Golden Nuggets #31

Back again. Back again. Using our real voices. No AI voices here. Dude, did you see the Scarlett Johansson stuff? The what, sorry?

The Scarlett Johansson stuff about opening eye, copying her voice. The Sky voice or something? Sounds too similar to her. Yeah, what a bunch of garbage, huh? I know, I thought that was so dumb. Yeah, like... I can't believe you're complaining. Ah, you know... I don't know whether they actually tried to copy your voice, but I feel pretty confident that if somebody just heard that voice out in the wild, they were just, whatever, checking out at a store, and the...

the clerk had that voice i don't think you'd say oh you sound exactly like scarlett johansson i i don't think you'd say that you know it does sound kind of like her but i think the reason people think it sounds exactly like her

Either they're being disingenuous or it's because in their mind, this thing is exactly like her and she voiced her. Like that's the association. If it weren't for that association, just the pure... side-by-side comparison of the quality of the or like the the quality and the essence and the tonality everything of the voice i don't think people would say that sounds exactly like scarlett johansson and in this particular case not to sound

I guess it's kind of a brag. I have an unusually strong ability to identify a voice. like whose voice something is after just hearing it. Like I can be in another room, I can hear someone speaking or I can hear somebody narrating a commercial and I know who it is. I, for some reason I can almost instantly identify who's speaking and I can. identify similarities between voices i don't know why that is i didn't train that it's just some weird thing and so a whole flash card deck for this

Yeah, exactly. I actually have 10,000 voices and I have to randomly identify them. I wonder if that would work, by the way. That's kind of interesting. But anyway. so because i have that sense i kind of trust myself here in a way where i wouldn't trust myself with let's say like identifying similarities between music because i don't know anything about it and yeah i will say i mean i should go back and listen to it again

Now that people are making a scuff about it because I only listened to it that one time at the event. But I just don't, I don't buy that it sounds exactly like her. And it would be pretty stupid. of open AI, I mean, almost amazingly stupid, if they deliberately copied her voice. Not an actress that sounds like her, but her voice. Yeah. Who did they come under pressure from to actually remove the voice? Was it Scarlett Johansson herself? I assume it was her. Oh, I see. Yeah, that's kind of dumb.

By the way, I saw a genuinely funny joke about this on SNL. Do you ever watch that? I've heard of it. That's like some talk show, right? Saturday Night Live. Yeah, it's a hugely popular cultural thing here. Well, it kind of doesn't make sense if you don't know about it. But anyway, it's been on the decline for a while. But I saw a clip the other day. It was a genuinely funny clip. Her husband actually is one of the guys on the show. Colin Jost is his name. He's a comedian.

And one of the jokes he had was somebody else had written on the staff and he was like trying to get through saying it about his own wife. And he said something like. You know, Scarlett Johansson has been in the news because OpenAI copied her voice in the movie Her, which I haven't seen because without that body, what's the point of listening to her? And I thought, man, that's finally like a good joke.

anyway go ahead sorry what were you gonna say that's funny uh i was gonna say it reminded me of like some of those um music uh related uh court cases where people claim that there's like a short melody and a song and then someone else uses it in their song and then there's some they sue them for stealing the melody even though you know

Yeah, it's hard to say that you could claim ownership over a simple melody or something like that. Or like a chord progression or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember there was a famous one with Ed Sheeran. Yeah, I was just going to mention that. Yeah, and he does this really good bit on a show where he shows the chord progression that he was getting sued for, and then he plays like 10 different songs, all popular songs.

that you'd know that all use basically the same core progression and shows how it's ridiculous to sue him for using it. It seems like kind of the same thing. Yeah, it does seem pretty similar to me. And in the same way, like... I don't know anything about music, so I find it hard to really evaluate those things. But what seems to me like should be at the forefront is what do you hear?

What hits your ears? When you listen to this song, does it sound like the same as this other song? That to me seems like it should be the supreme thing. But there's like this kind of technical analysis of the music. And sometimes I've heard it accused like, oh, you stole this person's song. And I listen to both. And I don't hear anything about them that's similar.

They both sound like music. I mean, I don't know what else is the same about them. But I remember Ed Sheeran, he said that if he loses this, he's quitting music. And luckily, he didn't lose. I like his music. But it is one of those things where it's like, if I don't hear it... If it doesn't sound like the same song, how can it be? And also, on top of that, just like you said, this chord progression is in every single pop song in the whole world. How can it be that you're singling me out?

Doesn't make sense. Plus, you probably didn't come up with it. You probably stole it from someone else, the Beatles or whoever. Then there was a guy who tried to... generate tons of different chord melodies and progressions and things and then um basically like i don't know a billion of them and then uh claim that he created all of them so that when everyone

Whenever someone else creates a song that happens to have one of those melodies in them, he can sue them. I saw that happen later. That's like... what do you call that patent trolling but for yeah yeah for melodies that's funny but yeah got you stole my melody got you but yeah i do wonder like um

Because Sam, I saw some people saying online, okay, Sam Altman has made reference to the movie Her a lot and how it'd be great to create an assistant like that. I actually haven't seen the movie, but as I understand it, it's like some dude falls in love with the robot or something. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like a more future, I guess, futuristic, you'd say.

It's just a voice. It's a disembodied voice. There's no body to it. And it's advanced. So it can read all his emails and plan his life and all this. I haven't seen it for years, but that's my memory of it. And she voices. Scarlett Johansson voices the thing and the guy falls in love with it and they actually develop quite a deep relationship and my recollection is that the movie ends with him realizing that it's kind of a vacuous thing to fall in love with a robot.

And he goes out and has a real relationship, you know, even though it's not exactly what he wants. Like you have to compromise with human beings in a way that you wouldn't with the robot and all these things. So anyway, I see. Oh, that sounds interesting. Actually, I need to watch that.

but it feels like it's actually a great movie okay okay it feels like uh well people were criticizing um them i i think i don't know if it's really justified but they were saying like OpenAI is trying to sort of tiptoe its way towards having like a sexy robot assistant so they can do something similar to what the more brazen companies like.

i think maybe character ai or replica or something like that uh those companies that basically uh well the replica one i know because i've seen the subreddit because i couldn't i couldn't believe that people would use this app but when i went to the subreddit and i saw the messages from genuine users i was like oh my god but replica is like a

uh like virtual girlfriend or boyfriend app i assume it's mostly uh doing girlfriends to be honest almost certainly yeah um but yeah it's just basically like almost like chat gpt but they they actually have a virtual avatar and stuff and you can style them the way you want and they will talk to you as if or text you as if they're your girlfriend or whatever um so i thought maybe well i saw people online saying you know maybe um what

open ai is doing by having like a attractive female voice it's like trying to go along that route and apparently there was even some stuff about open ai being more open to like lowering the content filtering so they'd allow more like pornographic content and stuff like that i did see that for the um for the generation of images oh right yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean i you know

I guess they could be doing that. I don't see why. Like, to me, it just seems like focus on making people more productive. You know, that's, I mean, I guess. if you want to get into that side of things but it's just so uninteresting to me relative to like actually doing new things because if you're doing that you're not actually doing anything interesting all you're doing is trying to replace what someone already has with another human being

Or what somebody could have if they just went out and met another human being. Like, is it interesting if you can do that? in terms of an advancement, like if you can make it sound exactly like a human or make it have a long memory so it knows about you in a way a person would. I mean, yeah, those things are kind of interesting, but the context in which you're developing them is so lame.

Because I don't actually gain any new abilities. I'm just stuck here with the same thing I could have already done in the real world. Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean. I mean, it's ridiculous. To me, when I listen to that voice... Like, of course, that voice is a nice sounding voice, the sky voice. And so is Scarlett Johansson's voice. I think that's actually one of the reasons the movie Her works. You have to have a person whose voice is nice to listen to.

Now, do you feel any attraction to this disembodied chat GPT voice? I mean, I guess if you were really thinking about it and you go, what if I met a woman who had that voice? You could say it like that, but I don't feel like, oh, I want to have a relationship with ChatGPT because it has this voice. I mean, that's craziness. Yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah. I mean, right? How do you feel about it? Oh, yeah, I think, well, what do I think? What was I going to say? I had something lined up.

Yeah, I think you're right. It's not interesting what they're doing or if they decided to go down that route. But I could see it being very lucrative, as in it would make a huge amount of money. I think it's probably one of the most popular... or most sought after applications of AI from the consumer side, like just behind things that increase your productivity, like the...

giving people like more social connection or you know faking the sort of social connection through ai uh has got to be just behind productivity increasing things i think right but it's so weird like i mean Look, if you're in a place in your life where you feel like you need that and you're listening, that's fine. I'm not making a judgment on you. I would say probably long term, if you're looking to maximize your mental health.

That's probably not the best choice. That's just my assessment. But if you're in that spot, totally cool. I understand. But to me, it just has zero appeal. It wouldn't bring me any... anything to have a friend who was an AI I mean do you feel differently about it no no I completely agree yeah I think um yeah I remember when this replica thing first came out.

people were saying online how you know this is like an inevitable thing lots of companies going to be trying to do this to create a chatbot that can be like your ai girlfriend or whatever um and that it could be possible in theory to do this in a very tasteful way where the the ai companion is like i don't know trying to increase your mental health or trying to get you to actually go outside or whatever right um but the financial incentives and

I know the competition between different companies will make it so that it will be as exploitative as possible, you know, and will probably make you worse off for having used it, you know. which is a shame yeah it is a shame i mean it's the same way that tiktok and youtube they don't care at all like literally at all as far as i can tell about helping a person get better in their life they just care about keeping you on their platform

Like that's what the whole point is. Yeah. And I just, I have a hard time believing that market forces would produce something that. tries to get you to stop using it i mean maybe at the edge there will be that but i think most people will just indulge in it and say stop trying to correct my life stop stop being paternalistic and just you know help me out

yeah yeah well back to the sort of um you know the thing about like focusing on stuff that's innovative and stuff um so the the speech feature itself is really innovative and kind of changes the game or at least i thought it did when i watched the presentation but i haven't actually found myself using it in my day-to-day usage of chat gpt and i'm wondering if you're the same or if you've been using it more well i don't have access to it still what at least as far as i can tell

I only have the old version where it has the regular voices. It doesn't modulate or anything like that, like the new features they showed up. Oh, I see. Those are the same voices I've had for, I don't know, whatever, six months. So that's one thing. Also, I finally get an alert when I go to ChatGPT. Oh, download the desktop app. So I go to download it. Turns out you have to have a Silicon, Apple Silicon Mac.

in order to use it which I'm currently not on I have a MacBook which is Apple Silicon but my desktop which I primarily use is an iMac Pro which is not Apple Silicon so That's that's a problem. I'm probably going to get a new computer anyway. But as of now, I don't don't have that. So I can't even use the desktop. I can imagine, though, if I were using the desktop app and it did have the more advanced voices and I could just activate the voice with like.

keyboard shortcut. I would probably use that because I wouldn't even have to leave the current screen I was in. I could just hold some button, talk, and then it would answer back to me in voice. I think it's because so many of my queries are about code. And they usually require that I copy and paste a bunch of stuff in there. To me, that's the reason. They haven't released the screen sharing.

part of the desktop app yet oh really okay yeah so i know that that was demoed during the uh presentation they did so i wonder if that will help but i mean still like often the context for the code will take up more than what's on my screen currently. I'll need to paste like, let's say two pages of code into the chat for it to have enough context to answer my question.

So I wonder if that screen recording thing is going to help or if it's still just going to be better to use it through text. Yeah, I do wonder about that. I mean, because I'm in the same boat as you in that a lot of my queries... Maybe most are about code. Not that I don't use it for other things. I just use it for code so much that it still makes up a great percentage. And actually, one comment on that, just as an aside.

Tell me if this is your experience. It seems to have gotten meaningfully better at writing code. Not like a huge leap. But there have been experiences I've had since the release of GPT-4-0. Where on the first try, it gives me the exact output I would have needed. And it just works straight up. Yeah, I'm not sure I've done enough testing to know for sure. whether there's been an improvement. But yeah, it seems pretty good in my usage so far. Yeah, so that's surprising and nice. But anyway, I...

It's hard to say how much the voice thing will be used. I think a lot of people already used it. And this is not something I realized until I saw other people using it, like actually saw it. And a lot of people would use it on their phone and just talk to it. And I think that's because a lot of people, for a reason I don't understand, because I never do this. I mean, intellectually, I understand it, but I never do this. People talk to their phone like they text that way.

Like a lot of older people do this. Even some younger people, like one of my brothers does this, like just talk to the phone instead of typing into it. And so I think for those kinds of people, it was already natural to speak to it, even with the old style voices.

Wait, so have you seen anyone doing anything cool with it? Not personally. Nothing like other than just speaking with it. Okay, okay. How about you? No, not really. I mean, I haven't been looking. I've mostly just been testing it out myself. But I tried to do the Chinese thing with it. And it seemed pretty good. I don't know.

it was good but like one thing that i thought would be interesting to do is like to um like listen to a a show or a podcast in chinese and then um have chat gpt running in the background also taking that as input and then i pause it a specific time and say oh what did they mean here can you like say that in a more simple in more simple language or something like that um

And that was actually really annoying setup because it wouldn't listen to audio playing out of my phone. Like if I have the ChatGPT open on my phone and I have YouTube playing on my phone at the same time, then it wouldn't take that as input for some reason. So then I had to... do this jank setup where i had my uh chat gpt open on my computer and my phone at the same time and then i was like playing audio from the computer into the phone uh to get it to work but yeah it kind of worked

uh so how long could it listen before it is like timed out uh well that's oh yeah that's one of the things i noticed like the um The speech interactions, especially if you're trying to use it to study a foreign language, like you need more time to think.

And sometimes, especially if you just don't have the vocabulary to say something, you're going to stutter and stumble over your words and take longer to actually finish your sentence than a native speaker would. And so I'd often find that it would time out, which would be really annoying.

uh because it like listens to you it listens to you and then it sends your message and then there's like this delay where it's no longer listening to you it allows you to do the interrupt thing uh if you keep speaking but um once it's sent sent your message there's like uh i'd say a two to five second delay before it will take in more input uh and so it ended up being really frustrating where it's like now i have to like hold

um my thumb over that thing to manually control when the messages get sent it feels less like a natural right right but it does take in a lot of input as long as that input is coming in uh continually without any breaks as soon as there's a break it sends it so I think it has like a really long context length like 128k so it can take in a ton of input but yeah that was my experience so far it's definitely like promising but

It's not. Did you get any value out of it? Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because especially when I could, yeah, that listening to like a podcast and then having it either ask me questions or I could ask it questions was kind of cool.

It was different to anything I've tried before with these like AI language learning assistant tools. So I try again. I mean, it seems to me like some of those problems could just be... fix without actually improving the model you could just change the way it interacts a little bit and you could make it better from language learning yeah yeah yeah for sure so that's promising you know i just realized

Well, I don't know if I just realized this. I've never once heard you say even a single word in Mandarin. And I won't make you say anything if you don't want to. For some reason, I just have a hard time imagining it because all I've heard you speak is English with your nice British accent and just the idea of you switching. And here I will resist once again doing an impression of a Chinese man. But just imagining you switching over and doing all the tones and everything, it's just hard to think.

Oh, man. Yeah, well, I won't embarrass myself by doing that. Oh, don't be modest. Don't be modest. James is actually fluent in Mandarin. Don't let him fool you. Far from it. Far from it. Especially nowadays, it's gotten increasingly bad. Yeah, I did Chinese at university and lived there for a bit. So at one point it was quite good, but now it's decaying. And you spoke German as well, right?

No, no, no. My German was way... It was even worse than my Chinese. I could read pretty well. I can still read and understand at a decent level. Especially one book by a guy called... Never mind, I won't go there. Especially one over and over listen, I had to go to the source not enough to read the translation oh man for a while i literally had that book on my shelf like i was gonna read it i literally had it on my shelf i was going to read it

Not in the original German, but I just wanted to understand, like, what was this guy like? By the way, if it wasn't obvious, we're talking about Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. I just thought, okay, I'm going to read that. I bought the book when I was like 15. So I had the book for a long time because I just was curious. But I never read it. I couldn't bring myself to read it for some reason. I just didn't want to.

absorb myself because I had seen some quotes where he says just the worst thing imaginable, as you can guess, like how, for example, Jews are bacteria on the earth that need to be wiped away. This guy's a monster. Anyway, sorry to take it down that path. But it's just funny the idea of having a bunch of Nazi books on your bookshelf. It also had like The Rise of Paul III.

and all these other books and just it's either you're a historian or you're a nazi yeah yeah i've heard um i've heard my account is very long like it's like 600 pages or something like it's the version i had must have been a bridge or something then because ah okay it wasn't it was i mean it was a longer book but it wasn't didn't look that big yeah yeah and i also heard i think um uh every

purchase of Mein Kampf like all of the proceeds go to I don't know some Jewish related charity or something Holocaust survivors thing as well. Yeah, that's good to know. At least I supported them. Yeah, yeah. It's not good to the Hitler estate or whatever. I wonder if you were a Hitler. You must have changed your name by now. I'm pretty sure. I would not live with that name, dude. No way. That's a curse. That's a curse on your life. Yeah.

It's just like if your last name was Dahmer. I mean, that's not even nearly as bad. But if you have Dahmer or any last name of a serial killer, you got to change that name up, buddy. Come on, just let it go. Get a new name.

But it must suck if your last name is fine, and then someone does something bad with your last name. And it's like, now wait, great, you've ruined my last name. Like, I think Weinstein did this. is that his name harvey weinstein weinstein i don't know it's einstein or einstein i can't remember which one it is yeah yeah so

You know, it's like that kind of thing. Or if your last name is Epstein, like I've seen some people with that last name. And it's like now whenever anybody sees your last name, they think of Jeffrey Epstein, even though you have no relation whatsoever to him. It's like a curse. Yeah, yeah. You have to get really unlucky. Yeah, but once you're into adulthood, you can't change your last name just because someone else did something bad with it. It's not my fault. I didn't do it.

Anyway. Have you ever thought about changing your name? Oh, never. I mean, technically, my legal... Actually, I have an anecdote about this. My legal name is Alexander. The name people call me my whole life, ever since I was literally a baby, is Xander. People call me that, even in my family. Or people that know me will call me Xan or something like that.

But nobody ever calls me Alexander. I mean, rarely, except like my mom sometimes, you know, and fucked up. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those kinds of things. So that's my name. But anyway. Sometimes when I call customer service, like the other day I was on the phone with Microsoft trying to identify where some charge is coming from. And they see my name written down because it's on my billing information as Alexander.

And when they ask me what my name is, I say Xander, right? So that's fine. Everybody knows usually that means that my legal name is Alexander and I like to be called Xander. That's my preferred name, right? And a lot of times what people do for a reason that's totally inexplicable to me, because I would never do this, is they start to call me Alex. And that just enrages me because.

That's not my name. That's not my name. That's not written down. That's not my name. That's not what I said to you my name was. You have two options. You can call me Xander or Alexander. Those are the two options for my name. And you chose some mysterious third option of your own volition. And so I just say every time I just say kind of rudely, I prefer Xander. And they're always very apologetic because.

They didn't realize they did anything wrong. So I'll ask you this. Why would you do that? Why would you start calling someone a nickname just on your own? If someone said to me, my name is whatever. Christopher, I would not say, hey, Chris, I would not do that. That's insanity. That's not my right to do that. Yeah, okay. I guess, I don't know. I don't know, dude. Come on! Maybe they've got someone in their personal life who they call Alex or something like that and it slips out. Maybe.

Maybe. It's so annoying to me. It's like, dude, what are you doing here? You have two names for me. Just call me one of those two names. Yeah. Anyway, I understand. I'm not actually mad about it. I know people are just trying their best. You know, I don't know. It will. It's just one of those funny quirks to me where.

People just automatically have some nickname that's associated with some other name. Like, oh, most people who are Alexander call themselves Alex, which is true, I think. But in my case, I don't. I go Xander. So I'm choosing the other part of that word and using that, you know, and I don't know. I just, it's one of those funny things, but. You've made things difficult for us. Now we have to remember a third option.

Because we usually, we hear Alexander and we go, okay, Alex, that's probably a solid chance. He prefers to be called Alex, okay? No. The interesting option. I will actually accept a fourth option because of my heritage. I will accept Sasha, if you want to call me that. Okay, okay. Sasha. But literally nobody ever does. But it's a Russian thing where if your name is Alexander, a lot of people call each other Sasha.

Oh, really? Okay. Interesting. But nobody ever does because technically I'm not Russian per se, although I have some sort of heritage there. But anyway.

Dude, when you said, have you ever thought about changing your name? Do you remember Carl Pilkington? I don't know if anybody's ever listened to these. These podcasts with Carl Pilkington and Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. They're the funniest things. And at one point. But Carl says, when I was a kid, I wanted to be called Brett. Do you remember that? Yeah. Dude, that was so funny to me.

Why? That's insanity. I've laughed at that so much. Wait, was it Brett or was it Bruce? I thought it was Brett. Maybe there was something else about a Bruce. I can't remember what it was. Maybe that was his best friend or something, was Bruce? I don't think so. Okay, I have to actually ask you something about British culture. In some of the podcast episodes, when Carl's talking about his brother...

He'll say something like our kid or something like that. Oh, yeah, yeah. What is that? What does that mean? That phrase? I think that was a northerner thing, but I hadn't heard that before either.

But yeah, I guess it just means... I don't know. I guess that must have been what his parents would have said. Like, our kid. And then he just does it as well. But I would never think of... using it so it must be like a culture like a specific thing where it's like a nickname for a sibling or something i think it's almost like um i don't know if you had this in your family but like the kids call

uh the parents like mum and dad but then your mum will call your dad dad uh it's kind of right yes to to annoy my parents well at first it was just like to be funny i call them by their first names and now i kind of now i kind of do it it just makes me laugh dude i because i i don't know i just

just the idea of it it's just funny to me so but anyway yeah i guess i guess our kid is like yeah i guess you're right it's probably an extension of that and just becomes a nickname but who would actually say our kid like that's such a specific phrase anyway i think it must i'm looking it up now and it seems like it's quite common um oh really it's definitely a northerner thing so it'd be like in the north of england

Are those the scum of England? No. Don't get me into trouble with the northerners. I've actually never really been up there. So you're talking like he's from Manchester. So which areas are encompassed by that? Let's see. Yeah, like Manchester. Where's Liverpool, geographically speaking? I think that's like... in the middle towards the north. Okay. Can you do a Liverpool-Lane accent? I'm so bad at accents, too. Me too, buddy. They should have had a wider range of accents for the chat GPT.

voices that's the true crime i agree i totally agree with that and also in addition i will say all the voices suck except for the sky voice and i'm disappointed by it that's my true feeling i i'm actually sad that the sky voice is gone because that was the best one in my view yeah oh i think last time i talked about um a little experiment that I wanted to do where I'd ask ChatGPT to do a Chinese accent. But no, it completely failed. It didn't work. It refused.

yeah it refused on the grounds of racism and insensitivity yeah it did um it tried to do a trump one but oh really didn't do the voice it didn't like do the

It literally just read it in a deadpan sort of old chat GPT voice style. That's crazy. I mean, it's funny to actually think. about what would happen if they took it to the extreme. Because in the limit, you could actually just copy the voice directly. I mean, with 11 labs, I don't know if people have tried this, but you feed it five minutes of audio and it has a very close facsimile of any voice you want.

So in the limit, if you said do an impression of this person, it could just do their voice like for real. And so is that like less interesting than sounding like you're doing an impression of a person? You know what I mean by that?

like if it was just their voice that's less interesting than like an impression of their voice in somewhere exactly that's a good observation actually like it's part of the reason it's so funny is because you hear them breaking character and it sounds like them but then they're doing this as well right exactly exactly and there's some like other quality to it that's not exactly like the person they're impersonating so yeah oh that's funny

Yeah. But some people, some human beings are extremely good at impressions. And sometimes you can't tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People have got really good at... Doing Trump over the years. Who's that guy? Tom... Oh, Shane Gillis? Shane Gillis, that's it. Yeah, he's great. He's an incredible Trump. Jamie Foxx is surprisingly good at it too. Really?

Yeah, you know who he is? The actor? I've heard of his name. Jamie Foxx. Dude, that guy is so talented. He can sing. He can act. He can do all kinds of stuff. He's a very, very talented guy. His impression on Trump is surprisingly good. Anyway, dude, okay. Years ago, I watched this series on YouTube, and I don't even know if it still exists, called The Impression Guys or something like that.

And it was mainly about these two dudes who were actors. It was like a scripted show, but it was meant to be like almost like an office style documentary of their life. And it was these.

two guys who were impressionists like they were actors but they did impressions and they were extremely good and they would do so many impressions throughout the show and at one point they had I think like a mock alcoholics anonymous thing but for voices so they were trying to stop doing impressions and all these things like it was it was a great show and i was stunned by how good at impressions they were yeah and

One of the guys in my memory kind of looks like Justin Timberlake a little bit, or maybe he does an impression of him. And that's why I think that I don't know. But anyway, I, they were so good at impressions and that was like their whole thing. And I just thought, is there actually a. a market for that like can you actually make money doing impressions and maybe you can like doing a live show or I mean surely you can't narrate as the person because that would just be copying their voice yeah

I think it would have to require like some element of showmanship, you know, some kind of performance would have to be involved or like a comedy routine involved in it as well. It's not enough just to read something in their voice. Exactly. Exactly what you were saying about the showmanship. One of the major aspects that made them so good wasn't just that they could do the voice. They could do the essence of the person.

You know, so many impressions. It's funny. This is actually funny to me. And this observation is not original to me. But so many impressions are impressions of an impression. Like when people do a Michael Caine voice, everybody says the same words. They say, my name is Michael Caine. They say the same thing over and over. And they're actually in that way. They're actually doing an impression.

of an impression and like people do the arnold voice and they go oh get to the chopper they say the same thing every time it's like It's actually an impression of an impression. So everybody you've heard, now you're doing an impression of that rather than an impression of Arnold. Tam, dude, who else can you do? No, don't make fun of me like that, buddy. Don't make fun of me like that. Maybe like a Kermit? I can't do Kermit at all. I'm not even sure I know what he sounds like.

I can't remember. I just know that's like one of the most common impression ones. And the family guy guys. Who else? I guess Trump would be up there. Some of the South. Yeah, I can't. I'm not really an impression guy, but it's just funny to me that. Those two are good examples to me. I wonder if there are others. But you know what I mean. This phenomenon of doing an impression of an impression.

you're not actually trying to replicate the essence of the guy you're just saying the same thing that everybody says when they do that voice yeah yeah it's kind of like they say that thing a couple times And that kind of becomes a meme. And then everyone copies the meme over and over and over. Right. Yeah. Or like people...

people do like Boston accents and they say the same phrases. Those kinds of things. Or they'll do like New York accents and they'll go, hey, or stuff like that. It's like, dude, what are you doing? That's not an impression. That's just a word.

oh man anyway yeah it's i forget how we got into that topic but that show with those guys was Good. I wonder if it's still on YouTube. Yeah, I'll definitely check it out. I've got it in a save the tab. Fantastic. See, that's why we need that AI Jamie, dude. It would give us both a to-do list. Go look this up. Go look that up. Yeah.

We could play a little bit of it on the show. Yeah, that would be great, dude. We need to build that. I bet someone's already done it. Surely someone's already tried this. Well, I know somebody's built like an AI summarizer for meetings because I was involved in a meeting where that happened just last week or something like that. And it was actually...

It was pretty cool. At the end, I got a summary that was AI generated, and it was pretty accurate to what we were supposed to do next, each of us, and what we spoke about. I mean, it was pretty cool, actually. It kind of pisses me off when people use those. I've got to be honest. Yeah, I can see why. The reason I don't like it is because I don't like the idea of being recorded. It feels somehow...

Like, you're ruining it. Like, obviously, we're not going to say anything untoward or odd. But it's like, dude, now I feel like almost violated. You're recording me. Like, I didn't say, let's record this. Like...

I just don't like that. And it's becoming more and more normalized as well. I think the reason I don't like it is just makes it seem like... you can't be asked to listen to the conversation or something like that right that's not true it's just uh the ai thing is just helping but i don't know it's similar to people who

uh like we talked about it before like they're your friend and um they could easily just reply to your message but instead they get the ai to write it for them right it's just like why are you doing this dude why are you sending me this freaking like Jargon filled, very corporate sounding message when you could just write like a basic text to me. Exactly, dude. It's like, what are you doing? This clearly was written by an AI.

oh I ate that dude it's so weird to me that's happened to me a couple of times where I go what is going on like how hard is it to just say like hey man here's this for you instead you have to be like hello i hope this email finds you well which by the way is the dumbest thing to put in an email it's the dumbest thing stop putting that i'm serious stop putting that in your emails it's so stupid or especially

especially if you say, by the way, I'm not saying you are stupid if you do that. I'm saying it's stupid to do that. Just because I know some people that do that and I'm not trying to personally insult them. I'm just saying it's stupid to do that because like, especially when people say,

I trust this email finds you well. Then you're not even saying that you're hoping I'm doing well. You're just saying probably you're okay. Great. Thanks. Thanks. You're making an observation about the probability that I'm doing well. Right. True. Exactly. It's so pointless. It's pointless, dude. Just say, hey, what's up? Here you go. Whatever. The subject line will be one of those.

really obviously generated by chat gpt clickbait sort of headlines where it's like unleashing the power of e-commerce yeah exactly streamlining all kinds of nonsense like that you know what's funny to me like so many scam emails don't seem to have meaningfully improved since the advent of of large language models like yeah there's still a bunch of scam stuff that's as obviously scams as as before like yeah

I got one a couple days ago. Like, oh, your Facebook account, like a business Facebook account, is being shut down for various reasons. You know, click this link to whatever. Talk to us and try to get stopped.

And it was just an obviously fake link and an obviously fake email. Like, why wouldn't you try to do better? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm surprised that the scamming and stuff hasn't... be more widespread with lms maybe i just don't hear about it as much i'm not sure yeah i don't know i i've wondered before whether the reason we think scamming is uncommon is because we're young

The reason I say that is because I've come to learn that most of the people who get caught by these scams, like phone-related scams and stuff, are on the older side. And I don't actually know why that is. It's not like old people are dumb.

and they must just be like less familiar with the technology or so i don't know what it is but i guess that could be why so maybe it's targeted at them but you know what sucks to me is that the phone calls almost all the calls i get are spam like literally i get spam calls every day it's made the phone almost useless to me because most of the calls i get i don't answer them like

Because they're not real calls. They're going to tell me some scam. And they actually got my name recently. So somebody must have sold my information somewhere. And so now they're telling me, oh, we have a vacation for you. Or we have... You know, get a low interest loan from all these kinds of garbage. It's like, dude, leave me alone. But the important thing is, are they addressing you as Xander or Alex?

They say Alexander, which I respect, and it's almost gotten me to join it, to be honest. That level of respect is enough for me to go on your free cruise. Where you're probably going to murder me and sell my organs. Yeah. Which isn't a bad way to go. At least you're saving people's lives. Yeah, yeah. True. You know? Very true. There are worse ways to die. Yeah. I bet you.

You're just going to end up getting ground up and injected into Brian Johnson as some sort of therapy. Dude, if you inject me into Brian Johnson, he would go back 30 years. He would be wicked young. He would get insanely strong, shredded. Oh, man. Can you imagine that? Just injecting a liquefied human being.

He just becomes so sick. Oh, man. Anyway. yeah so i i don't know the i like i say i forget how we got into that topic but uh the voices all suck the remaining voices i was disappointed because i downloaded the mac app on my macbook And that voice was gone. And so I thought, what happened? Because that's the only good voice. Which, by the way, why is it the only good voice? And do you agree with me that that's the only natural sounding voice?

the only i think i can't remember the name of the one that i settled on i didn't think it was the either of the female ones let me see Yeah, I can't bring it up fast enough, but it was one of the guy ones. It didn't sound like a natural human voice. I think maybe that was why I picked it. So you don't want it to sound natural? Not sure what I wanted, really. I don't know. I don't know what the ideal voice is. I was thinking about that, like...

what would I ideally have the voice sound like? I don't sound like your voice. Yeah, I was thinking, what if I had it sound exactly like me? Would I want that? Would that be annoying? I certainly wouldn't want that. Listening to your own voice, it never sounds like you expect. But then I was thinking maybe then it would sound almost like it was part of your internal monologue.

somehow that'd be freaky yeah i don't know that's probably that would make you psychotic like after some time you start hearing your own monologue like just your actual internal monologue as an outside voice. Yeah. I doubt it. I think that's some kind of psychological disorder, but I wonder if it makes it more common. I don't know.

Maybe I think I was wondering if it could help with certain things like ChatGPT is really good at answering coding questions. Say you're bad at doing... algorithm style questions those are ones i really suck at so let's say um you have it answer these questions in your voice would that help you learn that stuff faster

Because it's almost like you're hearing yourself answer these questions. If you know what I mean. I know what you mean. But for some reason, I don't think that it would have any effect. Like, I don't know. I could be wrong. That's an interesting idea. And I wonder if instead of just the voice sounding like you, if the phrasing and everything sounded like you, if it used words and phrases that you would use, maybe that would help.

because it would more naturally slot in that's possible another instance i'm thinking of is like if you it could like in a therapy context or a mental health context like let's say you um I don't know, have some unproductive thoughts about some event that happened to you. Maybe you could hear the AI voice using your voice, talking about it in a different way.

that you wouldn't normally talk about in a much more productive way or positive way or something like that. Maybe that would be useful. Yeah, I bet that would be useful. And I bet in general that the AI would be a good therapist. yeah because it's so patient in a way that no human being ever could be and you know people would probably feel less ashamed to admit things to it or whatever

because it's not a human being, you know? Yeah. So I would bet it'd be pretty good. Plus it reminds me of, in one of the Avengers movies, you know, one of the Marvel movies, Tony Stark, he has an invention. that i was reminded of when you said that he He's on stage at MIT and he's wearing these glasses. And it takes him back to this moment in his life, the last time he ever saw his parents. Because he saw them and then they went off and they got into a car accident and died. And so he kind of...

He relived that moment with very high fidelity. It was like it was really happening, but he just changed what happened. So he just said nice things to them or whatever, like made it so that their final moment was better. And it was like a form of therapy, you know, and so it was just like that. And so I bet, I bet that you could do things like that, that would help people process.

And it's almost like neuro-linguistic programming type of techniques where you're just trying to think about something in a different way or cognitive behavioral therapies. I'm very much like that, obviously. But this is even different than that because you're almost like...

giving your brain a new interpretation of what happened automatically because you're reliving it in a different way but is that healthy to just trick yourself into thinking something else happened i don't know yeah i don't know i don't know to be honest

I don't know, I was thinking about that recently, like I was rereading one of Woz's articles on stress and it was like different strategies to combat stress and things like that. And I think... like for example he's talking about um ways to set up your day in order to control for stress so like he puts the stressful tasks

slot just before his exercise slot because the exercise, doing exercise after your stressful tasks is kind of like a stress valve or whatever. Shit, I forgot where I was going with this. One sec. I believe in you. Wait, what were we talking about before this? We were talking about therapy and using it to recreate moments, stuff like that. Damn it, dude. I completely forgot. Oh, no. Well, I'll just ask you then.

Are you looking that up because you're feeling stressed? I think no. not so much i mean i think now because you forgot you were feeling stressed yeah i think now i feel i feel pretty good um why was i yeah i was i was looking at these articles because uh yeah let's say i felt a little bit stressed or something and then What do you mean, let's say? Are you making that up? I can't really remember why I was looking at the articles. I think...

It's because I was interested in getting back into plan. So all of the plan articles like linked to the stress related articles and things like that. So is this recent? This is maybe like a month or two ago. Okay. And, yeah, he was talking about, like, how... So this is now going off on a completely new tangent because I've forgotten how it connected to what we were talking about before. This is so dumb, dude. It'll come back. It'll come back. Okay.

and uh yeah he's talking about different strategies for dealing with stress and one of them was like um yeah procedural adaptation to stress so like how you actually um adjust your day and um how you arrange your day in order to deal with stress so that's like moving activities and having them in the right order in the right circadian alignment ah i've remembered okay okay i remembered okay and one of the interesting parts of the article was like

For some kinds of stressors, there's not really anything you can do about them. So it's actually rational to avoid them. And one of the terms that WAS uses is rational procrastination. which I always love that term. Um, and I think I loved it so much that I would just abuse it all the time. Like me not doing a certain task would always be a form of rational procrastination. And, uh,

So to tie it back to the Tony Stark thing, when's it rational to do something like restructuring the way you think about something, even though it's not real, if you know what I mean? So doing what Tony Stark does, turning an unpleasant... memory into something pleasant even though that isn't actually what really happened and it's very similar to the like when is an avoidance behavior rational when is it rational to avoid stress

And like the Stoics always say, it's rational to avoid something where you have no control over it. So if it's like you're waiting for your results from an exam.

then it's rational for you to just avoid thinking about that whatsoever because you have literally no control over it you literally just have to wait until you get the results there's nothing you can really do in the in the meantime so therefore and avoid it it makes sense to just avoid the stressor um right and i think maybe i guess for tony stark then it kind of makes sense to just completely avoid it like there's nothing he could do about that past event

And it's going to be really unproductive. He keeps dwelling on it every day and thinking about his parents dying horribly in a car crash or whatever. So maybe it's better for him moving forward to avoid... what actually happened and restructure it into something positive. Right, right. Yeah, I kind of come down on that side of it. It's like, if you can alter your thinking in a way that's more adaptive.

at some level i'm i'm pretty liberal about at least i think i am right now about where you'd want to do that and even to things like self-deception like sometimes it's adaptive to lie to yourself about what's going on. Like, I remember if you watched the Michael Jordan documentary, which is amazing, The Last Dance. I don't know. Have you watched that? I've not. I've been looking for...

documentaries like that, like sports documentaries like that to watch. Someone else suggested the Tom Brady one. Watch that. There's good Tom Brady ones. There's good ones of Kobe and all the rest. But the last dance is if you're looking to just get juiced up about a guy and about life and about and about all kinds of things like that. That's a great documentary. I mean, there's so many great points in it. There's one point where.

the owner of the team he was on, he said, you can literally say that Michael Jordan was as good at his job as anybody has ever been at their job. And you just hear lines like that. And you go, oh my, this guy's amazing. And he obviously is amazing. But anyway, at one point in the documentary, and if you watch it, you'll see this. And I'll probably get some of the details wrong. But he was... They're interviewing all kinds of sports reporters and stuff.

for the documentary and talking about that time because it was like 20 years before the documentary was filmed when the actual events occurred that they're talking about and so one of the reporters says the interviewer for the documentary the director whoever he said has anybody ever told you

the LeBradford Smith story. And he goes, no. So he starts telling it. And he goes, one night after a game, it was a playoff game or something. The Bulls, which is the team Jordan was on, played against some other team. And one of the players there... his name was LeBron, LeBron Smith. And so he had a good game or something and he got a lot of points. And as the game was ending and they beat the bulls, he said to Michael, nice game, Mike.

He just says that to him. And Michael Jordan took this as a personal front. Like he just disrespected me. He was basically insinuating that because he beat me. He was like making fun of me. Like he took it as a personal insult that this guy said, nice game, Mike. And so the next game. Michael Jordan went after LeBradford Smith relentlessly, just wrecked him and went crazy, and they won the game and all this, right? And later on, like 15 years later or something like that,

Somebody asked him because there was rumors that that never happened, that Bradford Smith never actually said anything to him. And. There was rumors about that. So somebody asked Michael, he goes, you know, did that actually happen? Did he actually say that? And he goes, no, I made that up. And, you know, he made that up in his own mind. he didn't make that up to anybody else he made that up to himself i mean think about what that means he made it up

to himself to give himself the juice. Like, oh, you're gonna say to me, nice game, Mike? Let's see what happens now. Let's see what happens now you're gonna say that to me, nice game, Mike. I mean, dude. Dude, that's in his own head. That's craziness. But he gave him the juice. He's just juicing himself up. Dude, isn't that amazing? That's incredible. I love that.

Dude, that's such a great documentary. It's so good. Literally the only – I don't want to spoil it for you, but this is such a good moment. The only point in the whole documentary where they interview him over and over and over, where he actually cries. He actually tears up.

is when he's talking about what people will say about him and what people do say about him. He goes, oh, you know, he was a tyrant. He did this. He did that with his teammates. He made him do this. He made him do that. And he starts saying, I never made them do anything I wouldn't do myself. And he goes, I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win also. And he's saying the reason you're saying that is because that's you and you never won anything.

And he goes, if you don't want to play that way, don't play that way. And he starts crying. Literally, he starts crying from that. That's the only moment. I mean, they talk about his dad dying brutally, getting murdered, everything.

And I think the only moment in the whole documentary where he cries is when he was talking about... how hard he played and how hard he made his teammates play anyway that documentary it just it gives me the juice dude i i love watching it i've definitely got it it's so good it's so good

I love these kinds of sports documentaries. I haven't watched one in so long. And it kind of makes me wish like, cause the stuff we do, you can't clearly win so often or, or like in that way. Like you're very often not. trying to beat anybody you're just trying to do better you know and obviously it's you can get plenty motivated for that but there are some personality styles where you do do better if you're in direct competition with another person

You know? Yeah. You just have to invent some kind of person in your head who's saying that your PRs are trash. Yeah, exactly. My PRs are trash? Trash? Yeah, let's see. Let's see. I've written 50,000 commits this year. How many have you written? None. You're just screaming alone in your room. Can't I go see a psychiatrist?

I've invented all these figures that make fun of me in my head. I bet it actually works. Oh, that's hilarious. But in some way, it made me think, man, if you're too happy... in life you can't get motivated in the same way that you could if you're not really satisfied with how things are going because that's often what gives you the motivation and like

I think it is a negative thing sometimes to just have such a cheery disposition. Yeah, it's like that classic, what's his name, the boxer, Marvin Hagler or something. Oh, yes. Hard to get up for a run at 6 a.m. when you're waking up in silk sheets or something. Right, right. And that's, yeah, it happens every time. I mean, in the Elon Musk biography, he calls it phoning in rich.

He says people just get rich and then they just stop trying hard. Phoning in rich. I'm rich. Sorry. Doesn't matter. Even good old Jeffrey Bezos. He's out there laying on yachts doing nothing. Think a completely lazy guy, juiced up, lifting weights, laying down on a yacht all the time. I'm joking, obviously. Jeff Bezos is the greatest living entrepreneur. I actually believe that.

Dan, you're picking him above Elon? Just in terms of pure entrepreneurship, I believe he is above Elon. I'd definitely say in terms of gains. He's looking pretty juicy. Oh, yeah, baby. Oh, yeah. He's juiced up, huh? Anytime you see an old guy... With huge biceps and bicep veins that don't look like it's just because his whole skin is thin. Because a lot of people have that problem. It's always TRT or sometimes even like steroid level.

anabolic usage yeah I bet Bezos has got the good stuff he's got it baby I don't know why dude more people should get on it it's stupid to me that you wouldn't TRT, the only bad part about it, if you've already had kids and you're in the later stage of your life and everything, is that you have to take it continually until you die. But there's no health risks as far as I can tell, as long as you stay in the normal range.

And you get perfectly good functioning, just like when you were young, except you're old. And now you have more energy, better sleep, better recovery, more vitality, all the best. More muscle mass, better bone density. And there's no health risk. In fact, it makes you healthier. So I don't see why more people don't do it. We should all get our dads on TRT, dude. You sold me, my friend. Get your granddad on TRT. Imagine your granddad gets jacked, dude.

that'd be awesome i'd love that that'd be great anyway all right my friend do you want to call it that there we go a little bit of steroid talk wrap it up Got a lot of variety in this one. Alright. See you next time. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.