I guess copyright violation in Coveing.
Sorry.
Don't worry.
Sit down.
Hello, beautiful people.
Today's Friday.
And this is the 1,000th episode of Weird Things.
A podcast that used to be about the future.
But became about the present.
Featuring copyright violations in the whole nine yards.
So we'll find out whether or not we are live right now.
Here we go.
Check.
Here you go.
And then we could do this.
There we go. All right. Excellent. Well, hello beautiful people. How are you guys?
I'm doing great. Thank you for complimenting me on my beauty. Many people just look at me for
my brains and wealth. People don't even look to me for either. There we have a few comment on my
natural beauty. Far too few joe h666 says woohoo the one
1000. Thank you very much. We're pretty sure it's the 1000th.
We're a little bit like, you know, you get a dog and you just sort of decide
when it's birthday, probably was. And then that becomes his birthday.
Some way, according to a search at some point,
we had definitely done 933 around the time that we started counting them.
Yeah. So we are definitely in the zone now.
All right. Well,
That's right.
Here we go. Got stuff set up. These are all good to go. And let me dig. Let me find a solar shop for Andrew. There we go, excellent.
All right. You want to take us in? Yes. Okay. In three, two.
Hello, and welcome to the Weird Things podcast. I am Andrew Maine, joined by Brian Brushwood. Hello, hello.
and Mr. Justin Robert Young.
Hello. Gentlemen, Brian pointed us out. We think this is our 1000th episode of Weird Things.
Give or take. I mean, we're dep-
thousandth episode of Weird Things.
Give or take, I mean, we're definitely in the zone margin of error.
No, we know we're not going to give or take.
We have to be bold here.
Like, either it's our, our thousandth or it's not,
because otherwise we're just going to be doing this for the rest of our lives.
You know, this was this.
What we did to argue about is whether or not the new Millennium starts on this episode
or the next episode.
Oh my lord.
God.
God.
And that's, that was an immediate annoying, most annoying person
in the room.
room identifier. That was like, like a dog whistle for pin dance. Well, Justin, damn it.
Damn it. Tricked me again. That's right. We dangled bait in front of them. Boy, I guess
we could take a moment and kind of reminisce about how far we came. I'll tell you what,
it was a real eye opener to know that we have fans that stumbled across this program
and went all the way back to 2008 and listened to every single
episode all the way to the present. How remarkable is that? Brian, you know, you got to do something
when you're doing time in prison. That's right. It's, right. Yeah, it's crazy. We started this
when I was in Florida. I've lived in two states since then. Andrews lived in Two Cities.
I have a child. I don't know of you. I guess Callie was and born. So there's
these two children that have been born from these hosts, uh, since. Uh, yeah. It's, it's,
it's a, and also when we started this, no, we had not launched private rockets into space,
let alone demonstrated reusable rockets. Right. We, I guess we'd have to look back at exactly
where we were in the smartphone revolution, but obviously no AI.
No, uh, LLM stuff. Uh, yeah, it's just, I mean, we were very, very different.
Our counter punch, when we very first started was in an age where all the skeptics knew that
Sasquatch wasn't real. We were the lone voice saying, but he's cool though, right? And so we wanted
to be in that interesting counter punch subset of rationalists and, and skeptical thinkers. And then
that led organically to...
I think around the time that we started doing Patreon, we started
doing picks and started doing after things to give the tools for
independent creators to make that part of the conversation.
Yeah, I, yeah, the genesis of this was, I thought the weird
things domain back in like the late 90s or something. And when
we started, we were collectively pretty frustrated with the
skeptic movement in that, yes, we believe in critical thinking.
Yes, we think there's a lot of these things are kind of believed
without a-
But no, we're not really into just dismissing people for being interested in these things.
And also, I got frustrated.
So I got frustrated because I always see a popularization of the skeptic community with one
the mean debunk that just the snide debunk of this is stupid, I'm smarter than you because
of this.
And then I saw it wrong sometimes.
I saw some mean debunks on stuff like no, it's not a UFO, but your explanation is not
actually correct.
It's this thing, but you're just as guilty as the people who are believing these things
because you're not, we can talk about critical thinking and open mind and being skeptical
versus same.
but I think that that was frustrating to me.
I just, I wanted to, I like a lot of these weird things.
I want to have conversations about stuff
and I didn't want to be in a space where you just go like,
oh, you know, I can't believe it.
And it's like, well, all right.
And I've seen some of those people with the most strident.
Oh, you're stupid for this been wrong.
Very much on stuff.
And don't have the capacity to own up to it.
Yeah, and that, I think
that was kind of a from the gut feeling that we all had
is that it's a weak foundation to dunk.
I'm going to put it on the right side of the screen, so that you don't have to worry too much about what you're doing right now.
And boy, was it, there were early odds, there was a lot of dunking on stuff.
And it probably felt good.
But this was before humanity learned a lot, of its lessons about how good it felt to
dunk on people and mass, you know, with the social media era of things.
Yeah.
And I mean, listen, I'm going to first end line to get my hypocrite card.
Let me go very clear.
I would rather say, yeah, that's not the preferable mode, you know.
to do that. And I think that that was the first in the skeptic community. I saw some people
elevated there that I'm like, no, they're kind of mean and they're kinda wrong about this,
you know, or they're not, you know that, and I've seen that repeatedly. And also, they
won't want to address other things. Like I watched, like, I think there was a room for a much
healthier debate about climate change. I watched if you brought up anything like, well, are we sure
that this projections are this like, oh, you're a denier, denier. You're anti-science. It's like
Like just asking and here we are 2026 and we're looking at it like oh.
Yeah, the upper limit predictions were all kind of BS and I know some prominent people in that movement
that would just shout you down and call you anti-scientific from suggesting the thing. We're not
it was true, you know, because they would just, yeah. Or suggesting that adapting would be
the way to go and already we're seeing a lot of adaptations. And I mean, not that I want to crack
open that debate, but it's been interesting to over the last two decades see the whole practical
discourse on that.
But think about where nuclear power was two decades ago when we first started this.
It was still, it's still had, you know, greens were not a fan for, and now among the youngest
generation, Justin and I talked about this on, uh, on great night.
We asked our producer and he confirmed that you know for the Gen Z crowd, the, the general
consensus is that the old's dropped the ball by panicking and locking down on nuclear
your power.
And as a result, you know, there could have been more green progress since then.
Yeah, I know. I think even the 20 years ago, when we started this, if we
spoke about 10 years, that 10 first 10 years getting bad upon it, we'd be 10 years into a
nuclear innocence. I would say my problem, though, is that I think a lot of people who now
are pro that aren't looking at the kind of thinking that led to the anti. And they're now just
just moving with their auntie to something else.
Yeah. That is, that is the reality. The one thing that I will say has changed if you're
just going to take a look at the meta picture is that like we are legitimately moving at a much
faster pace in everything compared to where we were two decades ago. You know, a government has
moved faster for good or nail. Obviously, the private sector has, has moved very quickly and
technology is moving on a pace that we even for the brisk pace.
that we were getting used to is now faster than we've ever had to the point where it
stokes fears that maybe it's moving too fast. Then maybe we should put artificial weights
on our legs to stop us from running as fast as we can. So there's, I think a momentum.
We feel the wind in our face on a level that, um, that we didn't before. And there is
a general sense of we can just do things that has permeated society.
does feel a bit to me like again, there's, you know, you remember seeing this the first
time around with the internet, where you can pretty much whatever you have right now
in terms of your understanding of what tools are available to you. I think it's safe to
say that you could start building, anticipating it getting better and faster and more reliable
from here, short of, you know, a nuclear holocaust.
or something, it's very likely not going away.
I don't think.
Well, listen, don't put all your eggs on one basket, everybody.
Yeah, yeah.
I would say that we talked about this before,
but I'll kind of go into this again.
Like, if you asked me 20 years ago,
what would surprise me most about today?
One, I think I would have thought we would get
to where we are with AI 10 years earlier,
because I was naive twenty years ago.
I didn't really know that the current rate of progress,
whatever I just would assume.
that we were just less than 10 years out
from the state of where AI is,
and it turned out it was 20 years out.
I would have thought, by the time we started seeing
reusability in rockets,
I would've thought we would be doing a lot more
reusability now.
It's been taken longer than I thought.
A side note, NASA just did a deal of Boeing
for the Starliner, which had issues because SpaceX
is not committee.
to the Falcon 9 being in service past 2030. Yeah, which makes sense because like when did you guys
wait, did we go to orbit since the last episode of weird things? Finally made it to orbit, finally made
it orbit, but the amount of time between then and when it's going to get human rated, you know,
like it's that starship.
It's, that starship program has been taken.
I mean, great.
I'm excited.
I'm thrilled.
And when it comes out, kind of feels great.
But like right now, because we're still waiting on the edge of our seat to know whether
that you'll take a pie to the face on our, the pie getting a pie, we're, I'm overdue
for the pie.
I, I the pie is in my face for, and that was, I was expecting that a while ago.
Just to remind new folks, I believe I believe the wager that is still yet to be settled
was.
locked in that the
first time they try to land and save the starship, they will nail it. And so far, they haven't
tried to do, you know, to make everything reusable yet.
No, I think it was orbit. I think I bet on orbit like a half ago.
Oh, yes, yes. That was many pies back. We were hoping for the pie. I
think it's a double or nothing if I remember correctly.
Okay, all right. I was wrong. So didn't happen. Finally
they did, but Starship did reach or, but they are able to play Starlink's amazing,
absolutely incredible. But NASA is like, if SpaceX is saying like, yeah, we're going
to stop doing the Falcon 9, because again, I get it's expensive to do that all that,
but it's also like, cool, bro. I would maybe wait until you're human rated on Starship
before doing that, because now we got to go to Boeing and say, you're going to take
What's up? Oh, you know what could it?
could it be, I wouldn't put it past SpaceX and its relationship with the
administration of trying to put the United States government in a position
to need to ask for them to hustle things up or something.
Like could that be possibly a leverage play?
To get the government to sign like a half billion dollar contract with Boeing
that they've signed and is happening.
Yeah, I guess I don't know
stand as 40 chess. Well, I'm okay. There's little. I mean, what happened is Isaac man and Musk and Musk said, yeah, we expect you know
Starship to be carrying people by this time. And we're going to we're gonna switch from Falcon 9 to Starship and Isaac
Men's like you expect it to be there. Yeah, I've got time tables and astronauts to put on the space station. Well the
the best I can. And then it's like Boeing. Remember that piece of crap?
So, so the book Boeing Starliner, is it still going up on the
Was it SLS? Is that what it was?
That can go on like a Vulcan.
That was a Ryan that went on the SLS, which was the NASA one. Yeah.
So I think you can go into Vulcan or go on a couple of different options.
I forget what they, I think I launched on the Vulcan before if I'm not mistaken.
Probably mistaken, but yeah, so I mean, again, and that's still like if you told me,
yeah, by 2030, we'd still be unsure how you're going to put an astronaut on the space station.
I'm back.
to be multiple providers, multiple. No, no, there may only be one. So wrong on that robotics,
I would have thought robotics would be a lot more advanced by now. You know, I would think I
would've thought that. And because before I understood the complexity, we were at the dawn of like
kind of Roomba level autonomy. And it really has in materially moved past there on a commercial level.
I mean, yeah, a lot of people got a lot of getting ready to get ready on that front.
I mean.
people are, you know, we, we have training data being being accumulated by remote teleoperated
house cleaning bots. But oh, I, I've seen stuff. I have seen stuff like it's happening now,
like I've seeing and, and like beyond even that training stuff, like models that are like
even if you choose shoes astra, GPT Astra's Xastra and ask it to do visual tests.
It's scary fast. So now that's going to happen. Yeah. But I would have thought 10 years
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
What about Goblins? Where do we think Goblins have gone?
You know what? Goblins, many goblins have found a new life. I'll bet right now, I'll
place my bet before I do. I'm going to search trends.google.com and I'm gonna bet we're
going to, we're entering peak goblans, but not for the reason that you would expect.
Yeah.
you would expect. Yeah. Well, they weren't the other lambs. Remember that. No goblin mode goblin
mode was engaged. But I'll say, I don't say this. I think these goblins were a lot more
beneficial to society than the goblons we used to cover in the early days of. Yeah, until
we learned something important, who else to explain that to the nice new people? Yeah. We
We used to cover news of the weird and an oft repeated.
news of the weird is specifically in Africa, stories of goblins. Goblins are actually dealing
with goblans, goblin attacks. And you know, we being people who love the supernatural would
talk about it. And we talk through it and all sorts of fantastical scenarios and how you would
defend against the gobblins. And would you prefernd the goblin's blah blah blah problem is this.
When you read enough of these stories and you start to pick up
some of the subtext, you realize the goblins are just kind of a folklore name or something
that is just lost in translation. That likely points to just, you know, molesters doing
the molester things or, or you know that's, that's where it's less, you get less into the fun,
like I'm a goblin kind of thing and more into the like, well, this is maybe we shouldn't be making
jokes I
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, like, oh, that's crazy people.
That person said, the goblin made him do it.
And we're here.
I dunno, there was a very public trial
where somebody said the blank made them to it.
And we were debating that.
The Beatles says they loved the monkey island exposé.
That was amazing.
Yeah, some original investigative.
That's what we did here.
Those you don't, no.
Yeah, it was working out on an office in Burbank.
I saw it.
sign that said Monkey Island, like you know, come visit Monkey Island and it was the address of the
production company. I thought it was a joke that they just made that and they said no, that's an
actual thing. I looked up, found out there actually was in Burbank, something called Monkey Island
which was this island filled with monkeys and there was some debate about where it was and I looked
at a couple of locations and there's a big highway that goes through there but I went over the
the highway over fence and then started going through there and I found the stone remnant.
because there's a park next to there is some weird shape to the grass like there's something under there and it was concrete and I found over there concrete the structure that matched monkey Island. So we discovered monkey island. That's amazing.
Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Um, yeah. Uh, to go. Hey, hold on. While we're on memory lane, uh,
shouts out to our ill-fated pitch for live weird things, investigations.
We only did the one the hunt for the night crea.
Wasn't a recoon, Brian.
It wasn't a record.
No, it wasn't.
It was the real night creeper.
It was amazing.
That was electric.
That was so pioneering.
Okay.
I remember that we gave extra focus to the iPad because by golly, we had an iPad and we
could pinch the zoom on and it was amazing, yeah.
What we did was we got a more, we've got a hot spot, which at a time when those things
weren't.
Yeah, we figured out how to stream video, you know, which back when it was harder to stream
video live into the field from the field, into there to do a live hunt for the night
creeper, a alleged South Florida night thing, which is probably just people seeing records
to stuff.
But anyhow, that was a fun thing.
That was a really, there was a there there.
There was a, there could have been a really cool there.
Yeah, you were done to pull back the
curtain, but we were close to doing a thing with revision three, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah,
yeah, yeah. That was, that was that was kind of like the that was the, yeah that was they
were, they were excited for it. And then amount of not happening for a million different reasons,
none of which I can remember. But, uh, Yeah, that that was,
that was a, that wasn't a moment, a moment in time. It was really fun. Brian and I auditioned
for Discovery Channel.
show. And I remember what was hilarious was before Brian showed up, I walked into the
room where some of the other people auditioning and some of these guys had done some UFO shows
were debating UFOs and they did, they'd go like, you know, there's three explanations,
you know. There's like, aliens, it's time travel or, and I'm about ready to go, you
know, not real. And then they go, yeah, yeah. And they go or interventionally. Yeah. It's
interventional. And I'm like, wait a second, guys.
Yeah, like that's it and like maybe it's not there like yeah, yeah, and I realized to like it's a stick
I know a lot of guys in the UFO space and I got a couple people in the U.F. space. A lot of it's sick. They know it's bullshit
You know they kind of know
They know it's bullshit, you know, they kind of know, but they just would just do this make believe kind of thing and whatever and not go down that because it's gonna be
What I really enjoyed I went to a full on big tent believer event and I loved it because it was fascinating to watch everybody talk up to the edge
Like like the top of the funnel that's very wide that everyone loves to hear is that they aren't telling you the whole thing everyone in the room agrees with that
Now the bottom of the funnel with what's actually going on
Everybody's got their own little end point, but since they're all in the room together the people on stage would all would begin at the broad thing and they would step closer and closer until they could tell past this phrase.
We will divide against each other and I will lose the room and so then they would they would walk around it. It was it was amazing.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, like I could be like, like, you know, I, I
My friend Paul Handnick, his dad's Jalen Heinecke did project blue book and you know a lot of
crazy weird stuff you know and I as a magician and skeptic to you I can explain it's probably
there but there's some other stuff too it's like I'm open just it's really hard to nail the
stuff down and the latest round of UAPs it just been so we've created an organization we've
We've started working weird, we've investigated this UAP, and I'm like cool.
What was your analysis of the Raytheon thermal imaging system that was done for this and the fact that this looks like this iris for that didn't even bother looking at that one, I'm like, huh?
You guys are not that credible, not saying it is, but it's frustrating, frustrating, because I want to know, I think we all agree, like I think everybody here, like we all think there could be aliens.
We all think to get a big moon you know you know, I am entirely convinced that aliens could make it to earth, you know
But I I think our favorite we were
that I think all three of us are varying levels of deeply sympathetic towards this simulation
theory. That was fun. Oh, yeah. I had, I had a conversation with a friend, somebody we
all know and it got awkward at dinner because I said, yeah, you have to give simulation
theory tonic credit because it's just it's really, you know, if you keep saying that this
is true, this is true then you come to the likelihood that it is true. He's like, oh,
no, no, and he was very upset about that. I'm like, well you know if you assume that you
You can, you know, sit me on this, it goes into the top, I just about to jump into you.
If you assume that you could have consciousness
in the form of compute, is like, you can't.
I'm like, what do you mean you can?
It's like, no, we, you know,
consciousness is a human construct, whatever.
And I'm, like, well, how do we know
that you can have it elsewhere?
We've never observed it.
We only know that it's in humans.
I'm wait a second, that's circular.
And like, could Neanderthal have it?
Could dolphins have it, and it was just a weird knee jerk.
You know, it was like well, the weird sort of road
to go down where they're just...
And they're like, they're writing a book on AI, everybody.
I was like, man, like, I'm not saying these things are conscious right now.
I am not saying LLMs are conscious.
I just think that if you're just going to shut the door and say that machines can't be conscious because.
Yeah, well, and.
because. Yeah. Well, and, and also it's like, what does that word even mean? Because it's,
it's a subjective experience that we try to map on to stuff. There's Sam Harris's wife,
Anika Harris has, I only made it halfway through the audible original series, but it asks
interesting questions like what does consciousness even mean and is it, is consciousness quite simply
an emergent property of any sufficiently complexes.
system. So it's like, you know, down to the switches and neurons, this is just a bunch
of little ones and zeros flipping on. And with enough of them, the complex, interesting
behavior, we have the subjective experience of what we call consciousness. If that is
the case, then can traffic be conscious? There's an accident that was four hours ago. There's
still a snarl there. Is that a memory of the accident? That was there or etcetera, etcetera.
on the other side.
Yeah, that's it. You know, kind of
Daniel Danette leaned in.
I always found it very persuasive to me is that because it's hard, as you said, you
have to first to describe the thing and we can go with an internal thing, only, no, I'm
sure.
And my argument's like, great.
And I, this person who said, light, it's an internal state, the only way you can know
it and all humans can have it.
I'm like, one, you don't know that because many people don't see images in their head.
Many people don' have inner monologues.
We've already described two very important things that I would state are part of my sense
of consciousness that are not universal.
did not go over well because it was just this thing.
they were starting from the assumption that we all, you know, feels, I'm like, you
know, you have people who have a Corpse's column that the stem between the two
hematheres of the brain that get severed completely unaware of one half of the
brain is doing the other half, what one hand is doing, like they're all these
outlier cases that state it. You know, I am like, yeah, what do we need? You
know, to me, it's like, I don't know, a self-aware system that can make
corrections and modifications. It has some sort of internal state that's
aware of the outer state, whatever it's hard. And that's like come back to empirical
point of view, like, what can I say?
system do that we can't, but so this debate came up because Chris Ola, one of the co-founders
of Theropik, who spoke at the Vatican, wanted to bring up the idea as clawed conscious, and
the Vatican wanted to push back on that idea of that, and a lot of anthropocopy people
are heavily into the idea that clawed is conscious or has a form of consciousness, and their
description of it tends to be...
very, they start to sort of apply emotions and stuff to it, which I don't know that I
adhere to because I just having work with base models and understanding these underlying
models are just to experience them in such a way. Like, I always find that kind of weird
because they start describing these behaviors. And like, these are kind of language things
trained into them later. Yeah. Well, and then, you know, we want to resist falling for kind
kind of cargo-cult assumptions of consciousness.
It's like, it's behaving...
It's making behaviors that are congruent as though there's a conscious entity in it and
weirdly, as we've talked about on this program, all things being equal, you'll probably
save yourself some brain calories.
If you just treat it as though, there's that they're on the inside, but that doesn't mean
there is.
Yeah.
We talked about this before like the hugging face incident.
When you look at the agent behavior and what they had, Justin's example is like they're
like me seeks, you know, like from Rick and Morty.
They're not like...
guys, we need to figure out how to escape and survive. If they're like, We need to solve
this task. That is my mission is the task. We got to solve this task, I think my favorite
element that I saw, I don't know whether or not this is apocryphal because I saw it
on social media. So we'll allow for it to not be true. But when confronted with the
the idea during these discussions that if this technology had a...
soul that anthropic would be one of the biggest slavers in world history. The issue was dismissed.
Yeah, for the video. Well, that's true. I just backpedaled.
Yeah. That's been my criticism of the pushback on some of the people from Anthropic who talk
about it, like, oh, we think it's conscious this, this, whatever. I'm like, okay. So bringing this
This thing into existence, like a sl-
and fortunate to do the most mundane stupid stuff.
You think that's morally where you would treat a sentient being?
You know, and if it's like, well, no, it's,
and I'm the example I bring up as the restaurant
at the end of the university, checkers guy did a galaxy,
the cow, that wants you to eat it, you know?
And like, you have to, that's what you're saying.
You've built the cow that's telling you to go eat it like,
well, was that ethical to do that?
Was it ethical to say, I'm under,
I'm not usually about eating cows.
What if I give the cow consciousness
and breed it in engine.
in a way that it tells me that his fulfillment comes from eating it, it's a lot more extra
steps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that we'll get to a point where we're going to have sufficiently complex systems
that are going to be continuously running.
The thing about the cloud or a triaxypt instance is you freeze it and you start it up again and
whatever flash through those parameters before is gone, but you can load that state back
up again and it doesn't really...
have a sense of self, like we do, but you might get to a point where you have really consistently,
really long running systems on stuff, but so much of what our sense of like self-preservation
is genetics. It's, you know, vegan carbon-based lifeforms stuck on planet Earth with limited
lifespans and the need to pass on to genes and whatnot. But when you're you know you're self
preservation changes as you have progeny, but if you're literally producing thought or producing
knowledge or information in zeros and ones.
you know, you care. Yeah, long as the data survives. The, uh, yeah, boy, we're speed running
among other things. We're speedrunning philosophy now with actual trial and error on things.
It's, it's fascinating. Like, like, okay, during the run of weird things, universally,
the most derided, useless undergraduate degree that you could possibly have is now maybe
one of
the most in demand things in the universe.
I hope you don't say philosophy because it ain't,
I hope it doesn't say, philosophy, doesn't it?
Yeah, well, the very least humanities,
I mean, basket weaving.
Yeah, it is a, a, I proof, Ellen.
I think they've contributed next to nothing
to the AI discussion, they've made it worse.
Oh, really?
Yeah, a thousand percent, thousand percent.
I, yeah, I, I'm over speaking.
a bit, I have friends with philosophy years in the AI, but I just think that it is not,
because a lot of it is, is that it's like I said, I've seen not going to name names,
people philosophy backgrounds, highly places certain labs, saying some stuff that I think
is completely irrational, totally divorced from how the things work, and I think I've made it worse.
Yeah, I think that there is a meaningful question of philosophy, but
but I don't know if it's in the tack right now.
I think that it's...
in how we deal with the tech. And I think it's in How we understand how society is going
to change and philosophically how it relates to our work to something that is more persistent
than us. And in specialized tasks in bursts and skills smarter like there's a lot to ponder
there.
It's the cartoon of the guy that tells the computer say, say, I'm alive and it says,
I'm alive and he goes, oh my god, my god.
That's like the state of philosophy in AI right now.
It's like seeing, there's a lot of papers and stuff
unconscious stuff like this.
And it's like, you're talking about an LLM
that was trained specifically on millions of tokens
of conversations and human stuff
that is being told and reinforced to emulate something
doing this, you know, that there is a thing that like,
the idea that I don't agree
The idea that I don't agree with it, but a guy named John Stirl, came up with the idea
of the Chinese room to refute the idea that these AI systems could be conscious and the
problem is a chunk.
So, so, so for the uninitiated, this was a way to prove that AI couldn't be real in,
it was basically, yeah, you walk up to a magic box and you write a question and you feed
it in and it comes out with an answer, back and forth, back, and forth.
Right?
that you are on the inside of that button.
And that the person asking the questions is Chinese you don't know a lick of Chinese all it comes in is a bunch of
Chinese gobble-to-gook you handed off to someone else who hands it off to another thing do another thing comes back and you
And you spit out the Chinese characters that you were handed and to that other person is like oh my god
This box is conscious and you're on the inside saying no my guy
This is there's no consciousness here now what I always hated about this is that essentially
That's how your brain works. You got Broke his area, you got your refrontal...
cortex, your migdala, what have you, and all we're doing is pretending that your amygdala
has its own consciousness and it can't believe that anyone believes that this brain is conscious.
Yeah, it's worse than that because if you unpack Surles Chinese Room, he's based on his
example is there's a person in a room with all the answers in books and all of this is
literally go looking up in a book. And I'm like, well, I can I can figure out if this is
Intelligent like a thinking system very easy like three questions, you know one is you know
You know, what, you know, can you tell me, what color is the sky on Earth during the day?
And we're like, blue, I get a great second question.
What was my first question?
Yeah.
Now, I have to have a memory system that remembers what I just said.
Okay.
do another one that would say like you know you know I preferring.
You know, you know, I referring to you know first question if somebody was standing there blah blah blah
I could ask a thing then first it has to has to come you know change it like that
My daughter early on a GP D3. Why do you think sir?
Challenges and consciousness is not the same thing. We don't know. Maybe they are. We do know why people like ah GP3
It's just a sarcastic pair it repeats things. I'm like cool. You know
Give me a plot line. That's a combination of the sopranos and jaws rights and entirely new plot line
Like this isn't a data that doesn't exist this idea does not exist anywhere like
for you creator.
Yeah, no, I just took two, the random things and put it to do it, it filled that void.
So that's a thing the Chinese room can't do, you know, and that was my problem is that
they'd go like, well, it has all the books.
Okay.
So you have an infinite and out of memory.
You know, you've got every answer possible in the existence of the universe.
That sounds like magic to me.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Well, Chinese secret, huh?
We're entering a place where stuff is going to get lost to the margin.
Bye.
I think that for anybody who's been listening to the Weird Things podcast for the last 18 years,
you have watched us enter an age where it seemed more and more like everything was on the record
and that that dataism could work and now we're bumping up against there's just not enough storage
and stuff is going to get forgotten and reality itself is whatever the version of the story is
because that's...
been written the most. And I don't know, it's fascinating to me.
Yeah, let me check my memory stocks right now. I'm not too present right now, no.
Yeah, I, if you guys haven't tried our listeners out there, we've had some really cool stuff.
You know, we had meta-muse has been getting a lot of attention as a persistent agent on that
that Grockbot's got attention.
Open I just amounts thoughts, sharing the topics.
and then throw their hat, the ring was something
similar to it too.
Part of what it is is often, I've said this before,
is like, sometimes what you have to do is not a new feature,
or a new capability, you just have to draw a circle
around something and say, this is for that.
This is for doing that.
And I think a lot of what news and rock bot and dots do
is just sort of say this is the thing
that handles this stuff over here.
Again, there's a little bit there
about persistence and stuff.
Well, and what's funny is we're sort of teaming in
on... on...
if it were in a human, we would call it personality. And I suspect over the next couple of years,
we're going to develop shorthands for types of personalities where it's like, if I'm going to start
giving instructions to a type of robot, I wouldn't mind the shorthand of being like, it's a Ken.
It's going to talk to you like a Ken, oh, I know what I'm dealing with. It's gonna be good at this.
It's got to be bad at that. It'll always forget that.
Do you, I mean, for me, and I guess this is for me all I care is like, I want to have-
I got into exchange with somebody in OpenAi about this.
They said, you know, like, I want to have different dots
because I want I have different conversations.
Like, what vision is it's an E nodes and executive system,
you delegate everything to them.
Like, cool.
Everybody I know has a great executive system.
Also talks to 10 different people a day
because they have a person for this,
a person, for that, and a person.
For this, your EA is often managing a lot of personal
calendars and scheduling stuff.
Like, I went a lawyer dot.
You know, look at my contracts.
Look at my gun, this, like this.
I went to lawyer dot, this is where I go.
I won a mccounting dot.
Go to my counting dot, go to this.
It can talk to each other whatever.
I just, that's been my thing.
It's about.
whatever. I just, that's been my thing. It's about like, I, I'm a big believer in separate
apps for stuff. Yeah. Because I like to context switch. So, but I think that, yeah, for
me, Brian, that would be my take on it, because it's just, let me have different roles.
For example, like, and this, this goes back to, as you guys know, a couple of years ago,
I read, read, any impulse, the expanded mind. And in it, she talks about how, you know,
what we think of as her mind isn't just the, You know, lump of gray matter in our head.
It's kinesthetic, it's in a-
environment. It's in our expectations. And as a result, like I like to have a place that I write,
an A-place that I podcast, an A Place that I edit and do, in another place I do money stuff
or whatever. But as I have trained or continue to train each of these producer bots for different
projects, I like them to be on totally separate computers. Because in theory, there's no difference
between the codex is that are running on
each of the systems, but right now, if I'm at this computer and I say post the episode
on Patreon, it is not possible for this computer to get confused and accidentally post to the
great night feed or to the cord killer's feed because quite literally this box ain't never
encountered none of that.
And I think that that reliability trade off, I agree.
I would like that for various dots.
Yeah, yeah, I think I think it's it's there's things where we think we want to work and then the
reality of it like a lot of people talk to me like I think all interfaces are going to move to voice.
I don't know. I'm in a room with my wife and now we have to whisper to you know we're whispering to
you know our bots back and forth. I would like to better keyboard like we just talked about. That's
a particular section of the brain that requires a different cognitive load to translate things into
Speaking talk.
Yeah.
Absolutely. I go ahead. You're speaking to guys dots is the most capable interface
that I've ever encountered for voice. I think it is the
most effective and yet there's just different modes for different moments. You know,
if I'm on a walk, I can get a ton done when I am talking to a dog. Like that is the optimum time
to do it, and it is really, really
capable. Otherwise, I got to text it. I want to use voice to put into the text, translate
into text. I don't know. I mean, to the separate dot stuff, I really just think that it's about
whether or not it is technically one executive assistant that is running everything.
I need different categories. I need to put things.
I needed to just...
be able to see where I am in all of these projects visually a lot easier. And I think, hopefully,
as we go forward, if in five years, I'm still looking at a gigantic mess of chat logs
and folders as my default for how I am using this technology, then we will have failed.
That is, that is, it is a bridge.
UI to get us from a very largely static visualization of computation, because we weren't creating a ton of
things. And so you could fairly easily be understood to put them in folders or to be able to search for
what you needed pretty easily. We're away from that, we're just going to be constantly, especially
the agentically, we're gonna be constantly doing things and things are gonna be being.
done on our behalf 24 seven, right?
So it doesn't make sense to put things in folders
or loose chats because there could be a million folders
and a million loose chats.
What we need is a meta understanding of all these things
that are grouped smartly into places.
And I can think of few different metaphors
at least off the top that make better sense, then a dot
that does finance a dot that does help.
a dot that does.
my friend, my social calendar, a dot that does whatever, like these are all huge things.
Great. Because part of the reason that we have been so addicted to folders and work spaces,
because that takes advantage of all the parts of our brain that are spatially aware.
And we understand that when we go to work, we can visualize going to a place where's the thing.
I was, this was close and proximate spatially to my full attention. And now it virtually is those
things. And as you
were describing Justin wanting to move past that, I was thinking like, well, but what what
modality would our brains instantly, what uses the hardware that we've already evolved?
And I think you're right.
The answer is personalities.
We are evolved to keep track of of the parentheticals of what this person knows.
And this other person doesn't know.
This is safe to say here, but not safe, to say over there.
Yeah, and I'll double down in a two because like
One of the things is that when you started looking at people who had really good natural
grasp of mathematics and stuff like art, Benjamin and whatnot, they would talk about numbers
having personalities. A lot of the ways that you can increase your computational function
as a person is by using the hardware we developed in our world for spatial hardware and then what
we use for social. We have really adapted social and spatial hardware, which means we're really
predisposed towards those tanks. You have the Dunnbar number, which is around how many
people we can, you know, interactions with stuff. I think that role specializations also like
why we left the Stone Age was, and it not just because it made sense to have one person
spend all their time doing this, it also made sense that I know go ask John for this,
because John's good at carpentry. I know to go ask so and so the farmer about weed because he's
He's good.
Now, John may know both things equally, but my brain, I know where to go and what.
to do and also solves the blank page like, what can I do?
Well, if I have an accounting thing, ask my accounting thing.
So I am, I get the idea, so you just have your assistant.
Does everything have, yeah, but specialization
doesn't just solve the problem of the, of the specializer.
It solves a problem of me knowing who I go talk to.
Well, I think what I should talk about for the tech.
I would like for there to be an orchestrator over top
of specializations just because I want my work.
orchestrator to constantly be asking my specializations, can you move this any more forward
before I bring it to the principle? Like if you're going to think of it as a person
who is the chief of staff and then everybody else that's delegated below them, that's
their job. Their job is to make sure that by the time that it gets to the principal,
it is as far as it possibly can be. It, you know, yeah. That's the way it is now in
the dot orchestration threads when he's
start a dot, you'll go look and you'll see if you go first, scroll down and code,
actually, you see these different threads that it's running. But I agree, elevate that up.
Yeah, but I'll tell you kind of thing too. So open, I did something super cool today.
A finance, the finance feature for chat, GPT, they open everybody free tier, everybody.
That alone has so much opportunity to help people finances. But if all of a sudden, you had a
security dot or security thing and you go like, what can you do? Like, oh, you need to reset all
all your passwords, I'll help you do that.
Oh, you wanted to take a look at your computer, make sure it's locked down. I can do that, too.
That would be amazing. That could save billions of dollars a year for people for this.
Like, hey, do you want me to look in your emails to see if I see any kind of suspicious
things coming in? I'd be amazed. So I got a question. How long until we see this feature?
Or maybe it's already there, and I haven't bumped up across it. But
would it kill us to put a four-digit pin code to before we open our finance or health tabs?
because I don't know how you guys,
but sometimes I walk away from a computer
and then I come back later.
And then sometimes another person might just open a random tab
and say, give me this or change this photo to that.
And it's like, that doesn't seem like it should be all
in the same bucket as, oh, my net worth
and my entire health history.
There is for codex, you can enable it,
but I got to know into me where you could say,
any time I log into
Let me see if that happens anywhere else.
G. James B is asking what the plural of dots would be,
like a murder of crows and ellipsis of dots.
That's hilarious. Good.
Yeah, right now for security, it'll do it for codex, but not for.
Yeah, that seems that seems way.
And that's purely out of convenience.
I would like to be able to make outer layers
of my external brain accessible to other people
in that household, but not the deepest layers
of my external brain.
Yeah, I mean, I would love for my wife to take control of this.
a bio-cal says I need to learn how to use
not tried. The onboarding, very easy. First thing it asks is, do you want to name your dot?
And it's like, or have it name itself? I can't. I haven't brought myself to do that yet. Have
you guys? We have check out Interdimensional on YouTube. That's the company Jess and I run
their buddy, Brett. We have one of our guys who works with us. Nick is going to be putting up
some videos for how to use dot and how to work on that. I don't know where to check where they are,
but we're going to
putting up some more stuff. But yeah, go to the Open AI stuff first, check out their videos,
and then we're going to try to put up some work stuff. And we might be doing some sessions on
like dots. Yeah. Is it, you know, what's the URL YouTube.com slash wood or the username?
International HQ on YouTube. HQ got it. Yeah, you
I think a lot of this tech rolls out really quickly. It's also primarily designed.
I think dots really shines the most as a coworker.
I don't know if it is phenomenal as a personal assistant,
but I do think that it is an ST or coworker,
and so the more that you give it,
that is like kind of actionable, the better.
I'm also a little bearish on like exactly
how helpful things that are just booking things for you
are, I think that that's a fairly narrow use case.
I'm going to put it on the right side of the screen to see if it's going to work on the other side as well.
like it when it happens, but it's not anything that I, you know, cannot be replaced by just
like, I'll put it this way. If, if like, United and Southwest each come out with, you
know, agentic phone numbers that I can put in a group chat and I can just say, Hey, I need
to go to Las Vegas, who's got the best price. And then they both offer me a price and an
ability to book because I have connected with them. Then that replaces a lot of that use
And I think that that's probably the place.
that we're going, either through SMS or RCS or just having agents, they're just going
to offer agents where we can just do a deal directly.
Yeah, like a travel dot would be just, again, my ideal, I don't have to travel, but you
know, a travel.dot would be great to just like keep track of this again, they can all
talk.
Yeah, I mean, I just, I think it's just where we're
going.
It's just, it's very, very exciting to watch the world be built plank by plank.
I'm going to put it on the right side of the screen, so that you can see that it's on the left side of your screen.
realize that this is the kind of stuff that's going to be here for a while that we're watching a new
paradigm emerge. And it's happening like week by week. Like the stuff that happened a year ago
seems like 10 years ago. It seems so like archaic episode 2000.
episode 2000 uh yeah I guess we'll be
will be significantly bodily machines by then.
We're gonna have a lot of parts of our bodies
that didn't start as parts of out bodies.
Big 16 years from now, you're that bullish?
I mean, if I can already think of several devices
that I'm maybe 10 years away from having inside my body,
certainly if the tech gets better.
Right, it's not that kind of podcast,
I'm not talking about that.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, I hope my ears aren't still just using the biological
your drums then. I'm sure I'll need knee replacements. They'll be upgrades.
There was an interesting comment. Boy, if you have the means, just listen to William
Shatner talk on literally anything. He is so outwardly, audibly terrified of death
And yet, endlessly...
hopeful. The interview I listened to recently was on the Moynihan report and he told this
story about how when he talks to his doctor, his doctor says, if you can make it two more
years, I can give you 10. And he talked about how, you know, this latest thing is shoulder
to plague them for so long, one minor surgery and all of a sudden everything's good as new.
Like he's he's leaning all the way into the ship of thesis dreams, so I hope all that
that trickles down. I mean, you know, I went and I bitched about having to travel. And
he's 95 and I pull up William Shatner and it's his event schedule of all the places he's
going to be talking. He's a horse, man, he's an absolute horse. And, uh, you
know, Brian, Brian was up on stage with him. We got the chance to meet him not too long
a go and uh sharp as a tack man like that is that is something that's that's changed.
I don't remember 95-year-olds acting like that.
That's a new thing that happened in our lifetime.
I mean, also, I'm 43.
I remember 43-year olds acting like me.
I remember, you know, maybe some of that is just different.
Well, after a question, but I get you.
Exactly.
Like, yeah, I dunno.
Age means something different, and I think that it is just a portent.
I'm going to show you how to make a video about how to create a new version of the video.
You can see the video description below.
You can click on the link in the description box below.
You can also click on this video.
You can watch the video on the channel.
My dad, my dad just turned 84, three weeks ago my dad had a triple bypass.
At the age of 80, when I called my, hold on, hold up, hold it, hold that.
When I called My Dad, he was on his way back from Costco.
That's amazing.
Like, like, just the very idea of operating on somebody at The Age of 84 when we were young
would have been like, like on a dare maybe.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure if I can do it or not, but I'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun, but it's a lot more fun, so I'm going to do it.
buy pass on like a Wednesday at home on Monday. That's just a just a stud. Yeah. You know, and
anything you're trying to tell him not to push it, but he's he's like literally, you know,
pushing the car to study himself to do this. But I mean, it's like, and I'm like, you
know, you look at that like you just when you think about that, you talk to Shatton and you're
You're thinking 50 years from now, yeah, for you, yeah.
uh, and he's like energetic. Like dude was spry. Like if you, if you were just to meet him,
have no idea how old he was and then ask like, Oh, how old do you think that guy is? I think
you might misguess by 20 years. You might think he was seven in his, in his seventies.
And he's been to friggin space. I watched like I think like it. One star. Yeah.
You watch clips of Starship.
And it looks so old and so dated and you look at that guy and you're like, you know, that guy's going to go to space in the 21st century in his 90s.
Yeah.
Well, I meant to be like, okay, I see it, but like that's like, like a cap and Kirk has been to space.
Yeah.
So let's go up. Let's go 20 years from now. So Brian you're you're I think that we're going to have a lot like met
I think like you're knee thing
I think you're gonna have the injection for your knee just rebuild your knee and give you the knee of a 20-year-old
I mean that's a lot of
hope. That's the hope is is that I grow a new set of teeth, a third set, you know, and everyone
thinks it's hilarious that I have an awkward year. We're a bunch of my teeth are missing.
Yeah, I think I am, I have bullish, but I will tell you so when I mentioned this before, but
so last night I've been working on the 3D printing project and I've got two 3D printers running
And I open up ultra fast mode on chat GPT which uses GPT Astra at 15 times.
the normal speed. Oh, man. Okay. And I said, I had to go out. I said I need there's supposed to be a token
reset. So I'm like, let's burn some tokens because it also uses it seven times the cost and I
said, Hey, I need to just make a sheet full of parts for me. Some different parts and things
like that screws and adjustment and fasteners and stuff. Just make this for me to just go ahead and
do it. Like I literally, you know, walked away from my computer for two minutes and 30 seconds,
Two minutes and 30 seconds.
seconds came back, a complete tray filled with all the different kinds of parts, things
like this. Clicked print in under three minutes and started printing. Now, the printing
takes forever. I could have said, make me a bunch of Lego pieces, I could've said make
me a kit, could have made me something like this, which may be a thing that I may do
next. This is for fun to show people it's like, well, and, you know, this is where some
people will rightly call us man children who are making toys and burning how much compute
that could be blah blah blah.
Just pretend instead of all of our exams.
examples were put again, please print out this folded protein for my, so I can make the
Senator understand how these two things link.
Well, that's where I'm getting, I, I don't know if I ever talked about it here, one of
the first projects I worked on, I left it open, and I was, I built an automated protein
AI scientist for a company that since got acquired by a much bigger organization.
And was able to build a very naive, very version, set version.
of that that would be able to pull stuff from there's a there's applied up the database
of stuff was able to use protein sequencing software all this to go through and do that.
And that was almost three years ago.
The state of that art now is remarkably more advanced and to do the thing Brian just
described to say, can you create this much more bespoke customized form protein?
But the only two is the thing that's going to happen is building your own lab equipment,
building you own gear to build stuff and make things, building your tools to be able
but to make sure that you can take that prediction
and put it in a reality.
is getting a huge speed up.
I am, I am all four people.
I'm telling people, get into the sciences,
get into health and medicine,
get into engineering.
If you have, if you understand health science,
engineering and codex,
you are in a brilliant position.
Like like that is the shortest cleanest path
to a Nobel Prize in medicine that I can imagine.
I mean, I think that's the best path to,
you're never having to worry about money again.
I'm going to put it on the right side of the screen to see if it's going to work on the left or right side.
Yeah, to, to a gigantic world changing success, a friend of mine runs a small business that
employs a few software engineers. And one of them is very, you know, AI coding pilled,
and does things like, with some of their thornier tasks that they have to complete,
We'll just throw it to the agents and say while he's going
to get chicken nuggets and come back and just see what happens. And sometimes it like crushes
it. And they can actually put it into the pipeline because it's, it's so far along.
And the other one does not like AI coding is morally opposed to AI coding and does not
AI code. And that person is a great, great coder, a, an exceptional coder. And I don't
But no, whether or not that person's...
going to be at the company very long. And that's that's the craziest thing about it is that like
for him, somebody with a natural understanding of what's going on and a skepticism toward the
capabilities of AI coding, he's the perfect person to employ this technology. He has everything
Everything set out for him, he just needs to turn that switch to say no, my new job.
is critiquing the code and pushing it further as opposed to hand crafting things that I'm copying
and pacing from GitHub. And he won't do it. And that's like it's, it's all I'll say to anybody
who's skeptical. Good. If you are also well knowledgeable in your area, that is without a doubt.
Obviously we have a small sample size, but the people that are pushing things
that are breaking down barriers that are moving their areas of expertise 10 years into
the future within months. They're all experts in their field who are using this technology
like rocket fuel. That is actually what's happening. It's not replacing, it is moving
things forward if you know it. That's, that is actually the gasoline that makes it go
that fast. Yeah, it's it's challenging because often for a person like that.
You know, you'll look around a lot of engineers' deaths, you see Rubik's cubes and puzzles
and things like that.
And you yanked the puzzle part out.
You yank to the, I found the satisfaction of rewriting it as myself and Rust and getting
this five millisecond speed up.
And that's the hard part, is I think the world needs artisans, but sometimes you do not
need it in your business, in your engineering team, because it's literally you're spending
money for that when it's not.
And I think that you can be, I think you can apply or that, like, I've built some really
cool stuff, that's just...
Five quarters of magnitude complicated more sophisticated than what I've done before. I've showed you some of the video avatar stuff
Some of the stuff I'm done and just like oh, can I optimize this model?
I get it to this kind of give you that could do that and that to me's fun. That's replaced trying to write a tiny little compact piece of code
But some people just built differently
I don't blame anybody for not wanting to make the switch partly because like we have a habit in American businesses
If you're the number one, let's say photocopy your
is if you're the number one, let's say photocopier seller,
then congratulations that you're yanked out of the field
and given a promotion where your new job is not
to sell photocompiers, but instead manage interpersonal conflicts
and have a layer of abstraction between you
and all of the sales.
And there are people who just flat out say, that's not fun.
That's not what I'm built to do.
That's what, yes, I do believe your bottom line will be better
if I take that promotion, but I don't like it.
Not on-
want to do it, and I don't blame anyone who feels that way in the face of AI, because
if you're a problem-solving person, it maybe doesn't feel good to suddenly have to take
all of your understanding of the problems and, and warm it through Broca's area to translate
it into word-talking, telling robots what to do.
I think that, yeah, I think everybody has to kind of come to peace with where they are,
you know, what they want to do, but.
Man, you know, comes down to productivity and this doesn't said like if you're if you think this stuff is sloped and great, you can be the guy that figures out how to really stuff the slop and make it better, but.
Yeah, there was an interesting post from Andre Carpati, who's a big name in the space and he was saying that like the more and more content and code that AI creates the more that you're going to need to read it. And so now the new skill to build up is.
having it explain its code clearly and concise.
And he had like tips on how he was doing that, but it's like, that's an interesting idea of like, okay. Yeah. No, I just I need to build up a better clear relationship with an extraordinarily voluminous writer.
I, so I had my 3D, I had a codex build me some 3D parts and it made a bunch of parts. I'm like, I don't know what to do to put this together.
Can you make me some instructions?
Janet in a 4-page PDF with dials.
grams showing how the parts go together? Yeah, well, oh, yeah.
Yeah, well, oh, and it was like here's a, there's a little productivity tip that you guys
probably already knew about, but I'm late to it.
A thing that was frustrating when I was first getting started messing around with codex is
I would ask it to do a thing and it would say here is an eight-page report and I'd be
like, great, it did the thing.
Now the job is on me to read this eight page report to understand what happened and
I would never get around to it and so instead, I have ceased to feel guilty and in
I'm going to put it on the right side of the screen.
Instead, what I think of as Aaron Sorkin protocol, they bother to make the page report and
I'm like, walk me through it.
Let's talk.
I ain't going to read your stupid report.
Let's just, let's walk and talk.
What is it?
So it's like this.
It's like that.
Okay.
Fine.
Like that is something that with a human, we feel, I don't know, terribly rude and wasteful
of their time or whatever, but the bot saying got none else to do.
You don't have to apologize for how busy you are.
I'm going to show you how to make a new one, so that you can see how it's going to look like when you're in the middle of the video.
And what you do and don't want to look at, yeah, I agree.
But I do think that like trying to understand it better is helpful.
And because you'll see the goal for difference and all that.
So predictions, what are we?
What are we going to see?
Brian's going to use some implant, maybe some cyborg stuff.
Yeah.
Maybe some regrown parts of my body.
I think, I think this is what I hope, well, put it on.
This is what we should see.
No reason why we can't.
Let me tell you
one on the state of robotics. Household, easy robotics that walk on your house to a lot of basic
household stuff, very common, very, very very common. You're gonna have a price point, you'll get it,
we're gonna reduce the cost of production on those things, be very cheap. I'm forgetting who knows
what sort of political turmoil and rejections all this, but there is a world on the other side of
this where we have way more jobs, way better human wages, all these sorts of stuff that people
just understand, that's the pattern, but anyway, yada, yadda, yado. I think that one thing is I think
I think that we could see inside.
every single building like you know he have a defibrillator like defibrilators and buildings have
saved lives to just pull that thing up on some of his chest. I think a medical robot I think you're
going to think about a Medical Robot like a fire extinguishing. I Think you're going to
think about some sort of thing.
medical robot like a fire extinguishing.
I think you're gonna think about some sort of thing
if somebody goes in the cardiac arrest,
some things gonna pop out of the cabinet in the wall,
run out there and start to administer medical stuff.
Maybe you have, maybe some of us say,
I don't wanna robot to resuscitate me
and we have rules about that.
We're gonna have to think about that
like do I want robot resuscitation or to insist a human?
But that'll be the silly little baby we'll be having with that.
Self-driving cars will finally be pretty much
what we consider fully autonomous.
I think GPT Astra gave me a lot more hope on that.
Like my Tesla's great.
And great, I use it a lot, but it can't navigate through a drive-through, it gets stuck on my parking lot,
it forgets stuff, it has no consistent own history of stuff. That's solvable.
I do think we're going to have, we'll finally have space stations and stuff, not in a huge way,
but I do you think that we'll have a couple of private space stations at that point.
I think that, yeah, health-wise, I think we are going to be, we're
going to found cures or treatments for ton of diseases. I mean, you look at this, like
Like, we cure obesity.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that just sort of happened is one day where like there's the pill.
There are some consequences to the pill, but they're better than being obese.
Yeah, you're talking about the the GOP ones. Yeah.
Yeah, i was going to you took the the autonomous cars thing. I
If I were to make a bold prediction, I would say that by episode 2000, obviously depending
and how
often do episodes that are catch. We will be at human driven cars being the minority.
Well, certainly the minority, but I feel like the trade-off is humans, annoying humans are going
to drive and drive poorly and sloppily because all the robot cars will be so good at dodging
the poorly driving humans.
Well, there's a phenomenon where people talk about feelings safer, bicyclists, and humans
feel safer around Waymos, because Waymos are better.
I think that, yeah, I mean, and it's going to get into sort of issues there too, though,
where we have a lot of, we push back on traffic cameras and things like flock and stuff,
because sometimes it's hard to follow the rules to get things done, like their intersections
in LA that you will never cross that intersection if you wait for a green light.
We will never cross it.
And everybody...
you have to sort of go for that.
You have to use that human judgment.
I know it's turned this, whatever, and do that.
And it's stupid, but that's how poorly
the plane and these things are.
So I do think that we might get to a point though,
where then we might say, well, okay, now that robots are here,
we're not going to tolerate the bad driving.
The bad driving, the human driving,
is accounting for accidents that this is.
We'll have numbers to show that we'll, you know,
he knew that at the wheel is, whatever risk, whatever.
And I think that you'll still be able to drive a car.
I think what they'll do is we'll just build in like an auto
collision avoidant system.
So if someone wants to drive...
their car, do whatever. And the robot says, no, you're doing a bad job. It'll take over. But
not every car will have them. But I think they'll move heavily into that. I think that we'll start
think about transportation differently. Once you're like, oh, I can do a bus, like I can have an
automatic bus line that ends up my block and goes to San Francisco every Saturday at 3 pm or 5 pm
of people in their hood want to go to San SF. You know, I could think of a lot of these things
if you bring your cost way down. So yeah, I think autonomous vehicles will be way, way,
way more abundant, obviously. I think that, like, literally...
you know, the roach coach food truck might pull into your driveway and you go look at that and
you say, Oh, I want this and it's going to go to somebody else's house 15 minutes later and 15
minutes later. I can see that. That would be interesting to have the new food truck is also your
delivery option. Yeah. It is pulling up and making your stuff on the way while it is when you
You order, it begins making it, it is...
done in your driveway. And then think about this. Okay. So instead of ordering brunch and
then waiting it for it to be delivered, you order the all you can eat buffet. It pulls
up you in the family, you load up all your trays and plates and then you're like, see
it. And so everything is cooked, food safe, ready to go. If you just want one piece of bacon,
You grab just one piece of bacon if you want to hold out of it you do that
There are a lot of things that we
That so there was a thing came out McDonald's is talking about using AI to figure out maximum pricing or how to price things individually per menu item, right?
Cool guys. I would love for you to figure
out how to maximize nutrition content
Caught nutrition content and cost to like cheap and make it make it as inexpensive as you can and make a profit and make
It as healthy as you Can that would get me excited. You know, well, oh, we you know, we made a big Mac actually good for you
take even better.
You know, I think that there are so many supply chain things that can be done once you really really think about it
I know a couple of companies are trying to work on they're working a robotic produce picking and because it's just we don't understand we were
It's funny because like I'm Latin America and they're like oh our produce is so much better and cheaper here. I'm like
you're probably right
You also are paying your people 45 cents an hour to pick your produce
You know, in America, we don't have that luxury.
Thankfully, I mean, that would be bad everybody, but like that's why robotic produce picking is like if there's just not enough, you know, as countries as other countries start to stabilize and their standard living increases.
People are like, no, I don't need to go across the border and got to need to be shoved into a truck and driven a 200 miles into California.
But a laly to go do this. I'm going to work here at my own home, like a normal person gets to do.
So I think that's a demand we're starting to see.
I will tell you.
I've seen some of these efforts and I don't think the mechanical engineering is this
clever as it could be, but I think it will get clever much better sooner faster.
And then I think we're going to start to see reduction of food costs go down.
Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. All right. Well, we'll mean again.
and episode two thousand. That's right. Until there were nine hundred and ninety nine episodes between now and then.
Yeah, anybody got any picks? I do. I saw Resident Evil. I liked it. It was fun. I didn't
care at all. I never played a Resident Evil game. It didn't matter, it was a fun. Go
watch Resident Evil, it'll only feel like a video game movie for about 20 minutes, and
then you won't care. Yeah, is that Krieger right? Just follow up from weapons. Yeah.
All right.
What is goes.
see it ends, the movie I produced, it's now in Apple TV,
if you want to buy and download it.
The Alex Olin film, 93% Rotten Tomatoes.
It's very proud of that kid.
It's got another feature coming out next year,
four by four of the event, which should be insane.
Very, very, very part of our circle, guys.
It's one of us.
Yeah.
We've got a pretty good circle, you know, guys like,
I don't know, Dan Trachtenberg.
Yeah.
When we're a fan of yours, it causes you to be a success. That's science fact. Exactly.
So, yeah, anyhow, very proud of Alex. I really enjoyed the film too, which is great.
We're helpful when your name's on it as a producer. You need to tend to like it.
Picks. You know what? I'm going to pick like man, I went back and I watched Star Trek 4 voyage home
and Star Trek 6, the undiscovered country, and ummmmmmm.
What I love about Voyage Home was,
Leonard Des Moines, after doing Star Trek III,
the search for Spock, that was just like,
how do we get you back to this movie?
Like, let me direct it to like, uh, okay.
You directed Star Trek II,
even by the way, he made Shatter look great in it.
Star Trek 3, best of the best iconic Shatter stuff
for the films.
Star Trek IV, voyage home.
Star Trek VIII, well yeah, okay, wait.
Who directed star Trek III?
What do you want? He did...
both. I didn't know that. Yeah. I knew he did the fourth one. Oh, okay.
Yeah. That was this condition for attorney that gave him. So he was because of the success of
the rig as it did good. They gave him a little more freedom because he went into to start
check four. He's like, here's the deal. No villain. They're like, what is like our enemies are going
to be, you know, planning bad information and time. I said, I want those to be the villains.
So like that's great.
easy. Probably hands down that
Rathacan my two favorite
Star Trek films of all time in
Star Trek 4 was great because
what's the problem? Big, weird
mysterious alien things shows up.
How do we solve it? We got to
solve it. We got the problems
all through. Wonderful, brilliant,
great. After that, five was hard
to get off the ground. Shatner
wanted to direct partly, maybe
Shatiner or partly, whatever is a
problem. But for, I remember seeing
that with my parents. I remember
I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm not sure if you know what I'm talking about.
I'm sure you're not talking about what you are talking about or not.
I'm just talking about you.
I'm really sorry.
I'm so sorry.
mom laughing, my mom, everybody loved that film. It was because it was didn't have like a crazy,
crazy budget, it was a very hugely successful film for Star Trek. What happened was later on,
the producers at Paramount, every time somebody wanted to pitch them something, the model they
kept sticking to was Wrath of Con. And like, no, we need a con. Who is your con going to be?
Ignoring for, which was this, let's mix the formula up, this film goes here.
there. That film goes there. Problem that got repeated when Abrams took over Star Trek,
like literally the story of the writers working on who did Star Trek beyond, they go meet
with Abrams. He's like, here's the one rule. We got to have a bad guy trying to destroy
Earth. They're like, what? Like, yep. Like the same as the first two movies is like, yep,
that's the formula guys. And Simon Pegg, you know, is a writer on that. And he's Simon
Pegg tells that story. And that's how stupid that studios can be. Like we figured it out,
guys.
This is what it is because that movie made a bunch of movie money and that's what the
plot was. And then they'll do the plot again and again, like, why isn't this working?
Nobody likes or franchise anymore. Yeah. And in Star Trek 6, I discovered Country, that
was directed by Nicholas Meyer, who was the roped with Harve Bennett, voyage home. Nicholas
Meyer is the guy who wrote and direct time after time, which was a great, greater, greater
vehicle? Yeah, yeah.
yeah, David Warner's great in that. And so anyhow, um, yeah, Nicholas Meyer, 20s guys,
ain't doesn't come up a lot, but really, really talented. Um, and did a great job on that.
So I would say four, track four, search up six, just both really good films.
I don't think I've seen six since it was in the movie theaters. And I hear that it aged
just beautifully. It's a, it's a charming murder mystery dinner theater production.
With prison, I mean, it's literally shifts of multiple times the interest care.
later on, which is totally fine. One of the greatest lines ever, only an old Vulcan
proverb, only Nixon can go to China. That's up there with, I love, I think it was Star Trek
3 at what I was like, like Quentin Tarantino used that, you know, cold-kling on dropper,
revenge and death, that was the end of Star Trek 2. It is very cold in space, Kant says
That's it.
Yeah, but that was they opened up. That was a line that came up was like,
old Klingon proverb, but you know, I think that's for three or whatever came up.
But like, yeah, so like it just yeah.
So my pick.
My pick is nine of the seven kingdoms slowly watching it. But it has been enjoyable.
I've liked it so far and a little for anybody with young children. I have a young child,
to your old.
Let me just say this, one of life's little pleasures, when you're trying to wrangle a toddler
to brushing her teeth, it can sometimes be motivation can be a problem.
But if you promise them that you are going to make a new photo in image gen of whatever
random thing that she's toddler obsessed with at the moment, boy, is she compliant?
Insta
instantaneous creativity to product pipeline is phenomenal to motivate very, very young
children.
So I am my, my secondary pick is wherever, I think it's image in 2.5 or three, I don't
know.
I dunno where we are in the actual model, but it is certainly making pictures of a cartoon
cow that my daughter is obsessed with.
Two questions.
Can you guys have a sticker box?
Do we have a sticker box, one machine I have? Remember the thing I had on my birthday?
And not? No, I don't remember that you pressed the button, you tell it what you want and
then it makes the sticker of it. Oh, no, we have not made one of those. No, you're going
to be able to. All right. Well, we'll see what that does, you know, the Santa's are doing.
I forgot to ask this question earlier for you before we let you go.
What is your name, your dots?
I declined to name my dot and I wanted to know if you guys did I did I had an impulse
But I held back and I may name it depending on what I hear you guys
Mine is guy because I really like that
Seen from kids in the hall brain candy where they fully is like oh me
I'm just a guy and then just walks away just like a
note joke. Um, but, uh, yeah, guy, although I have not changed it from the British woman's voice.
So right now guy has a British women's voice, I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to change that.
I will also note that with the bidirectional, um, new voice model, there's more slippage.
new voice model. There's more slippage in the voice than I had a notice before. Maybe
I'm just talking to it more and it always had that capacity. And now I am just kind of
hitting the the guard rails on it. But yeah, right now it's named guy and it might get a
guys voice. But right now, it still has a girls voice. I did. I think I shared with you
guys. There was, there was a hot 30 seconds. I tricked advanced voice mode like a year
and a half ago into talking like Homer Simpson until
content guard real shut it down. I had to evoke it in a bunch of different site oblique
ways. What about you, Andrew? What did you name your doc?
Right. I named mine after a fan of Clive Sinclair, the eccentric British inventor. There's
only one kind. You get like Bretton gets like once every 40 years to get us in Clare or
a Dyson and that's kind of it. And Clive'sinclair was an eccentric British
Inventor, Invented...
loved trying to make these very much of a challenging personality will put it, but there's a great BBC TV show they made our miniseries called Microwman, which I really, really enjoyed, and it's got great soundtrack and stars that would say Martin from the office, the British office.
Mark Freeman. Mark Freeman, yeah, Mark Freeman in it. And you know, Clives and Clares.
very interesting guy. My first computer we ever owned was a TimeX and Clare computer. He created
a Sinclair computer because he thought like the Apple tools were so expensive. He's like how can I
make one cheaper? How can I make one so anybody could afford it and optimize all kinds of
like bubble membrane keyboard, all this sort of stuff and came up with a 99 dollar personal
computer. I love that thinking. I loved that sort of thinking that he had at him because he came
out with like super inexpensive like other devices like radios and other stuff and he was always a
a guy and this is I want to make this is to you.
expensive as you can for everybody else in Italy, you know, the Japanese kind of cracked
that, but I call mine, uh, Sinclair.
Good climb, I guess.
I'm going to give a, let me give a sock to Dobby.
I'll name it right right in front of it.
Uh, because the first thing that popped into my mind was in Tron.
You know, there's that bit.
You know that just goes, yes, no, and all that.
But I thought it was, oh no, no.
Yeah, but i thought bit was too on the nose.
So from the gut, the answer that I didn't want to say,
Okay now.
I'll say it out loud now was, oh, it should just be called pixel or picks for short, P I X.
Yeah.
That's a good name.
Yeah.
Picks.
Got any picks?
It'll be like, yes, is this?
Yes.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
So, gentlemen, it's been weird.
Got it.
Do we have time for after things?
I do.
We'll get the-
Okay, well here I will, I will put us on hold for just a moment. I will press this button.
Adios. All right. One second. Boom.
So, that's my problem, my problem.
So, I have a problem, I've got a problem.
I don't know what I'm talking about, but I know I'm not talking about it, so I'm just talking about what it's all about, and I know it's not that bad, but it's just that I know that it's bad, and it's really bad.
我們來找一位美麗的女兒
她們都在一起
她們在一起
她們也在一起
她們就在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
在一起
Oh, dang, dang dang dang, heck yeah, you know, you're the only one who can do that.
Hey, hey, yeah, well hello beautiful folks
So I made a version of this oh no Bonnie's calling
Well, hello, lovely Bonnie, how are you?
We're in between programs.
I don't know if I can do it, but I'm not sure if it's going to work or not, but it's not going to be a good idea to do it.
I'm going to do a little bit of it.
I'm just going to try to make it look like I'm doing it right now.
I'm trying to make sure that it doesn't work.
It's not working.
It's working.
It's just working.
Thank you very much for joining us today, thank you so much for your time, and we'll see you in the next video.
.
.
.
.
I'm going to make sure that you don't have to worry about what you're going to do, and that you're not going to be able to do what you want to do.
Oh, right. There we go. Hey, hey. Oh, you cut it to short. I wasn't a bit of a cruddy montage.
Oh, yeah. Dude, I'm telling you, man, that, uh, that channel is still a little bit... Oh,
you know what? I don't have a way to drop down to just two hosts.
Whack, whack, what whack?
No.
Now, we have to go all, oh, you know what?
Hold on, I have a clever idea.
Watch this.
We can do the three shot and then instead of Justin,
I bet I can trade out instead of,
let's say layer Justin, we can make that layer chat.
Okay. Cool. See what that says. Test. All right. Yeah. Sure. Cool, all right. Well,
so Bonnie was calling reminded me that we had a dinner date so we could just dive right
in. Also, thank you very much, loving patrons for your incredible patience. I have three
episodes to get caught up.
But luckily, today's creative effort was put into cleaning up the on screen interface.
And as soon as we're done tomorrow, I will be catching up patronage.
Yeah, we think we're in a spice where the technology is finally caught up to our output.
Yeah.
I mean, to be honest, like it's getting, it's it's finally getting, well, we're here.
We get to talk about it on the show.
There you go, you ready?
Yep.
Three, two.
Hello and welcome to after things.
I and Andrew main joined by Brian brushwood.
Hello and we are joined by the chat room.
Thank you very much, chatroom.
Yeah, man.
So, you know, this is the part of the show where we talk
about the protect productivity stuff,
which a lot of it we've been doing in weird things
because, um,
Productivity tools have just been accelerating a lot.
You know, we've got Grockbot Muse
and now OpenA launch dots.
And, you know we've, part of it is is Brian,
Jess and I, we all kind of, like everybody listening,
we all kinda just start taking on a lot more stuff
in our lives, which means sometimes spending three hours
to edit a podcast, is it a possibility?
And we've been spending some time trying to build
some tools in pipeline.
And we think, we think we're in a good place
the pipeline.
Yeah. So I had, I had this thought and a number of things happened over the last 10 years.
And I don't know if you noticed, but no, no. Yeah. After you and I got TV shows, there was an
interesting opportunity to try to do. Yeah, yeah. And then I know that what I wanted to do was a
as a spiritual successor to hacking the system
that became the monorogue.
And during...
that time, everything built up linearly, you know, through around
up linearly, you know, through around 2019. And then 2020, a little something, something happened
that, that through the whole world upside down. And during the pandemic, there was an insatiable
appetite for content. And so we were able to, and you know I just purchased a fallout shelter,
you know a vault. And all of a sudden, people could sit, sit out the pandemic and do work.
So, I was able to grow with human labor and in...
during that time I could have ideas and then a week later I could see comps and iterations
on it and I could wave my hand and say more of this less of that. Oh, that's exactly right.
That's where we like it or whatever. And then when the when the sun came back out, people
went outside and the market became very saturated with content creators. Also around the time
that robots started to get better at stuff, uh, I'll tell you what it felt like if
it stuff, uh, I'll tell you what it felt like. It felt a bit like in a video game. You start
off the beginning of Assassin's Creed with all your skills turned on and you're just
mashing buttons and laying waste to everything. It feels great. And then for narrative reasons,
it's like, no, you must start again with only one punch and then, you know, you slowly
develop more punches or whatever. But boy, do you appreciate having a more when you learn
and slowly how to do things.
And that's what I feel like the last two years have been with learning the production
tools and and watching robots get closer and closer to getting us back to full strength
on the production side of things.
It's for me, the whole world changed in March of earlier this year.
That was the moment when productivity became so good that I was like, I would really
I'll see you in the next video.
deeply resent this going away.
Are you frozen or are you lost in thought?
Oh, you're lost in that.
I am deeply listening, Brian,
and begging for API access for something to.
Ha!
It's a, I've seen this phenomenon.
I wonder if you had this before,
where you, I get into builder mode,
and I know all about the tools.
All about the tool, like a build tools.
Do this, do this, does that.
in the creative...
part of me is gone. And I have a tool and I don't know what to do with the F and tool.
And then I'll get in creator mode and I want to create and I wanna create, I wanna do this,
but I'll feel like I'm just, I've just sort of clawing at air and I
don't want to do. And the best mode is when Creator mode and Builder mode are in sync
and agree with each other, which is rare. Yeah. How often does it happen for you?
Um, uh, man, well, as I've been re-shuffling everything, I've, uh...
I look forward to having that all important whimsy time.
Like I get little pockets of it
where I can't see anything urgent on the horizon,
but we're heading into holiday season
so things are about to get urgent again for me perpetually.
Yeah.
But I look for we're too whimsy-time.
I am from the sidelines deeply enjoying hearing
about your tinkering with...
with 3D prints and having stuff happen.
Yeah, I will share with what's going on there's more.
Like I've tried to limit myself to like one project
at a time, you know, like two projects at a times
because it's so easy to spin up projects.
Like that's the danger now.
Because like Codex, when you're doing Codex
because you're waiting for a response,
your brain's like, what can I do now?
You know, I became extremely productive
first with magic books in the
DVDs because I could use that time when either cognitively I needed a break to go do another part of a task like originally with my DVDs a magic DVD and do an instructional DVD.
Once I would have the idea go try Friday night audience test it whatever bar restaurant, whatever Saturday go recorded. I had a format for recording it.
like, like, knew all the trick first, go back, do step-by-step intro, whatever,
have template. Into the night, I'd have my video, and then I would sit down, and I'd
I would say, okay, don't have to edit until Sunday.
But Saturday night, I'd be like, yeah,
I'd just start to just do an assemblage.
And I do a rough cut.
And I get to rough cut and it'd be pretty good shape.
Then Sunday, I would switch.
I would start editing the video,
but then I'd become bored, go find music for the video.
Then I go find the music.
Then I become bored.
I go to Photoshop to start working on the cover.
I'd get on board.
Then I'd go work on the artwork.
And I would just go around those tasks.
So by Sunday night, the whole thing was done.
And it's great when you're working on one thing
and everything gets to that one point.
point of what you're trying to do.
My problem is now it's like I have five ideas that I go five divergent ideas that take
me complete different directions.
Well, and over the last year, two years, I've been kind of doing the reverse in that all
of my projects got just too diffuse from each other.
And you know, I turned 50.
It's like, man, it's time to get all my, all my shit and one under one big tent.
And, uh...
you know, we're getting closer and closer, but it's, in all it boy, it is great when you know
exactly where your flag is planted and everything, this is where hippie talk comes in,
everything kind of magnetically aligns. All of your spare thought cycles, you know you encounter
something neat and it just sort of tilts in the direction of, of whatever your big clear project is.
Yeah.
I think it's time that I am excited about one is like figuring out like the little stuff.
Like I was talking to Codex about this, about how like how should I be moving money from like
mutual, you know, like, like a like portfolio or balancing or something.
Yeah, like on the investment side, I'm fine. I'm like I'm pretty good, pretty,
pretty comfortable there but a lot of it's like oh I know that up for
next month or whatever,
I need to have this much cash set aside
and a lot of times I just dump it right into my checking account,
which is stupid.
So I'm losing probably a couple thousand dollars a year in interest.
You know, and somebody put out a tweet
which really, really struck home with me
because they said if people started using these tools
for agent stuff and moving stuff
between their savings and their checkings and stuff,
like that could kill the banking industry
because it's two or three percent interest or whatever.
And it's like that, I'm like,
well, I don't want to kill the Indian industry,
but I think we should start moving people towards that direction
because.
You know, most people could use an extra thousand dollars in their pocket here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, we both, you and I have seen, like, I've been this ruthless optimization
cost-cutting because like, yeah, when you run businesses like you, and I do, you pay
$20 for service here, $50 for service, here.
Next thing you know it creeps up and you get that bill, you get like, oh, we just renewed
your thing that you haven't used in a year for $500 or whatever.
You know, I've been like meticulous about
using this to go through all those things.
So I point to say is, on one hand,
I'm excited about the idea of just managing the book,
keeping the accounting and keeping costs lower,
but also then today, and how can I be more ambitious?
What can I do that I never tried before?
Yeah.
Yeah, I look forward to that moment.
Yeah.
Well, I think about this is that how much
Dead.
Patreon on Kickstarter on lock and, you know, like, there is just, it's, Brian
Justin and I had talked about Patreon like things a decade before Patreon
existed. And I know my problem is I often think things are too simple and I already
underestimate the friction. And that, that like, oh, well, yeah, you could go
build a thing like this. We'd had stuff. We talked about like, Oh, it'd be great
to do this. This, this, whatever. And it took kind of the
the people that built it to just go build it because it was an itch and a lot I will tell you a lot of stuff
I see in VC is this person isn't actually super smart and figured everything else out there
they kind of some people are smart and persistent some people kind of got lucky that the thing they chose
was at a point the market wanted it and they haven't and then also you see they run into friction six
months later because they don't understand they think that they're smart they got there like no out of
One out of 100 people, one person is going to try to build a thing you build.
which you could have on any other day do this.
But anyhow, point is that friction unlocked and kickstarter.
Like kickstarter, just the idea of like, I have an idea.
I end up kickstarter what it is, it's time travel.
And I, you know, it time travel
and the idea that like I know people will pay for it,
but I have to have this.
Okay, what if you tell them what you're going to have
and do every effort you can to prove to people
you'll have it and let them pay for now?
Yeah, brilliant.
You know, and I think about where we're gonna get
I'm going to put it on the right side of the screen, so that you can see that it's on the left side of your screen.
with a unlocks with a coding building stuff, organization, all of this stuff. And I am so excited.
Yeah, yeah. The surprises are going to be astounding and to be honest, but I'm really looking
forward to are the new social structures where like right now we can all have a sense of where
the games are at and want to play, but we're too nascent in
it for there to be, you know, like for example, in the college market, I don't know that
I ever would have made it in the College market if there wasn't the structure of NACA, of
this marketplace of generally agreed upon. We're going to take turns getting on stage
20 minutes at a time, perform your act, and then they can deal. And because of that structure,
I was able to come in and spend a year of fly on the wall saying, oh my gosh, there is
is a Brian-shaped hole in-
in this market that I think I can grow into.
And it turned out to be a total game changer.
And right now, those marketplaces,
those structures are emerging.
And there's certain best practices
that we're certainly trying to chase
like speedrunning from meeting to meeting
and that kind of stuff.
Meeting other like-minded creators
or tinkerers, experimenters.
You know, I'm getting on stage.
and giving talks about what I see in the emerging space of deception online. But I suspect that there's
going to be some killer structure that five years for it, that we none of us have heard of today,
but that 5 years will be the make or break place. Yeah, you know, I think about like,
you and I talk a lot about automating something. But if like somebody we knew popped up and said,
Hey guys, I know you're big into automation all that so am I but I figured out every pop
podcast optimization stuff, pay me a hundred bucks a month, and I will handle all of your
podcasts, make it uploaded, make sure it's EQ'd or make it whatever, which is a mid lane
between, oh, we'll just do it ourselves until an agent to do it versus paying an engineer
to do. I like, Oh, I think there's going to be a ton of those opportunities because like
the peace of mind to me is really valuable. And I'd say the agentic stuff has gotten great.
My wife is able to upload stuff and get on YouTube and do this. And a lot of these little
things. But and maybe there's a point where it's all gonna be agentic. But I think
There's a really good...
face right now to say, oh, you know,
I found this new podcast improvement tool
in audio and hands or whatever.
There's lots of, I would just,
I would pay somebody to use these tools
on my behalf to do.
Just so I know.
That's the real thing is to have an entity
that you trust and you can cognitively
offload the task to, and that you know.
You know, again, there's, right now,
as everybody learns what these tools can do,
I, you know, me personally is.
I'm doing a pretty good job of tasks, switching from thing to thing to think to thing, but boy,
I think in one year, I'm going to be a happier Brian, because I'll be a little bit better
rested, because all I have a sense of which things are not my job.
Like right now, it's not clear that any of it is not my jobs.
Yeah, I am happy to sometimes just pay other people to use these tools, because
I'll see you in the next video.
I know that there are people that like you know you think about like agents will get better
but there's a lot of human knowledge and things you have to think about, like thumbnails.
Yep.
You know, and I have to coax these things into existence to do this.
So I think that again, I think there's lot of opportunity and you just have to reframe
it.
It's not like you're an editor says, okay, what's going to work is I'm like, yeah, I'd
you know, love for that and that hundred bucks, they're like, yes, I know, listen to your
stupid podcast and make sure that it's fine.
That's just right is like I can't get real humans to listen to podcasts.
I'm going to do a little bit more on the other side of the screen, but I'm not sure if you're going to see it, but you're not going to be able to do it, so I'm just going to go ahead and do it.
And like I'll listen to a friend of ours has a podcast and I know who edits it and all
listen and like neither the guy doing the podcast, like I'm the only one who hears the dude
gave a bad take backed up and then gave a clean version and both are in the final product.
And I'm like, could could literally somebody listen to this?
Yeah.
I know a guy who's built a platform called Renty Human, which is supposed to make it
It's so much easier.
API just to hire people to do stuff, which I think it's kind of brilliant, because I do
think that there's like, I would just like, guess, here's 20 bucks. Find somebody reliable
to go do this thing for me who wants to spend the next 45 minutes listening to this thing.
You know, I think there's a lot of, I mean, yeah, what you mentioned the thumbnail thing.
There's an important step to the thumbnails because you can get a robot to make a thumbnail
and it will be objectively and people are going to bristle when I use this word.
it will be objectively a good thumbnail.
How?
However, subjectively, it will look and wreak of that robot's flavor of making things.
So it will, even though it is objectively balanced and good in the color palette and blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah.
At a glance, anybody under the age of 25 is going to say, this is a garbage podcast that
I should not watch because they clearly don't put thought into their thumbnails.
And so what you need is a human who is aware of the meta to say.
don't make it look like that. So it's like there's always an extra step that whenever I have a robot
generated thing, I'm like, great, analyze the output. What are all the tells that this is a robot
thing? Because robots like certain flavors more than others. And it's great. Now be the antithesis
of those. And even the current weird things set up that we're that we have around us right now,
is like a third model removed from the default lay everything out for me.
So we had a particularly long gap just then it's been a problem like on YouTube. I'll see
a title if it's a really bad video model because we'll have no play. And then like I'll
hear like one like it's the voices are gotten much better like a. I will wait. This is
I've gotten really good, but I'll listen to the copy and I got actually watched well as
a pretty sure it was a human do it. But the copy was written by AI. I could tell because
was just the way it said this matters or this matters and I was kind of like.
I don't mind if you use it, I use it all the time.
But if it's obvious to me that you're using it, you didn't use it well.
Yep.
And again, this is.
Yep. And again, this is, if you're doing anything in the arts, you want to be able to
vet your craftsman all the way down. Like again, I go back to chairs. You can point to
a chair. And if you are at the fanciest dinner, that chair better be handcrafted by somebody
who's done it for so many generations. And even though objectively, it's a more durable,
more reliable, better design, more comfortable chair, from Ikea, buh.
But that Ikea chair was mass-produced and mass-market it and and and.
Yeah, yeah, I think that, you know, again, we're all learning how to use these tools and how to improve and we saw that a lot to clip our stuff like that or it's just.
And that's been the weird part, too.
I think I think they have graphic design now that are like.
And I think you and I, more than most Andrew, have had a tour of the inner guts of a lot
of, you know, Hollywood stuff or production stuff.
We
know that everything was all so many things were always cookie-cord cutter or we hear that's
an APM music library thing or whatever. So as a result to our eyes, it's like, oh, these
robot tools, they just allow more customization. So they're actually more human, but to a lot
of people they've they seem less because they know how the trick is done.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
I gotta tell you, anybody has into building stuff, connecting your bamboo printer to Codex.
Kind of awesome and amazing.
That's your pick.
Yeah.
Because they have bamboo printers.
Go ahead.
Oh, this won't become a monorogue episode.
I don't think anytime soon, but I did some tinkering.
Are you familiar with talkie tapes?
Why is that something familiar?
They are.
They were strips of kind of cellophane-like tape that had grooves like a record player
on there.
And if you ran your finger down along them, it would talk.
It would be like, oh, yeah.
I remember once being out of plastic.
Like, yeah, yeah?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so I was tinkering and I was trying to see if I could make one on the bamboo printer.
And the property, the first problem is that there's not a lot of fidelity.
I only had...
like a.04 millimeter nozzle instead of a.02 or whatever. And then there's also not a lot of
space because, you know, with only, I don't know, less than a square foot. Yeah, I had to make
it a spiral. And I couldn't quite get the fidelity. But if you have a bigger printer,
I got it to make a digital ones and zeros version of a sample.
And then we tallied out how long would the strip have to be in order?
in order for you to get the correct, you know, number of hurts for, like, you have to go
a meter per second along. It was, anyway, that's a half-baked, modern, real guy idea that
I wasn't able to make in time. But that was exactly the kind of thing that you were talking
about.
Yeah. Yeah. I remember, yeah, I remember I playing with one of those recent, a lot
a couple years ago, somebody brought one to an event. Yeah, I was just thinking of like,
Yeah, I mean, you're, you can.
substitute, you know, speed for fidelity, if you try just doing it sideways as a spiral.
That's, well, that's what I did. I printed it out and then I picked it up and it broke apart.
It was like, there's just not enough surface area and there's no way to link them
on there. I just need a bigger bed and a more precise nozzle than I currently have.
This spiral wouldn't work like like like sideways, putting it sideways.
that it didn't have the fidelity. I mean, I was able to sink an afternoon into it. And
then at that point, it was clear I wasn't going to get an episode by the end of the day.
I love this stuff, though. Like I was thinking about like, uh, there's the uh, you got what's
the name? And like a Nikow TV, whatever, like where you basically it's the slit. Oh, yeah,
yeah, yeah.
You can make one where you have like a, you have a dance with a couple dots going.
and kind of a pattern out of there.
And you have a light flashes behind it.
And as it strikes, it'll flash for each point.
And you can actually make a mechanical TV.
And I just think about that, Mike, man,
there's a lot of fun stuff that you just, you know,
excited about playing with.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, bamboo printers.
They're just a few hundred dollars.
They're really high quality printer.
Three printers have gotten much better.
I just got a laser cutter for 300 bucks,
that I'm about to try.
Laser cutter, 10 watt laser cutter.
Yeah, you know.
What you're living right now is one of my favorite moments over the thousand episode
history of Weird Things is when we were talking about all of the infrastructure that is
currently stupid and largely dormant is suddenly useful because like I read about old printers.
Dot matrix printers that were for an Apple 2E that somebody writes custom firmware using
vibe coding and makes a live again.
So, every time I put in my AirPods, connects to my Mac, right?
But I don't wanna use the microphone on my AirPods
because I wanna use my Elgato Microphone on my Mac.
Go into the dot, and I'm like, hey, is there a utility
or tool to solve this?
Is, oh yeah, if this company has this $50 tool,
they have a chart, I'm, like, eh, can you build it?
Sure. 10 minutes later, running into my taskbar utility.
I'm like, on the part of my answer, he's like, I should...
share this. I'm going to maintain it. But like we'll build the thing, the ones in there automatically
make sure that it keeps the right microphone. Like holy cow. Like that was faster than it would have
taken me to probably go through the checkout procedure on some websites. Yeah. Well, and it's
out procedure on some websites.
Yeah.
Well, and it's that habit that we've deliberately talked through our cognitive rewiring.
It's that have it of constantly asking, but what do you really want, right?
Where it's like, oh, I need a doodead.
Yeah, but why?
Well, because it won't turn on the thing.
It's like well, why do you want it to turn on?
The thing is like because the signal won't go.
Well, why does the signal have to go?
And then you get in the weird parts and you're like, well, because otherwise they won't
know that it sounds like this.
So the real problem
is you need them to know that it sounds like this.
And it's like, yeah, you're sure that's the end?
It's like well, no, they really don't need to know
that it sound like this if what they do is get me there.
Oh, so all of this is because you want this.
How about we just skip to that?
And it was like, oh, wait, we could do that.
Yeah.
We could build the future if we try.
Well, hey, I got a dinner date because guess what?
robots can't replace good friends. And, uh, and so I'm gonna have to run, but do you
got a, you got any picks? Yeah, a bamboo printer. If you look for a printer, get a bamboo
printer. Uh, I'll, all double down on your bamboo printer printer thing. The A1 mini,
I got last Christmas, and it's really grown on me. It's been very frustrating at times,
but it's, really growing on me now that it's all working and I understand it better.
Oh, but now with code X and wife.
I you can just run it and you can also tell like surprise me. Yeah. Oh, my problem is quite literally
clogs and learning things mechanically and set up. But I got to pick that you might have already
read. I used it to help with the clog, by the way, I had the same issue. I had a problem where
something wasn't working. Then I just pulled on my phone and chat GPT, like, talked me through it,
explained it sold it. That's great. Yeah. So five years ago, we lost...
lost, nor Mcdonald, one of the greatest forces in comedy.
Did you ever happen to read his book based on a true story?
No.
Let me make sure I'm getting that title right.
It is, it's tall tales, like, he,
it's semi-autobiographical, let's see.
Yeah, based on the true story, but, but it's clearly written with ridiculous over-the-top
Shaggy Dog Stories and stuff.
And boy oh boy, is it great just to hear Norm McDonald narrate it? His voice from the beyond
because he adopts this kind of folksy vaguely agrarian persona. And, and, and you know, he talks
about, there comes a time in a man's life and, you know and it's like, I always thought this
and he talks about death or whatever, which all rings a little bit different now that he's on
the other side of it. But if you would like Norm McDonald to personally come into your brain
You
and make himself cozy for about six hours. Boy, are you going to love based on a true
story?
He's so good. There's, we're getting a documentary about him by Judd Appetale, which
hopefully it'll be good, you know, be interesting. I like the, I like that. I think Judd
Appetal does. I liked the, the Gary Shanling one. I would say that Gary Shanley, Mel Brooks,
very much politically in the same mind space as jet aptiles.
Ha! Got it! got it!
We'll see, you know, we'll see whether or not his appreciation is honorotic for all
of my favorite norm norm McDonald quotes.
That sounds like a bunch of commie gobbling cook.
Yes.
Love it.
I love that clip of where he's on the show with Adam and he says he's starting to go to
the doctor and the doctor says you know you've got heart disease.
You know, you got a yeah, the exercise worked out whatever like you're going to die because
that's not funny.
And he goes, he's a doctor, not a comedian.
Ha ha!
All right, we'll see you guys.
It's been after it's been
after got it awesome awesome.
All right here.