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00:00:43.37
Stephen Schneider
All right.
00:00:44.01
Alan Baltis
Okay. buts right
00:00:47.37
Stephen Schneider
Good to go. so
00:00:48.100
Alan Baltis
All right. Yeah, more center. Okay, there we go.
00:00:54.63
Stephen Schneider
So I got to start. You mentioned Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, ah which we usually talk about.
00:01:00.28
Alan Baltis
Right. It’s…
00:01:02.10
Stephen Schneider
ah let let me Let me see.
00:01:02.34
Alan Baltis
Exactly.
00:01:03.37
Stephen Schneider
i didn’t see it. Let me see if I could sum things up. Apple’s doing great. We’ve come out with a ton of new products to make your life wonderful. Here they are.
00:01:12.01
Alan Baltis
um Actually, interestingly, they didn’t have a single new product announcement.
00:01:17.76
Stephen Schneider
Oh, wow.
00:01:17.84
Alan Baltis
It’s software. Sometimes they have a company that because often like, you know, the big changes in Apple Silicon and stuff like that, it allow them to do new products, but, you know, not coinciding with this. So it was the keynote was all about new capabilities.
00:01:34.76
Alan Baltis
And then the state of the platforms thing was much more for coders. And that’s really what, you know, the developer conference is all about. And I, you know, I really am not only an Apple huckster, I’m just continually impressed with their making magic happen.
00:01:53.54
Alan Baltis
They have that. they Because I also look at things from like the investor viewpoint, somehow Apple is currently out of favor with the world because where’s Apple’s artificial intelligence? Where’s their AI stuff?
00:02:09.56
Alan Baltis
And the ignorance of people that think that,
00:02:14.28
Stephen Schneider
I’ve got a rant to go on about that exact topic later. So go ahead.
00:02:18.60
Alan Baltis
you know, like people run off of press releases, people run off of like, I don’t know, everything that’s in the cloud, everything that’s being enabled by ChatGPT, which is itself miraculous type stuff.
00:02:32.55
Alan Baltis
it’s um It gets, if you will, all the press and all the good press and what’s weird is apple has been doing things with artificial artificial artificial intelligence for like five years now as soon as they had in apple silicon the neural engine the chip that um mimics so much of what nvidia does with their gpu slash ai enabled chips that’s been part of what apple’s been able to do for an incredibly long time especially in the technical world and so when you have apple devices able to
00:03:04.57
Alan Baltis
um learn what you’re doing and anticipate what you’re doing and make everything easier for you. Whether it’s everything about your email, everything about your mapping, everything about your web browsing, and it’s all integrated across their entire family of devices so that you really can start a session on your Mac, continue on your phone because you had to leave for a while, your iPhone,
00:03:27.77
Alan Baltis
the it On your iPad, on your tvOS, the fact that they’ve got this family, like, you know, every time that i uses my i use my phone for mapping, well, it talks to my watch and makes sure that it gives me little haptic things about here’s where you’re going to turn left. So it’s not just having to walk down the street, looking at your phone, bumping into things.
00:03:48.18
Alan Baltis
It’s that you really could… wrangle yourself with it tells you where you’re going. It remembers where your car is. It lets you know where the best parking prices are. Like as it finds out what you like doing, it’s your constant companion.
00:04:02.93
Alan Baltis
And so when they so many other things have like Microsoft’s main product is called Copilot and at various others. It’s just amazing the kinds of things like ah has always been not only useful, but deep that not only does it do exactly what you want, but it does more. And only when you start to like think, well, wouldn’t it be cool if, oh, it’s already doing that.
00:04:24.88
Alan Baltis
They have for 30 years been ahead of the curve in all those different ways, especially with the Mac OS and the various different things. And so then seeing how Apple continues to say, hey developers, we’ve created this cool foundation level stuff that you can make use of.
00:04:41.22
Alan Baltis
And whether it’s with Vision OS and now making it so that if you have any kind of device like your phone, you don’t have to always be wearing the glasses, though that’s the next big thing, not only from Apple, but from other places.
00:04:53.73
Alan Baltis
you can like point your phone at things and say, what’s that plant? What’s that mountaintop I’m looking at? While I’m walking down the street, tell me about it’s it’s really magic. You know, like sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
00:05:08.15
Alan Baltis
And they continually wonderfully surprise me with, they’re they’re not just like putting out the lowest common denominator things so they can sell the most units. They are the Porsche of magic.
00:05:20.30
Alan Baltis
oh if Everything that’s out there, phone-wise and TVS-wise, but they’re at like the the forward prices. They really have, and i mean now there’s going to be some crazy changes because of whatever’s happening with tariffs and and what Apple is even candy in that regard.
00:05:32.32
Stephen Schneider
Thank you.
00:05:36.52
Alan Baltis
They’ve always managed their… um vendor relationships their their producer relationships so you know they they haven’t they’ve made use of the fact that the far east really has cheap labor but they’ve also been and in in ireland and other places where they gave them a knowledgeable workforce they’re they’re shifting a lot of their production to india this wasn’t talked about at the worldwide developer conference but these are things that haveve just been coming out so i know i’m going a little bit on but when you just see of How much, like, this is what i but one of my summaries to Colleen after I watched it was, I need to, like, take my Mac and take my phone and look at them as if I’m experiencing them for the first time.
00:06:19.12
Alan Baltis
Because what I’m realizing is, being a 20 and 30 year veteran of these things, of course you get habits as to how you do things. And the fact that I don’t talk to my phone as much as I’d like to, their Siri is ah just as good, if not better, than Alexa or Apple.
00:06:34.80
Alan Baltis
you know any kind of so audio type things are going on there. And like all the gestural things you can do, all the capabilities. Like I often just take a picture, of a photo.
00:06:48.01
Alan Baltis
I’m all over Alaska that on my cruise and I’m taking photos and they have it where you really can, like in real time, make the photo better make it so that you you take multiple photos and then it combines them together into the perfect photo you know mean so it’s eliminated like in our lifetime you don’t need to worry about motion blur anymore you don’t need to worry about how much you can look take a photo that’s captured in raw format and zoom in later not having zoomed in now and and still amazingly retained resolution and you can
00:07:21.51
Alan Baltis
take things out. I think I mentioned, you know, I was a 50,000th rider on the Raptor. And so I got my cool little, um, uh, uh, picture taken with my little sign.
00:07:33.24
Alan Baltis
Well, Colleen, who is a computer user, but not a geek like I am, she was able to take that photo and like take out the miscellaneous people, somebody with a baby cart, and like and it and it not only does that, but like the fence that was behind it is perfectly replaced, replicated, so it looks like it should, and the sky, and the fact that they have these miraculous things In your hands, for the everyday people, they continue to do that and push forward.
00:08:03.30
Alan Baltis
And so I’m just, every time I go to one of these, i am just so enthused by there really isn’t someone who’s only trying to take old technology and wring every last dollar out of it. Apple continues to like,
00:08:15.69
Alan Baltis
earn your love they they just do such amazing things that i kind of want to like go to everybody and say why aren’t you using apple products i know there’s again 20 30 year old arguments about well we don’t want to be in the walled garden of apple well if if everything works perfectly almost all the time just like it should and better than you expect And the world is eroding all the time privacy, but Apple maintains it, and it has no viruses that can defeat it because they’ve done all the right things with how their programs work, and that you can’t get to the kernel. Like, it it’s just…
00:08:52.58
Alan Baltis
It’s amazing in the same way that whenever I read consumer reports and I read all about the good cars versus the bad cars, and yet I see the crappy cars on the road all the time because people walk into the dealer and say, I’d like a blue one and I want to pay $500 a month.
00:09:06.61
Alan Baltis
And they don’t really care about, will it last 15 instead of five years?
00:09:10.53
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:09:10.97
Alan Baltis
Will it keep you safe? Will it get good gas mileage, et cetera, et cetera. They’re just such a triumph. If you’re a discriminating consumer, You really want to buy Apple products, even compared to Android is great. Google does good things, but they’re continually playing catch up as compared to wowing me like Apple does.
00:09:31.01
Alan Baltis
So the fact that they’re good at, well, that was a good idea on Apple’s part. Let’s make our phone better too. Let’s make our our Wi-Fi. You know i mean? it It just is. I admire all the people that go to Apple and say, I’m going to change the world.
00:09:43.69
Alan Baltis
I want to make, you know, Everything better. Everything better about your safety and security and your stability and your the cost, like your your capability per dollar is just so amazing in an iPhone or a Mac mini or every other device they have.
00:10:00.62
Alan Baltis
So not really a rant over, more of a gush. You know what i mean? I just… and And it goes on all this week. And there’s all kinds of then um sessions that drill down into now that you’ve got this capability, we’ve we’ve got the development environment. We’ve got the Swift language. We’ve got the foundation classes. Hey, developers.
00:10:22.34
Alan Baltis
You can do everything that you want with all these things because we’re not, if you will, a walled garden. We make all this stuff available so that we we don’t we don’t think, as mighty as we are, that we can do every cool thing.
00:10:34.51
Alan Baltis
Let’s get an an array of 100,000 developers. There are going to be the next guys that have… the perfect way to go to dinner and then split the bill up you know what i mean between you and your friends and just we can start they have design awards every year and every one of those things is like groundbreakingly cool you know what mean like they at the apple watch nowadays i think we’ve talked about this little bit it used to be that like fitbits were what monitored your vitals you know what i mean so you could see what your your vo what is it you know oxygen uptake was your vo2 max and stuff like i’m using the wrong acronym but nowadays it really is with you and i both having some concerns in this regard it can tell me how’s my blood sugar How’s my blood pressure? How’s my and and it’s one of those things it doesn’t have to be perfect But the fact that you’ve got a wearable now that really helps to monitor your health all the time and put out little alerts saying Remember that atrial fibrillation you had maybe you’re experiencing it again Luckily, I’ve never had an alarm go off like that But it the fact that I that it does that I’ve got ah a really cool um
00:11:43.96
Alan Baltis
companion that takes care of me and like hey you’ve been sitting too long get up you know what i mean and it and i think that they’re continually good at the balance between don’t know i don’t like to be told what to do i really don’t i have an odd psychological thing about resisting authority to a certain extent or at least resisting idiot authority where they just want their way when they get
00:12:05.74
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:12:06.59
Alan Baltis
explaining to you why this is a good idea. Well, Apple’s really good at the nudge, that little cajolery that says, you know, if you move like 30 steps, you know, 10,000 steps a day, if you move for 30 minutes, here’s all the health benefits that go with it. I will show you a little chart about how you’re pursuing that goal.
00:12:23.75
Alan Baltis
And so they gamify things. They make it that you can see your progress, that you can like be proud of yourself, and and i the fact that they’ve got all the psychology behind it all of the how to do a user interface that is always helpful instead of being intrusive instead of being pushy they’re they’re just it has integrated into my life in ways that i don’t know that anything ever has because i really do have that i’ll get to that you know stop reminding me know what i mean i don’t want to be nagged i want to be like
00:12:55.40
Alan Baltis
to know encouraged they’re very heartening they’re very encouraging it’s there’s so much cool stuff going on with all of their devices and how they work together
00:13:05.54
Stephen Schneider
And what you were saying about how they’re integrated, they do things, you know, people are kind of stuck on this whole chat bot thing. You know, that’s really what we have. ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Copilot, Gemini, they all have a chat bot. And people are like, oh, you put, you tell it what you want. gives you this document. It gives you an image.
00:13:27.71
Stephen Schneider
Wow. The AIs go change the world. But what they’re not understanding That’s the 10% of the iceberg you see on top of the water. There is still 90% of that iceberg left to to see and discover. And what Apple’s doing is how AI is going to be used more so.
00:13:45.56
Stephen Schneider
yeah And it’s the beginnings of how it’s going to be used. The chatbots, the creating images, it’s all great. It’s all wonderful. And heck, this all ties together. I got things I wanted to talk about ah that tie in with that.
00:13:56.65
Alan Baltis
yeah
00:13:56.87
Stephen Schneider
But it’s not the end. It’s it’s such the very beginning. 20 years from now, the things that will be going on and happening, but you’ll look back and go, wow, everybody was so excited that it gave you a ah document and an image. Ooh.
00:14:12.48
Alan Baltis
like’ve I’ve heard read lately that Google is um losing um their search engine market share because people don’t go to Google any anymore.
00:14:18.10
Stephen Schneider
Because of AI, yeah.
00:14:20.48
Alan Baltis
if They don’t sit down and try to type the right query using Google food that would give it the right calculus. They just say, hey, Google, where’s a good restaurant for four people that allows dogs? And, and, that the AI is good enough nowadays that it knows how to parse that, you know, all the natural language stuff that really is a Star Trek type breakthrough that we’ve been wanting all of our life, you know, computer, you know, show me, show me how to make transparent aluminum, you know, that kind of thing.
00:14:41.59
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:14:43.80
Stephen Schneider
no
00:14:45.07
Alan Baltis
It, the fact that that’s at our fingertips, there’s going to be, it is only the start now, but there’s, ah we’re soon going to be already, um, like arrogant and entitled about, well, it’s always done that, right? You know, no, only hearing like lifetime, you know, but there’s, so we, we often like ah kind of nostalgically and geek pride wise talk about, remember back in the days when you had to use a command line and you had to know the flags that went with this DOS command and all that kind of stuff. i I was so good at doing all the parameters.
00:15:15.71
Alan Baltis
The fact that that’s not going to be necessary for generations and generations to come. And that, They’re going to like try goofy shit to see whether it can do it, and they’re going to be amazingly surprised.
00:15:26.45
Alan Baltis
The first time that I tried Wolfram Alpha, which is a lot of ways a natural language precursor to what we got going going on with ChatGPT, I really was like, let’s play Stump the Band. Can you tell me what the current you know temperature is in Morocco? Why, yes. Do you care about Marrakesh or do you care about Fez? You know what i mean?
00:15:42.22
Alan Baltis
It was like… it it it surprised me with how much how did they put it in this entire encyclopedia so that it could be quickly searched and figure out what you want like from context and occasionally know part of it was i could make it going on the wrong path if i phrased what i wanted badly or something like that but most people aren’t trying to fool it they’re not trying to find its limitations they’re just trying to integrate it into their lives And so the tip of the iceberg stuff, it really is interesting to see what it can already generate, AI in general. know what I mean?
00:16:18.13
Alan Baltis
and this is I’m not sure about this. One of the things that I like about Apple’s products and how they integrate with me is a big problem with current AI is it’s got the large language models, the bases of of of what they’ve based things on, and they’re poisoned in a lot of ways. If you go to see all the continent content on internet,
00:16:37.03
Alan Baltis
on the internet And 20% of it is crazy. It’s conspiracy theory. It’s misinformation. It’s old, et cetera, et cetera. But that yeah the the the current large language models don’t necessarily know enough to distinguish between what’s true and what’s false.
00:16:53.95
Alan Baltis
And so you get ridiculous things, bigoted things. if if If Apple is learning from me, And here’s me at my most arrogant. I’m smart 98% of the time.
00:17:05.63
Alan Baltis
What I do with my life is a very efficient way. How I write is very well done. what What kinds of things I am interested in are not stupid, most of the time, they’re pretty intellectual. They’re pretty interesting or interesting to me and others.
00:17:21.58
Alan Baltis
And so the fact that it’s capturing me and that I’m a really good example of how to interact with a computer and get things done quickly and correctly, and and I just don’t have to save all that in my head anymore. I don’t have to make notes off to the side.
00:17:34.94
Alan Baltis
It’s wonderful to have virtual off to the side and that it’s it’s not just like my memory store. You know what I mean? and And I i think I told you about this. but Early things that I read was about a memory palace that you create an image in your mind and you store things in there that you know you’re not going to have to have at your fingertips all the time, but you want to remember them.
00:17:57.16
Alan Baltis
So you play the mnemonic tricks you picture where do I store all the information about um but park fixing the electricity in my house. i’t have to do that more than once every year, but you create a room in your house and you you walk in and there’s a file cabinet there and you put the stuff that you need.
00:18:14.65
Alan Baltis
And then it’s amazing. You just kind of walk back there and you open the file and out comes, oh yeah, that’s right. I changed from knob and tube to to you know um circuits and I can like you can even in your mind almost picture the order in which you put things because you were thinking, well, what am I most going to have to deal with?
00:18:31.79
Alan Baltis
The kitchen seems to have things where they’re not good about Energy Star yet, at least not all our older devices. So I put those on the top right because it’ll be the ones that I have to like debug the most often.
00:18:43.06
Alan Baltis
And without going into it, I’ve used that for tons of stuff, for deep memory stuff, that that your mind, my mind, is really amazing in what it retains without my realizing that it has done so.
00:18:55.39
Alan Baltis
And so when we have a nice conversation and we use our good vocabulary, and we think back on a movie that we saw 50 years ago, I’m so happy about things that pop out without unbidden, without my having to remember them.
00:19:06.24
Alan Baltis
But things that I really wanted to remember, I’ve got this mnemonic device that I make use of so that sometimes I can dredge up things I knew I wanted to remember, but I knew I wouldn’t use it often enough to have your mind to do the refresh that it has to do in order to retain those synaptic connections and stuff like that.
00:19:10.22
Stephen Schneider
Thank
00:19:24.26
Alan Baltis
And so it might not be in real time like if you’re you’re a quiz bowl, you know what I mean? Not every comes to me in Culture Quest, but there was long ago ah book, Orn Ox Omnivore, where there was a creature that was like a phoenix-type creature, but the key thing was, whatever time that it regenerated, it retained memory of its past lives and learnings.
00:19:43.85
Alan Baltis
And so I kind of wanted to do that. I want to make sure that if I’ve ever seen it, learned it, listened to it, I retained it. And I don’t think I’ve had to do mnemonic training to do it. My mind is just kind of cool like that.
00:19:55.77
Alan Baltis
But for those things that, and i’ve we’ve laughed about this, I have a memory block of like, every time I go to my storage locker, what’s the keypad code to get into my facility? It just doesn’t stay.
00:20:07.07
Alan Baltis
I’ve tried to make mnemonics as to, well, the year that Kennedy was assassinated or the year, know what mean? Like, what can I do that will have this thing that’s associated with Berea Square Storage And it I don’t know why, but it just doesn’t stick.
00:20:21.45
Stephen Schneider
Mm-hmm.
00:20:21.88
Alan Baltis
So I had to do something that wasn’t my usual amusing way of remembering things, but really kind of grounded in something that, well, I know I’m not going to forget my birth year. And luckily, I’m of anybody who’s trying to break into Berea.
00:20:35.07
Alan Baltis
59 is not part of the code. You know what mean? So, but I, when I’ve had to do things like that, I’m real, and anne I’m 65, and so there’s a little bit of, oh no, the word didn’t come to me right away.
00:20:49.14
Alan Baltis
Oh no, I can’t remember this person’s name. and And I love them. I can’t believe that I am forgetting my really good friend’s wife’s name. It’s shameful, it’s embarrassing. Well, maybe virtual can help me with that.
00:21:02.09
Alan Baltis
I’ll start wearing my glasses and it’ll be boop boop. And it’ll always put like whenever I see someone, it’ll pull up, hey, name and relationship.
00:21:08.43
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:21:09.16
Alan Baltis
And I don’t know what they’re, you know, I don’t want it to be like crazy evil. What’s their, what’s their salary? What’s their allergy? So you could kill them if you wanted to. You know what i mean?
00:21:19.84
Alan Baltis
I’m not, I’m not looking to do anything crazy like that, but it would just be very interesting to me to be able to continually survey the world and be able to say everything I look at it gives me I don’t know, top three things that you probably want to remember about that or the links that say, if you wanted to investigate this product, you’re looking at on the shelf further.
00:21:41.64
Alan Baltis
Here you go. Here’s the consumer reports rating. Here’s prices of both online and in the store. And I would love to have that kind of information constantly at my fingertips as I see my memory fading a little bit that it like stepped in and helped me out.
00:21:55.64
Alan Baltis
And I think that Apple’s a really good bet for my being able to do that. So that’s kind of funny. I had formed some of those thoughts until we were just talking about it now.
00:22:06.65
Alan Baltis
But that’s one of the things I really love is that it’s virtual, not virtual humanity. Because I don’t know that i care about the opinions of about 90% of humanity.
00:22:17.16
Stephen Schneider
Mm-hmm.
00:22:17.53
Alan Baltis
I think they’re unlearned. I think that they’re knee-jerk. I think that they’re wrong. I think that they don’t have anywhere near the same curiosity and joy and discipline that I’ve had in trying to make sure that what I have here is not cluttered with stupid and ugly You know what I mean? i’m I’ve got a pretty clean brain.
00:22:37.67
Alan Baltis
It might not be that it’s all perfect, but it sure isn’t. I’ve embraced stupid. You know what I mean? So maybe there at that that’s I gotta like write this down.
00:22:49.52
Alan Baltis
That’s really interesting stuff about.
00:22:51.18
Stephen Schneider
we Well, you see, we’ve we’ve got AI that’ll do a transcript and you can just grab the transcript.
00:22:52.58
Alan Baltis
there
00:22:57.26
Alan Baltis
And that too, you know i mean?
00:22:57.26
Stephen Schneider
You don’t have to write it down.
00:22:59.18
Alan Baltis
Honestly, i just saw it, you know, always there’s little memes and ads and stuff popping up in Facebook. They had one something that was called like Findly, where it really is a little pendant that continually is listening and it provides those kind of transcripts.
00:23:12.53
Alan Baltis
And like, wow. I really could use that. I don’t always remember everything that I’ve heard during the course of the day because there was interference and collisions, because I wasn’t paying full attention, whatever else it might be.
00:23:25.24
Alan Baltis
And it would be really great to not only do that, but then by reading them say, oh, I don’t know that that’s what i wanted to have left behind. So call, text someone and say, by the way, when were talking about this, I might have said this, but it’s not all the way. Let me tell you the full thought here so that there’s no misunderstandings.
00:23:44.66
Alan Baltis
And that’s just for me thinking about casual things. If you were like in law, where every word really matters, if you were in politics, if you wanted to be able to prove somebody said something that they’re now denying, it would be pretty cool to have that perpetual memory device.
00:23:47.26
Stephen Schneider
and
00:24:01.21
Stephen Schneider
And even better, without having to go back and say and review it and say, oh, I wanted to expand and I forgot this, the virtual owl would automatically know there was more to the thought and automatically contact the person and send it.
00:24:15.07
Stephen Schneider
That’s…
00:24:15.28
Alan Baltis
Exactly.
00:24:15.51
Stephen Schneider
that’s
00:24:16.55
Alan Baltis
Well, you had mentioned, know, we always have our little, Hey, what going to talk about today? You mentioned things about agentic AI.
00:24:21.74
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:24:21.77
Alan Baltis
So what, what, what have you been working on that give you like thrills and heartening and stuff like that? What do you think?
00:24:27.44
Stephen Schneider
So, so for work, I’ve been doing this project and we’ve been working out for a while And it’s existed. it just hasn’t been easily accessible for a good price.
00:24:38.85
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:24:38.89
Stephen Schneider
um Basically, ah for for anyone that doesn’t understand, it’s a RAG system, um which is ah basically taking all of your documentation, all your documents, and putting them into your own custom ah virtual owl, your own custom AI LLM.
00:24:58.99
Stephen Schneider
So you don’t go to chat GPT and ask questions about anything. You go to your specific company’s chat and ask it questions about your documents.
00:25:10.26
Alan Baltis
Got it.
00:25:10.42
Stephen Schneider
So. Yeah.
00:25:11.16
Alan Baltis
Companies have it attempted things like that by having like an internal wiki, you know what I mean, where they use Wikipedia software to make it that there was a knowledge base.
00:25:15.18
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:25:18.22
Alan Baltis
They’ve called this knowledge base for a long time. And some things have succeeded well and other things haven’t because someone still had to be the curator.
00:25:25.62
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:25:25.85
Alan Baltis
and Okay, so, okay.
00:25:27.08
Stephen Schneider
Yeah, and this is this is literally, you know, all the documents created, whether it’s a blog post, a webinar, ah ebook for a client, whatever, all of that is put into this.
00:25:37.91
Stephen Schneider
And then it’s just processed and subsumed into this vector database by the AI.
00:25:42.62
Alan Baltis
That’s great.
00:25:44.05
Stephen Schneider
And you ask it questions as if you were talking to a person, hey, ah what are the trends in learning management over the last three years and what direction does it look to be headed? And it pulls it from what we developed and wrote.
00:25:59.42
Stephen Schneider
So working on that and it’s come, I mean, the price has come down from a hundred thousand a year to below 50,000 a year.
00:25:59.49
Alan Baltis
great
00:26:09.42
Stephen Schneider
ah you know, and so it’s becoming very affordable for companies.
00:26:14.57
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:26:14.72
Stephen Schneider
And i know I’ve looked Right.
00:26:16.10
Alan Baltis
For companies, maybe not individuals, but like, you know, there’s any number of technologies like Avid when he started off that this is the way to do a movie and it was a hundred thousand. And when it came down to like 10k, any studio could afford that any people could afford.
00:26:28.21
Stephen Schneider
right
00:26:28.76
Alan Baltis
And it really, boom, you started to get all kinds of independent production.
00:26:31.94
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:26:32.57
Alan Baltis
So what does RAG stand for?
00:26:33.18
Stephen Schneider
So um
00:26:34.57
Alan Baltis
Okay. Okay.
00:26:36.08
Stephen Schneider
i I want to say random access generation, but that’s not it.
00:26:39.55
Alan Baltis
okay okay
00:26:40.67
Stephen Schneider
And I know it here. Oh, retrieval augmented generation, not random retrieval.
00:26:44.76
Alan Baltis
There you go. Okay, thank you.
00:26:46.03
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. um And the thing is, and we you know we talk about the coding and they say, AIs go get rid of coders. Well, you’ve been able to create a RAG system ah for several years now, at least several years, but you had to do all the coding. You had to do the you know the Python, the connections and and translations and work with the the LLM and blah, blah, blah.
00:27:10.35
Stephen Schneider
Now the system, it’s so dirt simple. I literally dragged the files over and then sit back and wait for it to upload.
00:27:19.57
Alan Baltis
while it reads them, while it parses them and makes its own internal representation of them and creates the connections.
00:27:19.60
Stephen Schneider
And,
00:27:24.95
Alan Baltis
That’s very cool.
00:27:25.03
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. And I don’t have to do any pro.
00:27:25.91
Alan Baltis
It’s magic. and
00:27:27.21
Stephen Schneider
I don’t think I just have to copy some code and drop this little bit of code on the website and it’s done, you know, five years ago, it, it would have been a project trying to just create the LLM and then create the code to connect it.
00:27:40.66
Stephen Schneider
And it would have been huge.
00:27:42.40
Alan Baltis
right
00:27:42.40
Stephen Schneider
Now anybody could practically do it. I’m not telling work that anybody could do it. I’m telling them it’s still difficult.
00:27:47.34
Alan Baltis
ah if
00:27:47.91
Stephen Schneider
um But, but,
00:27:49.26
Alan Baltis
but
00:27:50.35
Stephen Schneider
ah But I’ve been playing with this other thing ah because there are other systems out there to make these and have control over it.
00:28:01.16
Stephen Schneider
you know This is a company that we’re using.
00:28:01.75
Alan Baltis
right
00:28:03.47
Stephen Schneider
So when I’m looking at the document list, I’m stuck with how they display it. And it’s annoying because I can’t find duplicates easily. I can’t list the original dates easily. ah you know So i can’t go in and reprogram that to display differently.
00:28:18.37
Alan Baltis
but You want to add functionality besides the base of what the tool itself gives you.
00:28:18.72
Stephen Schneider
I’m
00:28:22.41
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:28:22.88
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. I mean, you know, pros and cons. So I found this other thing. It’s like, oh this is so cool. It’s called N8N, N8N, the number 8N.
00:28:34.40
Alan Baltis
I’ve read about this. Okay, go on. Okay.
00:28:36.50
Stephen Schneider
it It’s what they call agentic AI. Basically, you’re creating an agent that does something. And this, again, you could do Zapier is a good example of this type of thing where you you tell Zapier, okay, look at my website.
00:28:54.15
Stephen Schneider
When I post a new post with this tag, grab that and take the,
00:29:03.56
Alan Baltis
so yeah
00:29:03.96
Stephen Schneider
sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, I thought i didn’t want to interrupt.
00:29:05.88
Alan Baltis
I was looking at my notes because like I have a big to-do list and one of the things that I made a note of was to further investigate N8N.
00:29:06.52
Stephen Schneider
and Okay.
00:29:13.80
Alan Baltis
So very interesting.
00:29:13.96
Stephen Schneider
So, but yeah, so Zapier will grab that document off your website and then you can tell it to take it and summarize it and send it out to these CEOs and then take that document and turn it into a Facebook post and post it here.
00:29:15.47
Alan Baltis
okay
00:29:29.33
Stephen Schneider
And it’ll do all that. That’s agentic AI.
00:29:32.02
Alan Baltis
Yes.
00:29:32.05
Stephen Schneider
Well, N8N allows you to do that with anything, with just about, and people, non-coders, right? are on Fiverr selling templates of these things they created, just, you know, you know, big, uh, running workflows, 50 bucks and boom, selling them to companies.
00:29:48.44
Alan Baltis
yes
00:29:51.08
Stephen Schneider
Now, most of them are focused on, uh, summarizing your, your mail or, or doing an ad campaign to send things out. So I’m playing with it.
00:30:02.21
Stephen Schneider
And Now, again, everything you can get an an agent to do, you can do manually. It’s just the agent can do it automatically and quicker.
00:30:10.68
Alan Baltis
right
00:30:11.47
Stephen Schneider
So last night, happened?
00:30:13.91
Alan Baltis
no it’s not to distract you that one one of the cool things that that you the reason they they say know agi you know artificial general intelligence is that we’ve had things like the ability to play jeopardy and defeat champions but deep blue really worked on a very specific application of that and long ago i i think you know i did my two years as a dot-com guy and we had um
00:30:16.71
Stephen Schneider
ye
00:30:33.86
Stephen Schneider
Thank you.
00:30:40.75
Alan Baltis
our system maintainers, there’s always logs being created of every single thing that happens on all your servers. And you if you’re you can go through those things and look for blips, you know like a human being just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and you look for, oh, why did that drop for a moment? Why did we lose connection or have, you know and him they started to have tools that would go through all of that text because in the wonderful world of Unix-based systems,
00:31:07.66
Alan Baltis
everything is a text file there there weren’t databases with specific structures and stuff like that everything gets saved as text well someone said if that’s really true that all it is is ascii characters i will go through and i will look for those anomalies and i’ll create kind of a an error report or a state of the system report so instead of someone having to be there at two in the morning looking for those kinds of things it would do that create alerts the person could get something on their
00:31:24.34
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:31:33.08
Alan Baltis
Back then, pagers just going on phone. We were just starting to smartphones back then. But that was still, they knew exactly what to look for because they knew what kinds of things were being created for this log, et cetera.
00:31:43.87
Alan Baltis
And there’s any number of other um big parsing algorithms that have happened that gave you that kind of stuff. the fact that now we have it, like you’re saying, i can just do it on anything.
00:31:54.78
Alan Baltis
And i can I can decide what kinds of things I want to do with it in a way that’s very human.
00:31:54.82
Stephen Schneider
Right. Yeah.
00:31:59.35
Stephen Schneider
yeah
00:31:59.79
Alan Baltis
We’re still having to know the the format of things and the importance of things. You know what I mean? so
00:32:05.27
Stephen Schneider
And and you could you could create this agent, like you said, looking for these blips to send out an alert, but at the same time, it could take all that data and put, you know, here’s the top 10 visited pages.
00:32:17.21
Stephen Schneider
Here’s the keywords used to do that and send that to specific people. You know, this person could get the keyword report.
00:32:21.83
Alan Baltis
Exactly.
00:32:23.71
Stephen Schneider
This person could get a summary of visits and who’s revisiting, ah who logged in, you know, different people with different information, all from one agent, if you want. And it would trigger automatically.
00:32:34.57
Alan Baltis
Exactly.
00:32:34.64
Stephen Schneider
You know, that type of thing.
00:32:35.53
Alan Baltis
Very much separating the signal from the noise. you know We had all kinds of things that would put out all kinds of false positives. There was an anomaly, but it didn’t end up having any impact. And so a difference that makes no difference is no difference.
00:32:47.28
Alan Baltis
But then it would say, well, I detected this. we were starting to get you know overflow. And then an hour later, we did indeed run out of memory, fill up the log file on another server, et cetera, et cetera.
00:32:57.60
Alan Baltis
And it would find those patterns. You’d have to anticipate what kind of patterns do I want to look for? Nowadays, the learning part of AI just says, well, let’s say that I was a dedicated operations person. And instead of my spending hours and hours and hours looking at what happened and then what did it cause to happen and how can I head that off?
00:33:17.36
Alan Baltis
It looks for that for you. And it starts to say, i’ve I’ve learned that anything that happens at two in the morning by 3.30, if you don’t correct it, you get a blip, you get a bad thing. you know what I mean? It it doesn’t for you.
00:33:26.43
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:33:27.63
Alan Baltis
How amazing that this thing is like an idiot savant that maybe it’s only learning it to start with, but after a while, it’s amazing to think that it uncovers because one of the things that people have is they get bored.
00:33:39.92
Alan Baltis
Their eyes glaze over from looking at reams and reams of data, but this guy doesn’t.
00:33:44.54
Stephen Schneider
On green bar.
00:33:45.50
Alan Baltis
i Honestly, oh my God. So the fact that we’re getting that now, that we can like have this, I don’t know, robotics and AI are one of those things.
00:33:56.17
Alan Baltis
I don’t have to hire a human monkey to look at these things. This thing will never get tired and it will help me out and I’ll be able to maybe coax it, train it a little bit. But otherwise, it not only finds things that I told it to look for, it starts to uncover things like how are we doing chip design nowadays?
00:34:13.61
Alan Baltis
that it does things with material science that human beings wouldn’t try because they think in a very 2D instead of 3D way, or in a, um if if this could bad thing could happen, thermal problems, don’t have any risk of that whatsoever, but it’ll actually skate close to the edge, experiment with it and say, you know, I made traces down to two nanometers, nanometers nowadays, and it still works.
00:34:14.23
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:34:39.35
Alan Baltis
And so I guess our fear’s over. the materials and the silicon and the closeness of things that in the overall, that doesn’t matter as much as you thought it did. So kind of like if you’re a musician, you won’t play musical mud, you play according to mostly classical music things. But once in a while you get, well, that that’s what jazz is about is improvisation and discovering something beautiful without realizing that that was available to you.
00:35:02.30
Alan Baltis
So back to you’re working with these cool things and your company or your rag is putting out all kinds of interesting reports and
00:35:03.84
Stephen Schneider
but
00:35:09.25
Stephen Schneider
so So that’s one of the things that this NAN can do is you can create a rag system to to do stuff. So I’m looking into that because one of the things we like to do is not rely on tons of outside services, which is funny because part of our business is connecting companies with services.
00:35:30.40
Alan Baltis
Right. To be that outside service provider or connector.
00:35:32.21
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
00:35:33.68
Alan Baltis
Exactly.
00:35:34.25
Stephen Schneider
But, you know, like this, we could, you know, bring it in house, completely developed, controlled by us without tons of code, you know, and just run it through AWS and have a folder.
00:35:45.69
Stephen Schneider
We drop things in and it automatically adds it.
00:35:47.55
Alan Baltis
Thank you.
00:35:48.17
Stephen Schneider
And so what what I did last night, now this is the the cool part last night. I dropped a manuscript in a Google folder. It detected it, pulled it in, and then um created a summary of it, put the summary back in the folder.
00:36:06.63
Stephen Schneider
Then it translated it to Japanese, put the Japanese manuscript in the folder, Then it created an audio of the Japanese and put that in the folder.
00:36:17.15
Stephen Schneider
And so what I’m work want to do now is work on it. So I could put a manuscript up there. It detects the chapters, breaks it down by chapter, translates it into like three different languages, puts the manuscript of those languages back in, puts the audio in.
00:36:32.44
Stephen Schneider
And just by dropping a manuscript into a folder, you have your book translated into three different languages ready to go.
00:36:39.45
Alan Baltis
What an amazing capability. And this is kind of weird. In a world where some people are acting very isolationist and very overproud that like, we why don’t you speak English?
00:36:51.91
Alan Baltis
Like if you want the world to know what you’re doing and appreciate it and pay you for it, you got to learn the the languages of 15 different companies, not one, or force everybody to do that.
00:37:02.86
Stephen Schneider
right
00:37:04.58
Alan Baltis
And now i another holy grail has always been you OCR, when it first became available, you could take things off the page and translate it into computer text. Amazing.
00:37:15.73
Alan Baltis
Audio translation of, you know, ken who who made the first Babel fish that was still halting and wrong and that kind of stuff, but then it got better and better. It started to happen in real time. So you could, like, be out on the streets of Paris and say, could you help me find the train station?
00:37:29.30
Alan Baltis
he would say, Harley-Vous, you know, let train, you know what I mean?
00:37:29.92
Stephen Schneider
I’ve used that feature when I was in Florida.
00:37:34.31
Alan Baltis
I just, the fact that that kind of stuff is, That is another universal translator Star Trek magic. And I guess they had to get the computing power and the and the knowledge bases and whatever else it might be so that it isn’t just kind of like idiot savant.
00:37:49.66
Alan Baltis
It really does understand context. It understands like if you’re in Paris, maybe it’s a different accent than if you’re Marseille or whatever else it might be. And I think that that’s something, again, that people might not appreciate that there really was the Tower of Babel, you know, um in biblical mythology that said, how did the world fall apart? Because we couldn’t talk to each other.
00:38:14.25
Alan Baltis
And anything that enables that that, that lets other cultures interact in a way that it really handles real language. And that’s just, in our lifetime, I’m sure that that has like,
00:38:27.42
Alan Baltis
I don’t know, enabled commerce, stopped wars. You know, like let kids growing up learn more deeply and quickly than they ever have before.
00:38:37.75
Stephen Schneider
Except you mentioned the Babelfish Hitchhikers Somebody said something that traveled through time And when it came out on whatever world It was translated and started a war So, you know
00:38:45.54
Alan Baltis
ah
00:38:47.92
Alan Baltis
It did cause a war. It did cause a war. Yeah, so perhaps a poor example to mix those metaphors or those references is a better term. You’re right.
00:38:58.40
Stephen Schneider
like but That’s Douglas Adams genius right there
00:39:01.28
Alan Baltis
Right, exactly. so ah So, like, if this is kind of interesting. You know you said before, well, I’m not going to, you know, necessarily, if you’re the person that’s introducing these cool capabilities to the company, they’re not going to be looking for, you know, hey, can we now get rid of you?
00:39:18.51
Alan Baltis
They’re going to say, i love this. Can you make that 10 different flavors of ice cream is instead of one?
00:39:23.15
Stephen Schneider
Well, that’s the, that’s the great thing is there’s just so many, our company is almost one hundred percent remote.
00:39:23.80
Alan Baltis
We love what you’ve done. Please do more. Yeah.
00:39:32.02
Stephen Schneider
Not, not quite as much as it used to be. They do have an office. There’s a lot of people that do come into the office daily or you a couple of times a week, but, but we do so many things. We live with our email.
00:39:42.44
Stephen Schneider
We live with Dropbox. We live with,
00:39:44.12
Alan Baltis
everything virtual Exactly. Everything.
00:39:45.69
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:39:46.21
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:39:47.02
Stephen Schneider
Everything’s a Zoom meeting, or actually we use Microsoft Teams now. Everything’s a meeting, and we we get the translations of meetings to send it to people that couldn’t be at the meeting. you know There are so many applications we could probably work on and develop for internal use to help make that whole everything run smoother, run better, run better.
00:40:07.65
Stephen Schneider
You know, I looking at all these documents, I’m like trying to weed out duplicates or earlier versions and only use the latest version and stuff. And, you know, you could create something that would look in a folder and if it sees more than one, try and guess which one it is and, you know, send an, a text message to the analyst said, Hey, is this the final version?
00:40:30.04
Stephen Schneider
And if they say, well, yes, it is, you know, reply. Yes. It comes back and okay. And then it renames it a certain way or moves the file to a final place.
00:40:38.60
Alan Baltis
that’s how crime document instead of the previous ones exactly
00:40:41.15
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. It does something, you know you could put all this in to just make those menial little tasks that get skipped just because we’re in a hurry. We forget we have a lot of things going on, you know, or or to make it easy. I’m looking at this. I’m like, great.
00:40:54.73
Stephen Schneider
Everybody names their documents differently is final, the right one or is ah edits the right one or, you know,
00:41:00.24
Alan Baltis
okay they append the date or they don’t and then you can’t even distinguish without going into the document
00:41:05.59
Stephen Schneider
Oh yeah. I’ve got multiple ah documents that have the same date on them.
00:41:06.72
Alan Baltis
yeah
00:41:10.38
Stephen Schneider
And one says one, one says two, one says final edit. So, you know, that, that, that’s fun.
00:41:16.50
Alan Baltis
very
00:41:18.71
Stephen Schneider
So a little offshoot of that whole discussion and,
00:41:18.72
Alan Baltis
okay
00:41:24.09
Stephen Schneider
I got this finally done. I don’t know if I showed you. I don’t know if I mentioned it. So I got my picture book done.
00:41:29.83
Alan Baltis
Very cool.
00:41:29.90
Stephen Schneider
honest Connor meets the the crypto guru.
00:41:33.12
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:41:33.40
Stephen Schneider
aye And it’s got pictures and then facts about leopards on every page.
00:41:39.80
Alan Baltis
Oh my God. Okay.
00:41:41.40
Stephen Schneider
And I love it because if you look, what I did was it’s got watercolors, but then 3D picture type people over top of it.
00:41:51.44
Alan Baltis
embedded. OK. and
00:41:54.25
Stephen Schneider
which I think is a cool little look. ah And here’s here’s where, ah this is why I was putting this. So I think the book’s cool.
00:42:01.31
Alan Baltis
okay
00:42:01.65
Stephen Schneider
But I did have somebody at my last author event go, oh, who did the art? I said, well, you know, I created the the the watercolors. Oh, that’s just disgusting. I don’t want that. okay, I think you should buy you know should pay artists. We’re putting them out of work, blah, blah, blah. I says, well, you know my book, I hired Tom Zoller. He did the covers. I think it’s amazing work he did.
00:42:22.61
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:42:22.69
Stephen Schneider
Oh, I love Tom Zoller. These are great. Oh, that’s $10. Well, I don’t want to buy anything.
00:42:28.22
Alan Baltis
Oh.
00:42:28.77
Stephen Schneider
Put your money where your mouth is, folks. If you’re going to complain that I used AI, then pay and buy the thing that I didn’t or understand these
00:42:30.49
Alan Baltis
ah
00:42:39.90
Stephen Schneider
technology you know I could go into a huge example. I have examples. I’ve talked about this for 10 minutes with examples about this. Tech changes things. We lose some jobs. We gain some jobs. We always have.
00:42:52.17
Alan Baltis
That’s right.
00:42:52.21
Stephen Schneider
I don’t see people riding their horse and going to a blacksmith just to keep blacksmiths in jobs. Okay, we’ll just stop there. Here’s the thing. I very much could hire people to make the pictures for a picture book, but if I’m going to do a watercolor and then put 3d people on top of it, that’s two different artists.
00:43:05.80
Alan Baltis
Okay.
00:43:11.63
Stephen Schneider
That’s going to be easily $700, a thousand dollars to pay to get a full picture book, which means if it’s a thousand dollars and I’m selling it for 10, I’m I have to sell a hundred of them to just recoup my Well, that’s not true because I only make $5 off of it. The other five materials, I have to sell 200 just to pay for the artist before i make any money.
00:43:37.37
Alan Baltis
right
00:43:37.88
Stephen Schneider
So most books don’t even sell 200 books at Barnes and Noble sometimes barely sell a couple hundred throughout the whole country.
00:43:45.73
Alan Baltis
right and so they don’t even get issued in the first place because everybody looks at that that economic play they say it’s not even worth doing well okay yeah
00:43:50.71
Stephen Schneider
Yes. Exactly. So, so there’s my argument. I do not disagree. Yes. I think it kind of sucks that anybody like me who is not artistic whatsoever can make a full picture book without paying a single artist. I understand that’s, that’s kind of sucks, but On the flip side, I think this is a cool story. It’s something that I felt needed to get out and it would not have if I couldn’t have done it this way.
00:44:21.11
Stephen Schneider
So you you you got artists maybe that aren’t going to be working as much making kids picture books, but you’ve got a lot more good kids picture books with some niche, some topic that you and your kids may really love.
00:44:35.77
Stephen Schneider
And it’s not the same vanilla crap that they have 500 of at the store.
00:44:40.34
Alan Baltis
Exactly.
00:44:40.98
Stephen Schneider
So, yeah you know, I will stand on that hill. I understand that I’m, you know, I don’t want to argue with people and make people upset. It does suck artists. But then again, we had newspapers. We had people that used to draw ads.
00:44:54.06
Stephen Schneider
Well, then they came out with cameras and and color printing and they got rid of all the ad drawing people and they had people with cameras doing ads. And then they came out with computer graphic designs, got rid of the camera guys and just had one guy doing great.
00:45:06.44
Stephen Schneider
And then they came out with the internet and stopped doing newspapers at all. I guarantee the people that want to bitch about AI putting people out of work got newspapers in the 70s, in the 80s, in the 90s, and then 2000s.
00:45:12.07
Alan Baltis
sorry.
00:45:20.02
Stephen Schneider
And then they canceled their newspaper subscription because the internet had it all. Well, if you’re going to do, if you’re going to get newspapers while they’re changing technology and getting rid of jobs and then canceling it because you don’t want to pay the money because you have the internet, shut up.
00:45:36.46
Alan Baltis
oh
00:45:36.63
Stephen Schneider
Mic drop. There we go.
00:45:37.27
Alan Baltis
there e So I, that whole thing about creative destruction, that’s even like an an economics term, it has happened all the time, that there’s always been the the cannibalization of existing laborers, business, artists, that kind of stuff.
00:45:46.67
Stephen Schneider
yeah
00:45:52.84
Alan Baltis
It always happens when there’s new technology. That’s why it’s called disruptive in so many ways. But what we’ve also seen is everybody has to learn to adapt. And so i um I’d like to have something beyond the watch face that Apple gives me.
00:46:07.99
Alan Baltis
And it gives me like 10, but none of them are perfect. And so instead of going to ah a an artist and saying, give me and ah um a watch face that nobody else will have but me.
00:46:20.28
Alan Baltis
And remember when we had the non-fungible tokens, that went really wacky for a while because people wanted to have what they knew was a unique thing. And we found out that maybe digital isn’t the only way to do that, or that if they generate 64,000 images, each of which is unique, but they only differ by two or three pixels, you don’t really have unique. You have stilted unique.
00:46:44.65
Alan Baltis
um So what i what I was thinking is i went and there’s an app that has 200 new watch faces, seven bucks. So somebody, instead of saying, I’m going to be the um ah master artist that I’m going to wait for, sponsorship from the Medici’s or from the church or be captive in those ways, then instead I’m going to put together a portfolio of 200 watch faces.
00:47:11.04
Alan Baltis
And I don’t know who’s going to what want what, but if I did the time to put together 200 and then I can leverage that into being $7 sales times 10,000, because people will always find something in that batch, then I’m going to put together 200.
00:47:22.23
Alan Baltis
but Whatever the thing is, if I can create one $10,000 watch face or I can sell $10,000 worth of packages of that kind of stuff, I think that’s a a trade-off that every artist, every laborer, everybody has to do as to what’s the niche that I’m going to find.
00:47:37.30
Alan Baltis
And if I’m prolific, then I do it this way. If I’m exacting, then I find a sponsor and I and i make ah ah a masterpiece, et cetera, and all the ways in between. I’m going to license some out, but some going to keep for myself.
00:47:49.41
Alan Baltis
And so we’re all having to learn. It isn’t that artists aren’t aware of the pressures that are on them economically, like you were saying. Tom Dollar has to be saying, I can do some work for comic books, but I can also do my independent work and I can do book covers for Stephen and things like that.
00:48:03.21
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:48:04.25
Alan Baltis
And a lot of people are doing that.
00:48:05.34
Stephen Schneider
And. Yeah.
00:48:06.33
Alan Baltis
There’s not just one thing. They put a toe into 10 different pods.
00:48:09.61
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:48:10.26
Alan Baltis
You know what mean? that So, yeah.
00:48:11.02
Stephen Schneider
I’m not saying it’s easy, but there are still avenues. And you know I’ve hired Tom to do some great artwork.
00:48:14.72
Alan Baltis
Yeah.
00:48:17.44
Stephen Schneider
I mean, you know that’s a great picture. I love the pictures he’s done. In book three, the picture he did, I love it.
00:48:21.09
Alan Baltis
Absolutely. Yeah.
00:48:23.04
Stephen Schneider
It’s a little different. um But I’ve never had the reverse where Tom said, hey, ah i want to hire you to write a story for the pictures I drew. He writes his own stories too.
00:48:34.31
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
00:48:34.58
Alan Baltis
Right, right.
00:48:34.73
Stephen Schneider
So, ah okay. You know, the the the art we’re supposed to hire all the artists, but the artists aren’t hiring writers necessarily. Yeah. And that’s being a little, you know, that’s a little pushing it.
00:48:45.42
Stephen Schneider
I understand. But the,
00:48:46.80
Alan Baltis
There are artists that really, what they want to do is draw. They don’t want to come up with, you know I just, I got an omnibus from um Peter Tomasi, who had been a really um good artist for a long time and then kind of moved into writing and still worked with people that he liked working with, Doug Monke and stuff like that.
00:48:50.31
Stephen Schneider
yeah.
00:49:03.11
Alan Baltis
But that’s a big transition to make to not only do it yourself, but to have other people recognize, oh, this artist who I had said, he’s just an artist. He actually has some stories in him too. And I’m going to give him a chance.
00:49:14.68
Alan Baltis
Well, There are artists that just want to draw. They really don’t have whatever the spark is that says, I’m going to create the silver surfer like Jack Kirby did. They just want to have somebody to give them a plot outline and they’ll create it.
00:49:26.98
Alan Baltis
They’ll they’ll film the movie. You know what i mean? But they’re not the one that comes up with the idea for the movie.
00:49:31.65
Stephen Schneider
Right.
00:49:32.35
Alan Baltis
Anyway, I think that there’s niches for everybody like that too. um And the ability to transition in between. So if I was, don’t know, I can’t draw. at all.
00:49:42.92
Alan Baltis
And yet the fact that I could go out there and say, Al’s got a book in him. Could I do a picture book for kids? That’s the story of, you know, Colleen talks about doing kind of a revised ugly duckling and she can draw really well, but it’s painstaking to draw beautifully.
00:49:58.92
Alan Baltis
She could just say, Hey, GPT, give me a picture of the ugly duck wearing a ah helmet or something like that.
00:50:01.86
Stephen Schneider
Right. it
00:50:05.69
Stephen Schneider
And I think some of the people that say things like, you know, oh, that’s disgusting.
00:50:06.12
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean?
00:50:10.21
Stephen Schneider
You’re putting people out work and I wouldn’t buy that. But I don’t think they understand how many companies for the past year or longer have already been using ai to make ads, to make ah videos, to make images images.
00:50:25.15
Stephen Schneider
and labels and whatever else that they’re already using AI. They have been products you’re buying right now that you’re supporting are using AI.
00:50:34.59
Alan Baltis
That’s right.
00:50:34.59
Stephen Schneider
You know, ah my buddy Reese, he works for a company that does government work and he’s a ah graphic designer. He takes pictures, you know, he just, he goes to trade shows and he takes a million pictures that they turn into brochures and stuff. Well, they don’t always do that. He’s working on some images,
00:50:54.21
Stephen Schneider
for the guys, marketing guys to do a video or something like that. But instead of paying and him and flying him to go take pictures of these different things, he’s learning how to use AI and create those images just like they want and sending it to him using AI and not leaving the office.
00:51:10.62
Alan Baltis
Got it. Yeah.
00:51:10.77
Stephen Schneider
And it’s cheaper to do that. And when you’re watching a 30 second ad, that’s flashing up 12 different images, you know, yeah just panning over different images.
00:51:21.79
Stephen Schneider
Are you really that upset that they didn’t fly somebody to Arizona to go to that one cave, to take the one picture to use in that ad? Or are you okay with them creating that image with AI, saving the company, you know, a thousand, some $12,000, whatever,
00:51:40.11
Alan Baltis
yeah
00:51:40.56
Stephen Schneider
And possibly keeping the prices the same. Now we could get into the whole thing of that money is just going to the CEO’s pocket. Okay.
00:51:48.24
Alan Baltis
I don’t know.
00:51:48.38
Stephen Schneider
That’s whole nother argument. I get it. But you know, if you’re flying people around and taking pictures of those, that those costs go into how much they charge for the products.
00:51:59.09
Stephen Schneider
So, you know,
00:52:00.94
Alan Baltis
ah You know, therere a big thing behind all of this is the inherent liberalism or conservatism of what do you think about those technologies?
00:52:12.35
Alan Baltis
Some people want to say, every image I look at, it really has to be real because there’s a purity to that. And they make this whole purity test to those kinds of things. And like, oh, look, here’s a picture where they got it wrong. Somebody has six fingers instead of five, and they’re happy to point out those errors.
00:52:27.80
Alan Baltis
But they don’t point out probably 90 out of 100 images that you’re looking at nowadays are computer generated or retouched and idealized.
00:52:36.71
Stephen Schneider
Retouched. Yeah.
00:52:37.52
Alan Baltis
Exactly that. You know what mean? there’s There’s nobody that’s in Hollywood that has fixed their image.
00:52:40.34
Stephen Schneider
Oh yeah. The same, the same people complaining about this type of thing have no problem using their phone.
00:52:43.48
Alan Baltis
so
00:52:48.25
Stephen Schneider
You know, the phone that put how many wedding photographers out of business and they have no problem, like you said, taking a picture and hitting a button to, to pull out the the people that they don’t want in the picture.
00:52:52.68
Alan Baltis
Like that.
00:53:00.27
Stephen Schneider
something you would have had to send to a photographer editor to fix before, but you’re not doing that. That’s my, that’s where I get irritated is they don’t understand how much AI has already affected their lives.
00:53:08.69
Alan Baltis
That’s just.
00:53:12.94
Stephen Schneider
They’re already using it without even necessarily being aware of it, but they want to bitch about this one thing. And those are also the type of people that, that would make it their mission in life to ruin mine, go onto Amazon and get 50 of their friends all to go give me one star reviews and how horrible, you know what I’m saying?
00:53:25.50
Alan Baltis
and but
00:53:30.18
Alan Baltis
Right, we’ve learned the game of the system, exactly.
00:53:32.27
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. You know,
00:53:33.05
Alan Baltis
help I have had this discussion so many times, ah especially because i’m a I’m a futurist, I’m a technologist, When I see a new technology, I have such curiosity about, well, where’s that going to go? And what can we do with it? and think of how cool it will be, how wonderful it will be in the future.
00:53:50.63
Alan Baltis
And others have the, they think of the awfulization of it. They think, oh my God, that’s going to put people out of work or make it that you can’t tell a real image from a false one or whatever else it might be. And there’s there’s a real dividing line there between wouldn’t it be cool if instead of won’t it be awful if?
00:54:06.90
Alan Baltis
And I think that history has taught us that technology has almost always made the world better. I know that lot of technology has been war-based and that from that you also get GPS.
00:54:18.78
Alan Baltis
You know, there’s been so much of our quality of life has been from medical things and people are always, well, what if that, you know, what if that gets out? What if nanotechnology gets out? What if AI takes over?
00:54:32.83
Alan Baltis
and And I understand there’s
00:54:34.13
Stephen Schneider
That’s all Michael Crichton books right there.
00:54:35.90
Alan Baltis
Right, exactly. There’s caution. There’s cautionary tales to be told. So it’s not that there’s only one way to be or another, but the people that want it to be only a certain way, there’s something inherently wrong with that. They don’t know the future. They can’t even predict it beyond three days from now, much less 10 years and 100 years from now.
00:54:52.70
Alan Baltis
So if you try to think of it that way, what did the people in 1900 think about what the world was going to be like in 1930? And if they didn’t take into account Early jet airplanes, penicillin, ultraviolet light.
00:55:05.43
Alan Baltis
Like one of the joys of my reading my Doc Savage books was how often they made references to new scientific things that have now become so commonplace they’re not even… They don’t make a blip in people’s minds about there was a time before penicillin where people really, they got sulfa drugs or they died.
00:55:21.96
Alan Baltis
you You always cut limbs off and cauterize things instead of fighting the infection. They didn’t even know to wash their hands. And so all that advancement, like, and And one of the big problems that I have with anything that’s inherently about don’t let the future arrive.
00:55:40.33
Alan Baltis
You know mean? Trying to ban books because they have dangerous ideas. Well, they have good ideas in them too. And we should be aware, we should monitor what people are making use of that. But especially, I guess, because it is relentless geekery, there’s so much technology that I can’t think of where it has to come out for the better instead of the worse.
00:56:00.45
Alan Baltis
We really, you know what i mean? i ah
00:56:02.13
Stephen Schneider
but
00:56:02.41
Alan Baltis
just…
00:56:02.96
Stephen Schneider
the problem is ah most people are adverse to change of any sort and, and they don’t understand that change is really the only constant, you know, you’ve heard that before too.
00:56:08.77
Alan Baltis
And that to
00:56:14.84
Alan Baltis
exact, you know, like it it will, things will change.
00:56:14.94
Stephen Schneider
ah
00:56:17.94
Alan Baltis
How you deal with it is how you’re going to have a happy life or a crappy life. And yet some people will fight and fight and fight.
00:56:24.21
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. And that’s been my, yes.
00:56:24.81
Alan Baltis
Like the good old days, there’s never was a good old days the way you envision it.
00:56:28.65
Stephen Schneider
Yes.
00:56:28.73
Alan Baltis
You know what I mean? That’s a falsehood. that Oh, well.
00:56:31.79
Stephen Schneider
my argument with people with AI is it’s too late for this discussion. You, you understand this discussion should have happened in 2010. You know, that’s when, but, but it’s way too late. It’s out. It’s there. You will not stop it. Now you’re just going to get behind.
00:56:47.56
Stephen Schneider
My problem with that is that our kids or go get behind if we’re not working with them on it, introducing them to the right ways of using it, the things it can do.
00:56:57.100
Stephen Schneider
We’re not going to get those genius leaps of how to use AI in the future.
00:57:03.17
Alan Baltis
Right.
00:57:03.67
Stephen Schneider
We’re not going to get the new products, the new AI, if we’re trying to keep it away from kids. That’s my my thing. We just got to work with kids on Or they’ll use it in ways we don’t want them to.
00:57:14.79
Stephen Schneider
You know, it’s that responsibility thing too.
00:57:15.31
Alan Baltis
like
00:57:17.04
Stephen Schneider
So that… it
00:57:18.11
Alan Baltis
I think often what it does is it doesn’t stop and it only delays it. And where there’s a lot of good things that could have happened. Like everybody that talks about we had the cessation of a stem cell research during Bush, ah Bush II, because of words from the religious right about that’s playing God or whatever else it might be.
00:57:37.78
Alan Baltis
and and And yet, now we’ve I just read that CRISPR technology has enabled us to eliminate HIV. They really found out how to edit people at the genomic level to make it so that we can eradicate diseases that have baffle us as to how to do it because they are one of those that they’re cunning and they mutate and they’re and all that kind of stuff and so we have rna technology that’s enabling cobit to be combated instead of just oh my god pandemic it killed a third of the world you know what i mean there really are some things that the the genes i’m sorry the germs are um cunning that they want to live in their own way and they quickly mutate and they fight all that stuff
00:58:17.45
Alan Baltis
So what should be stacked up against, oh gosh, that could have been bad, is how many lives did you let die because you didn’t allow stem cell research to continue?
00:58:25.01
Stephen Schneider
Which
00:58:25.93
Alan Baltis
All the people that we didn’t cure leukemia in time, we didn’t cure cancer in time, we didn’t cure, because all those things are coming. We’re getting to where we can see with And how inherently conservative do you have to be that there is technology that has worked like vaccination, and yet you convince yourself that it’s dangerous more than it is helpful, despite hundreds of millions, if not billions of people not having died or been crippled from polio and measles.
00:58:43.11
Stephen Schneider
which
00:58:54.35
Alan Baltis
And you know, I mean, oh, God.
00:58:55.81
Stephen Schneider
And did you see ah RFK fired the whole 17 member board of the people that validated vaccines? And and so so we’re going to get a generation of school kids dying from all those diseases that we had stopped.
00:59:12.02
Stephen Schneider
And did you see the thing going around that weatherman saying, hey, you know what? It’s almost hurricane season, but I can’t let you know anything because they’re not letting me know anything. So good luck with hurricanes.
00:59:21.16
Alan Baltis
Right. I think what’s going to happen is it’s not going to be a whole generation. It’s going to be, we’re going to get a year worth of, why are we not letting the things we set up work like they should?
00:59:32.66
Alan Baltis
Why are we not letting the smart people take care of things that instead this arch conservative, arch fearful attitude is having us put our ni and head in the sand in ways that’s just going to kill millions of people.
00:59:40.54
Stephen Schneider
yeah You hope. You hope.
00:59:44.90
Alan Baltis
The first
00:59:45.50
Stephen Schneider
that’s
00:59:45.70
Alan Baltis
hurricane rolls in and we didn’t have any preparation why we asking about it we just had horrible storms right in missouri oklahoma etc that all the national weather service reporting that could have told people get to shelter evacuate etc then instead we had unnecessary deaths and i gotta tell you but obviously they of course they didn’t and i don’t even know
01:00:01.61
Stephen Schneider
Well, that’s because the Democrats did that because they control the weather. Unless… Unless you’re in Hawaii, because if you’re in Hawaii, then fudge the fish controls the weather.
01:00:12.52
Stephen Schneider
If you’ve seen Lilo and Stitch.
01:00:12.79
Alan Baltis
ah I have not seen that, but I, that, you know what i mean? The fact that we have to start making fun of it because it’s just so unbelievably stupid and careless. So I don’t like the term unnecessary death. How do we call it like manslaughter, um negligent murder?
01:00:27.99
Alan Baltis
The fact that these didn’t have to happen and yet somebody, some idiot’s decision to stop us from having what we already have that keeps us safe. Everything we’re doing to dismantle food safety, air safety, water safety, weather safety.
01:00:40.95
Alan Baltis
It’s unbelievable that we’re putting ourselves so much at risk over an an ideology that’s been proven to be wrong.
01:00:47.96
Stephen Schneider
yeah
01:00:48.27
Alan Baltis
It never worked.
01:00:49.13
Stephen Schneider
i i don’t think i think I don’t think it’s going to be just a year.
01:00:50.34
Alan Baltis
Never.
01:00:53.63
Stephen Schneider
i think it’s going to take longer. ah yeah that you’re you’re
01:00:56.16
Alan Baltis
It could take, it’ll be like, i don’t know, the someone’s going to lose their family to a tornado and they’re going to go to Washington and say, who made that bad decision?
01:01:06.38
Alan Baltis
Don’t advocate that.
01:01:07.11
Stephen Schneider
so Well, it won’t matter if it’s
01:01:09.63
Alan Baltis
Please don’t do it anyway. Don’t be that crazy. But I can’t believe it hasn’t happened already.
01:01:13.34
Stephen Schneider
it won’t matter if it’s like one of us, it has to be the Uber rich, you know, they’re the ones in controlling everything.
01:01:19.38
Alan Baltis
or the uber insane. You know what I mean?
01:01:20.75
Stephen Schneider
And well, it’s kind of the same in today’s world.
01:01:21.58
Alan Baltis
It really will be that you killed my daughter and I will not let you continue on this planet for having your negligence having led to her death.
01:01:23.81
Stephen Schneider
It looks like. Did,
01:01:30.29
Stephen Schneider
And did you see this whole thing about the the protester rallot at riots in l LA? I haven’t seen a single video of people smashing in windows and flipping cars. And these aren’t riots, folks.
01:01:40.52
Alan Baltis
All false. That’s right.
01:01:42.63
Stephen Schneider
And then that video going around.
01:01:43.26
Alan Baltis
They have posted things from other riots where there had been like a cop car set on fire, but it’s not.
01:01:46.73
Stephen Schneider
yeah
01:01:48.36
Alan Baltis
Of course, whatever the idiot 10%, now 40% of our country, lapsed that up like cream, whereas everybody says, you know it’s false information. They don’t have anything like that. What we have is, here’s an Australian reporter getting shot for no fucking good reason.
01:02:02.02
Stephen Schneider
On purpose. I mean, did you see the video that he just went?
01:02:03.26
Alan Baltis
I’m horrible. He turned around. Exactly. like it it So the fact that there’s such suppression of good media, real fact finding, just the truth coming out, lets you know that it’s because they want to be able to get away with literally murder, and we have to stop that.
01:02:19.50
Alan Baltis
And I don’t think it’s going to take… This administration, I think it’s going to be that this administration is going to get shut down because they’re so blatant and so deadly about things that people will get fed up far sooner than, let’s wait for the next election.
01:02:21.19
Stephen Schneider
And the…
01:02:31.88
Stephen Schneider
I hope.
01:02:34.05
Alan Baltis
I don’t think the election is what’s going to happen. I think there’s going to elimination and jail and…
01:02:36.79
Stephen Schneider
Unfortunately, I think the administration really is pushing us into a civil war on purpose. That’s why they’re suppressing so much information because they want the only information to be what they say it is to to rile people up and put us against each other.
01:02:52.76
Alan Baltis
Luckily, despite them having decided to own the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, those are not the only way to get news out nowadays. The Internet exists. How do we get the Arab Spring? How do we get all the places that try to do that art suppression?
01:03:04.32
Alan Baltis
Even the Great Wall of China, Internet-wise, still has leaks. People still find ways to get information around, and that’ll happen here in the States. It’s not that we only have.
01:03:15.38
Alan Baltis
the suppressed media. There’s tons i run on Facebook and there’s all kinds of real information and protest and looking into the future. There’s all kinds of people that are still saying, Hey everybody, wake up.
01:03:28.63
Alan Baltis
This is really happening. It’s really bad. Here’s the truth. It hasn’t been suppressed yet. We’ll see how much the mimetic war for truth wins over a ah convenient falsehood.
01:03:43.54
Stephen Schneider
We’ll see.
01:03:44.42
Alan Baltis
Al Gore, right? An inconvenient truth. So imagine that.
01:03:47.49
Stephen Schneider
Yeah.
01:03:49.30
Alan Baltis
Imagine Al Gore having gotten elected instead of the stolen election all the way back to 2000. Imagine what a different course our country would have taken with a smart, decent guy instead of tool to being an office.
01:03:54.59
Stephen Schneider
yeah
01:04:02.100
Stephen Schneider
The problem is the smart, decent guys can’t be bought as easily. And so they’re not the ones that’ll win. That’s.
01:04:10.15
Alan Baltis
it might be but luckily the world isn’t only 500 people in congress it’s all the other people that really are why did i take a job in government because i wanted my school to run correctly not because i wanted to suppress books or whatever the crazies reasons for trying to get work that are you know there’s it’s not the deep state it’s the wonderful benevolent i made a life out of being a teacher state that we have to maintain
01:04:26.38
Stephen Schneider
Right.
01:04:35.31
Alan Baltis
and and all that mimetic naming. I don’t know, next time that I have someone talk to me about um arch conservative cause um how if i call him a baby killer you know they’ve tried to do that for all of the whether it’s reproductive rights or not but baby killer much more applies to the people that are stopping vaccines much more applies to the people that are not letting weather service get through so there is a good inflammatory term you’re a traitor you’re a baby killer you’re you’re you know i mean you’ you’re just so willfully ignorant and evil in your ignorance
01:05:07.67
Stephen Schneider
See, now you’re using too big of words again.
01:05:09.11
Alan Baltis
i think that’s well i you’re right i just have to what’s i need to find a nice meme like baby killer and just that’s what the reds are they are they ah kill many more children than any abortion clinic ever will
01:05:23.56
Stephen Schneider
i just keep using Star Wars with the Empire. It works.
01:05:27.47
Alan Baltis
and that works too because most people have seen star wars so i don’t know we’ll we’ll see what it takes but it sure isn’t going to be quiet
01:05:33.04
Stephen Schneider
Yeah. Yeah.
01:05:36.17
Stephen Schneider
know. So, right.
01:05:37.14
Alan Baltis
Okay.
01:05:38.23
Stephen Schneider
Got to go, man.
01:05:38.24
Alan Baltis
So there, on that joyful note, all of the pleasure, Stephen.
01:05:41.11
Stephen Schneider
Yep.
01:05:41.92
Alan Baltis
We’ll see in a week.
01:05:42.82
Stephen Schneider
Have great week.
01:05:43.06
Alan Baltis
Okay.
