your your your characters to do that. Um and I put it through and I asked it some simple questions like uh w what are my ticks? And it found writing ticks that I had done too much. So I could go through that. That was useful. That's useful. But reaction, you know, bl unblocking, reaction. I think those things can be useful. Now as I enter as I work on the next book, I do have these folders filled with PDFs. And I can imagine doing things like like there's in the invention of the of the um amplifier. It's a very complicated time frame. I might ask it to do a timeline for me. Just so I can keep that straight in my own head, not make it wrong, but at least it becomes a working structure. But I would never, I agree with you, Paris, I would never go at it. Let me just one more thing. So this week in Sacrifice for the show, I went and watched in the theater the AI doc . Which one? It's the one that's out of the theaters now. Isn't there two? Isn't that the whole th ing? Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, this this is the one that's it's uh trist it's it's Tristan Harris's burn last week. Yeah but you know it's also because I hadn't had popcorn in the theater in six years, so it's you should have gone to see Project Hail Mary, the population of the stuff show. The Reading uh uh whatever uh Banville Theater. It's in the suburbs, wouldn't know. There were three people including me in the theater. But really? Yeah, yeah. This thing is it's subsidized. It's like Melania. It's subsidized to get it out there. So uh the Doomers subsidize it. Um but at one point he's trying to the guy's playing the dog I don't know what AI is. What's AI? And then screen for screen it comes back. It's pat patterternsns,, pat patterternsns,, patter ns. And it strikes me that yes, that's what AI is good at, to your point, Paris. It's going to find and replicate those patterns. To me, I came to realize creativity is breaking the patterns. Creativity is seeing the different path to go. And AI is never gonna do that. And uh so I think it's useful in some ways to get things done, but in terms of what we do, in terms of trying to think that we we work creatively and find unique value and and and human uh interest in things, that's still our job. I think Yeah, and I mean well I think you're right, Jeff, in in what you're noting that it it can be useful in finding these patterns. It may be like having moments where like you're blocked and you just want to try and get something on a page. But I also think it's important to emphasize that there is great usefulness in that struggle, you know? Um trying to find those patterns yourself and really struggling with it and struggling to I agree. I think I want to resist the patterns. yourself and then realizing that hey there's something about this that is blocking me and I'm not able to succinctly analyze this or identify the patterns and synthesize it onto a page is useful data in and of itself. I think that obviously there are situations where using a tool like this to expedite that process could be useful, but you have to understand that your what your the trade-off is. And the trade-off is that you're not thinking as much, no, you aren't getting as deep of a understanding of the material. The outputs could be wrong. And I think you have to be okay with mak ing that trade. And I I don't know, the thing that worries me is that we are setting ourselves up in a system where uh even just taking writing and journalism for example, you have these institutional pressures to produce for a lot of journalists more and more, faster and faster for less and less money. And that leads to people uh feeling like they have to turn to these tools in order to make it work somehow. But uh the output is not going to be half as good ultimately. Okay. Okay, we're about fifteen minutes away from the launch, so I want to just do a few uh news stories so we can cover what's going on because there's a lot going on right now in the uh AI space, some big stuff. The f biggest one I think of the week is the leak of clawed code's source code. Did you see that? Anthropic said it was a human error. It could easily have been a vibe coded AI error. But the leak uh was immediately pulled down but not fast enough and it has now there are tens of thousands of copies. Uh Anthropic's been putting DMCA pull down requests out like crazy trying to uh trying to get them off the internet. It's not illegal to have it though. If you it's th they they couldn't sue you if you just have it, right? But journalists we would say that's that. You can own it. Like you can have it on your hard drive. But uh people are putting out, for instance, uh somebody's ported it over to Python. And uh you can download that. And there's some question about it's it's originally TypeScript uh code. There's some question about if you download clawed code in Python and run it , uh, there's 32,000 stars on the GitHub right now. I'd be a little nervous about it. Um, but you know, I don't know, the lawyers will have to weigh in on that. There are people who have taken it and done interesting things with it. For instance, uh Ben Davis has actually uh taken and put in Doom in sideclawed code. So of course it's really it's an important part of every one. What? Can it play Doom? Yes. And it can. Uh easily, quite well. In fact I don't know why that's such an accomplishment. But anyway. Uh we've seen a lot of interesting analysis of how Claude Code works. I think I could summarize it by saying it's more than just the model that Claude Code uh almost half a million lines of code. It's um the harness is very important to the effectiveness of Claude Code. It's not just Opus 4.6. A lot of really interesting uh stuff. There is a website that I think is, if you're interested, um, is worth looking at. It's Claude Code Unpacked. And uh you can actually see the process of how Claude Code works with what you type in, which I think is is kind of cool. And it shows the architecture and stuff. It's less it's less of a geeky uh deep dive into the code and more of uh just uh you know kind of a a higher level how it works and what it's doing. There were some hidden features that showed up. There was one that uh I think was intended for April Fools. It was only supposed to work April 1st through 7th. Called Buddy. It was a virtual pet , a Tamagotchi inside of Claude Code that you'd have to keep alive. Um there is some interesting agentic stuff like something called kairos . Um there's some very expensive things. There's an auto dream mode, which I think would be very interesting. When you're not using it, when you're idle, it goes through what happened and organizes it uh into learnings, uh which is potentially very, very powerful. So this is a nice little site if you want to just kind of understand what anything surprised you in this? Um , no. I don't know if we really learned all that much. Well, okay. Wasn't there something that uh tracked the amount of times you cursed at Claude Code? Oh yeah, you want to see that? Uh I could show you that. So uh this this comes from uh Wes Boss. He was digging into the code just to see a variety of things. For instance, when Claude Code works, it has uh a verb that goes over and over again and there are 187 of them. He found the verbs. These are what they call the spinner verbs. These are the words. They filter out twenty I won't say them on the uh air. They're kind of George Carlin's twenty-five worst swears. It also keeps track of when you swear at it and uh sends it back to the home office. It logs your prompt as negative in their internal analytics, West Boss says. Now, I think that makes sense because that's a sign that whatever Claude did wasn't right. And so maybe in the voicemail jail would do that. Yeah. So there was some valuable stuff. There was also a mention of copy barra. I'm sorry. I getting I get spammed and I have should be in Do Not Disturb when I do these shows. I don't know why I'm not. I apologize. Um You live life with your every time your phone rings, it makes a sound. Oh yeah. I'm a YOLO. Not only does it make a sound, but because I have 18 Macs in this room, all of them make a sound. What a nightmare. Really? Oh, that's nice. No no commercials, no phone calls. Boy, the youth today. They live a different world. You writers, you know how to live. The other thing I think is important, and uh this actually is kind of an interesting topic, uh they have there is mention in it of copy barra. We've heard about this mythos model that anthropic supposedly is getting I saw one uh tweet, accurate or not, that said April sixteenth, soon, that is so good that they have held it back and have been warning governments and security experts, this is gonna be dangerous when we release it. There's also a rumor it will be extraordinarily expensive. OpenAI is about to release SPUD. Both of these models, they say, are a step change above what they're already doing, which is already very impressive. I'm not saying this is not an inspiring . Mythos sounds good, right? It just Spud. Here comes Spud, your potato. U Uh but it brought up an interesting point that I I kind of think is intriguing. What if these companies do release really good agents that are incredibly capable , but price it so that only the wealthy can afford it . Mm-hmm. I was just saying is that not where all of this is going? Isn't ology works all the time? Isn't how I I don't mean like somebody who can afford a three thousand dollar computer. I mean a millionaire. I mean somebody who has so much money they can spend ten thousand dollars a month on their volume based business Charles people what it cost for these services, yeah, that only the extraordinarily wealthy would be able to do it. I mean, this is probably one of the reasons why there's um a uh poll um that I included in the rundown that one of the takeaways was that a majority of Americans across all ages and political affiliations think AI will do more harm than good to their everyday lives. The only exception is people ab who make over two hundred thousand dollars a year. At the same time, people are using AI more than ever. It's just like social media. It's the media uh trope being played back in the polls. It's the movie you just saw scaring people. And actually, honestly, I think it's also people who encounter AI as chatbots have a very different impression of what AI is and is capable of than people who are encountering it in tools like Claude Co. It's just a very How is clo Claude Code is still a chatbot? You're interacting with it. I mean it's just uh all I can say is the quality of what you get back from it, the capabilities it has. I don't use it like a chat bot like you're getting actions from it. You're getting I'm getting actions from it. I'm getting it's writing code. I'm not getting I'm not saying , hey, how much is a stamp? Um Yeah, but most the average person No, they're not gonna get any use from coding. I understand. So why would they use that? No, I'm not saying they should. I'm just saying their experience is very different because chatbots are kind of dopey. And if you're making silly pictures or if you're asking it, you know, find the best running shoes for me, that's just a very different experience than if you're using it to code. And the people who are using it to code are seeing a different expression of what AI can do that is much more powerful and much more intriguing. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying you should be doing that. I'm just saying it's a different view. View of it. The other thing that's a big story, and then we're going to have to take a break is the big time compromises, supply chain compromis es. Uh first on Pi PI uh with the light LLM. And now this one happened yesterday, Axi os, which is by the way, a library used by Cla wed code. The problem is when these are compromised, uh people are downloading them and running them without their knowledge even. They're they're libraries that are invoked by other tools you may not know. And uh they this is becoming a real serious problem . Um we talked about light LLM uh last week, uh which is widely used. Forty we now know for forty seven thousand people downloaded it in the forty six minutes it was available. These tools are uh these libraries are downloaded, you know, light LLM is downloaded I think ninety two million times a month. Three million more than three million times a day. Uh Axios also extremely popular. So these attacks can really threaten in a in a big way. We're going to take a break. When we come back, I do want to uh watch us uh get us to watch the uh Artemis II launch. It looks like they're go. It's a very nice day uh uh quick Cape Canaveral. Um T minus twelve minutes and killing. Yeah, we're actually at ten now. So Yeah, 10 minutes. Uh so it's a hold. It's a hold of ten minutes. Uh yeah, maybe, yeah. Yeah, it does look like they're a hold. That's a normal hold, I think. Yeah. Um I just want to play Walter Cronkite, that's all. So we'll sit here at the watching pad and watch as Artemis two makes its way to the moon. First time we've gone back to the moon in how many years has it been? Thirty some years. Hope it's still there. It's full tonight. There's only one way to find out. Yeah, let's go see. They don't get to get out. That's all they have to drive around it. It's like uh when you know you're driving down the highway and you saw the drive-in movie and you got a glimpse of the movie, but you didn't you didn't get to watch the did you ever heard of drive-in movies ? A what in what? You surely have been to a drive-in. Yeah, I have. Well, I haven't been to one, but I know of the concept. You know they still exist? There's one or two. I was saying I have I have not been to one because I don't know where they are. It'd be a good field trip for the Brooklyn gang. I would love that. COVID to your zip car? During COVID, they they they brought them back in the Bay Area. There was a bunch of driving that popped up. Yeah. You get and and and you have to park in the and there's a hump where you park, so tilts your car up a little bit I'm gonna be honest, my entire knowledge of drive in movie theaters other than just conceptually from reading is from an episode of the TV show Psych that uh where a pivotal scene with uh serial killers took place at a drive in movie theater. Yeah, 'cause it's dark and you get out of the car to go to the popcorn stand and you never anything could happen. Anything could happen. But then you could not find your car getting back and you're lost. Never happened to me. Uh but it was fun for dates . 'Cause it was just the two of you in your car . Uh we're gonna take a break, come back with more memories from Gramps . You're watching Intelligent mach ines with a couple of old guys and a young lady named Paris Martinot and uh Mr. Jeff Jarvis. Our show today brought to you by Mon arch. Oh yeah, I'm so glad I have Monarch. I tell ya, tax season, right? Really gets you to look at your finances. Monarch is perfect for that because they help you make progress with your money all year long. So you don't get to April fifteenth, look back and go, What happened? Where'd all I made a law? Where'd it go? I love Monarch. Simplify your finances with Monarch. It's the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life , budgeting, accounts, investments, your net worth, and future planning all together in one dashboard on your phone, it's on your laptop. You will feel aware and in control of your finances this tax season. And you'll get 50% off your monarch subscription with the code IM when you go to monarch.com. Monarch isn't your average personal finance app. I've tried them all, by the way. 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You can let Monarch look out for your money with a person alized weekly summary that alerts you to big spending spikes, uh shifts in net worth, upcoming expenses. Oh, another thing they do, this is new. You can split bills with Monarch. You don't need another app. You just scan and upload a receipt. Monarch will automatically parse the items and the prices. This is the AI at work. Then you share a link or QR code with your group. Everybody can claim their items, settle the bill effortlessly. How about that? Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes money management simple. Use the code IM at monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off at monarch. com. Don't forget the code, very important, im monarch.com. We thank him so much for supporting uh intelligent machines. Let's see. I'm gonna go uh I guess we're still on a hold here for NASA. Let me uh go full screen on this . Um there's happy people watching. The chat suggests to me that things are happening. You're not up to date, I don't believe. It's not just a hold, is it is it something else? You're not live. It looks like you're not live, Leo. Oh. Well I wanna be live . How do I get live? You gotta not be doing I don't know, but it's not that . Are you sure? I think it's live. Is he live? Because I don't know. The the time code at the bottom says there's six hours and twenty-three minutes into that already. Well that's just you know that's just them. The clock is still top. No, I'm live. Yeah. Ten minute countdown. We're cleared for launch. Uh we're just waiting. And by the way, uh our own uh intrepid space hosts , Rod uh Pyle and Tarek Mal ik are not there. I don't think they're in that. Maybe they are in that audience uh of dignitary. Those are dignitaries. They're not very dignified. I think they're out there at the bleachers. You know, there's a great seat across the water from the the launch pad where you get to see it actually happen and feel it. Yeah, more importantly. I was really sad. We were uh at the uh Kennedy Space Center uh last month and the rocket had been pulled back. They had to put off the launch. We came this close. There they are in the uh in the bleachers. That's the bleachers. Is the gantry already pulled back or is that not yet. They're about ready to restart the countdown. What's a gantry? The thing that holds the rocket up. Well, there's Elmer Gantry, but that's a different thing. That's a preacher. Uh and then there's You're telling me there's not a preacher holding that rocket up? Is it well I I think uh the good lord is holding that rocket up with his uh with his mighty um you know . Um no it's actually that tower, which will slide back. Uh but that's pretty close to watch because the thing you don't want the thing to fall over. Can we all get corn shirts? Is that the thing? I think we all need corn shirts. I think we all need corn shirts. Uh I'll get a normal I'll get a corn shirt like yours, Leah, but then we've got to get a custom black one for Jeff where it's like all the corners. A black corn shirt? Uh grayscale. Black scale. All right. Uh let's see. What else? There is uh we got a lot of news to uh get through it yeah google um oh actually we should mention this open ai we did mention it early i think uh closed oh this was on windows weekly uh a another round of financing 1 2 2 billion dollars . That gives them an eight hundred fifty-two billion dollar valuation. So losing Disney's $1 billion last week was no big. Unbelievable. Um, and and what I thought was kind of interesting, you know, SpaceX is also apparently today going to uh uh prepare for their IPO, which should be a pretty spectacular IPO, but I doubt they'll raise a hundred twenty two billion. Yeah, I mean they confidentially filed today, right? Yeah. So it's interesting that you can still if you are growing at the rate that OpenAA is growing, not making money obviously, but if you're growing, uh you could still go to the uh investors and say, Hey, give us some money , and they'll give you enough money so you don't have to go public . Um there are rules. We were talking about this um on Windows Weekly. There are SEC rules. Google was in the same position. They didn't really want to go public, but they had to because the SEC rules say I think if you have more than a thousand investors, you have to go public. You are de facto a public market. Yeah. And that was because they were giving uh stock options to their employees . I don't know what intel situation intelligent machines is in. The countdown has resumed, so we are now nine minutes away from launch. We will cover that launch, but we'll continue uh until then. Yeah, SpaceX is filed confidentially. But how do we know that if they file says Bloomberg says it? So that's well Bloomberg knows. They know. I mean Bloomberg, yeah, knows. I don't see SpaceX as a business. Is it a trillion dollar business? It's the same thing as uh Uber, as uh we work as well . OpenAI. These are companies that aren't currently profitable, but there's an Well that that's what no, that's what I'm questioning. There's only so many rockets to go up. There's only so much uh uh They make money, quite a bit of money on uh Starlink. Uh fine, fine. But it sells money from the government, doesn't it? Like it's all government. Yeah, that's the same thing. They're selling there's these, you know, this isn't a SpaceX launch, this is a NASA launch, but uh yeah, they're making a lot of money from the government. Uh I think there's probably thinking of things like asteroid harvesting, asteroid mining. Yeah, because that really goes so well. Cities on the moon. Yeah, both Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal have reported that SpaceX is filed. Yeah, they say what they uh what they expect uh the strike price to be or they're aiming to raise between forty billion and eighty billion dollars in an offering Aaron Powell So OpenAI without going public raised twice that Well yes and that's why we're all kind of squinting our eyes at that point. And uh you have to figure that uh SpaceX were really is it already part of Tesla and XAI or is there have they not merged all sort of gantry moving just . SpaceX combined with uh XAI in February to create a one point two five trillion juggernaut in the biggest corporate tie-up by value in US history, which is the most Wall Street Journal clause of all time. A jug or not. A ? Uh well yeah, so the AI there's the AI investment there too. So maybe that's part of it. I mean what will be interesting which they note is that once the filing is made public, it's going to have a bunch of interesting and never-before information about the combined company's operations. Um, because they obviously have to go into detail about all of this. This is why Google didn't want to go public. Yeah, you gotta open the books. All the public. And tell all the people the reasons why you're a bad investment. I I I have to s of Tesla's public, right? I have to say companies have gotten very adept at non-gap accounting and hiding. And for instance, Apple Apple no longer says how many iPhones they've sold. You'd think that'd be material of material interest to investors, but somehow they get away. with it I guess the argument is that if if you really want to know that you and you don't want to invest, then you don't invest. It works for them. But the whole point of I know disclosure . By the way, the Trump administration is thinking or the SEC is thinking of uh eliminating quarterly reports. Right . Saying maybe we just do this twice a year. What? What ? Why? It's a lot of work. Every three months you gotta get all the finances together. So s so sorry that you have to tell the public and your investors what you're up to every three months. Such a terrible time. My point is that it's it's slanting away from investors towards these companies. Uh I mean yeah. That was the whole thing. It is like the bare minimums. Yeah. Well I mean they're the next people, right? Because first they screw over the custom That's called in shittification. So you wait another three months to find out more, yeah. Yeah. Uh Google is rolling out AI inbox beta for AI ultra subscribers. That is a statement that sounds felt like just fake. That sounds that sounds like you generated that statement algorithmically. What is an AI ultra subscriber? I don't even know. It's a personalized briefing that surfaces the actual information you need instead of a message that you have to open and read. I I mean there's no company that I would trust to do this less than Google, who any time I try to use the search function in Gmail, it returns anything that I did not search for. It is like astounding how bad it is. And this is returning the things I'm looking for. Yes. It's baffling. And again , well the they've said that they have a new engine quote engineered privacy environment where your information is processed in a separate space and doesn't leave that space so that Google doesn't have access to the U.S. So I signed up for a Google Workspace Studio that's supposed to send me notify me of urgent emails. Yeah, this is kind of example. Example. How notifications are supposed to work? Jeff is urgently asked to donate five twenty five dollars to Mary's US Senate campaign tonight. It worked first FEC Debun. That was urgent. It's urgent. It was so urgent. They got moderator Jared Jarvis needs to coordinate a preliminary meeting with the panelists and submit administrative materials. Urgently. Urgent . I think people are just gonna game it, right? donation . I wish I could have a button that eliminates all solicitations for money. It's also just very I don't know. Any Google rolling out any features like this has my hackles raised because Gmail and G Suite are I think notorious for not allowing you to turn off any of the extra AI features or else it completely wrecks the basic functionality of Gmail. If you try to turn off the awful little un uh little purple line that says how you should rephrase every sentence of your email, not for grammatic ish, it's not because the grammar's wrong.' Its not because the spelling's wrong. It's just like we think this would be better phrased. If you want to turn that off, you have to turn off all spell check. You have to turn off uh any sort of um ability to sort your inbox in into like little categories. You have to turn off basically every feature that makes Gmail Gmail because it ties in those features with like as you're just the P stands for picky. I suppose the P does stand for picky. Yeah. Now I have to point out Gmail launched on this day, April Fool's Day, 22 years ago, 2004. Can you believe this? And in 2004, I thought it was a pretty good idea to create a Gmail account. Laporte . Not a good idea. Two minutes to launch. Two minutes to launch. Should we should we go to the uh the video? I'm sorry to interrupt. Yeah, it's exciting. I have the audio. I think I do. Let me make sure it's two minutes is a launch. Well, Google has announced that you can now change your Gmail name. Yeah, I mean uh if I change it, it's not going to be Laporte, it's gonna be Laporte 5879999 or something, right? Something that no spammer will uh will know. Unfortunately, you keep your existing Gmail and the aim and uh because of course they're not gonna turn off that, you'd lose all your email. So I'll still get all the spam I get a laport. And you could revert to your name when you when you regret changing. It's just another boxes that you I guess I can't do it computers, is now or uh nothing unfortunately. It should be. It was it is intended to be, but uh these are reused No, no, that's a different one. You t we're talking about the ones who were stuck there because the because of the leak in the Boeing uh Boeing return vehicle. they both retired from the astronaut corps. One minute yes the guy the astronaut was returned a little while ago. It turned out yeah he, we went somehow lost his ability to speak and he's fine now. Speaking again. Yeah, he's fine now. He just wanted to come back. Houston will take control. Here we go. I'm not sure that I've ever watched a mission to the moon happen live. Oh, you missed it. Actually no, I I'm certain that I haven't because it's the first time in fifty years. And they'd say we're about to what year was the last time we went to the moon? Fifty years ago. NASA. No, the last time? No. The last time astronauts it it says on NASA's website, we're sending astronauts around the moon for the first time in fifty years. And here we wow. Jeez, you and I are old We are so old. Holy cow. Yeah. These are very powerful engines. Whoa. Oh my gosh. Very fast. Whoa. That's that's steam by the way. They water cool the uh launch, so that vapor is steam. That's so cool. I'm always inspired by watching these. And praying a little bit. Yeah. You and I are old enough to remember watching. I was in the newsroom when it happened. On time passing 30 seconds into the lights. Integrity passes the ultimate vehicle. Target milestone. No , I was very much built in the world has nothing on her more than twelve hundred miles per hour. It's I like doing this because it's fun to watch this together. Uh it it's a c a good communal. We need Jammer B. Yeah . That's the cheers coming from the uh bleachers there . It's apparently something to see. The ground really rumbles. There's a huge one. Oh, to slip the surly bonds of earth. Actually that's what Reagan said when the challenger astronauts died, so we don't say that. Sorry. That's not the way to that's not really what they're trying to do right now. Integrity is fourteen miles an altitude, eight miles. So five days away from uh the moon. So it takes how many orbits uh orbits around the earth before it swings. I th I I wasn't sure I asked that question and I don't know if anybody uh knew that. Probably not a long time. Now if you were really Wolf-Croncott, you'd have a model, you'd be explaining all that. We would have these models that they would take apart. One minute fifty second goes like this and it won't just like this. And you'd have an accident on Jim Lovell or somebody sitting next to you. Well, what's amazing about these now is there's the people at the bleachers. Look for Rod uh and Terra Cutter out there, I'm sure. There's of course a bunch of tourists. Hey, there's your mom and dad. Guidance converge. Nope. Whoa. How cool . Hey, there we go to the moon is this. There's a shot. Look at that. Yeah. Watch you're gonna one shot inside was mainly of the feet of two of the astronauts I know earlier it was interesting. They you could see the foot cam ? Yeah, well they have these big boots. Two minutes forty five seconds of mission elapsed time into the Artemis 2 mission. Thrusters on integrity and upper stage confirmed in a ready state ahead of service module fairing separation. Do you think that person's chosen like do you think there's like a little audition for who has the best voice to kind of do the public announcement? Well it might be now. It used to be Capcom and uh these guys were now it's now it's now it's some P I, yeah. Oh, there goes the fairing. They don't need that anymore. They're out of the atmosphere. Gosh, you guys are a little bit more. I wish Richard Campbell were here because he knows exactly what's going on. He was an amazing board system tour guy. Houston integrity good last Jennison great view Would hate to be a fish right now Teamico eight plus zero two We see a sale on board, Stan . Stan Houston has you loud. Can I go to the bathroom now, Dan? says the kid going through the Outstanding Stan, we have you the same . Three minutes fifty seconds into the flight of Artemis two wise. To verify accuracy . Light dynamics officer analyze the time of main engine cutoff confirmed at eight minutes two seconds. Time of Miko . MICO. Main engine cutoff. Oh Darren points out a makes a good point. It's all fake, because we know the Earth's flat. Right. Right. It's just big massive space, as Brand read points out. The Carmen line is the line the order between the atmosphere and space . Pretty amazing. I love the pictures, these pictures from the best part. Yeah, movie or cursor, Leo. Outstanding stand, we see the scene. There it is. There is no cursor in space. I was God. Moving it in the game. Move your cursor. Paris back in the day, this is this is an incredibly wobbly picture where the sense to know that image would go all around the screen because there was no holding steady Now we can do it. Amazing shots. These are incredible. That's what's a thousand miles an hour. Someone in the chat uh oh I guess to make a AI video of uh one of the corns on Leo's shirts taking off like it's a videos anymore. I was just about to say I almost interrupted myself a bit more than I was the animations were always great too. Miles in altitude, four hundred sixty miles downrange. It's good. Everything's gone great. Very encouraging. Patrick asks a great question. What's that bright spot in the middle and what's the stuff coming off of it? Again, the time of meeting was confirmed at eight minutes, two seconds into the case. Yeah , what's that? That's the engine. Oh, that's like from below. It's an extreme I don't know what that is. Seven minutes of mission elapsed time. Very cool though. Very cool. Uh congratulations. Godspeed, as they say. They should do a podcast from up there. They should do a podcast on the moon. That would be cool. I'd volunteer for that. Uh let's see, what else? Uh are you going to change your name? Did you change your name on Gmail? We were talking about that before the uh launch. I've got a bad one I've got. What would I change it to? That's the thing is I have all the email Gmail addresses I'd want and I have them I guess separated because I this wasn't a thing before. But now I just have all of my logins all be logged in at the same time. We'll just toggle through them, like the different user s so Yeah, I don't really use Gmail anymore, so uh I guess I don't really need to worry about it. Have you tried the Atti app on Blue Sky? You can't available for us. No. He uses AI to give you control over your social feed, and it is right now the most blocked account after JD fans on Blue Sky . Um Tracks. Yeah. Yeah. It allows users to design their own social media algorithms and create custom feeds within an AT protocol. So you're making your own algorithm, which is a good thing, right? Yeah, this is what A T this is what uh at Proto was all about, was control . 1 25,000 users have blocked Addy's Blue Sky account. Why? I don't know. Oh it's AI, yeah, kind of That's worse than the White House and Ice . Um I think it makes good sense. I I saw somebody on on the socials on Blue Sky, who said that if um the algorithm is supposedly addictive, uh whoever was I wish I could remember, said, Well I don't use Facebook and it's got an algorithm. I use Blue Sky and there's no algorithm and I'm addicted to it . But now you can make your own other things. Yeah. Well we'll see. I I you know it's early days yet. Uh once we get access to it, we can see how that is. The uh electronic frontier foundation, we just uh I just did a nice interview with her director, Cindy Cohn, a couple of weeks ago. That's available on our Twit feed. Um, is suing for answers about Medicare's AI experiment . Now, Jeff, you and I are on Medicare because we're Shaneing Y yourour Sh shininaj . Mm-hmm. Uh they uh Medicare is proposing to use an AI algorithm to determine what treatment we get. The death panel turns out to be a machine. It's worse than a death pen. I'd rather humans made these decisions. Amen . This was announced by Dr. Oz last year. That gives me confidence. It is uh the program is known as Wiser , which is uh an acronym that stands for Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction . Did they really think this through? This name is not good. It uses AI to assess prior authorization requests. Ah, interesting. Prior authorization requests for Medicare beneficiaries . Oh, I see. Prior authorization requires medical providers to obtain advance approval from the insurer before delivering treatment. So it is a request can I deliver can I fix Jeff's bum ticker. Which already that is a that is a system that exists in order to put more hurdles towards people accessing care. It's already a speed bump, and you're adding robotic speed bump on top of that. Sorry. By design, wiser incentivizes contracted companies to deny prior approval against the best interests of patients. Because vendors are compensated in part on the volume of healthcare services they deny. Well this is worse, it's uh I'm not on Medicare, I'm on advantage. This is the only choice I was given. So na is paid a lump sum. Right. And uh its job is to then be as as efficient with me as possible. Give you as little care as possible Go, EFF. They want to know more about them. Yeah, thank you, EFF. We appreciate it. Um Governor Newsom has signed an executive order requiring safety and privacy guardra ils from AI companies that do business with the state . I'm not sure what those guardrails are defined guardrails, right? Yeah, what is those? Uh they'll have to explain their safety and privacy policies around AI . The state will examine policies carefully on how the companies prevent exploitation of individuals, including the spread of CSAM . The government will also consider whether AI models are used to monitor individuals or block certain speech. Companies will have to explain how they're avoiding bias in their systems. Not sure that's a bad thing, but uh And they also uh he called on state officials to begin watermarking AI generated or manipulated videos they create. Certainly the state officials who are creating AI videos should definitely watermark them. I would agree on that. I don't know if you can compel private individuals to do that, but you certainly if you're working for the government and you're doing that, you should you should label. And uh David Sachs, we thought might be leaving the White House, but no. He is he has a new role, uh David Sachs, the podcaster and AI and cyber coin uh czar at the uh Trump administration uh is uh gonna continue to advise but I'm not sure how to find out. this last week. Well but it was it was written it was written as if by an adult. Yeah. There were some booby traps in it, but it actually had some decent things in it. Nothing's gonna happen though. Nothing's gonna happen . Um You're watching Intelligent Machines, Jeff Jarvis, Leo Laporte , Paris Martineau, great to see you. Good to have you. Now let's talk about these surveys that you were talking about, Paris. Fifteen percent of Americans say they'd be willing to work for an AI boss. Fifteen percent . Well that's not a big one fifteen percent of Americans say their boss is so bad. How bad? How bad? I'd rather work for AI. A Quinnipiac poll . Uh only fifty it really should be only fifteen percent say they'd be willing to work for an AI . The majority said they would would not be willing to swap their human boss for an AI people manager . Nevertheless, you may be ending up working for an AI. Companies like Workday have launched, this is from TechCrunch, AI agents that can file and approve expense reports on your behalf. Amazon has deployed new AI workflows to replace some of the responsibil ities of middle management. You know, y you c I you can get rid of middle management. I think that's okay. But of course all those people are out of work. Yeah, nobody likes work day. Uh this is pink AI is being used to replace layers of management in what some are calling the great flattening. It's true that in a lot of tech companies there are a bunch of people who don't do anything. Useful. And most people are I think would be much happier with less hierarchy. Anyway, Quinapiac says Americans are wary about what it means for job prospects. Seventy percent of the respondents say they believe advances in AI will lead to a decrease in the number of job opportunities. More than half the U.S. this is the one you were talking about, Paris, say uh AI is likely to be harmful. And the only segment they split up uh all of these responses, whether you think AI is going to do more good or do more harm, into a bunch of different things. You know, they split it up by like your political beliefs, what generation you're in, income, what you know about AI. Uh in all cases, they were adamant you're gonna be doing AI is gonna do more harm than it's gonna do good. In the one exception is people who made over two hundred thousand dollars a year. Those people said, Yeah, I think AI is gonna do more good to my day-to-day life than which I think is notable. Anthropic asked the question of uh several actually eighty thousand people. If you could wave a magic wand, what would AI do for you ? The largest uh group cohort said uh 18% said people hope for professional excellence. It would help them do better. That's such a funny category. Yeah. Then personal transformation , then life management, time freedom, financial independence, societal transformation, entrepreneurship, learning and growth, and only five percent were hoping for creative expression. Right, Paris. Hopefully . That's uh the survey. Survey says . Um what other uh uh before we move on, what other stories uh were you excited about? Paris, you first I got I got one or two uh I'll give you one real quick. Most people this is from you, Jeff. Most people don't enjoy their jobs, says the perplexity CEO. Shocking. Wow. I'm so glad we have somebody on this case to figure it out. And so that means good news, they're going to get laid off, but it's a chance to start your own AI venture . AI layoffs create entreprene urial opportunities. This was of course on the All In Podcast with David Sachs and Jason Kalakatus during GTC . Uh Aravan Srinivas acknowledged, yeah, hey, I could displace jobs, but the reality is most people don't enjoy their jobs. So it's a boon. No, the reality is most people don't like having to have a job. Most people st well enjoy paying the rent . Having been paid by the job they don't enjoy. All right. I gave you a minute to think about something. Did you find something you care about? Line eighty? What is the biggest AI conference? It is the um ICML. God now I've got to remember what that stands for. Right. Well, you know, it's international uh cooperation of machine learning specialists. It is the International Conference on Machine Learning, right? Yeah. So they put out um a call for papers , and in it they buried invisible instructions. So they put they put these in the papers that they sent out for peer review. Peer review, right. If a reviewer fed the paper into an LLM, the invisible instructions would then insert telltale phrases in the review so that they would know. Hey, you used an LLM for the review. Uh of the papers , five hundred and six reviewers used AI, 398 had their own papers rejected as a result . So in other words, a lot of people what the hell. They did agree not to do that, I guess. Violations of the LLM review policy Aaron Powell But there's a fair amount of upset that this organization would do this to their own. It's the International Conference of Machine Learning. You think they won't use AI? Exactly. This is what they do. Exactly . The decision to assume from the outset that your reviewers cannot be trusted to read a paper and think about it without a machine doing it for them tells you something far more important than the number who got caught. It trapped them. It tells you that the institutions responsible for advancing human knowledge no longer believe human judgment is the default. So says a helper. Yeah. It was only one percent of all reviews. So it wasn't that widespread. Actually I'm surprised it wasn't more widespread. I mean don't most of these systems catch prompt injections like that? Well, I don't understand how if it was a paper to review, how did it end up in the pr review they wrote? I mean I guess probably what it would be is the classic like white text in a document thing where you upload it in like you upload a PDF to Claude or ChatGPT and you, the human looking at it, just see your normal PDF with the black text you read, but hidden in there is white text or very small text that you don't easily see but that the LLM parses. But the issue is the word spaghetti into the review. And then a lot of these uh systems now have kind of a built in defense for that, which is there's something in this that told me to insert the word spaghetti. I'm not going to and it will notify you of it. So they're not even using the best AI.s The ones that got caught were using crappy AI s. Uh what else? Do you got another you have another uh story, Paris, that you would like to I mean we talked about this earlier, but uh there was this Wall Street Journal piece uh that was a um it's line ninety two. It's a profile of this journalist at fortune, Nick Lichtenberg He's very relaxed. You know why? He's very relaxed because he uses AI to do everything. You don't write in your lap. Have you ever written in your lap with your feet up on the desk? No. No. I mean, not in many, many years. That does not look like a good way to write a story. They say that on a Wednesday in fr February, he uh it's journalist Nick Glickenbeard produced more stories in six months than any of his colleagues that Fortune delivered in a year. One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven. I'm a bit of a freak, Lichtenberg said. Now let me do a rare case of a Par is back in my day, which is back in my day when I started my journalism career, uh a wee eight year, eight, nine years ago, I also regularly cranked out seven stories a day. And it wasn't because I used AI, it's because that's called aggregation, baby. You write up other people's work, you do a you source it to them and you're basically just doing a bunch of quick blogs that really add very little to the overall ecosystem that's a good idea. You just are trying to scrape off some of the traffic if people want to read about that story. This is not, I don't know, anything novel, but it's being pitched as if it is like a revolutionary approach to the city. He said AI assisted stories accounted for nearly twenty percent of Fortune's web traffic in the second half of twenty twenty five. Most were written by Lichtenberg. And basically how he seems to do it is he just like throws some stuff in his LLM of choice , prompts it to write an article and then pastes it in the CMS and edits it from there. And I'm just like, this is a disaster. I mean, it's a disaster ethically. It's basically participating in this uh interview and profile is advertising to your readers that you don't care enough to even do the work to produce work for them. You're just offloading it to something else. And also the thing that ended up making me sad about all of this is given my own experience, like, yes, living in the aggregation like the aggregation content minds wasn't great. It sucked. It was you were not producing good journalism by any means, but it was also I think like an essential part of the experience of becoming a journalist and getting exposed to a bunch of different like that when you're writing six or seven aggregation pieces a day, you are reading like six or seven big news stories every day , figuring out how those stories work, and then figuring out a way to kind of make your own facsimile of that. And that is a useful skill for first job journalists or early stage interns. And it just makes me sad that I don't know, this whole section of the economy of the journalist ecosystem has been hollowed out and will continue to be hollowed out because like what are the earliest stage career options for this You can't imagine uh the work Woodward and Bernstein did in the Washington Post exposing the Watergate burglary as being done by a machine. That's that a human has to do it . Now I can imagine a rewrite machine rewriting their case. Yeah. That's dumb. So yeah. But but if but but real reporting, you gotta go out and do it, right? Mm-hmm. You don't get to the real reporting right away though. You need to go through those initial steps of reading other people's reporting and figuring out It's like such an essential step to learning how journalism even works is just reading a bunch of like if you're fresh on a beat, the advice I always give to like younger new reporters, like just read literally everything you can on the beat, like the commodity news stories, press releases, uh, write-ups of press releases, write-ups of other people's scoops, anything possible because ingesting all that information will make you a smarter person and better reporter and better writer, because you'll start to see the patterns. And offloading that sort of pattern recognition to a tool That's really true. This is why I also this is why despite the fact that we have calculators, you still teach children math because it's important to understand the basics and be involved in the work before you get to offload it to something. Yeah, and then you get to the point where you're like, okay, this is what I want to offload to AI and this is what I want to offload to AI. But until you get there, you need to do all the stuff yourself. Yeah. And I'm just worried that this is creating a whole culture where that's not even going to be an option for people anymore. Is that once upon a time you had to take a pencil and graph paper and draw charts and graphs and pie charts and all that. And then suddenly um spreadsheets did it for you. And it wasn't cheating. It was just easier. It was just it was just information presentation. And it did it well. Well how much did you learn from drawing pie charts ? Whatever that would be. Learn some like to understand that the pie chart is gonna be made up of like five l one part of it will be five little identical slices, the other part will be ten. And that that's the to understand it by doing it by hand, to understand the proportion You want to say the subtitles stories are data visualization. This goes back to the story out of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. They argued that they can get more stories now out of the reporting and Paris objected at the time, but I think there's some level writing the commodity crap th that that just gets you um SEO and and links out of volume is is the last dying gasp of mass media and scale. We've got to go to quality. But at some point, some of the stuff that exists . All right, let me ask you this way. For many years now, long before LLMs, uh the wire services have used computers to write financial results stories . The basic uh their EPS was this, the this, the their their was that it's just a rewrite of the um uh report they send out, there's no reporting involved, maybe there should be, but there wasn't. In any case, it was just a rewrite of that. Is there any problem with that? Is it is it's just a commodity piece of work? Did that a lot did that uh free up reporters to do more actual reporting ? I mean I think that's a specific use case because the reason why those commodity newswares do it is because the entire value proposition of paying for a wire service or subscribing to Bloomberg Terminal is getting that information as quickly as humanly possible at speeds that are not replicable by a human. True. I mean I think for like if you're even thinking about it from a purely like business perspective, obviously zooming out from that sort of like commodity speed , I just I'd have to hope that if you are positioning yourself as a news company that wants subscribers or at the very least is trying to convince people they need to come to your site and see your ads in order to read your work, you have to hope that you're offering something of value that is some sort of unique capability that isn't just whatever Claude Opus 4.6 can generate from a single prompt. Like what is going to separate you from every other website that does that? It's really about how you learn, isn't it? Um So here's a good question though. Once you learn uh So f for me it was really uh interesting to learn that numbers squared was called squared because it referred to in fact a square. The area of a square is this multiplied the sides together. Those are a s 3 by 3 by 3 by 3 square, the square of 3 is 9, which is the area of the square. And when you there's a process of learning that that you can 't just what I just described, I don't know if you can learn that abstractly, but if you do it, if you write it on paper and you do it, you learn it. Now, do you ever need to do it again? Probably not. You don't need to keep making pie charts. you don't have to write a thousand articles about No, I'm not sure. Yeah, we're losing into the Yeah. And what we lose Yeah. It's well, it's what we might also gain because the the the uh waste of time my favorite example of this was always the BuzzFeed two color dress story . And I would go to journalism conferences and I would say, How many of you had your own version of that story? And every hand would go up. An utter waste of journalistic resources. Yeah, no kidding. For everyone to re BuzzVed story was fine. It was cute. It was fun. It was what it was. They all rewrote that story so they could get their own SEO and their own social clicks and a complete and utter waste of journalistic resource. Um don't do it. I see that now when I do my uh beat check, there's so many duplications. I'm actually now having the AI do some de duplication. So I but the trick is what's the best story? Maybe the is it the original story the one you want? I guess it is. Sometimes but sometimes somebody answered the other thing. Or sometimes someone like has, yeah, an interesting angle. They have additional reporting that they're able to add to it. And I think that that's got to be the differentiating factor for all of this. But I I think these are the questions that people across all these industries, you're gonna have to start asking themselves is like, yeah, sure you can just like automate the most bare bones average of average version of it, but what value does that add? You need to be thinking about what is valuable about the work you're producing, not just how much work can you produce and how quickly can you do it? You're watching Intelligent Machines, Jeff Jarvis, Paris SmartNow. We're glad you're here. We especially thank our club twit members for making this show possible. Uh without you, there would be no intelligent machines. There would be practically no Twit. If you're not a member of Club Twit, please consider twit.tv slash Club Twit, add free versions of all the shows, access to the Discord special programming. That is only available to club twit members twit.tv slash club twit thank you in advance all right i've got our picks of the week next At EDF, we don't just encourage you to use less electricity, we actually reward you for it. That's why when you use less during peak times on weekdays, we give you free electricity on Sunda How you use it is up to you. EDF. Change is in our power . House Otto Shift Weekday peak usage by 40% can earn up to 16 hours of free electricity per week, subject to fair use cap. Let's start our picks of the week as we always do with Paris Smart No . I'm shocked that we're here. This is the fastest show we've done in years, I think, Leo. Are you okay ? I am attempting to make the show shorter. I didn't I thought that was a bit. No, it's not a bit. I even I even vibe coded a uh a little uh clock . You'll see right here. Is it a clock ? It's a clock. Wait, don't you ha oh wait, it's a clock that just says content with an ominous photo of a frog frog. I just like that the the frog looks like it's judging you. It does exactly for those listen just listening, I should imagine a frog that is just looking deep into your soul That's a good idea. Well Leo, my pick was gonna be the thing that you put as your pick. So I've got two kind of crappy picks instead. No, no, do the pick. No, no, you go first so you can steal my pick. That's the one. Well, then my pick is gonna be um this wonderful collection of obsolete sounds. Where did you find this? I'm so impressed. I came across on Blue Sky or Twitter? W'hats in one of my bookmark folders? So here's a don't look don't look at the screen. Let's see if Jeff will know this. Here's a sound, Jeff. What is this? Hello. Silence. That's what the silence. You got it. Good job. Why is it not making the sound? Let's play a random sound. It's not very loud, is it? I think I just heard my stomach. Was that it? Oh no, it's working for me, but it is. It's just not very loud. It's just not very you have to click on the computer icon . It's just not very loud. So basically it is a collection of disappearing sounds and sounds that have gone extinct. Um like payphone corner. Like a mobile phone interference. Remember that pr p pr essure. Phillips type HM three two ten coffee grinder. Like the sound of winding up a pocket watch. A cash rate. An Oliv ietti Dora typewriter. Oh, I had an Olivetti. I love my Olivetti. Is there a cigarette vending machine here? Oh, that's the sound you don't hear much. An old dial telephone. Let's do that for parents. Thank you for buying a Phillips video . This is great. Yeah, they've got an old cache register in there. Yeah, you don't hear this much. Yeah, they're very quiet. I've got it turned all the way up. I can't. Also, unfortunately, each sound in the project is recomposed and reimagined by artists. Oh no. So it's kind of and now it's stuck. Stop it. That's the old dial telephone. Yeah, I mean I think part of the reason why it's been reimagined is so that they can play them off it. You know? So that they can actually have them and have them available for you to download. I like this notion that you that i uh uh you're gonna have a time when you just don't hear that sound anymore. Yeah, sounds will just you know disappear. I mean they have an attendance recorder in here. They've got a lot of coffee That that's the drawer coming out of the cash register . Cash? What's that? Cash. Well, as soon as Trump sig ns the dollar bill, that's it for me. I'm like I'm going to coins. Oh wait a minute, he's on the coins too? Oh no. No pennies. I um I'll also shout out because it was a partially stolen pick . Um Semaphor had a great piece this week about the oldest job in journalism, New York Post runners, which are I bet Jeff knows what those are. They are the reporters that every single day wake up don't know where they're gonna go, but they've got they get a call and are told, Hey, you gotta get to the Bronx and knock on doors in this building and figure out anybody who's witnessed this crime go. Is that still exist? Yes. And they reporters do a that's reporters. But I mean, it was a reporter without an assignment. It was like a little desk at the post that still exists to this day and when a lot of other newsrooms don't have this kind of specific type of assignment thing, but it is uh It's a general assignment reporter. Yeah. It's a general assignment reporter that no, but their specific job in the post is to like physically get to a place as fast as possible and do something in person while someone else is writing something up for them. Yeah, well that's what some m my job was to be the person back at the office and rewrite. Yeah. And they would call in the notes. Meanwhile I pull up the clips, I figure out what else is going on. I get the you know city wire and all that, and then write a story on deadline. So I describe that process in my own semaphore piece follows one runner from the post, Reuven Fenton, and he goes around and does a bunch of stuff. I mean it's not just one thing in one day. Oh no. He's a busy guy . I mean there's uh I've like met a couple of these people um at various like parties or journalism events and th they always end up telling some kind of wacky story about a uh a non insignificant part of their job is like Oh, I had to do that. When the plane crashed? Oh you called the first names you get are the flight crews. Oh. And so you end up calling the flight crews uh family and and you know the lie of journalism. I'm sure you want to tell people your story. About your oh Jesus, I feel ashamed of myself for that. So are you often the person are you sometimes the person who has to tell them that that is that this happened? Wasn't supposed to be the case, but it's certainly possible given I mean they say um in this the nature of the runner's job is to operate inside legal and ethical gray zones, and needless to say you can't do any of it from your desk. Quote, it's easier to hang up on someone, one of them told him. It's harder to slam a door in their face. I mean that's the kind of the purpose of this. Like yeah, I think that this is a trap I often fall into a lot 'cause I've grown up in this age of journalism digital journalism where I'm like, oh well, you know, give somebody a call, text them, uh, you know, send them emails if you want to get the real stuff, you gotta go and knock on people's doors till they tell you no don't I don't want to talk to you. And that's a lot harder. The other job was to get a photo of the dead person . To ask the grieving mom. Can I can I borrow that photo? Are there some people who love this job or is this a paying your dues kind of thing? Oh yeah. There was one guy we had at Chicago today, the paper that had it at a borrow. Um if it was really embarrassed he would ask anybody any question. It was like like let Mikey eat try it. Um you would send him out and he would he would ask anything of anybody the rest of us wouldn't want to do. I mean there are certainly some reporters that like that is their whole edge is they have no sense of shame. So I would say social shame or empathy or uh I think when Versailles they will ask any question no matter how deeply uncomfortable it makes someone or how s uh large of a reaction it gets from them that could be negative could potentially I am always deeply uh concerned and anxious and wrought with guilt that I am messing someone up or re-traumatizing them by not asking about something in the No, and that means I get worse stories. such as uh a a t a tweet that you fell for that was an April Fool's tweet from the Nestle . Okay, I'm mad about this actually. Which is I'm the biggest fan of crunch bars. Uh it's a thing my friends make fun of me for if they're going to bodega and you get something I'm like, please give me a crunch bar. If I'm at the movie theater, I wanna get a thing of bunch of crunch and have a little See I like chunkies. Do you ever have a chunky? We're gonna get there. We've got a I've got a one track mine. I saw this tweet. Important to note, this tweet posted March thirtieth, ten thirteen AM it's not April Fool's Day. And so I got my hopes up. It's a treat that says you've been pairing bunch of crunch with popcorn for years. Now it gets its rightful spot in the concession stand. Introducing the Buncha Crunch concession dispensure experience coming soon. It mixes Buncha Crunch in with your popcorn, which would be ideal. But no, it was just a lot, it was an April Fool 's lie, not a jape, not a jest, because it does not come on April Fool's Day. And I refuse to be considered an April Fool. I hate it's my least favorite day of the year. I hate it. I hate it. I actually uh inspired by one of our club Twit members asked Claude to come up with the base best April Fool's pranks uh for the year, for this year. Uh and their work more than I thought. Uh Tom's guide had an AI powered alarm clock that wakes you up by automatically brewing eight o'clock coffee. Ad Age said this year's pranks lean heavily into the blurred line between fake and real . Raising canes enlisted McKenna Grace to unveil Cane's sauce Coke, a fake Coca-Cola variety inspired by the chain's signature sauce . Uh Arco Golf Analytics announced smart pants, an intelligent golf apparel system with advanced biometric monitoring and adaptive climate control . The Royal Albert Hall announced a Gen Z youth initiative called Let Them Cook . I'm not sure what that what that means. T Mobile had uh a cologne that smells like a phone. Here is uh uh AI sticker printing machine for Fido . It's called pet mode. People kept sending me uh links to uh Indian fitness uh company or like some sort of wellness brand that announced a protein condom. Oh geez. That makes sense. Was there lead in it? I mean that's yeah. Yeah puts the lead in your pencil. Are very serious legit ranking of the best live products Apple's ever made. These are all from Tom's Gu ide. Here's Yahoo. It's no more scrolling interface. I don't know. I don't get it. The scroll stopper. It's available in the TikTok shop. Oh, it's a thing you put on your thumb. So you can't scroll anymore. It's a chastity belt for your thumb. It's a chastity belt for your thumb. No more scrolling. Here's the smart golf pants . Uh that's not a joke. That's April Fool's launch. Big head mode. That's actually real in the Fortnite. They've done that before. Yeah, a lot of games have big head modes. Big head modes. A big six speed manual shifter for your phone from Bitmo Labs. Anyway, uh we're glad we didn't have to do any April Fool's jokes uh today. Yeah. Jeff, your pick of the week. Well I just want to say that tonight is the last night. Whatever that is, it is disgusting. I don't maybe I should record this for Paris. Tomorrow nurse Cindy is coming to take the foot and a half long uh catheter out of my arm. But that's good news because you're getting better. Yeah . Yeah, I'm not looking forward to I'm looking forward to being gone. So wait a minute, it's it's in on and it goes on here all the way up right over the heart because that's where the the the volume the the speed is the fastest so the stuff will mix in. This is a pressure bulb and it hooks into my thing. And yeah. I have to spritz in uh sal ine . I have to rub it with alcohol. I've been doing this for ten weeks. Ten weeks. What's that glad you're feeling better? Ten weeks since I got out of the hospital. Ten weeks ago you podcasted from the hospital? Yeah. That's crazy. Time flies. In my hospital gown. I have no shame. All right, for a p ick. Uh college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI written work . Okay. But it's kind of fun. I don't know what the first thing is use typewriters? Yeah. Great. This is a Corn ell. Wow. Oh, but they have to do it in German, which is that's really cruel. It's doubly because the German typewriter ke key keyyboard is actually different. The Z is very important. Look at them. They're really struggling. One says, oh that's why it's called return. Oh yeah. These poor kids. Did you ever use typewriters as a normal thing, Barrett? I think we talked about this. Never, right? I mean, not as a normal thing as in like in my childhood, however, in uh in college , uh whenever I was studying abroad in France, I would often go to the uh um Shakespeare's uh cafe, whatever it's called. Um Shakespeare and Company, they had typewriters there. And so during a time where I was at my most intolerable and I had to like translate poems into French for some assignment, I would translate them and to instead of writing them out, I would have them typewritten on there. And then my uh teacher would always professor would give them back and be like, I can't mark this up, it's too pretty. Um which I always thought was kind of funny. We did a uh big head mode for April Fool's Day uh one year in our Twit studios. There's Father Robert and me with our big heads. Those heads are pretty large. This is when we had the technology, my God. Look at that studio. You never saw this studio, did you, Paris? I never saw any studio in person. Yeah. Oh. When are you coming to New York and what studio are we gonna book here? Oh yeah, we gotta get a studio to do the show . We need to have like three costume changes. We gotta have corn shirts, we've gotta have hospital gowns, some third thing. Maybe you can do a big head. Uh yeah, I think so. Yeah, we could do it. I think the lighting and set up. Does he have Ethernet connection in there? That's a point. I've supposedly built a studio in the in the re restaurant. Well yeah he was gonna fix sandwiches in the window wasn't he? Yeah he was and stream it all that never really happened. No. You know why? It was too much work they have told me too ambitious. That was so ambitious. Well, no. I mean, they didn't know they were gonna be selling sandwiches, but by the, you know, every second another sandwich. So um, that is about it for this show. I wish we had the big head mode now. I d we don't have a tricaster anymore. That was back in the day when we had all the kids. It's actually pretty funny. Uh we do this show every Wednesday right about 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. You can watch us if you're in the club, in the club to Discord. Otherwise, just watch on Twitch, YouTube, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick, After the Fact On-demand versions of the show at twit.tv slash im . There's an intelligent machines channel on YouTube for the video, or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client, and you'll get it automatically as soon as we are done. You will find Paris Martineau at uh the wonderful consumer reports. Are you have you filed lately or are you working on some massive expose ? You know, it's a great question , Leah. It's a great question with great answers. Um she's not gonna give them to you. I'm not. I mean there'll be uh I'm working on a couple different stories that have weirdly competing timelines, but things will come out when they come out. Yeah. When they're okay. That's a no non-answer answer as they say in the business. Yep . Yep. Uh anyway, thank you, Paris, for being here. Paris.nyc. We can work on how did your secretly British Saturday go? It didn't happen, I'm sorry. It needs to happen. No, it doesn't. No, you need to do things you enjoy. I accompany my friend to watch him get a tattoo instead. Oh my. This week could be Oh my. Were you there just for moral support or did you join I was, but I might I might get a tattoo this weekend. I don't see and what would you get if you got a tattoo? I mean that's the question. We'll see. I need it . This is something you're gonna have for the rest of your life. Yeah turning into a dad. And you're gonna just walk in and choose at random. No, and he's gonna kind of fun. Does it need to be meaningful? Yeah. Not meaningful. Leo regrets his . Yeah, but you can't see it. That's where the sun literally don't shine. I already have a tattoo. So you know what? I think you have I've seen I saw one in a picture. It's of David Bowie ? Mm-hmm. It's a Ziggy Dusty of his head. It's Ziggy Stardust Yeah, I can't pull my arm my shirt up farther enough, but it is the Ziggy Stardust . And why did you get David? That's a very interesting thing for a person of your age to get. He's one of my favorite artists of all time. Really? Mm-hmm. Interesting. I think just an incredible creative. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. Uh he used to watch our TV show. He was a fan of uh the screensavers back in the day. Yeah. Well that's uh that's a that's a so maybe you could get KISS on the other bicep. Get Gene Simmons or something. No, no, no. This arm I wanna do a full s like incorporated sleeve that I plan out, but this arm I wanna do more like a little guy What about your acting career? No. Yeah, what about your acting career? All the actors have tattoos now. They do. It's true. It's true. Jeff does not have is the only person who's I think the biggest uh differentiation. This is the biggest point of conflict in our podcast history. I think is you two being genuine disappointed. Dismayed. Dismayed by my tattoo plans. As your parents no doubt would be as well. I really wanna part of the thing is I want to find uh someone for the the little ones. I want to get more medieval woodcut style tattoos. Oh, like a pentamant tattoo. Gutenberg. You should have Gutenberg. That would that's actually very interesting. Hey, get a lin otype. Help Jeff promote his book. That could honestly be interesting. Put the cover up. Put the cover up. It's very intricate. So when you go uh to the tattoo artist, do you go in with materials or does he have a book that you Well so n this is the thing is I've normally been the sort of person that would only tattoo like pitched it to a tattoo artist. We worked with it. They like had some, you know, examples for what it looked like. We decided on it. Um but I've been meaning to get more tattoos for the last I've been meaning to get more tattoos years, but never have because I'm like, well, like I don't know what to do. Didn't pitch it. How old were you when you got David Bowie ? Uh twenty . Really? Do your parents have tattoos, if I may ask? No. No, of course not. What did they think about you getting a tattoo? It's her generation. They often I'll see them and they'll be like , so d uh do you still feel okay with your decision to get a tattoo? And I'm like, Yeah, I do, actually. Thanks. Yours is fairly innocuous. Now, Paul has a good suggestion in our club, Twit, you should get your New York City tree maintenance certificate tattooed so that you'd always have it available in case of questions . A certified tree maintainer. A civic tree person. You know my editor at work had heard me bragging about it and has signed up and is gonna be a licensed citizen tree pruner as well. Wow. Wow. You you're starting a movement. You know the tattoo gun, the tattoo device was actually uh a a uh successor to an invention by Edison that was meant to create stencils to duplicate documents. Ooh . On your wrist. On your wrist. And that didn't work, but instead it puts little holes in your skin. I'm I'm at Trees New York trying to find the if they have a citizen pruner kind of uh I mean I could just get like the park department logo with the tree. It's a London plain tree leaf, which is uh That's a good that's a good look. That's a very good. That would be it would say you'd be able to do kind of want to get a large knife or sword sort of situation here. I think it looks a little bit like a hypodermic i inserting itself into a cancer cell, but you know, other than that . So when when Leo does finally come to New York, we have to, I think, take him to your tattoo parlor to get a clawed logo. Let's get tattooed. Guys, let's all get tattoos. Let's all get brains tattooed. Yeah, that could be fun. I would do that. I would do it. I would do that. That would be pretty funny. Honey. Um Listen, what else is what else do you gotta do with your skin? Yeah, what else are you gonna do? Jeff Jarvis's new book, Hot Type , is uh available for pre-order. You go to jeffjarvis.com and you could also get the Gutenberg Parenthesis, which is fabulous at paperback, magazine, his history of the magazine, The Web We Weave. He's written many books. And uh and soon he's gonna uh be uh editing a series of books about AI, which is pretty darn exciting. Intelligence, AI, and Hanumity, Bloomsbury Academic. Nice . Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Paris. Shout out to everybody sending me woodcut and cool medieval tattoo recommendations that are in New York City. Keep 'em going, guys, 'cause this is hard to find the tattoo artists on the internet. We are all going to get when we go to uh New York City uh to celebrate intelligent machines, we're all gonna get this tattoo uh of a brain uh on our back. Oh Jesus. Oh boy. That's that would take a long time, wouldn't it? We need something simpler . Yeah. Something not simply detective in here. Oh. Corvids of course are crows. Yeah. Yeah. Really enjoy it. Adam Savage has a ruler tattooed on him so he can measure things with his forearm. Slowly goes out of scale though, right? Slowly goes out of scale. Yeah, but you know, don't we all I think it's kinda ugly, to be honest. Uh I mean it's not I've seen a lot cuter ones. There's some minimalist like a little line sort of situation. PDP 8 switches. I'm gonna get the Bowie uh lightning right on my face . Only I can you can kind of see it if I pull up here ish . You know, it's it's a good tattoo. It's good. You should get one. I think I actually am impressed that uh you would uh be so sophisticated as a young person. How much did it hurt? Doesn't it not much at all? It feels like a f it's kind of a prickly vibration. It's like a bzzzz. I mean this was just a line, a simple line tattoo, so it frankly didn't really hurt at all is what I would describe. But I I think a little bit more in depth one might hurt more. I held my it hurts when you fill when you fill it in it's that's when it hurts if you want to colour it. Whose hand did you hold? I held uh Jason's hand, Jason Cleanthus' hand. He had I met him because he had a twit tattoo on his inner inner wrist and he was my producer for some years and uh he was there and I held his hand and gritted my teeth as I subjected myself. Lisa screamed at you. Yeah, she was not happy at the ultimate humiliation. She's the only one who sees it, so it's okay. Uh thank you everybody for joining us. I'm sorry about this last bit. Uh but I hope you will come back. We will see you next time on intelligent machines. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Hi, I'm Leo Laporte, host of This Week in Tech and many other shows on the Twit Podcast Network. Can you believe it? 2026 is around the corner. So this, my friends, is the best time to grow your brand with Twit. Nobody understands the tech audience better than we do. We love our audience. And we know how to effectively message to them. We develop genuine relationships with brands, creating authentic promotions that resonate with our highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. 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