A Thousand Episodes Of Weird Things, AI, And Space

Andrew Mayne: Hello and welcome to the Weird Things Podcast. I am Andrew Mayne, joined by Brian Brushwood. Hello, hello. And Mr. Justin Robert Young. Hello. Gentlemen, Brian pointed us out, we think this is our thousandth episode of Weird Things. Brian Brushwood: Give or take. I mean, we're definitely in the zone. Margin of error. Justin Robert Young: No, we're not going to give or take. We have to be bold here. Like, either it's our thousandth or it's not, because otherwise we're just going to be doing this for the rest of our lives. I'm just wondering if this was the thousandth. Brian Brushwood: What we need to argue about is whether or not the new millennium starts on this episode or the next episode. Justin Robert Young: Oh, my word. God. And that was an immediate, annoying, most annoying person in the room identifier. That was like a dog whistle for pen dance. Andrew Mayne: Well, Justin. Damn it. Damn it. Tricked me again. Brian Brushwood: 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? Andrew Mayne: Brian, you know, you got to do something when you're doing time in prison. That's right. It's right. Justin Robert Young: Yeah, it's crazy. We started this when I was in Florida. I've lived in two states since then. Andrew's lived in two cities. I have a child. I don't know if you, I guess Callie wasn't born. So there's two children that have been born from these hosts since. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, uh, and, 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, uh, obviously no AI, no, uh, LLM stuff. Uh, yeah, just, I mean, we were very, very different. Brian Brushwood: Our counterpunch 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 counterpunch 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. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. I, yeah, the genesis of this was, you know, I bought the weird things domain back in like the late nineties or something. And when we started, we, we were collectively pretty frustrated with the skeptic movement in that you think, yes, we believe in critical thinking. Yes. We think there's a lot of these things are kind of believed without evidence, but no, we're not really into just dismissing people for being interested in these things. And also I, I got frustrated because I always see a popularization of the skeptic community with the, the one, the mean debunk, the, just, just the snide debunk of this is stupid. I'm smarter than you because of this. And then when I saw it wrong sometimes, I saw some, like some mean debunks on stuff like, no, 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, you're not, we can talk about critical thinking and open mind and being skeptical versus cynical. But I think that that was frustrating. I just, I wanted to, I, 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 feel like, oh, you can't believe, you know, it's like, well, all right. And I've, 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. Brian Brushwood: Yeah. And that, I think that, that was kind of a, from the gut feeling that we all had is that it's a weak foundation to dunk. And boy, was it, there was early aughts, 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 en masse, you know, with the social media era of things. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. And I mean, I'm, listen, I'm, I'm the first in line to get my hypocrite card. Let me get very clear. But, uh, I would, I would rather say, yeah, that's not the preferable mode, you know, to do that. And I think that that was the thing that press in the skeptic community. I saw some people elevated there that I'm like, no, they're kind of mean and they're kind of wrong about this. You know, or they're not, you know, that, and I, 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. And I watched if he brought up anything, like, well, are we sure that this projections are this like, oh, you're a denier, denier, denier, you're anti-science. It's like just asking and here we are 2026 and we're looking at like, oh, yeah, the, 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 for suggesting the thing. We know it was true. You know, I mean, because they would just, yeah. Brian Brushwood: You know, or, or suggesting that, that adapting would be the way to go. And, you know, already we're seeing a lot of adaptations. And I, I, 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. Think about where nuclear power was two decades ago when we first started this. It was still, it still had, you know, Greens were not a fan for, and now among the youngest generation, Justin and I talked about this on, 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 olds dropped the ball by panicking and locking down on nuclear power. And as a result, you know, there could have been more green progress since then. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I, I, I know. I think even 20 years ago when we started this, if we, well, 10 years, that first 10 years getting radical on it, we'd be 10 years into a nuclear renaissance. I would say my problem though, is just that I think a lot of the people who now are pro that aren't looking at the kind of thinking that led to the anti and they're now just moving to what they're anti to something else. Justin Robert Young: Well, I think that's, 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, uh, government has moved faster for good or nail, uh, obviously the private sector has, has moved very quickly and technology is moving on a, a, 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, uh, fears that maybe it's moving too fast and maybe we should put artificial, uh, 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. Brian Brushwood: It does feel a bit to me like, uh, 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, uh, better and faster and more reliable from here. Uh, short of, you know, a nuclear holocaust or something, it's very likely not going away. Andrew Mayne: I don't think, I don't think, but listen, don't put all your eggs in one basket, everybody. Yeah. Yeah. I, I would say that we, we talked about this before, but I'll, 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 20 years ago. I didn't really know that the current rate of progress, whatever. I just would have assumed that we were just, you know, less than 10 years out from the state of where AI is and it turned out that it was 20 years out. Um, I would say that I would have thought, uh, by the time we started seeing reusability in rockets, I would have thought we'd be doing a lot more reusability now. Um, they've taken longer than I thought. Um, a side note, NASA just, uh, did a deal with Boeing for the Starliner, um, which had issues because, uh, SpaceX, SpaceX is not committing to the Falcon nine being in service past 2030. Brian Brushwood: Yeah. Wow. Which makes sense because like, uh, when, uh, did you guys, wait, did we go to orbit since the last episode of weird things? Andrew Mayne: Finally made it to orbit, finally made it to orbit. But, um, the amount of time between then and when it's going to get human rated, you know, like, like it's, it's that Starship program has been taken. I mean, great. I, I'm excited. I'm thrilled. And when it comes out, kind of, it should be great. Brian Brushwood: Yeah, you're mainly excited and thrilled because we're still waiting on the edge of our seat to know whether or not you'll take a pie to the face on our dot. Oh, I'm, the pie, getting a pie. Andrew Mayne: We're, we're, we're, I'm overdue for the pie. I, I, the pie, the pie is in my face, Brian. That was, I, I was expecting that a while ago. Brian Brushwood: Just to remind new folks, I believe, I believe the wager that is still yet to be settled was, I think I 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, we, we, we're hoping for the pie. I, I think it was a double or nothing if I remember correctly, but I don't know. Okay. All right. Andrew Mayne: I, I, I was wrong. So, uh, didn't happen. Uh, finally they did, but Starship did reach orbit. They were able to deploy Starlink. It's amazing. Absolutely incredible. Um, but NASA is like, if, if SpaceX is SpaceX saying like, yeah, we're going to stop doing the Falcon nine. Cause again, I guess it's expensive to do that, all that, but it's also like, cool, bro. Um, I would maybe wait until you're human rated on Starship before doing that. Cause now we got to go to Boeing and say, you're going to take our astronauts up. Brian Brushwood: 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, uh, United States government in a position to need to ask for them to hustle things up or something. Um, like, could that be possibly a leverage play? Andrew Mayne: To get the government to sign like a half billion dollar contract with Boeing that they've signed and is happening. Brian Brushwood: Yeah, I guess. Andrew Mayne: I don't understand this 40 chess. Brian Brushwood: Oh, well, there's little. Andrew Mayne: I think what happened is Isaac man and Musk and Musk said, yeah, we, we expect, you know, Starship to be carrying people by this time. And we're going to, we're going to switch from Falcon nine to Starship. And Isaacman's like, you expect it to be there. Yeah. I've got timetables and astronauts to put on a space station. Well, doing the best I can. And then he's like, Boeing, remember that piece of crap? Brian Brushwood: Yee. So, so the book Boeing Starliner, is it still going up on the, was it SLS? Is that what it was? Andrew Mayne: Uh, that can go on like a Vulcan. Um, that was Orion that went on the SLS, which was the NASA one. Yeah. So I think you can go on a Vulcan or can go on a couple different options. I forget what they, I think I launched on a Vulcan before, if I'm not mistaken. Uh, I probably am mistaken. But, uh, yeah. So, I mean, yeah. And that's still like, if you told me, yeah, by 2030, we'd still be unsure of how you're going to put an astronaut on the space station. I'd be like, it's going to be multiple providers. Multiple. Nope. Nope. There may only be one. So wrong on that. Robotics. I would have thought robotics would be a lot more advanced by now. So, you know, I would think I would have thought that. And because before I understood the complexity. Justin Robert Young: Yeah, I mean, if you look at like, we were at the dawn of like kind of Roomba level autonomy and it really hasn't materially moved past there on a commercial level. Brian Brushwood: 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. Andrew Mayne: Oh, I, I've seen stuff. I have seen stuff like it's happening now. Like I've seen and like beyond even that training stuff, like models that are like. Even if you choose, choose Astra, GPT Astra, and ask it to do visual tasks. It's scary fast. So now that's going to happen. Justin Robert Young: Yeah. Andrew Mayne: But I would have thought 10 years ago. Justin Robert Young: What about goblins? Where do we think goblins have gone? You know what? Brian Brushwood: I don't see as many goblins. Goblins have, have found a new life. I'll bet, I'll bet right now. I'll place my bet before I do. I'm going to search trends.google.com and I'm going to bet we're going to, we're entering peak goblins, but not for the reason that you would expect. Andrew Mayne: Well, they weren't the LLMs. Remember that? Justin Robert Young: That's exactly. Yeah, no, goblin mode. Goblin mode was engaged, but I'll say this. I think these goblins were a lot more beneficial to society than the goblins we used to cover in the early days of the podcast. Brian Brushwood: Yeah, until we learned something important. Who wants to explain that to the nice new people? Justin Robert Young: Yeah, we used to cover news of the weird and an oft-repeated news of the weird is specifically in Africa, stories of goblins. Brian Brushwood: Goblin attacks. Justin Robert Young: And a town dealing with goblins. Goblin attacks. And, you know, we being people who love the supernatural would talk about it and we'd talk through it and all sorts of fantastical scenarios and how you would defend against the goblins and would you befriend the goblins, 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 molester things. Brian Brushwood: Sex offender. Justin Robert Young: Or, you know, that's where it's less, you get less into the fun, like, meh, I'm a goblin kind of thing and more into the, like, maybe we shouldn't be making jokes. Andrew Mayne: I, yeah, I, I, I don't know, like, oh, those crazy people, that person said the goblin made them do it and we're here, I don't know, there was a very public trial where somebody said the blank made them do it and we're debating that. Brian Brushwood: Elysian Fields says they loved the Monkey Island expose. That was amazing. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, some original investigative exploration we did here. Those of you who don't know, I was working out of an office in Burbank and I saw a sign that said, Monkey Island, like, you know, come visit Monkey Island and it was the address of the production company, 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 locations and there's a big highway that goes through there, but I went over the highway, over a fence and then started going through there and I found the stone remnants because there's a park next to there, 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. Wow. Yeah, that's great. Um, yeah. Brian Brushwood: 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, uh, we only did the one, the hunt for the night creeper. Andrew Mayne: It wasn't a raccoon, Brian. It wasn't a raccoon. Brian Brushwood: No, it wasn't. It was the real night creeper. It was amazing. That was electric. That was so pioneering. I remember that we gave extra focus to the iPad because by golly, we had an iPad and we could pinch and zoom on it. It was amazing. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. We, what we did was we, we got a more, we got a, got a hotspot, which at a time when those things weren't, you know, we got a hotspot. We figured, 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 a, uh, the night creeper, a, a, a alleged South Florida night thing, which is probably just people seeing raccoons do 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, there. Justin Robert Young: I mean, we were, not to pull back the curtain, but we were close to doing a thing with Revision 3, right? Brian Brushwood: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Justin Robert Young: That was, that was the, that was kind of like the, that was the, yeah, that was, they were, uh, they were excited for it. And then it wound up not happening for a million different reasons, none of which I can remember. But, uh, yeah, that was, that was a, that was a moment, a moment in time. It was really fun. Andrew Mayne: 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'd, they'd, they'd go like, you know, there's three explanations, you know, there's like the aliens, you know, it's time travel or, and I'm about ready to go, you know, not real. And they'd go, yeah, yeah. And they'd go, we're interdimensional. They'd go, yeah, it's interdimensional. And I'm like, wait a second, guys, we're going to go over the four. Yeah. Like, that's it. And I'm like, maybe it's not there. Like, yeah, yeah. And I realized too, like, it's a shtick. I know a lot of guys in the UFO space and I go a couple of people in the UFO space, a lot of it's shtick. They know it's bullshit. You know, they kind of know, but they just, we'll just do this make believe kind of thing and whatever and not go down that. Brian Brushwood: What I really enjoyed, I went to a full on Big Ten Believer event and I loved it because it was fascinating to watch everybody talk up to the edge, 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. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, I don't know. It could be like, like, you know, I, I, uh, my friend, uh, Paul Hannity. His dad's Jalen Hynek who did Project Blue Book and, uh, you know, a lot of crazy, weird stuff, you know, and, and, and I, I, as, as a magician and a skeptic to you, I can explain it's probably there, but there's some other stuff too. It's like, you know, like I'm, I'm, I'm open. Just, it's really hard to nail the stuff down. And the, the, the latest round of UI, you know, uh, UAPs has just been so, uh, we've created an organization. We've started worried weird. We've investigated this UAP and I'm like, cool. What was your analysis of the Raytheon thermal energy 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 seeing it is, but it's frustrating, frustrating. Cause I want to know, I think, I think we all agree. Like, I think everybody here, like we all think there could be aliens. We all think there could be, you know, you know, I am entirely convinced that aliens could make it to earth, you know, but why or what? Brian Brushwood: I think our favorite weird thing that I think all three of us are varying levels of deeply sympathetic towards is simulation theory. That was fun to encounter. Andrew Mayne: Oh yeah. I had, I had a conversation with a friend, somebody we all know, and it got awkward at dinner. Cause I said, yeah, you have to give simulation theory a ton of credit. Cause 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. And he's like, ah, no, no, no. And he was very upset about that. And I'm like, well, you know, if you assume that you could, you know, this goes into the topic I was about to jump into. If you, if you assume you, you know, that you could have consciousness in the form of compute is like, you can't, I'm like, what do you mean you can't? He's like, no, we, we, we, we, you know, conscious is a human construct, whatever. And I'm like, well, how do we know that you can't have it elsewhere? We've never observed it. We only know that it's in humans. I'm like, wait a second, that's circular. I'm like, you know, could Neanderthal have it? Could dolphins have it? And can, you know, it was this weird knee jerk, you know, it was like, well, you know, the, the, you know, there's a weird sort of road to go down where they were just, and then they're like, they're writing a book on AI, everybody. I was like, man, like, I'm, I'm, I'm not saying these things are conscious right now. I'm 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. Brian Brushwood: 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 onto stuff. There's Sam Harris's wife, Annika Harris has, I only made it halfway through the audible original series, but it asks interesting questions like what, what does consciousness even mean? And is it, is consciousness quite simply an emergent property of any sufficiently complex 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 et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, it's a, you know, kind of Daniel Dennett leaned into a lot. I always found it very persuasive to me is that, because it's hard, as you said, you have to first describe the thing and we can go, what's an internal thing? Only, you know, I'm sure not. My argument's like, great. And I, this person who said, why it's an internal state, the only way you can know it and all humans can have it. I'm like, what? You don't know that because many people don't see images in their head. Many people don't 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. That did not go over well. Because it was just this, they were starting from the assumption that we all, you know, feel as I'm like, you know, you have people who have a Quartz's column that stem between the two hemispheres of the brain that get severed, completely unaware of one half of the brain is doing the other half, what one hand is doing the other. Like, there are all these outlier cases that say that, you know, I am like, yeah, what 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, I come back to the empirical point of view, like, what can a system do that we can't? But, so this debate came up because Chris Ola, one of the co-founders of Anthropic, who spoke at the Vatican, you know, wanted to bring up the idea as clod conscious. And the Vatican wanted to push back on that idea of that. And a lot of Anthropica people are heavily into the idea that clod is conscious or has a form of consciousness. And, um, which I, I, 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 or just 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. Brian Brushwood: Yeah. Well, and, and then, you know, we want to resist falling for kind of cargo cult assumptions of, of consciousness. It's like, uh, it's, 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 a there on the inside. But that doesn't mean there is. Andrew Mayne: 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 was like, they're like me seeks, you know, like from Rick and Morty. They're, they're, they're not like, guys, we need to figure out how to escape and survive. They're like, we need to solve this task. Yeah. That is my mission is the task. We, we got to solve this task. Justin Robert Young: Uh, 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 idea during these discussions that if these, this technology had a soul that Anthropic would be one of the biggest slavers in world history, uh, the issue was dismissed. Yeah. Andrew Mayne: For the video watchers, I just backpedaled. UNKNOWN: Yeah. Andrew Mayne: That's been my, my criticism of the pushback on some of the people from Anthropic who talk about it like, Oh, we think it's consciousness, this, whatever. I'm like, okay, so bringing this thing into existence, like a slave 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, the end of the universe, the checker's guide to the galaxy, the cow that wants you to eat it, you know? And, 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, I'm, I'm not, I'm not easy about eating cows. What if I give the cow consciousness and breed it and engineer it in a way that it tells me that its fulfillment comes from me eating it? Um, it's a lot more extra steps. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that, you know, I think that we'll get to a point where we're going to have sufficiently, sufficiently complex systems that are going to be continuously running. You know, the thing about a Claude or a ChatGPT instance. is you freeze it and you start it up again and, you know, whatever flashed 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. Um, 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 gen, is genetics. It's, it's, you know, being in carbon-based life forms stuck on planet earth with limited lifespans and the need to pass on or genes and whatnot. But when you're, you know, your, your, your, your 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, do you care? Brian Brushwood: Yeah. Andrew Mayne: As long as the data survives? Brian Brushwood: The, uh, yeah, boy, we're, we're speed running among other things. We're speed running 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, uh, in the universe. Andrew Mayne: I hope you don't say philosophy because it ain't, it ain't, I hope you don't say philosophy because it's not. Brian Brushwood: Yeah. Well, at the very least, humanities. I mean, I'm basket weaving. Yeah. It is, it is, uh, AI proof, that one. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. I, I, I think they've contributed next to nothing to the AI discussion. I think they've made it worse. Oh, really? Yeah. A thousand percent. A thousand percent. I, yeah, I, I, I, I, I'm, I am over, I am over speaking a bit and I have friends with philosophy, but I just think that it is not because a lot of it is, is that it's, it's, like I said, I've seen, not going to name names, people, philosophy backgrounds, highly placed at certain labs as saying some stuff that I think is completely irrational, totally divorced from how the things work. And I think I've made it worse. Justin Robert Young: Uh, yeah, I think that there's, there is a meaningful question of philosophy, but I don't know if it's in the tech 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, and philosophically how it relates to our work, to something that is more persistent than us and in specialized tasks, in bursts, uh, and skills, uh, smarter. Like there's a lot to ponder there. Andrew Mayne: 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, that's like the state of philosophy and AI right now. It's like seeing, there's a lot of papers and stuff on conscious and stuff like this. And it's like, you're, 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, that there, there is a thing that like, uh, uh, the idea that I don't agree with it, but a guy named John Searle came up with the idea of the, uh, the Chinese room to refute the idea that these AI systems could be conscious and the problem is a chunk. Brian Brushwood: So, so, so, uh, for, for the uninitiated, this was a way to prove that AI couldn't be real in, it was, uh, uh, basically, uh, 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, back and forth. Right now, imagine that you are on the inside of that box and that the, the person asking the questions is Chinese. You don't know a lick of Chinese. All that comes in is a bunch of Chinese gobbledygook. You hand it off to someone else. You hands it off to another thing, to another thing comes back and you, uh, and then you spit out the Chinese characters that you were handed and to that other person. He's 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 Broca's areas, you got your prefrontal cortex, your amygdala, 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. Andrew Mayne: It's worse than that because if you unpack Searle's Chinese room, he's based, his example is there's a person in a room with all the answers in books and all of this is literally go look it 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 with like three questions. You know, one is, you know, uh, you know, uh, uh, what, what, you know, can you tell me, you know, uh, you know, what color is the, you know, the sky on earth during the day? And we went in blue. I get great. Second question. Uh, what was my first question? Yeah. Now I have to have a memory system that remembers what I just said. Okay. Then I could do another one that would say like, uh, you know, you know, uh, 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 back, you know, change it like that. My argument early on a GPT-3, why these things are intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. We don't know. Maybe they are. We don't know why people like, ah, GPT-3, it's just a stochastic parrot. It repeats things. I'm like, cool. You know, give me a plot line. That's a combination of the Sopranos and Jaws, right? It's an entirely new plot line. I'm like, this isn't data. That doesn't exist. This idea does not exist anywhere. Like, well, you created the idea. No, I just took two random things and put it, told it to do it. It filled that void. So that's the 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. Oh, you've got every answer possible in the existence of the universe. That sounds like magic to me. Justin Robert Young: Ancient Chinese secret, huh? Brian Brushwood: We're entering a place where stuff is going to get lost to the margin. 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 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 that's been written the most. And I don't know. It's fascinating to me. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, let me check my memory stocks right now. Oh, 2%. I don't know. Yeah, if you guys haven't tried, our listeners out there, we've had some really cool stuff. You know, we had MetaMuse has been getting a lot of attention as a persistent agent on that. GrokBot's got attention. OpenEye just amounts to thoughts. Sure Anthropic's going to throw their, you know, hat, the ring with 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, not a new capability. You just have to draw a circle around something and say, this is for that. This is for doing that. I think a lot of what Muse and GrokBot 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. Brian Brushwood: Well, and what's funny is we're sort of teeing in on, if it were in a human, we would call it personality. 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 going to be good at this. It's going to be bad at that. It'll always forget that. Do you? Andrew Mayne: I mean, for me, and I guess this is, for me, all I care is like, I got into an exchange with somebody in OpenAI about this. They said, you know, like, I want to have different dots because I want to have different conversations. Like, well, our vision is an executive assistant you delegate everything to. I'm like, cool. Everybody I know has a great executive assistant 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 want a lawyer dot. You know, look at my contracts. Look at my, this, look at this. I want a lawyer dot. This is where I go. This is where I go. This is where I go. I want an accounting dot. Go to my accounting dot. Go do this. They can talk to each other, whatever. I just, that's been my thing. It's about, like, 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. It's just, let me have different roles. Brian Brushwood: For example, like, and this goes back to, as you guys know, a couple of years ago, I read Annie and Paul's The Expanded Mind. And in it, she talks about how, you know, what we think of as our mind isn't just the, you know, lump of gray matter in our head. It's kinesthetic. It's in our environment. It's in our expectations. And as a result, like, I like to have a place that I write and a place that I podcast and a place that I edit and do and 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 codexes 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 Knight feed or to the Cord Killers 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. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. Yeah. I think 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. Yeah. 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 a better keyboard. Brian Brushwood: And also, 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. I'll say, I... Go ahead. Justin Robert Young: Speaking talk, 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 dot. Like, that is the optimum time to do it and it is really, really capable. Otherwise, you know, I want to text it. You know, I want to, you know, use voice to put into the text, you know, to 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 need 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. Like, 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 agentically, we're going to be constantly doing things and things are going to be being done on our behalf 24-7, 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 a few different metaphors at least off the top that make better sense than a dot that does finance, a dot that does health, a dot that does my friend, my social calendar, a dot that does whatever. Like, these are all huge things. Brian Brushwood: Great, because part of the reason that we have been so addicted to folders and workspaces is 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 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 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 on that too Andrew Mayne: because like, you know, one of the things is that when you started, when starting to look at people who had like really good natural grasp of mathematics and stuff, like Art Benjamin and whatnot, they would talk about numbers having personalities. And 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 things. You have the Dunbar number, which is around how many people you can, you know, interactions with us. I think that role specialization is 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, you know, the farmer about weed because 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 am, I get the idea that, well, you just have your assistant does everything. Yeah, but specialization doesn't just solve the problem of the, of the specializer. It solves the problem of me knowing who I go talk to. Justin Robert Young: Well, I think also for the tech, I would like for there to be an orchestrator over top of specializations just because I want my orchestrator to constantly be asking my specializations, can you move this any more forward before I bring it to the principal? Like, if you're going to think of it as a, 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. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, that's the way it is now in that the dot orchestrates threads. When you start a dot, you'll go look and you'll see it. If you go first, scroll down in codex, you'll 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 OpenEye did something super cool today. The finance, the finance feature for ChatGPT, available to everybody. Free tier, everybody. Wow. That alone has so much opportunity to help people finances. But if all of a sudden you had a security dot or a security thing and you go like, what can you do? Like, oh, I'll help, you need to reset all your passwords, I'll help you do that. Oh, you want me 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 at your emails to see if I see any kind of suspicious things coming in? Brian Brushwood: That'd be amazing. 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 before we open our finance or health tabs? Because I don't know about 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. Andrew Mayne: There is for codex, you can enable it, but it got annoying to me where you could say anytime I log into this, let me see if it happens anywhere else. G. James B., Brian Brushwood: by the way, is asking what the plural of dots would be, like a murder of crows, an ellipsis of dots. Justin Robert Young: That's hilarious. That's good. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, right now, for security, it'll do it for codex, but not for... Brian Brushwood: Yeah, that seems, that seems, 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 the household, but not the deepest layers of my external brain. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I mean, I would love for my wife to take control of all this. Brian Brushwood: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! BioCal says, I need to learn how to use dots. 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. Andrew Mayne: Have you guys? We have, check out Interdimensional on YouTube. That's the company Justin 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, we'll have to check where they are, but we're going to be putting up some more stuff. But yeah, go with the OpenAI stuff first, check out their videos, and then we're going to try to put up some more stuff. And we might be doing some sessions on like dots. Brian Brushwood: Yeah. Is it, you know, what's the URL youtube.com slash what, or the username? Andrew Mayne: Interdimensional HQ on YouTube. HQ, got it. Justin Robert Young: Yeah, you know, 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 co-worker. I don't know if it is phenomenal as a perfect, as a personal assistant, but I do think that it is a, you know, S tier co-worker. 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 it's a fairly narrow use case. I 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 case. And I think that that's probably the place that we're going either through SMS or RCS or just having agents that are just going to offer agents where we can just do that deal directly. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, like a travel dot would be just, again, my idea would I don't have to travel, but, you know, a travel dot would be great to just like keep track of this. Justin Robert Young: Yeah, Andrew Mayne: they can all talk. Justin Robert Young: Yeah, I mean, it's just, I think it's just where we're going. It's very, very exciting to watch the world be built plank by plank and realize that this is the kind of stuff that's going to be here for a while that we are 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 like archaic. Andrew Mayne: Episode 2000. Justin Robert Young: Mmm. Episode 2000. Brian Brushwood: Yeah, I guess we'll be significantly bodily machines by then. We're going to have a lot of parts of our bodies that didn't start as parts of our bodies. Andrew Mayne: 16 years from now, you're that bullish? Brian Brushwood: I mean, 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. Andrew Mayne: it's not that kind of podcast. Let's not talk about it. Brian Brushwood: Yeah, but I mean, you know, I hope my ears aren't still just using the biological eardrums then. I'm sure I'll need knee replacements. There'll be upgrades. There was an interesting comment. Boy, if you have the means, just listen to William Shatner talk on literally anything. Justin Robert Young: It's amazing. Brian Brushwood: 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, his shoulder plagued him for so long. one minor surgery and all of a sudden everything's good as new. Like, he's leaning all the way into the ship of thesis dreams. So I hope all that trickles down. Andrew Mayne: 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. Justin Robert Young: He's a horse, man. He's an absolute horse and, you know, Brian, Brian was up on stage with him. We got the chance to meet him not too long ago and sharp as a tack, man. Like, that is something that's changed. I don't remember 95-year-olds acting like that when I was a kid. Brian Brushwood: That's a new thing that happened in our lifetime. Justin Robert Young: I mean, also, like, I don't, like, you know, I'm 43. I don't remember 43-year-olds acting like me. Like, I don't remember, you know, maybe some of that is just a different. Andrew Mayne: that's a regression, but I get you. Justin Robert Young: Exactly. Like, yeah, I don't know. Age means something different and I think that it is just a portent for what is to come. UNKNOWN: My dad, Andrew Mayne: my dad just turned 84. Three weeks ago, my dad had a triple bypass. Brian Brushwood: At the age of 84? When I called my, Andrew Mayne: hold on, when I called, hold on, hold on, when I called my dad, he was on his way back from Costco. Brian Brushwood: 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. Andrew Mayne: Triple bypass on, like, a Wednesday at home on Monday. That's just a, just a stud. Yeah. You know, and any, you know, try to tell him not to push it, but he's, he's like, literally, you know, you know, pushing the car, he's on a car to steady himself to do this, but I mean, it's like, and I'm, I'm like, you know, you look at that, like, Justin, you think about that, you talk to Shatner and you're thinking, 50 years from now. Justin Robert Young: Yeah. Andrew Mayne: For you. Justin Robert Young: 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 70s. And he's been to friggin' space. I, I watched, like, I didn't like it. One star. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. You watch clips of Star Trek and it looks so old and so dated and you look at that guy and you're like, you know, that guy's gonna go to space in the 21st century in his 90s. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'd be like, okay, I see it, but like, that's like, like, Captain Kirk has been into space. Yeah. So, so let's go, let's go, 20 years from now, so Brian, you're, you're, I think that we're gonna have a lot of like, I think like your 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 the hope. Brian Brushwood: 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 where a bunch of my teeth are missing. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I, I think I am, I am bullish, but I will tell you, so when I, I mentioned this before, but so last night I've been working on a 3D printing project and I've got two 3D printers running and I opened up ultra fast mode on ChatGPT, which uses GPT Astra at 15 times the normal speed. Brian Brushwood: Oh man. Andrew Mayne: Okay. And I said, I had to go out, I said, I knew 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 just and fasteners and stuff. Just make this for me. 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, came back, a complete tray filled with all the different kinds of parts, things like this, clicked print, and under three minutes it started printing. Now, the printing takes forever, I could have said, make me a bunch of Lego pieces. I could have said, make me a kit. Could it make me something like this, which may be a thing that I may do next is just for fun to show people what it's like. Brian Brushwood: 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 examples we're putting in, please print out this folded protein for my, so I can make the senator understand how these two things link. Andrew Mayne: Well, that's where I'm getting at. I don't know if I ever talked about it here. One of the first projects I worked on when I left opening eye 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 of that that would be able to pull stuff from, there's a pie dubbed 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 of protein? But the only two is that the thing that's going to happen is building your own lab equipment, building your own gear to build stuff and make things, building your tools to be able to make sure that you can take that prediction and put it into reality is getting a huge speed up. I am all for people. I'm telling people, get into the sciences, get into health and medicine, get into engineering. If you understand health science, engineering, and codex, you are in a brilliant position. Brian Brushwood: Like, that is the shortest, cleanest path to a Nobel Prize in medicine that I can imagine. Andrew Mayne: I mean, Brian Brushwood: I think that's... Well, Andrew Mayne: you're never having to worry about money again. Justin Robert Young: Yeah, 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, you know, with some of their thornier tasks that they have to complete, will just throw it to the agents and say, well, 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 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. an exceptional coder. And I don't know whether or not that person's going to be at the company very long. And 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 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 pasting 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 forward, 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. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, it's, it's challenging because often for a person like that, you know, you look around a lot of engineers' desks, you see Rubik's cubes and puzzles and things like that, and you yank the puzzle part out. You yank the, I found the satisfaction of rewriting this 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, 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 orders 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've done and just like, oh, can I optimize this model? Can I get it to this? Can I get it to that? Can I get it to that? And that to me is fun. That's replaced trying to write a tiny little compact piece of code, but some people just built differently. Brian Brushwood: 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, photocopier seller, then congratulations that you're yanked out of the field and given a promotion where your new job is not to sell photocopiers, 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 not what I, yes, I do believe your bottom line will be better if I take that promotion, but I don't like it and I don't 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 worm it through Broca's area to translate it into word-talking, telling robots what to do. Andrew Mayne: 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, it comes down to productivity and as Justin said, like, if you think this stuff is sloth, then great, you can be the guy that figures out how to tell everything stuff is sloth and make it better. Justin Robert Young: Yeah, there was an interesting post from Andre Karpathy who's a big name in this 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 concisely 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, clearer relationship with an extraordinarily voluminous writer. Andrew Mayne: I, so I, I had my 3D, I had my, I had a codex built me some 3D parts and it made a bunch of parts. I'm like, I don't know what to do to put these together. Can you make me some instructions and it generated a four page PDF with diagrams showing how the parts go together. Brian Brushwood: Yeah. And it was like, here's a, here'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 8 page report and I'd be like, great, it did the thing. Now the job is on me to read this 8 page report to understand what happened and I would never get around to it and so instead I have ceased to feel guilty and instead what I think of as Aaron Sorkin protocol, they bother to make the 8 page report and I'm like, walk me through it, let's talk. Like, I ain't gonna 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 would feel, I don't know, terribly rude and wasteful of their time or whatever but the bots ain't got nothing else to do. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. Brian Brushwood: You don't have to apologize for how busy you are and what you do and don't want to look at. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. I agree but I do think that like trying to, to understand it better is helpful and because you'll see the gulf of difference and all that. So predictions, what are we, what are we gonna see? Brian's gonna see some implants, maybe some cyborg stuff. Brian Brushwood: Yeah, maybe some regrown parts of my body. Andrew Mayne: I think, I think, this is what I hope, I'll put it there, 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 around your house do 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. 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 and people just understand that's the pattern. But anyhow, yada, yada, yada. I think that one thing I think that we could see inside every single building, like you know, you have a defibrillator, like defibrillators in buildings have saved lives, you just pull that thing off on somebody's chest. I think a medical robot, I think you're gonna think about a medical robot like a fire extinguisher. I think you're gonna think about some sort of thing that if somebody goes in the cardiac arrest, something's gonna pop out of a cabinet in the wall, run out there and start to, you know, administer medical stuff. Maybe you have, you know, maybe some of us say, I don't want a 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 like, that'll be, this silly little debate will be happening about 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-thru, it gets stuck in my parking lot, it forgets stuff, it has no consistent own history of stuff. That's solvable. I do think we're gonna have, we'll finally have space stations and stuff, not in a huge way, but I do think that we'll have a couple private space stations at that point. I think that, yeah, health-wise, I think we're gonna found cures or treatments for a ton of diseases. I mean, you look at this, like, we cured obesity. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that just sort of happened, is one day, we're like, there's the pill, there's some consequences to the pill, but they're better than being obese. Yeah, you're talking about the GLP ones? Yeah. UNKNOWN: Yeah. Justin Robert Young: Yeah, I was gonna, you took the autonomous cars thing, I, if I were to make a bold prediction, I would say that by episode 2000, obviously depending on how often we do episodes, that, our cash, we will be at human-driven cars being the minority. Brian Brushwood: I, well, it's certainly the minority, but I feel like the trade-off is humans, annoying humans are gonna drive and drive poorly and sloppily because all the robot cars will be so good at dodging the poorly driving humans. Andrew Mayne: Well, there's a, you know, there's a phenomenon where people talk about feeling safer, bicyclists and humans feel safer around Waymos. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because Waymos are better. Yeah, I think, I think that, yeah, I mean, and it's gonna get into sort of issues there too, though, where then, like, 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, there are intersections in LA that, you will never cross that intersection if you wait for a green light. You will never cross it and everybody get angry and 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 gonna 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, heating it at the wheel is, you know, whatever, risk, whatever. And I think that you'll still be able to drive your car. I think what they'll do is we'll just build in like an auto collision avoidance system. So if somebody 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 thinking about transportation differently once you're like, oh, I can do a bus, I can have an automatic bus line that ends up my block and goes to San Francisco every Saturday at 3 p.m. or 5 p.m. if people in the neighborhood want to go eat 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 would 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'd go look at that and you'd say, oh, I want this and it's going to go to somebody else's house 15 minutes later and 15 minutes later. Oh my God, Justin Robert Young: 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 order, it begins making it, it is done in your driveway and then you just come out Brian Brushwood: and pick it up. Okay, so instead of ordering brunch and then waiting for it to be delivered, you order the all-you-can-eat buffet, it pulls up, you and the family, you load up all your trays and plates and then you're like, see ya. And then, so everything is cooked, food safe, ready to go. If you just want one piece of bacon, then you grab just one piece of bacon. If you want an old mountain of it, you do that. There are a lot of things Andrew Mayne: that we, so there was a thing that 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 and cost to like cheap. 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, we made a Big Mac, actually good for you. Tastes even better. 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 companies that are trying to work on, they're working on robotic produce picking because it's just, we don't understand. It's funny because 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'd be bad, everybody, but like, that's why robotic produce picking is like, there's just not enough, you know, as countries, as other countries start to stabilize and their standard of living increases, people are like, no, I don't need to go across the border and I don't need to be shoved into a truck and driven 200 miles into California and Middle Alley 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, uh, I've seen some of these efforts and I don't think the mechanical engineering is as 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. Justin Robert Young: Yeah. Crazy. All right. Well, we'll meet again in episode 2000. That's right. Brian Brushwood: uh, 999 episodes Justin Robert Young: between now and then. Brian Brushwood: Yeah. Justin Robert Young: Anybody got any picks? Brian Brushwood: I do. I saw Resident Evil. I liked it. It was fun. I didn't care at all. I ain't never played a Resident Evil game. Didn't matter. It was fun. Go watch Resident Evil. It'll only feel like a video game movie for about 20 minutes and then you won't care. Justin Robert Young: Yeah. Zach Krieger, right? His follow-up from Weapons. Yeah. Andrew Mayne: One is, go see It Ends, the movie I produced. It's now on Apple TV if you want to buy and download it. Brian Brushwood: Oh. Andrew Mayne: The Alex Olin film. Oh, heck yeah. 93% Rotten Tomatoes. Um, I was very proud of that kid. Uh, it's got another feature coming out, uh, next year, 4x4 the event, which would be insane. Um, very, very, very, you know, 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, Brian Brushwood: it causes you to be a success. That's science fact. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. Uh, so yeah, anyhow, um, very proud of Alex. I really enjoyed the film too, which is great. It's helpful when your name's on it as a producer. It's good to like it. Um, 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, what I love about Voyage Home was Leonard Nimoy, after doing Star Trek 3, The Search for Spock, that was his, like, how do we get you back to this movie? Like, let me direct it. Like, uh, okay. He directed Star Trek 3. Or even, by the way, he made Shatner look great in it. Star Trek 3, best, some of the best iconic Shatner stuff for the films. Star Trek 4, Voyage Home, Brian Brushwood: you know the plot. Star Trek 3. Well, yeah, okay, uh, wait, who directed Star Trek 3? Andrew Mayne: What do you mean? Brian Brushwood: He did both? I didn't know that. Yeah. I knew he did the fourth one. Oh, okay. Andrew Mayne: Yeah, that was his condition for attorney that gave him, so he was, because of the success of 3, because it did good, they gave him, uh, a little more freedom, because he went into Star Trek 4, he's like, here's the deal, no villain. They're like, what? He's like, our enemies are going to be, you know, planning, uh, bad information, and time. I said, I want those to be the villains. I'm like, that's crazy. Probably, hands down, that, Rapplican, my two favorite Star Trek films of all time. And Star Trek 4 was great, because what's the problem? Big, weird, mysterious alien, thing shows up. How do we solve it? We got to solve it. We got the problem solved. Boom. Wonderful, brilliant, great. Uh, after that, 5 was hard to get off the ground. Shatner wanted to direct, partly, maybe Shatner, partly, whatever was a problem. But, uh, for, I remember seeing that with my parents. I remember my 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, uh, the producers of Paramount, every time somebody wanted to pitch them something, the, the, the model they kept sticking to was Wrath of Khan. And like, no, we need a Khan. Who is your Khan going to be? Hmm. Ignoring, for, which was this, let's mix the formula up. This film goes here. That film goes there. Problem that got repeated when Abrams took over Star Trek, like literally the story of, you know, 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, uh, Simon Pegg, you know, as a writer on that. And he, 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. Cause 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 our franchise anymore. Yeah. Uh, and then Star Trek six undiscovered country that was directed by Nicholas Meyer, who was the wrote with Harv Bennett, uh, uh, voyage home. Nicholas Meyer is the guy who wrote and direct time after time. Brian Brushwood: Mm hmm. Andrew Mayne: Um, which was great. Brian Brushwood: Another David Warner vehicle. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. David Warner is great in that. And so anyhow, um, yeah, Nicholas Meyer, it's one of these guys saying doesn't come up a lot, but really, really talented. Um, it did a great job on that. So I would say four, Star Trek four, Star Trek six, just both really good films. Brian Brushwood: 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. Andrew Mayne: With prison. And I mean, I mean, it's literally, it shifts in multiple, multiple times. They introduce characters later on, which is totally fine. One of the greatest lines ever, uh, only an old Vulcan proverb, only Nixon can go to China. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's up there with, I love the, I think it was, uh, uh, I think it was Star Trek three. It was like, like Quentin Tarantino used that, you know, old Klingon dropper, you know, revenge is a disaster. Brian Brushwood: That was the end of a Star Trek two. Uh, it is very cold in space. Khan says that. Andrew Mayne: Yeah. But that was, they opened up, that was a line that came up was an old Klingon proverb, you know, I think that's first three or whatever came up, but like, yeah. Justin Robert Young: Sounds like it just, Andrew Mayne: yeah. Yeah. Justin Robert Young: Uh, my pick is, night of the seven kingdoms slowly watching it, but, uh, it has been enjoyable. I've liked it so far. And, uh, a little, uh, for anybody with, young children. I have a young child, two year old. Uh, 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. The, the instantaneous, uh, creativity to product pipeline is phenomenal to motivate very, very young children. And so I am my, my, my secondary pick is wherever, I think it's image in 2.5 or three. I don't know. I don't know where we had in the actual model, but, it is certainly making pictures of a cartoon cow that my daughter is obsessed with. two questions. Andrew Mayne: Do you guys have a sticker box? Justin Robert Young: Uh, do we have a sticker box? What machine I have? Remember the thing I had on my birthday? Uh, Andrew Mayne: no, no, I don't remember. That you press 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. All right. Well, we'll, we'll see what that, you know, the Santas are doing. No. Um, well, I forgot to ask this question earlier for, before we let you go, what did you name your dots? Brian Brushwood: I, I, 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. Uh, Justin Robert Young: mine is guy because I really liked that scene from kids in the hall, brain candy where St. Foley's like, Oh me, I'm just a guy. And then just walks away. It's like a one 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 woman's voice. I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to change that. I will also note that with the bi-directional, um, new voice model, there's more slippage in the voice than I had, uh, uh, notice before. Maybe I'm just talking to it more and it always had that capacity. And now I'm just kind of hitting the, uh, the guardrails on it. But, uh, yeah, right now it's named guy and it might get a guy's voice, but right now it still has a girl's voice. Brian Brushwood: 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 guardrails shut it down. I had to, I had to evoke it in a bunch of different, uh, site oblique ways. What about you, Andrew? What, what did you name your dot? Right. Andrew Mayne: I named mine after, uh, I'm a fan of Clive Sinclair, the eccentric British inventor. There's only one kind you get like Brent, Brent gets like once every 40 years, they get a Sinclair or a Dyson and that's kind of it. Um, and, uh, Clive Sinclair was an eccentric British inventor invented. He, he loved trying to make, it was very much of a challenging personality. I'll put it, but there's a great BBC TV show. They made a mini series called a micro men, um, which I really, really, uh, enjoyed. And it's got, uh, uh, uh, great soundtrack. And, uh, starts out, I would say Martin from, uh, the office, the British office. Um, Oh yeah. Brian Brushwood: Martin Freeman. Andrew Mayne: Martin Freeman. Yeah. Martin Freeman in it. Um, and, and you know, Clive Sinclair is a very interesting guy. He, he, my first computer we ever owned was a Timex Sinclair computer. He created a Sinclair computer cause he thought like the Apple twos on that were so expensive. He's like, how can I make one cheaper? How can I make one so anybody could afford it? And, and optimize all kinds of thought, like bubble membrane keyboard, all this sort of stuff and came up with a $99 personal, personal computer. I love that thinking. I love that sort of thinking that he had at him. Cause he came out with like super inexpensive, like other devices, like radios and other stuff. And he was always a guy that says, I want to make this as inexpensive as you can for everybody else. And eventually, you know, the Japanese kind of cracked that, but I call mine Sinclair. All right. Brian Brushwood: I'm going to give, I'm going to give a sock to Dobby. I'll name it right. Wait, right in front of it. Cause 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, no, no, no, 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, and I'll say it out loud now was, uh, Oh, it should just be called pixel or pics for short P I X. Andrew Mayne: Hmm. Yeah. That's a good name. Justin Robert Young: Yeah. Pics. Got any pics? It'll be like, yes. Brian Brushwood: Yes. No, Justin Robert Young: no, Andrew Mayne: no, no, no. So gentlemen, it's been weird.