Welcome to Nice Ashes, I'm Nate. And I'm Mike. What are we smoking today, Nate? So I know Mike had this grandiose plan for season three where we would only smoke very budget sticks. But the problem is that I don't like following rules as we've established from our very first meeting with one another. And I last year, a year ago now, I was advertised to and gosh darn it, if the advertisements didn't work. So I ran out and got these limited edition cigars from Alec Bradley.
This is a Shamrock Filthy Hooligan and it's a Tri-Leaf wrapper cigar that looks fantastic. Check the episode image for a picture of it. But these are limited edition and they came out last year, so 2023 around St. Patty's Day. And we're a little bit late now, but we're still going to smoke these this year and talk about them because they've been sitting in our humidor's for a year and we've been looking at them and like, boy, boy, we can't wait.
Right. And I'm assuming that this episode is going to come out just before St. Patty's Day. It'll be just after. Oh, it's just after. Okay. So these cigars will probably still be at your local cigar shop if it's just after. It's a chance, yeah. Yeah. Because I've been looking forward to this. This is tremendous. Incredible shelf appeal. Even the cap, because they have a swirl pattern with a natural green leaf Connecticut and a Maduro and the cap even has the tricoloring into it.
Mine had a green cap, but then it had a Maduro on the edges. It was really nice. Yes. Great shelf appeal. If I saw this at a cigar shop, I don't think anything could stop me from buying it. Assuming that it wasn't like a hundred dollars or something. Like I'm pretty sure I would just impulse buy it. It wasn't a hundred dollars, but hopefully it'll be well worth the money we spent. This is more than we normally spend on sticks for our show.
But like I said, the pictures of these showed up in my email inbox and I was like, holy cow, those look fantastic. And then it said limited edition. And the only other thing that would have gotten me out of the door faster, pre-Kathleen Kennedy days would be limited edition Star Wars, whatever. But now we all know how that goes. So let's light this thing up and then we'll talk about what we're talking about, Mike. Absolutely. All righty. All right. We're lit.
We're going to do first thoughts in just a second. But I wanted to put out an ask for any of you listening to us, if you listen to us, whatever platform you listen to us on, if you have a moment and you're not subscribed, go ahead and subscribe. But if you have an extra moment, if you wanted to write a review for our show on whichever platform it is, you listen to us, that would help us get a little bit more visibility with the algorithms and things like that. If not, no big deal.
Not asking you to make stuff up and say we're the greatest thing ever. Just something truthful would be nice. But yeah, first thoughts, Mike, it's got that acetone flavor that cigars have occasionally. It does. The first couple of puffs. Yeah. And usually that burns off in the first half inch, quarter to half inch maybe. Not an overwhelming start for something with an overwhelming... There are deeper under notes. But it's not an overwhelming start.
There's been some cigars we've smoked and they've been just kind of wow from the first puff. But I'm willing to wait on this one. Let's see what it brings. Yeah. Like I say, this has got to be the nicest looking cigar I've ever seen. It's tremendous, truly. Yes. Yes. Beautiful. So we went as a family down to the art museum. Real quick story before we get into our topic, whatever that may be. Sure, sure.
And we went down to the art museum and we were wandering around and I walked through this gallery and it had a little sign on it that said some images in here might be... You know how they do. Like might be upsetting for some people. And so I walked in and it was this... All of these pictures were painted by a Native American who said that he thought all of his paintings kind of like went with songs and things like that.
And I didn't really bother to read all the plaques, but it was a lot of like Native Americans being like... They were really kind of cartoony paintings. And there were Native Americans and white people and the white people had captions above their heads like, I lied to you and I'll lie to you again. And there was one that had like a white man standing behind a Native American woman whose crotch was bleeding. And it was kind of like all of these things.
And you know, like I get it on one hand, but on the other hand, if you would reverse the roles, right? And they were making fun of anybody else or painting pictures like this about anyone else, any other racial group, it would be flat out blatant racism. You know, and some of this stuff was historical, I'm sure. I don't know. It felt kind of weird, but I guess like art's supposed to challenge you, right? In some ways. Sure. It all depends.
It's very in vogue right now to what I would say be racist against white people and to negate any facts that are not supporting the idea that the white man is responsible for all the evil in the whole world. Yeah. Well, and you've seen those memes online, right? Where people will ask like the AI programs to tell them a joke about white people and it will tell them a joke. And then they say, tell me a joke about black people.
And the AI comes back and says, I'm sorry, that would violate my terms or whatever. Yes. That doesn't surprise me. We're going to talk about that in the episode because- We are. Yeah, we are. So today we're going to talk about AI. It's a hot topic. It will be a hot topic for the rest of our lives. Maybe we'll make a prediction or two. So let's get into it. I am the one that did the research. So we're going to start off with what AI is because there's a lot of confusion.
Yeah, there's a lot of confusion. On AI or current level. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry, Mike. I just, for our listeners who have not had any interaction with AI, I fought kind of embracing AI because I've seen Terminator. But our show utilizes AI in a couple of different ways. Our content is not generated by AI. That's all Mike and myself. But the audio transcripts, if you're a podcast transcript person, that's all generated by AI.
And I've been utilizing a transcript AI tool that will summarize episodes so I can put that in the description and it gives me the keywords, the tags, the hashtags. So we're using it on the show to a limited extent, right? We're not using it to generate content. We're not doing any of that. It's just basically a nice way to summarize or to convert our audio to text that we can summarize and things.
So I just wanted to kind of like level set because some people think AI and they're thinking, you know, oh, they made a whole movie with AI or they made all these fake images with AI or they did all this crazy stuff. They're rewriting books with AI. And it's like, well, you can also use it for just a tool like a computer before that, the typewriter and then the calligraphy pen and slate and stone or whatever. So go ahead, Mike, the modern AI.
All right, so there's confusion about what AI is because they're selling it as like a thinking machine and it is not. What AI programs currently do is they analyze data by finding patterns in the data set they're provided with and the pattern that they find is what would be called like focused by a prompt. So you prompt the AI or the algorithm. You're initiating a query. It uses its data.
Yeah. Yes. Yes. And the thing about intelligent AI is that it can use its previous searches and feedback from those searches to refine future searches. So now we're on like 10 years of this AI that's been corrected and corrected and corrected and corrected by human input. And it's becoming accurate for the first time, like truly accurate. And it's only because it's got so much input. Yeah. And that's the thing, like I would equivalent. That's right. That's the right saying wording.
Equivocate, I think is what you meant. That's all right. Equivocate. I don't know. I would I guess I would say that like so like chat GPT. Let's just say that I've got that one on my phone. I've used it to kind of like rework some of the sections on my resume to help me write cover letters and things like that, where AI is different than say a Google search, because when Google first came out, learning how to use the search box drastically dictated what success you had with Google.
And the same thing with AI, you have to have a good prompt. But the thing that differentiates AI between like a Google search box is in Google, you would type in, you know, black socks. And then if you wanted to look for black men's socks, you would have to type in black men's socks.
Whereas if you're using AI, you could say show me black socks, and it would say, okay, and then you and then you could just type in say, no, no, I wanted men's socks, and it would show you men's black socks, because it would remember your previous input from before. So it's kind of like, to an extent, to simplify it down. It's like an advanced search box almost, except it can, this is where things get a little dicey.
I'm sure Mike will talk about this a little bit, but it can generate responses that aren't just hyperlinks or product images, right? It can it can generate emails, it can generate, you know, that comes from being able to use previous search queries. So it's not just using yours, it's using everybody's.
So when you ask an AI generator that focuses on images to create an image of Freud based on somebody's style, makes it somebody else's style, it's already done Freud, it's already done the one artist style, it's already done the other artist style. So it can blend it together because it has many years history of having done this before. So the earlier versions were pretty archaic, and he couldn't really do it.
But by being corrected and added to and interacted with, it adds to its own ability to search and to combine. And that's a pretty powerful tool. And it's going to get more powerful. As time goes on, it's only going to get more accurate. So I think about it. Yeah, like we're already experiencing it with all those social media platforms. There's no moderator human being on social media. It's all AI.
They're finding search queries or terms or phrases and doing a meta analysis and then banning people based on that. There's no human being that's involved with it. And they're analyzing like video on YouTube and everything else. So yeah, and I know even like Google is using AI in their search box or integrating that into their search box to be more relevant. Multiple platforms are using AI to generate quick responses to answers or quick responses to questions.
Yeah. So I searched up something about a foot issue and it gave me the answer right there. Like it's most likely this. You can fix it with this. You know, it's pretty handy and that's not a specialized chat box. So the real question, and this is the long term repercussion. Yeah, you didn't go to Dr. AI. You just went to the standard AI box, right? Yeah, I went to the standard AI box. I didn't go to like, not even WebMD, but like, you know what I mean? I didn't use a specific chat box.
So there will be. It would be so easy to program WebMD's AI because all you have to tell it is whatever they ask, tell them they have cancer. Right. So that's a joke because like usually when you search things on Google, WebMD comes up with the worst thing ever. This is like it could be a headache or it could be cancer. Right now, today in 2024, there's been a chat box that's passed the bar exam in California. Right now in 2024, the best chess and Go player on the planet is an AI.
I've done some research and as of today, there is no reason to have a doctor, an accountant, a pharmacist, a data analyst, any sort of secretarial work. None of those people should have jobs today. Like we are capable of creating a chat bot that has all every medical case that's ever existed anywhere that you could download the app on your phone that's provided by your insurance company and it could give you the answer to your question as long as you put accurate data into it.
It's just a matter of you having your own blood pressure cuff and giving it the answers. Right. Like there is really no reason to go to a general practitioner doctor. Yeah. And if you paired it with say an Apple watch or a Fitbit that measure, say your heart rate and other things, like some of those measure your sleep patterns and stuff if you wear them.
So, and with your phone's camera, it could see things quicker, faster and diagnose things with more speed and accuracy than a human could because I know I've been trying to implement some stuff in my professional life and I was told that, and this was just for optical character recognition, but I was told that that has about a 91% accuracy rate and I have to believe like humans inputting data is way, way less than that, 40, 50% maybe.
So I don't see why you like at least the very first line of defense wouldn't be AI. Absolutely. For some of these things like. The progression has been really fast. So I, again, I did some background research in 2015, Google AI had a kerfuffle because it was labeling pictures of black people as gorillas and things like that. Do you remember that happening? I remember that happening. Yes. So I do. And that's like the machine learning algorithm, right? Yeah. And that's incorrect.
Basically, it needed more training. So what they did is it needed that interaction to be told no to so it could learn. So what they did is they just blocked the answer gorilla from ever coming out. It would just say, don't know. You tell me, right? And that's how they fixed it. And now it doesn't do that anymore. So these are dumb computers. So in 2020, the same AI bot would have difficulties telling if it was a dog or a wolf or a cow, depending on the background.
And it would automatically assume that a black hand holding something was a gun, stuff like that. And they got heat for that too. But it did advance. To be fair to, not that I should, but to be fair to Google or to be fair to AI algorithms and programs and things like that, they feed these programs from the internet. And I don't know if any of you have ventured onto the internet lately, but there are large swaths of the internet that are very, very racist and very not politically correct.
And whatever, whatever you like is what you like. But these things are trained on mass data. They have access to the internet. They can look things up themselves or the algorithms can and reference other things. So depending on what they were fed, if some racist person makes a hundred posts and Mike makes one post and they're only shown those two posts, the AI is going to think that all humans post racist things 99 times or 99% of the time, which is not necessarily a true thing.
That's why they need that training. Right. They need the training. And then that is where like the sinister part of this comes in is that you can heavily influence the output of the AI based on two things, which is the data set. So if you remove data from the data set, it'll never come up with new data. It can't generate something new. It can only combine things that already exist.
And then two is if you put in the algorithm that it cannot answer X, it'll never give that answer even if it's correct. So you can block it from saying the true thing if you don't want it to say that that's not serious when it's something like black people's being gorillas, right? Like that's just polite or whatever. But it could come up with something sinister. We could all imagine something sinister depending on who created it.
Especially when you're talking about Dr. Bond, who's like, if they say, prescribe opioids times 1.5, it'll come up with opioids as the answer to your problem one and a half times more than it automatically should. You'll wait the answer to where you want it to be. You can minimize the answer to other things given whatever drug company or insurance company. Yeah. And if you're in Canada, you'd program it to suggest suicide, doctor assisted suicide for what, 70% of the cases or something?
Yeah. I mean, those are, I'm just making a joke at some of the things I've seen it meme wise, but you could, and it could be doctor. It could be something even like, let's take another favorite movie of mine and maybe Mike 's, I don't know if we ever talked about it, but office space where they make a program to shave off fractions of a penny, but he forgot he put the decimal in the wrong place.
So let's imagine you have the accountant bot and it's doing your taxes for you, but you told it to purposely miscalculate. And then suddenly you've got the entire nation is committing tax fraud or something. So it could be any number of things, I suppose. And we're nearly there with accountant bot to do taxes because like last year I did my taxes with a program and all I did was click yes or no, yes or no, yes or no. That's pretty much what AI is. You're doing a yes, no input.
And I haven't done my taxes this year, but I would bet you dollars that I'm going to put in. I have more than just my W2 unfortunately. So I can't use, cause there's a free program. If you only have a W2 that you can literally, it'll just, the AI is free. Anybody that has more than just the W2, you have to buy it for like 40 bucks or whatever the hell it is. But this year I shouldn't have to do any of that. Yes, no shit. I already have all my answers. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure.
So it's, it's, it's going to change the way things are done. I mean, just think about your local pharmacist. They're supposed to check to see what drugs you're on so that you don't get killed by a prescription, but a computer's already doing that. There's no reason for the pharmacist. You should just be able to go to the vending machine, you know, and have it dispensed out. Like they are literally a superfluous person. They're not mixing any drugs for you. It all comes in a bottle.
No, so by and large not. Every once in a while they do. I've seen a mix some things like for our children, like with an ear infection, they mixed, I think it was basically watering it down, you know, to child strength. But I think by and large pharmacists don't do a whole lot of that anymore, at least at the, you know, Walgreens CVS. Right. Or the one inside Walmart or wherever. Which is where I'm going. Like, like my parents, they have all their shit delivered to them.
Like they already have an AI. Hold on, Mike. I'm getting, I'm getting a flood of angry emails from pharmacists and they're calling for the cease and desist thing up. No, I'm just kidding. Oh, we're not trying to defend pharmacists. There are certain jobs like my job could be automated and I would be happy as long as they still paid me. Right.
I mean, that's the big thing is these are going to take jobs, but then people have to still do something because our society evolved to the point where we have to have to have a job and money. And last year, AI bot passed the bar exam in California. So it can probably pass the bar exam everywhere. So why couldn't the AI bot, like you could literally defend yourself if you had the access to the AI lawyer bot or you could sue somebody with AI.
And you're allowed to be on your phone in the courtroom, but it might be a good opportunity for public defenders. Why shouldn't you be allowed to use it? I don't know. I mean, but that's, I think that's part of the problem too, Mike. And I saw this when I was working for the Boy Scouts is the Boy Scouts had just launched an app with the Boy Scout handbook on it on phones, right? You know, phones, tablets, right?
And a lot of the adults were saying, I don't want my kids to be on their phones on a camp out and blah, blah, blah. And I get it. I get it. You don't want people, you know, but I'm saying, look, they could be looking at the digital Boy Scout handbook app, you know, and interacting with that and learning things. They could be watching YouTube videos about first aid or how to build a lean to or whatever. They could be using it for good things. They could be using it for regular teenage things too.
Like I don't know, but that's kind of- We have a societal disconnect between generations. Yeah, we have to be forward thinking about this. Otherwise we're going to be Blade Runner, dude. And I don't want to be Blade Runner society with fucking cyborgs killing people and other cyborgs hunting cyborgs and everybody living in like shanties. You know, we have to be forward thinking and become like the Star Wars, Star Trek society because we're at the verge of that right now. Like I am not joking.
The more I research into it, it's going to affect my job. It's going to affect everybody, everybody's job is going to be affected and it's going to make my job. Yeah. I'm going to be more productive. They can't limit like when they finally eliminate somebody like a plumber or a electrician or a welder, then nobody's going to have a job anymore. You know what I mean? Like that's the last line of defense, so to speak. Yeah. So it's a two prong process, right?
Before this actually ends up putting a lot of people out of work, whatever that means, that sounds like a bad thing. It could be a good thing. We'll finally go back to that society where we're eating grapes and having naked bath orgies and things like in the Roman times. An AI on a computer is limited to that computer, to that screen, to that device, to wherever the internet is. So an AI right now can't come in and rewire my house. It can't come in and fix the leak in the toilet.
So you have to couple that with, you know, robotics or something. Right. Well, the real issue is, you know, or the real benefit is you're going to hire the electrician to come in and fix your shit. They're going to have instantaneous access to every rule that is applicable and they might even be able to have methods available so they can put data in and get out how to do it like instantly.
So it's going to lower my or my, any electrician is going to have to lower their rates because their specialty is going to be worth less money, you know? And that's, we're going to talk about that too, because... I was going to say, I'll make you more efficient, but if you know how to use the tool like you, I'm guessing you being a classically trained electrician versus me not being that.
If I had ElectroBot 2000, let's say, and you had ElectroBot 2000 and you plugged in and said, ElectroBot 2000, I need to wire this, that, and the other thing, you know, with your specific lingo of how you know how to talk, electrician, right? The industry words.
And you would be more efficient with ElectroBot 2000 than I would be because I wouldn't have the right lingo and it would give me answers that I wouldn't understand and it would get me to a point where I'd be like, explain that, but like I'm stupid. And then it would dumb it down for me and I might still be able to do it, but it would still take me longer because I don't have that skillset of generating in my brain the correct prompt for the AI bot.
So I think there's still going to be people interacting, but you know, like I can Google better than most people I know and find things that most people I know can't. So there's, it's definitely a skillset that you learn either by training or by being really bored in college when the internet was kind of newish. So right. Like I had computer classes about how to search on the internet. Like I have lessons about how to use search boxes.
So I also can search things and find them that apparently other people have difficulty with. I've never had an issue finding any information on the internet. I've never had any, any issue either. Yeah, ever. So it's always interesting. So I'm going to do a little data analysis for you here because there's some. Are you about halfway with your stick or no? I am, maybe not halfway. Yeah. I'm, I'm just about there. Let's do that before we do your data analysis.
I think the acetone taste was gone by about half an inch in. Yes. I don't know. I would call this a fairly mellow cigar. I would call it if I had to describe it and we're so, so snooty when we describe it, it's dark and it's creamy and some very, very smooth. Yeah. I was thinking like Woody, like a little Oki or something. Yeah, it's very good. Very good. Very good. Yeah. I like it. It's been consistent.
I haven't noticed any kind of changes outside of that first half inch with the acetone and I've never, I've never smoked anything that's had a natural leaf on it, even in part. So this is pretty, it's exciting for me. I think I've had a natural cigar once like the green leaf cigar, but it's been so long ago that I'm not even sure if I'm remembering it or if it's in my, if I'm imagining it, you know what I mean? Like I'm not certain that I have.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I, and I, correct me if I'm wrong, Mike, and I don't know if you were telling me this or somebody else was telling me this because now that we have a cigar podcast, I find I'm talking about cigar cigars with other people more often, but somebody was telling, telling me that a green leaf cigar like that, you can smoke it like within the first couple of days that it's been rolled or it has to sit for a while or else the wrapper will make you sick.
Yes. You could smoke it right away as it's rolled within the first week and then you have to let it sit in a humid or for about six months before you can smoke it. Yeah. Yeah. Down in Mexico, a lot of the resorts have hand rolled cigars, things like that. I've never gone to one that had, I've never been to a Mexican resort of any kind. Oh, me either. But I've never been to a resort that had a cigar. That might be nice as is season four. We'll see. I'll be honest with you.
I don't think I've ever been to a resort. Yeah, I don't. I went to Steamboat Bay Resort. Okay. I mean, I guess I've been to some resorts, but they've been kind of like, I don't know, I've never been to a resort. I've never been to a resort. I've never been to a resort.
I mean, I guess I've been to some resorts, but they've been kind of like the, yeah, they've kind of been like the Northwoods, like places where they're not the all inclusive Mexican kind of like get drunk and lounge in the pool fests. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. Long story short, as I knew the previous owner of Steamboat Bay, I was friends with their son and we went, I've been there because I knew him.
I didn't stay at Steamboat Bay Resort, which is like a fishing resort, you know, with dinghy boats on Leech Lake. So yeah. I figured it was either fishing or bowling related. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Always is right. Data analysis. Yeah. Yeah. So there's some disagreement and my theory is that they don't want to freak people out. They don't want riots on the street.
So the major publications are saying one thing, but then if you look at the actual people who are involved in AI, they're saying a totally different thing. So according to CBS, a fifth of jobs will be eliminated by 2040 and two thirds will be economically devalued by AI by 2040. That's significant media wise, right? Yeah. That's what the mainstream media is telling us. But I found a guy, I found a guy named Ben Goertzel and he runs a company that is developing AI on purpose.
That's the only thing he's doing. And he predicts that by 2030. I don't know how he could develop AI accidentally. Well, this is his he's a nerd and his only job is to do this and he's in his fifties. So he was part of the original dot com system. Right? Yeah. So he's here to chew bubble gum and develop AI and he's all out of bubble gum. That's right. He predicts that by 2030, 80% of all jobs will be eliminated. And basically any sort of human level analysis will be gone.
Like every analysis will be done by a computer. So he's predicting like massive societal change right around the corner. Yeah. Let's talk about that for a second, Mike, because even the media's, which we do or which I assumed when you said the media's analysis, I assumed it was watered down, right? Like it's not the full true story, but even the media's analysis is a pretty big shift, is a pretty big change. Two thirds devalued and whatever percentage you said.
You can see I can't keep numbers in my head. So AI should do my analysis for me. Right, right. But even what the media is saying is going to be a big shift. So and what the actuality is going to be is going to be an even larger shift. So I wonder, I don't think as our society is currently structured and as our economy is currently structured and as our, I don't know, country is currently structured, I don't think that that's going to mean good happy times for that 80% that don't have jobs.
No, no. I've been following it. It hasn't been on like the television a lot, but it's been around on like alternative media sources. There's been major layoffs in the tech sector for the last two years. And IBM in 2023 announced that they are going to eliminate 30% of all positions at the company and replace their research teams with AI. So IBM itself is going to start cutting.
And that's the first, obviously tech sector is going to be the first ones to start cutting their people, but it's going to spread. Yes. So why would you go bankrupt going to the doctor when in 22 the chat bot was a better doctor than half of the doctors in 2022? So what is it like right now? You know?
Yeah, I'm thinking so people can go to the, to the doctor bot, but if people don't have jobs or if they have lower paying jobs, right, or whatever jobs that AI can't do right now, anyway, even if they charge the same amount that they're charging now for healthcare for that chat bot AI, right, like they just switched the provider and the insurance pays the rich people who own the chat bot, they won't be able to charge those prices because nobody would be able to use any of them.
Or there'd be some kind of like black market human doctors that are offering, you know, like $20 healthcare, you know, and you might see like these black markets pop up around these sectors that have been completely taken over by AI, unless our society and culture changes something drastically about how we interact with all of these different services.
And I know in Europe, they've, they've done studies where they've actually done trials of a four day work week where they just cut a day out and they don't actually make up the extra eight hours, but they pay them as if they worked that day, you know, and the productivity on the human side has gone way up and happiness has gone way up and the drain on the healthcare has gone way down.
So I think maybe with maybe AI can be the thing that might finally shake the, the American corporatist hold on our healthcare and wellbeing. Maybe I mean, that's the optimistic view, right? Well, so the most optimistic view is that we undergo a radical change as a global society and that we more or less eliminate work for money and that people will do jobs that are passion based jobs only. Yeah. So people aren't going to stop farming if they stop being paid.
It might even help farming because farmers have a hard time making their farms run because of the profit motive a lot of times and people want to be farmers, right? We won't not have school teachers, people who are school teachers already work for free more or less. They don't get paid anything. They don't get paid enough to pay their own bills, social workers, you know, carpenters, potentially some electricians, some tradesmen, certainly welding.
These are things that people want to do and enjoy doing. They're not going to stop doing it just because you stop paying them. That's what they do for fun anyway. And I think that for jobs that have to get done that people don't want to do, the work day will become, the work week will become like 20 hours because people are going to need jobs. You're going to have to have some sort of economy. Yeah. And it'll have to come.
So like the jobs that AI can't do that people have to do, it will have to become a kind of like a salaried thing. It's not going to be somebody sitting there making sure you're logged in eight hours a day doing sewer cleanup or something, right? It's going to be, you just go and clean it up and then you're done and you still get paid your amount because it's just the consumerist nature.
I mean, a lot of the things that we buy are already created, not created, but like manufactured by robots and like machines, right? They're just right off the assembly line. And then we pay money and then people collect that money and then we get the thing. But if we don't have money coming in, we can't buy the thing. But nobody really wants to work really.
And if we have the economy that we currently have, even plumbers and welders and the people you said who would still work because they enjoy the work aren't really going to keep doing the work if they can't cover their basic needs. At least they have a skill to let them cover the basic needs. But other people like my job, sales enablement analyst, yeah, and AI can do that right now today and do it better than I can probably, you know, because they can look at every sales enablement analyst ever.
But here's my question, Mike, if what that guy said was true and 80% of the jobs are going to be obsolete because AI, will we be stuck? Will that be like freezing our society and technological advancements like an amber, like just freezing it right here? Because right now AI, and you just told us, AI can't create original artwork necessarily.
It can be prompted to do a mix of styles and things, but AI is not going to sit there on its own and create, you know, I want something that looks like Edward Bunch's Scream and Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night mixed together. Like it's not going to do that on its own. So the innovation, you're telling me right now, AI can't innovate. It can make things more efficient. It can tell you trends, but it's not really going to tell us like, hey, the next step in AI is this.
Or if you want to solve that unsolvable mathematical problem, here's the answer, right? It has to have that input to draw upon, right? Or am I wrong? Right, right. Well, some people in AI think that by the 2030 to 2040, possibly AI could be creative because of the number of data transactions that occur.
What hopefully what we do as a society is do things like free education so that you can get retrained to do something that's still necessary in our world and not go into bankruptcy doing it because your job's going to be eliminated in 10 years again. Then we go to a more flowing sort of education based economy where people just keep on learning new things and do different things with their life.
Also, we'll have to go more towards research and development and artistic creation and things like that. Everybody will be in research and development because there's no there's no reason not for them to be in research and development because computers probably will never be able to do creative research. They'll be able to help the creative research, but they won't be the driving force behind it. I think that's the sort of world that we're going to have to move towards.
Maybe eventually, who knows? Even in the fanciful Star Trek or other even other maybe more hard sci-fi stories, the AI, they have their ideas and stuff, but it's always sterile and they want uniformity. Humans don't really want that. They want things that are provocative. They want things that generate emotions and things like that. I don't think that aspect of our society will change. I think it'll change for the better. People want to be in the local acting troupe.
They already do it for nothing. You know what I mean? Imagine how much better your local entertainment will be if there's more people who are able to do entertainment because they're freed up from their bullshit day job. Hopefully. You can actually have a stage production. There'll be a lot more drug addicts too. Hell yeah. I mean, do what you do safely. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. Yeah, of course it will.
I think the societal shift then will be... because there's already a huge societal stigma about people who... I mean, the hustle culture, right? You got to be working... I wake up and I'm going to get this bread and grind 100 whatever. Jesus Christ. A lot of that, in my opinion, is a product of the fact that we no longer have careers. The middle class no longer exists. We don't have good careers anymore. We do, but a smaller percentage of people have those good careers.
People have to grind and struggle to make it work. You have to do five different things to make ends meet. AI will eliminate the ability to do that. Instead of saying, hey, this is twisted and messed up. There's so many people out there that have all of these great ideas. Talk to anyone, I don't know, 18 and under. Hopefully 16 and under. They have all these crazy ideas and crazy invention ideas and just a very unique look at things.
But then you lose that because that's not how our society is structured right now. Back in... I'm not saying these were the good times, right? Back in ancient times, you have what? Plato and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. People that actually devoted big chunks of their day or lives to philosophy and thinking about these bigger issues that affected all of humanity, regardless of anything. We've really drifted away from that, I think.
There's not really new... Maybe there are, but there's not really new like, oh yes, we're going to... Here's this philosopher. We have to go see him because he lives in this barrel on the side of the street and he dispenses wisdom and yada, yada. But maybe we could be more introspective. There's a possibility that AI will cause more of that because people will have more free time. People who are currently productive, who want to stay productive will have to do something that is not being paid.
You know what I mean? So- Yeah, yeah. But as a society, we'll have to be able to look at people and say, look, they don't have a job or they don't work as much as Mr. Grinding on LinkedIn from four in the morning till 10 at night. And we won't be able to say, well, they're lazy. Because people look at homeless people and they say, they're lazy. They won't get a job, as if jobs are just there to be handed out like candy.
So I think there's going to be some shifts that are going to have to happen within the societal mindset, cultural mindset towards some of these things. Well, we're going to have to build public housing that is not dangerous. We're going to have to possibly get away more police officers and have them work fewer hours. But in a society where we don't have job competition from other careers, you might get people who want to be police officers for 20 hours a week and then do training for whatever.
And then you wouldn't have as much burnout amongst those professions. I think that... Yeah, I'm all for working less time. I mean, I don't... People weren't... We'll have to. I don't think people are here. I don't think people are here to work. That's not what the rich people say. Obviously, because they're making money every time you work. The boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I shit on company time. But people aren't here. I'm not here.
Basically, my job is like a glorified call center, except I don't have to talk to anybody on the phone, but I'm answering help tickets and things. And that's all that I do. And when I ask my boss, like, look, man, I'm just a call center employee. And they're like, no, no, no, you're not. You're not. You do this and that. And the other thing, I'm like, no, I'm basically a call center. And AI could do this and anybody could do this.
But what AI might not be able to do is interact with the people in a way. And I think about this mostly with the doctor bot. The doctor bot is going to come in and be like, you got cancer. You got four months. Whereas a human would deliver that news differently or more humanly, I guess. I suppose you could train AI, but until we get used to talking to robots and things, it's going to be weird.
But there's something about that human connection and that's where the art and stuff like writing and filmmaking and music and all that kind of stuff. I don't know. I mean, I want to be optimistic about it. I do. I do. Disney announced that they're moving their animation studio to Canada. And there's two reasons. One, they can use AI there legally. There's no barrier to using AI so they can eliminate employees.
And two, there's no law that says they can't be discriminatory in their hiring practices, which currently they got exposed as potentially having illegal hiring practices. Yeah, I saw that. Yes. Allegedly, they have been using illegal hiring practices and they could be prosecuted for it. So they're moving out of country so that they can do what they want without any consequences. And that's just going to continue to happen. That's the trend. Right?
So it's going to be a matter of whether we as individuals want to consume that product and punish them with our dollar. Yeah, which they own so many other companies. I didn't know this until I think five years ago that Disney owns Touchstone. That's Disney's adult film. I don't want to say adult film like raunchy hardcore pornography, but anything that's PG-13 and above goes to Touchstone. Didn't they buy Miramax too? They own almost everything.
Yeah, it's like WB and Disney own damn near everything other than independent film. And we talked about this, like we can't vote with our dollar because even if we do, it's still going to them somehow because they own everything. But that's what I mean. The optimist in me is AI is going to take a lot of these mundane things that people just don't like doing that aren't rewarding. Me answering help cases on an internet queue is not rewarding.
Sure, I'm helping the salespeople do their job and close deals. But whether if I'm able to help them or not, it doesn't really have a bearing on my life or my income or my lifestyle or anything like that. And so of course AI should do that. Of course it should. In the future, I truly believe the only jobs that will be left are jobs that people want to do. Now this might not happen in our lifetime. We'll probably live in a hellscape. Yeah. Long term, right? As if we haven't been already, Mike.
To an extent, I mean, we've lived through three economic depressions. A 20 year war. A 20 year war. Three economic depressions, a massive pandemic. A massive pandemic that could allegedly have been caused by accident by our own research labs, allegedly, right? And to top it all off, now we have to choose between two senile old bats for president. Well, that's one of the big issues is that our leadership worldwide, our leadership is not the correct leadership to deal with this issue.
It's not even just the United States. It's everybody. I would just say it's not the right age demographic to be leading us into this new uncharted territory. Not one presidential candidate, including third party, is under 70 years old. Yeah. Right? Because RFK Jr. Yep. What's her face? Jill Stein. Obviously the two major candidates. Cornel West. Well, I'm more on the precipice of World War III. Yeah, continually. Did you see the Putin interview with Tucker Carlson? No, I didn't.
No, I heard about it though. It was two hours long and I watched it. I watched the Oliver Stone interview years ago with Putin and I watched the interview that he did during the Trump administration. And I am not a supporter of Russia here, guys, but listening to him talk and watching him do interviews makes me wish that we had somebody as competent as him leading the country because it's pathetic how he is a smart guy. Like, I'm not saying he's a good guy, but he is definitely sharp.
He's on it. Yeah. Right? And he's been around the last several presidents that we've had. It's shocking, shocking how incompetent our leadership is. It has been. And like I say, we're on the edge of World War III right now. Iran bombed a US military base. Yeah. We're almost there. There's countries in Europe that are talking about installing the draft again, getting ready. It's crazy. Like European Union countries, it's not good. Yeah. It's not so. Things are very...
So to bring this back to our topic, Mike, I'm going to stay with your thread here though. What do you think... So let's say it's 2030 or whatever it is, right? The guy said. Sure. And 80% of jobs are replaced by AI. Everybody's got more time. And let's just say we're going optimist with this. Everybody's got time. They got time to write that novel. They always wanted to write that memoir. They have time to sift through old family photos and digitize them. They have...
Whatever it is they want to do, right? They can finally put up that fence in the backyard or buy a new grill and spend more time grilling or learn how to use a smoker, whatever they want to do. What impact does that have globally for wars and major disagreements? Because I can see people like racist people that focus hyper-focus on these things. I can see that being a very bad thing. They're able to have a lot more time to do that and to try and rile people up.
But if you have AI that says they're crackpots, maybe the rest of the people that are used to watching news in the morning and then before bed and then over lunch and get the same three stories repeated to them ad nauseam might just say, well, we can ignore them. So I'd be curious on what you think that might do for global conflicts. There's a real possibility that we are heading towards the rollo cop, judge dread, civil on massive level, civil unrest globally type situation.
We have already seen massive civil unrest in this country and in other countries. A lot of the reason why it doesn't spread is that the media tries to limit our access to the information about it. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it could lead to massive political upheaval. That's a good thing potentially based on the conversation we just had about global leadership and how incompetent they seemingly are. Yeah. But it could also be...
And if you go back to our country's roots where our founding fathers said a little revolution every once in a while is a good thing. So it's change and a lot of corporations love to say, embrace the change, but they only mean embrace the change if it's change that they're initiating, not if it's being initiated elsewhere. So you have to think those kind of- What is it? The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of Patriots or whatever, right? Yeah, something like that.
Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Change is good, but it's always an adjustment period. So it'll be very interesting to see what happens. I know that, well, I've only got maybe two, two and a half inches left of this cigar. And I know I want to talk about some of the creative things that AI allegedly does. Yes. And I think you did too, didn't you, Mike? I will lead up to this. So our government is currently trying to enact legislation to deal with AI.
And instead of being like, oh, let's just make a universal education a thing, or oh, let's just make universal healthcare a thing, or let's get in front of this problem and start doing more public housing and dealing with the homeless problem and create infrastructure so that we can deal with 80% of the people changing jobs in the next 20 years or 10 years.
Yeah. And I think to clarify really quick, Mike, when the government says let's deal with the AI problem, that doesn't mean AI is a problem to the everyday person. No. That means the AI is a problem to our politicians' pocketbooks. That is correct.
So instead of doing any policies that are forward thinking and could help us in the long term to where it make us maybe a more progressive, not in like the traditional political way that we use now, but a more forward thinking, forward moving society to deal with these rapid changes that are happening. The government wants to ban pornography being generated by AI.
That is that just last week, both the president and Congress were in discussions about passing laws to ban AI from generating pornography. Yeah. And when Mike says last week, listeners, he means early February. I mean early February of 2024. We are recording this early. Yes. Because we're going to get ahead of things for once. Gosh darn it. Yeah. For once. For once we're ahead. That leads us into what you wanted to talk about.
Yes. And we're actually recording this on the eve, the night of the... Now I don't know who Taylor Swift is and I've never watched the Super Bowl, but he sure sounds fast. I just learned today who was in the Super Bowl because they had an ad on my TV for it. Yeah, so Sarah, the night before the Super Bowl, she was watching this Amazon Prime movie called Kelsey or something. It's about the Kelsey brothers. They were playing on opposite teams last Super Bowl, the last Super Bowl.
And so their mom was the star of the night because she had two Super Bowl contender sons. Right? But one of the Kelsey's is... And I don't... We'll be watching a movie and Sarah will be like, oh yeah, this is the one that's dating so and so. And I'm like, who the fuck are you talking about? I don't know any of these actors' names. And I'm a film guy, but I'm not saying like I don't know any actor's names. I'm just saying, there's being a film person who likes film and I'm not...
This isn't a slight at my wife because she loves film too. And this isn't a slight at you, not you, Mike, but you, the listener. If you just like the... I don't know, the relationship drama around celebrities, right? That's fine. I don't have anything against that. I'm not into that. So I get very confused when my wife starts talking about who's dating which other actor, actress, that kind of thing. I don't know and I really don't have the brain space to focus on that.
But anyway, one of these sports ball players in the Super Bowl tonight, of course this is early February for the rest of you, is dating Taylor Swift. And Taylor Swift recently, last month, right, had all of these AI generated nudes, I'm going to say leaked, but it wasn't really leaked because it's not like they were nudes that she took that were then hacked from her personal device and leaked onto the internet. These are just AI generated images that were spread, disseminated on the internet.
And Mike was not able to view them. I was able to view them. And if you've seen an AI image, one of the Super Bowl commercials was those people that had that really out of touch Jesus is One of Us commercials last year, maybe at the Super Bowl. And they had one this year that had a whole bunch of like these images and stuff of people washing other people's feet.
And they all looked AI generated because they all looked like, I don't know, Renaissance paintings almost, but photo real Renaissance paintings, if that makes sense. Like you know how AI can look in a certain sense, like it'll generate these images, but it looks almost too good to actually be a real image. You know what I mean? Yeah, there's a term for that. So it looks a little cartoony or a little like painty or whatever. And so I'm like, man, I'll bet you they just AI'd this whole thing.
But their message was, Jesus didn't teach us to preach hate. Jesus washed feet. And I was like, oh my God, you guys. Like you're now you got all the foot fetish people Googling Jesus, like the fuck are you doing? And that's where maybe a human would need to reprogram their AI and say, maybe don't lead with Jesus washes feet. You got to put it, you got to put that in context.
I remember a sermon when I was a kid and our pastor got down and was washing people's feet in the front row, but he'd be like prefaced it without being goofy and weird about it and like awkward about it. But anyway, so those kind of like, it's not really cartoony, but it's kind of like CGI you know what I mean, like you can tell that it's not really a picture.
So it's, you could probably recreate this in a, in a photo studio with, I don't know, a thousand lights and perfect staging and somebody who knew exactly how to create like the most kind of fakey looking picture that was still real. But you know, you would just look at it and be like, this is two staged. So that's how it's here because we are not active social media users. So from what I understand, there's a lot of filters and editing that goes into people's photos they put on social media.
And I think a lot of people are already accustomed to that. A lot of people are used to that. Oh, I think, I think they're used to that. I saw something where I think Texas banned, yes, uncanny Valley. That's exactly right. I think Texas recently passed a law banning filters on dating apps, maybe or something. That's so stupid. So there's a really good, what a waste of government resources. I know that. What a waste of time. Why don't we deal with the problems that we actually have?
But on the, but let's, I'm just going to play devil's advocate here, Mike. I agree with you a hundred percent, like the fuck, but let's play devil's advocate, right? You're somebody trying to find a date. They got these pictures and this was, this is true even before filters, right? You, cause if you're on a dating app, same with resumes, you're only going to put the good things down. Same with references. You're not going to put down your mortal enemy.
You know, the boss you fucked over, you know, you're not going to put him down as a reference. Like yeah, I stole from my last job. Why don't you call them and ask them about me? You know, so there's always that kind of like personal editing that goes on with dating, with career searching, with all of this stuff. But let's just say for a moment, since catfishing and stuff has gotten huge and there's a lot of people, FBI and otherwise posing as certain things online to expose other people online.
And some of those things are justified and some of them aren't. But you know, let's say you've got all these pictures of this person that are filtered and AI generated and stuff. And you're like, wow, this, you know, and let's assume. Also, you're shallow and only look at the outer beauty and not the inner beauty, not to get all philosophical and whatnot here.
On one hand, you would think why, why not just have these people meet these people and find out that they're phony and using fake images and have like the platform that they're using and that person can just flag them and say, this isn't how they look. And the platform can do that research and ban that person or whatever. Like that would be the ideal.
But on the other hand, if the company's not going to do it, the government should be forcing the company to do that instead of enacting laws to punish citizens. Because all of these things are here. You're not mandated by government law to sign up for Facebook. So you can use whatever pictures you want on Facebook, but your government mandated if you're a man to sign up for the draft, that's illegal.
But right now, you know, so if the government mandated that you had a Facebook, then I could see the government mandating that your Facebook pictures are you and not filtered. Just for a super simple example. But anyway, back to the Taylor Swift nudes. They're very uncanny valley and they're very fakey. And I don't really get what the attraction is with Taylor Swift anyway. Whatever, whatever it is.
But the whole thing is that the Pentagon or is the Pentagon or I don't know, government is now like trying to do all this stuff because Taylor Swift got upset about these pictures. And I don't know that she actually got upset. Right, Mike, as you said, she didn't really respond to him, but her fans got upset. Yeah, yeah. The article I read was that Taylor Swift and her quote unquote team did not acknowledge it. They didn't talk about it and they said nothing.
They were like, this is not an issue that we're interested in dealing with. Right. It's not my problem, basically, which is the right response. Like I'll give I'll give her respect for that. That is the right answer from her. Yeah, I feel like she's done a good job of navigating the legal and creative pitfalls of being a musician because she's rerecording all of her old stuff. So she gets the royalties and stuff. She got screwed over by the record company, I guess.
I don't know a whole lot about it, but I think she's. She's done. I don't. Yeah, but she's done a good job of navigating some of these very interesting things that come about, especially now with AI. But you're a public figure. And I don't know, let's say back in college and stuff, my dorm mate, totally not me, would look up or would see things and it would be, you know, like this is totally this super hot actress naked. And it was totally not right.
They found somebody that maybe had a similar body build and then they would Photoshop the face on or they, you know, do whatever. I remember the Britney Spears fakes back in the day. And it was like, yeah, kind of maybe it looked like her in the dark. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, back then, like the photo resolution you could download on your computer was crap. So you could take a picture of like a Thanksgiving turkey and say, hey, this is Rosie O'Donnell or something, you know, naked.
And you'd be like, oh yeah, that's great. I love it. I don't know. I'm not trying to be upset, make anyone upset who's a Rosie O'Donnell fan if they still exist anymore. But the point is that you can any, any, let's just go Star Wars because we like Star Wars. There's Star Wars porn parodies and they're not getting sued out the ass. No, no. And AI will certainly make an AI movie based on Star Wars. Like that's, if it's not already there, it will be and it'll be photorealistic.
Yeah. Yeah. I watched a lot of videos of Arnold Schwarzenegger being voice copied into famous movie scenes where he's singing. Oh yeah. The hills are alive and everything and the face looks really bad, but the voice sounds perfect. Like it's him singing, the hills are alive because there's so much of his voice out there that they can generate it.
You know, any of these people, there's Joe Rogan who has, there's an AI Joe Rogan podcast between him and other guests and it's AI generated conversation. And I'm sure if we ever get popular, then there'll be AI voices of us out there too. Right. And it's really made up conversations. Well, I can't imagine AI us saying anything worse than we say regularly on our podcasts. So I'm not too concerned about it, but I did do some legal lookup.
And so a lot of the legal stuff online is basically saying for porn purposes, as long as you're not claiming to actually be the person, right? So the porn Britney Spears was Britney Speared was their porn name. So it wasn't Britney Spears, but you knew who they were trying to be like, right? So you could just, or it was Britney Spears with three S's. Yeah, something super dumb.
And so I found an article here that actually this is another, this is a podcast episode and it is podcast is endless thread and it is co-hosted by Amory Severson and Ben Brock Johnson.
But basically they're saying that since the creation of deep fakes in 2017, AI technology that can face swap has been become very commonplace, especially in pornography, but there's no federal law that criminalizes the creation or sharing of non-consensual deep fake porn in the United States, at least at the time of this was written June, 2023. So there's really no law against it right now.
And they said that really the only thing is kind of like, it can have damaging emotional and physical effects for the person being deep faked, right? But it's not necessarily illegal to do. It's kind of the same thing with lookalikes, right? And the big thing is when a lot of the Britney Spears stuff came out, she was under eight, she was under 18. And, but the thing was they weren't claiming to be Britney Spears. Their names were Britney Speared or Britney Spear XXXXX or whatever it was, right?
So they weren't saying, Hey, I literally am Britney Spears. They're just like, I'm somebody who looks like Britney Spears, who's about to get naked for you. So have fun. So I think that's kind of the thing. And nobody's going to look at these and nobody, I don't think anybody said when these Taylor Swift things popped out that they were like, Oh, look, Britney or Taylor Swift was having a gangbang with the Kansas city chiefs.
I think they were just like, look at what AI thinks Taylor Swift looks like naked. Like I don't, I don't think it was presented in that way. I don't know for sure. Cause I wasn't on the cutting edge of that because I literally don't care. But yeah, it's not something that I'm an expert in or even slightly knowledgeable. We're not lawyers. We're not lawyers.
But people were saying that that, that was tantamount to physical abuse, sexual abuse, releasing deep fakes of somebody that's popular in the popular sphere. We are so soft as a society. And we've talked about this before. Yeah. We're so soft as a society that stuff like this, these crazy things that people say are just accepted. And it's like, yeah, the world's a really hard place. Sometimes this is not really an issue that anybody should care about.
Yeah. It's not as much as people do for sure. Yeah, I guess, I mean, we can think about this. Let's think about this in a couple of different ways or one other way. I only have one, a couple of different ways, as long as a couple to you means one, Mike like bullying, right? Like I was bullied or I had people say bad things about me in school, right? I had people make fun of my diabetes in school and morally is that right for those people to do that to me?
No. I mean, is there anything I could really do as a 12 year old child? Also no. You know, and schools typically don't care about the bully. They care about the person who's being bullied when they fight back. And then the person who fought back is bad, you know, because they didn't follow the appropriate channels of the school, blah, blah, blah. So is it morally right to create AI deep fakes of Taylor Swift naked and then distribute them on the internet?
No. Like, no. You know, there's plenty of people who want to be naked and want you to see them naked on the internet. There's no, I mean, there's no reason, right? And I'm not trying to get into the morality of porn or not or whatever. Like whatever it is, whatever it is. I'm just saying, is it morally right for somebody to, let's just take you Mike to say, I'm going to have AI make some naked Mike pictures that I can enjoy while we're recording our podcast so I can, whatever. Who knows?
I'm not doing that, Mike. Just you can rest easy tonight. But you know what I mean? Like it's not morally right to do that kind of thing and to share those things. But as somebody in the public eye, as much as Taylor Swift is, there's nothing you can really do because you're a public figure. No, it's inevitable. I guarantee you there's going to be a Johnny Depp porn, AI porn. There will be. Yeah, yeah. There has to be. You know, it's rule 34. Missing fingertip and all.
Yeah. If you can think of it, it's out there. Yeah. And Disney owns as much porn as they do own film because they legally own all the derivative of rule 34 stuff. And they have, I read this, that when a new animator comes on board, they will show them at least one folder of their most recent film and all the porn that people have created from it online and say, just so you know, whatever you're making for us, this is the kind of stuff people will make out of it. Just to prep them.
I'm not saying this is great. Make them aware. But just like, hey man, you're going to have these crazy sick fucks making crazy sick fuck like Officer Judy Hopps porn for whatever. It's a rabbit. It's been going on forever. AOC has deep fakes. Yeah. There's a, you know, all these people, I'm sure that Nancy Pelosi has deep fakes out there. That's disgusting. Where? Where? I'm just saying. Everybody has them. That's popular, right? Right. It's certain. It's inevitable.
Just got to accept it and move on, I guess. That's my view on it. Yeah. We're not, we're not pro pornography deep fakes. No, but I'm pro accepting reality and moving forward. Yeah. I mean, as long as the technology is there and if you do anything to put yourself out there, even us with this podcast, right? Like we could be, we could get angry, angry male at some point, somewhere, somehow, right?
Somebody could come and say, well, I don't, I didn't like your opinion on this or that or the other thing, but we're putting ourselves out there. We are adults and we chose to do this regardless. So we're not trying to be inflammatory and make people upset. And some of the things we say, it might be upsetting. I don't know. You know, you might not agree with us and that's fine. You don't have to. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on things.
But that's kind of comes back to our, it's kind of been a recurring theme. I think Mike is kind of like the, the polite discord, you know, you can, you can disagree, but you can do it so politely. You don't have to have everybody on your side all the time. And you don't learn if, if people are telling Kathleen Kennedy that putting a chick in it and making her lame and gay is a good thing, you know, like everybody around her. I did watch that too, by the way. I watched the parent. Oh, I did too.
It was, it was very funny. It was great. I watched, now I've watched several of the South Park specials and I highly recommend them to people. They're a lot more adult than what was on Comedy Central, more graphic for sure. Well, and, and I'll, I'll say this real quick.
Since you brought up the Pandaverse is that I thought the ending of Pandaverse where they had a clear path forward to prevent the Panda apocalypse or whatever the fuck it was, was handled a lot better than the ending of Barbie, even though I liked Barbie and I liked Barbie a lot better than a lot of the other things that I've watched. Uh, you know, I kind of wanted that show us then the utopian state. Right. That was hilarious that they got all the handymen from other galaxies or whatever.
Yeah. Yeah. So they didn't have to fix anything. Yeah. Yeah. Pandaverse was great. If you haven't seen it, uh, go watch that. Don't be making weird AI deepfakes and posting them online because chances are the government's going to make that illegal and they're going to come for you. They're not going to go for Taylor Swift for generating what 63 tons of CO2 emissions, uh, every plane plane trip.
But yeah, I just remember you can't have plastic straws, but you know, John Kerry can fly around the world on his private jet. Yeah. Well, and even, uh, even the most loved person in all of history, Barack Obama had like pizza flown in from Chicago to the white house just so he could have lunch and then think about the emissions from that and stuff. But I have to drink out of a soggy straw. Uh, Mike doesn't, Mike doesn't dislike the paper straws as much as I do.
I have, uh, uh, I've never had an issue with a paper straw. So I've had so many issues with paper straws, but I can't say the reason why. So I'll tell Mike afterwards and is it sounding, is it sounding? Uh, it is something that an AI chat bot would not be allowed to say. So anyway, uh, how much of your cigar do you have left, Mike? I am burning my fingers. Okay. I'm about, I'm there too. So what did you think overall of this one? It was good. Uh, no flavor change. Very mellow.
I would say it was dark. Yeah. Yeah. Melo, dark, mellow. I w you know what? I would say the shelf appeal was maybe the best thing about the cigar. The smoke was good. It was, it was a good smoke. I think there would be other things I would rather smoke, especially considering this is a limited run. Yes. But the shelf appeal. Oh yeah, I know, man. If you have, so I would, I guess I would, I would caveat it with this. I don't think I would buy another one of these given the price point.
But if you want to have a cigar that you can whip out and have everybody be like, Oh my God, that looks amazing. What is that? What's going on? And you want to have a really good smoke. Like it's a good smoke. Sure. You have the disposable income, go ahead and do it.
But I, I this, you know, and trying to keep and tie this into Mike's vision, grand vision for season three, where we smoke budget cigars and say what's the best part of that also is smoking some of these limited runs that you might be tempted by and letting you know if it's worth the investment or not. This one could go either way for me. I wouldn't rush out and get it again, but it looks fantastic. I would not, I would buy it again. I wouldn't rush out to buy it again.
But if I saw it on the shelf, it looks so nice. I'd want to put it on the top of the box. You know, it just looks really good. I know that's ridiculous. Yeah, it's silly, but that's part of it too. And you know what it, and it's, I don't feel like I was cheated out of money on this one. And maybe I just, maybe it looks so good. I had higher hopes and maybe it was my own expectations that got in my own way. It's a good cigar. It's a good cigar. It's a very good cigar.
And the last half inch is as good as the first inch. It's just, uh, I just, I don't think it's a necessary staple in your humidor cigar. So I'm not, I'm not advising you because since it's limited, I'm not saying I'm not going to tell you to go out and buy a box or two boxes or five boxes of these. Like don't do that. But if you want a good cigar that, that has, that looks really interesting and a lot different than other cigars you see out there. Sure. Pick it up.
If you got, if you got the scratch to do it, was there anything else on AI that we missed Mike? I don't think so. Be prepared people. Be prepared. Yeah. Whatever that means for you and your job and livelihood. All right. Thanks for listening. Don't forget if you have time to give us a review on whatever platform you're catching us on, it would be much, much appreciated. Check out our website and our Patreon. We've got some cool behind the scenes stuff there too. So again, thanks for listening.
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