This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI AM six forty the Gary and Shannon Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Monday, February third, twenty twenty five, there was.
A we'll get into the tariff thing here in just a second. There was a story that I saw earlier that lawyers for Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were in court today. For the love my wife was reading through a bunch of that stuff over the weekend with I mean, she had more fun reading that with like a box of popcorn. Really, she said it was.
I look forward to her just giving me the cliff notes because I am with you, like I'm with you when you're oversaturated with Taylor Swift. I am oversaturated with Blake Lively Justin Baldoni news.
Here's a I guess there's more protesters in downtown LA. There's like sevens there's seven or eight people. There's a Jeffrey Epstein angle to this, Oh, Blake Lively Justin Maldoni thing. Apparently, Sigrid McAuley, best known for representing Jeffrey Epstein's victims, is one of the lawyers that has gotten involved.
With this that's a name that just to me shouts from the rooftops.
Which one Jeffrey Epstein or Sigrid McCauley.
Sigrid Sigfredigrid Sigrid McCauley screams like East Coast prep school? Maybe people a dungeon, what robes? All sorts of nefarious things, skull and skull and bones, society of things. Also, schools are closed and emergency crews have been deployed on Santorini, the Greek island of Santorini. There's a spike in seismic activity and they are concerned about a potentially powerful earthquake there. Precautions also ordered on several nearby islands in the GNC
all very popular summer vacation destinations. They said more than two hundred undersea earthquakes have been recorded in the area over just the last three days.
Sigrid mcaulay is a female. Interesting You didn't think Sigrid sounded female? No like a female name. No, all right, it's time for swamp water. I'm a politician, which means I'm a cheat and a liar. And when I'm not kissing babies, I'm stealing that lollipops yeah, we.
Got the real problem is that our leaders are done.
The other side never quits. So what I'm not going anywhere?
So that now you.
Drain the squaw, I can imagine what can be and be unburdened by what has been. You know, Americans have always been going.
They're not stupid.
A political plunder is when a politician actually tells the truth. Have the people voted for you were not swamp watch
They're all counternoying the tariff thing. President Trump has said that the terrorists would go into effect midnight, DC time, one minute after midnight, and as of right now, the twenty five percent tariff on goods from Mexico is on pause because he and the president of Mexico have agreed to some of the conditions, including Mexico sending about ten thousand National Guard soldiers to the border to try to prevent the crossing a fentanyl and people and things like that.
But this doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet. In terms of what could be a trade war, Senator Chuck Schumer had said, this is a bad idea.
We're now in a trade war with Mexico and Canada. Hi for the American people, it'll now be a war between prices and their paychecks. That is the last thing we need. So if you think that this is good, if someone tries to convince you President Trump or anyone else that this is good for the American family, I have a bridge in Brooklyn.
I can tell you. Was this a bluff all along?
Was there ever going to be Is there ever going to be a shutdown on trade or the twenty five percent tariffs on Mexico? Or was this all just for show? And the two sides wanted to a peer that they were stricter than they were and this was always going to happen.
And I don't think it was a bluff because a bluff would indicate that he never intended to that. Trump never intended to put the terris in place. And I think he fully intends to put them in place, because this was.
The reason I bring that up. This was a common conversation among investors on Wall Street. Is he bluffing right? Because it was going to be a big swing with everyone's money, Whether it was a bluff or not.
I yeah, I don't think it's a bluff because but it is a negotiating tactic, and this is what he does. That's exactly this is his game plan. He's done this forever. He's the guy who wrote or the deal. I mean this is he knows what this is and he knows what he's doing. Do I think it's a great idea?
No?
I hate the idea that we've been struggling through inflation and all this is going to do is add more inflation if in fact they go into effect. But I mean, we saw this earlier today in pre market trading. The Dow, for example, was down like six hundred points. It has rebounded significantly, especially since we got word that Mexico has capitulated to a large degree. So the Dow right now is only down fourteen points. It's almost break even and could potentially in the next couple of hours still do
a nice positive run to end the day in positive territory. Now, around the world, things were not so good. All of the European indexes were down about a point. The Asian indexes were down almost three points, so or three percentage points, I should say. So this does have worldwide repercussions. But again, this is what he was planning the whole time. He wanted to force Mexico to the table and they came. Now he's going to try to force Canada to the
table and we shall see what happens. The story out of DC is that he has a phone call at least with with Justin Trudeau coming up at about noon today, so maybe they agree. Maybe Justin TRUDEU sticks by his Disney pants and says, we're going to take this to the We're going to take it to the court, or we're going to take it to the field. We're going to do trying to think of a sports analogy, it ain't working.
Coming up next, we will go to the AI desk Open. AI last week released a tool that can shop for your groceries, book a restaurant for you. Now they can gather information from across the Internet and boil it down into concise reports. Cliff notes AI you no longer have to deploy your team of girlfriends to find out about.
That first date. Elon Musk says us aid is a ball of worms. It's not an apple with worms in it. It's just a ball of worms like Medusa's hair. That's the whole thing. So this Agency for International Development is
being gutted. It is one of the major things that Elon Musk has been doing while exerting his control of the Department of Government Efficiency, joining us talk more about this, Joe Khalil from DC and Joe, let's discuss what kind of things Elon Musk can do as the appointed head of this brand new government agency.
So you hit the exact point of contention, because we have no idea legally what he can or cannot do. Democrats today jumped out on this story there in front of the USAID building, saying it is illegal for Elon Musk or for anyone up to an including President Trump, to just unilaterally shut down of federal government agency like USAID, which has thirty billion dollar budget every single year. But
Elon Musk very clearly wants to shut it down. He's not mincing words he talked about with the ball of worms. I think he tweeted something like thirty six times over the last two or three days about USAID. At one point he said it needs to die. So he's making crystal clear where he stands on that. What is actually happening right now is the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, just in the last two hours said that his department, the State Department, is actually taking over USAID. It's no
longer going to be an independent agency. But the Secretary of State says he's going to have the last word on where money goes. There's a lot of debate about, you know, whether USAID is spending too much money, does it spend money in places where we shouldn't be Democrats today say it's vital to our national security.
To have USAID in place.
So there's a lot of back and forth.
We can imagine this manned up in the courts.
What is USAID for people who are just learning about it? Is this something tied to for extance, for example, our assistance to Ukraine the battle putin?
What is the budget of USAID?
Yeah, so it's the largest agency we have in the US government that gives money to more than one hundred countries all over the world. And the idea in concept and theory is that let's say there's a small democracy somewhere near China and they're going through government, you know, disarray,
there's poverty there. US age dollars might then flow to that country, with the thought being that if that country is actually more stable than it is, you know, in poverty and in disarray, that makes the region more stable, and you know, if there is potentially a conflict with China or Russia or someone else, that that would be an asset where the United States might get some benefit rather than it may be falling into the hands an influence of China and Russia and then working.
Against the United States.
And that concept is actually agreed upon by everybody, accept Elon Musk apparently. But the debate is, you know, is there serious waste? Is there enough money that is going to places potentially that maybe you shouldn't be going And Senator excuse me, Secretary Rubio today made that argument and said, you know, we need to make sure every single dollar that is going out through USAID goes to something that actually benefits American interests in our foreign policy. And he said,
right now that isn't the case. That's a very different thing what Secretary of Rubio is saying than what Elon Musk is saying, which is shut it down.
It's all corrupt. I think he said it was a tool.
Of leftist Marxists again on social media.
So you know where this ends up.
We're not exactly sure, but that is generally what USAID is is meant to do in theory is to you know, it gives aid, it responds to natural disasters and poverty and dysfunction in other countries, with the hope that we get benefit from it in.
The United States.
I heard your slip there.
Don't worry.
I'm still writing Senator Marco Rubio on my checks. Also, what's going on with the Treasury Department. There were reports that the Department of Government Efficiency had to be given or got access to a federal payment system that for the most part, is very locked down. Is that a significant thing that people need to worry about?
You know, it's I guess it's not for me to say whether people should worry about it or not, but it definitely is something that is new and maybe surprising the Treasury Department. You know, if you get a paycheck and you work for the federal government, treasury is basically you know where the pool of money fits. Your paycheck goes from that. So there is a lot of information in there that is public, but there's some of it
that is not. And apparently DOSEE officials have gotten the names and salaries and figures and numbers of the Treasury Department's base. So all people who are who are paid and there was some serious pushback from Treasury officials against that, and apparently the same was sort of the case with USA I D as well. We know that officials and both have been we've heard from our sources, dismissed, largely due to the influence.
Of Elon Musk.
So, you know, it does appear like if people are putting up opposition to this government's demands, that they are being dismissed. That doesn't mean that they again won't have you know, won't have their day in court to try to you know, address that. But yeah, those types of things are happening, and two big examples today.
It seems like this is going to play out and a lot of different departments as Elon Musk gets his hands into things.
Joe Khalil, Washington correspondent for News Nation, Thanks for you time.
Of course, happy to be with you.
Absolutely good stuff. We at the bottom of the hour are going to the next segment talk a little bit more about UH, talk more about the the world of AI. For a couple of reasons. They have one of them chat GPT. I think it is is our open source has unveiled a new research tool right it uses AI.
I mean isn't that Google? I mean, don't we get the bullet points? Don't we get the concise thing when we type into something in the search box on Google that's driven by AI.
Well, we'll talk about that also, the potential for using AI for very personal things like actually writing an obituary.
I'm going to have a I write you a birthday card in the break, but okay, be a little.
Late, but right, okay, Gary, are we related?
I also have a grandma Esther and grandpa Ben and they passed away a while ago.
Oh this is very odd. Sounds like someone not a secret family.
They from Organ?
Did they live in Organ?
Well? Pacific Charac Abraham Lincoln?
Did no?
Anyways, have a good day.
Look he was a very distinctive person, Abraham Lincoln. He had distinct features. Yeah, didn't you had? Don't you have roots in the Pacific Northwest? Or is that your wife? Just your wife?
Just her? You don't have any Huh? They're all California Central Valley folk. Well that's where they ended up. But yeah, Grandma Astor's family was like Minnesota or Michigan or something like that makes sense from way up there, Yeah, that makes sense. And then Grandpa's.
Ben.
Where does Ben hail from? Ben could be from Oregon, I have to look, he's not. I know that he could be from Bend. They've been in California for a long time. Or you know what, Germany, that's where they came from. In fact, I think Ago the Grandpa Christian came from Germany somewhere at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ah, that's why we don't know much about Ben.
Huh.
Well, I was also three when he died, right, you didn't.
There was never stories about Ben passed down. Remember Old Ben used to eat fava beans out of the can. No, no interesting, So few things we know about bans.
I don't know.
I was thinking about a bean and that was the first bean. And we'll do your Jeopardy question too, always to make his own beer.
I know he did. See that's a fun fact I was looking for about Ben. Okay, well, there you go. We were talking earlier about the potential for you know, danger when kids play outside.
Talk about playing on death trap playground sets. Okay, when it was acceptable and fun. My best friend David Angulo and I were playing and he forgot he was growing, I guess because he didn't deck low enough to avoid the steel half dome on a city bridge playground set. And as I remember, he got four to six stitches on his forehead, which didn't prevent him from serving eight years as an army ranger, then twelve years as an army helicopter pile.
Well, maybe that's why he went into the militaries, because he found out how tough he was. And by the way, that would never happened today. Could you imagine the lawsuit if your kid hit his forehead on the some city ridiculous.
We will address the naked dress scene at the Grammys. You know, it's not the first naked. There's been a lot of ways to do naked. It's kind of like the rule when it comes to it's a rule I can't even bring up. You can't go full naked, all right.
You can.
Allude intimate it, you can allude to it, you can show a little bit here and there, but the full naked it's frowned upon. It's like Britney Spears Instagram posts. She wants to show you her vagina, but she doesn't. She gets right up to the edge there and she wants to jump off that cliff, but she stops short of it, just short of that cliff. Every single day they jumped off the cliff. Last night, Kanye and his girlfriend.
She is pushed. You think so absolutely? You think she had a bit of a how was that a prisoner vibe? Very much?
The whole blinking morse code saved me. Think people think that's sexy. I think some women think that that whole vulnerable save me, I need to be saved thing is what men want by that lunatic by all of I mean, yes, I think they think that's sexy. That look of like help me.
This is why I don't expose you to thinks this little kid voices when they talk exactly, it's like tummy, you know your Jeopardy question. Yeah, I'd love it. Key, Let's watch some video games for two hundred dollars. Let's watch some video games.
Yeah. The Super Mario Brothers movie with this Chris in the title role had a high score at the box office of one point three billion in twenty twenty three.
Chris, do you want to hint? Yes, I am Groot. I think that's right. Oh, okay, did I do a right hint?
Is that right?
Well?
Yes, Groots movie? Yes, it was it was friends with the Groot, right, he was he was friends with Boom. A week ago, open ai has released a tool, had released a tool that could go online to shop for groceries, book a restaurant. Now they're offering something that will gather information from across the Internet and synthesize it in concise reports. Yes, there's something I'm missing here because it seems like that is a Google. But I will say this, I'm not
I'm not certain. I'm gonna have to ask my daughter about this, because this is what she does. She does research. And they're saying open Ai says that deep Research, which is the name of their tool, can do complex research tasks that it might take you somewhere between thirty minutes to thirty days, depending on how specific your research is.
But I think people who do research for a living their delight and the point of their research is to find out things that they were able to find out the research that they were able to compile, to prove a certain point or to get to a certain conclusion. It's part of the side, it's part of the creativity of research.
Is you doing your own what leads you?
You know?
What research have you come up with or have you stumbled across that leads you your own individual thought to think about, well, what about X.
Y or Z, ask the next question.
Exactly so, and that's very individual. It's not everybody researches the same way.
Says It sounds as if this is a good way to summarize other people's research, and then like, I think what you're saying is then develop your next question. What is the next question that you would ask on whatever line of research you're looking at, it's cliff notes.
If you are too young to know what cliff notes were. When you were given a signed reading in school, sometimes it was pretty dry, you know, Sarah Plaine and Tall Nanook of the North. These were things involving things you didn't care about when you were twelve, and all you cared about was pop culture or the boy sitting next
to you. So you wanted a shortcut. So if you had parents that didn't care, they would help you acquire these cliff notes, or you could check them out from the library, which was just kind of a synopsis of the book that would tell you the major plot points
and the different relationships and things like that. And I can compare it to a television show for people this day and age, if you're watching a show and you're fully into it, you're just watching the show, you pick up a lot more than if you're watching the show and scrolling through your phone.
Right.
You may not miss the dialogue, but you may miss a look between the two characters, right, which adds connotation and adds purpose to whatever relationship that is or what have you. You miss a lot in missing the nuances. And I think that that's what you miss when you get the cliff notes of anything, or you don't do your research for everything, or you don't watch the movie, or you.
You know, well, that's actually that will lead into the next segment we're going to talk about about using AI for stuff, for more personal stuff like that. I want to give you an example of how open Ai, the company that put this together, this tool, how they showed
it off to members of Congress. They said they gathered information about Albert Einstein, and he asked Deep Research to put together a detailed report about Einstein for a hypothetical Senate staff member preparing for a congressional hearing where Einstein
would be the nominee for Secretary of Energy. And it says that in addition to providing information about his background, about his personality, it actually generated five questions that a senator could ask Einstein to determine if he was going to be right for the job. So it sounds like it does that other step of maybe it does ask Okay, if you're asking it to research something about, let's just keep it topical the effectiveness of vaccines, just because of
the whole RFK thing. If you ask about the effectiveness of or a specific vaccine and all the studies that have been done about a vaccine polio, for example, could you then prompt it to say, what's the next iteration of this kind of research with today's technology, today's science, et cetera that didn't exist fifty years ago when the polio vaccine was relatively new. What should we do now? What questions should we ask now to advance the science
when it comes to vaccine effectiveness or whatever? And it sounds like it will come up with those kinds of questions, which is good, but it does take away the human l of it, which I think is probably the thing that needs we need to have we should have or at least in conjunction with this, not one or the other you're not gonna You're not gonna you're not gonna tell deep research research vaccine effectiveness and then do with it what you will and kind of you know, come
up with your own studies. This is also one of the things that I think people are not thinking about when it comes to AI. They realize how easy it is, how how quickly tasks can be done that would take you days or weeks. It could take AI very few days or weeks. In fact, just a couple of minutes in some cases. But that rate short sometimes shorts you. I can't that. I can't expand on that. That's perfect. It just came up with that. No, you did, Yeah,
you just made quote. You just you just totally yeah. Did you just look that up? No, I just CHATPT. I just came up with it. Are you cold? Do you want my scarf?
Ter hear?
How much scar I'm a scarf. Look at how good that looks on It's a manly scarf.
It's not you just said scarf. It looks great.
Here.
I'm going to take a picture and then I'll post it on our story at Gary and Shannon so that everybody can see you in your scarf.
No, This is exactly. I have not touched the scarf since you threw it upon my head. So do you want to smile or no? No, you look like you're a terrorist.
Oh I do, well, bat look at you. My eyes were closed. Oh well, you're gonna check it out.
Elon Musk held a live session once last night. You do look like you're in the televan said that he spoke in detail with about us ai D with the President of the United States us A i D. Sorry. The Trump administration has already placed a couple of top security chiefs at the Agency for International Development on leave after they refuse to turn over classified material. This is one of those things. It's about a fifty billion dollar
budget that they're looking at. So salvage crews have also removed a large portion of that American Airlines jet from the Potomac River near Reaga National Airport after that collision last week they killed sixty seven people. Authorities have said that this operation to remove the plane from the river is going to take several days, and then they'll work to remove the Blackhawk helicopter that was also involved in
the crash. The deadliest US air disaster since two thousand and one we're talking about our artificial intelligence and uses thereof. And last week we actually had the question of you know how it is that you use AI in a regular basis. A lot of people said that they use it for simple tasks like responding to emails if they're busy, or coming up with specific answers to questions while they're at work, and you could use it for a lot
of different things. I told you that I used it to try to come up with a good radio script for the holiday radio show that we do every year, and it was awful. They just came back really bad. But people have been saying that they are using AI to come up with things like wedding speeches and even obituaries. The thing that makes me worry about all of this is those are meant to be human moments. Those are meant to be something that you have to sit down
and think about. And you could do the superfluous flowery I don't know portions of a or a service, a funeral service or obituary or something like that, but then you have to clarify it. You have to go back and fine tune the thing. Even if chat GPT does a bang up job they're going to get things wrong.
I mean, you can take inspiration from other people or other wedding speeches that you've heard things like that, obituaries. But the thing what about wedding speeches and obituaries are that those are very personal. Those are personal to whoever you're doing it for. It's personal to your relationship to those people as well. It's just it's I can see why it's getting a lot of pushback and fervor that
it's AI. But we've all taken advice from others. If you have married a couple or you have done an obituary. I know when I've done both of those things. I have reached out to other people who also have relationships with a couple getting married or the person that died, and said, hey, what do you think what would you like included? Or what is one part of his life or their life that think you think should be including. You know, things like that, well, you ask for feedback and input.
There's one of the Associate professor's communications of Michigan State I named David Markowitz said, obviously, generative AI platforms have not lived emotion. They don't experience emotion. I mean it can read the text of somebody describing a motion, but the AI chatbot doesn't know what that is. And he compared it to it's analogous to learning about a culture without experiencing it. You learn about a past culture, whatever a people, but unless you were there, you don't get
to actually experience. You're just learning some of the basic factors.
It goes back to Goodwill hunting and Robin Williams's character talking to Matt Damon's character and he says, sure, you can tell me all about the Sistine Chapel and who painted it and the frescoes, but you can't tell me what it smells like inside of it.
Well, Katie Hoffman is a thirty four year old.
Market That was another nineteen nineties movie reference, as.
He nailed it, But she's used it a couple of times. She used it to draft a text to a friend to tell her that she wouldn't be going to the wedding. There was another one she provided a diplomatic response to a friend who had last minute backed out of her bachelorette party and wanted her money back. Now, those types of questions and potential emotional personal pitfalls that you go into, you have to jump into that. Yeah, that's how you learn as a human being to deal with that awkwardness.
It's kind of like when I invited you to my wedding and you did not RSVP nor really talk about it at all. You just weren't there. And did I ask AI to talk to you about it? No, because that's that's stupid. Instead, I just hang it over your head for thirteen years and bring it up at every chance I get.
Yeah, like that, that's what I mean, dealing with those very personal things. Yeah see, And don't you feel better for it? You didn't rely on some robot to tell me off.
We will talk trending when we come back to Gary and Shannon.
You've been listening to The Gary and Shannon Show. You can always us live on KFI AM six forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio ap