Please Toilet Keep Working

Show Notes

The conversation covers the evolution of AI and technology, the future of language models, AI news and OpenAI, and the public interest in space exploration, specifically the Artemis launch. The conversation delves into the impact of media control and choice on public attention, highlighting the shift from traditional media to new media and the influence of social media and algorithms on content consumption.

Takeaways

• AI and Tech Evolution
• The Future of Language Models Media control and choice impact public attention
• Impact of social media and algorithms on content consumption
• Shift from traditional media to new media

Chapters

• 00:00 The Evolution of AI and Tech
• 23:02 AI News and OpenAI
• 29:51 The Future of Language Models
• 39:57 Artemis Launch and Public Interest

What is The Insanely Great Podcast?

The Insanely Great Podcast is your weekly mix of tech, AI, sports, politics, and whatever other shiny object grabs our attention. One minute we’re breaking down the future of artificial intelligence, the next we’re debating game-day drama, political chaos, or the kind of random topic that somehow becomes the best conversation of the episode. Smart, funny, and just unhinged enough to keep things interesting, it’s the podcast for curious people who like their insights sharp and their conversations a little unpredictable.

Christopher Weeks AI: Welcome to the insanely great podcast episode number three for Friday, April 3rd, 2026. Please toilet. Keep working.

Christopher Weeks: Hello, welcome to the Insanely Great Podcast. We're back again for more talk banter. With me as always is my good buddy DJ.

DJ: Hey.

Christopher Weeks: How are you doing there, DJ?

DJ: I'm doing well. How are you this week?

Christopher Weeks: I'm well, I'm well. For everybody that thought ⁓ two episodes was enough of listening to our crap, you are going to be disappointed. You'll get a third, fourth, fifth, and it might go on infinitely. Who knows?

DJ: That's right. Only our wives can tell.

Christopher Weeks: ⁓ yes, yes, though I was looking at our, our statistics and, ⁓ our numbers are actually going up. So either, ⁓ the Google bots finally found us and have been listening to our stuff or open AI has been indexing our stuff. Cause we talk about AI a lot. Yeah. Wow. they're probably like, who's that host that you have? ⁓ I wish you would stop talking so much and have DJ talk more.

DJ: Nice. Hi, Mom and Dad. Hi.

Christopher Weeks: do my best to have DJ talk more Anyway, so what's what's well, talk about the ⁓ as kind of primarily a tech podcast Let's talk about one of the big things This class Wednesday April ⁓ 1st ⁓ not April Fool's and this is not an April Fool's joke But it was the ⁓ 50th anniversary of Apple do you think of all that DJ ⁓

DJ: Nice. I, off, it's like, my God, 50 years. remember when they, remember in the ⁓ mid ⁓ maybe 2010 or early ⁓ 2010s they were becoming one of the richest companies in world. And ⁓ no one knew they were going to keep that going, ⁓ especially after jobs passing. And now look at where they are now. It's ⁓ crazy to think how they've gone.

Christopher Weeks: Absolutely. know, thinking about it, looking back and how they were the company that had to take a bailout from Microsoft to stay afloat. Otherwise wouldn't have existed. They were ⁓ bad product away from being Steve Jobs came back ⁓ and the thing he said was, you guys have way too many products and you have about

DJ: you

Christopher Weeks: you know, 20 or 30 different products that you guys are selling were way too, we have way too many engineers going to different products. I wanna focus just on four, and the first thing he did was get rid of 90 % of them.

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: You know, people forget that ⁓ jobs at that point hadn't had a successful product.

DJ: Very true. I remember one of the questions he went around asking was, which one of these do I sell to my mom? Which one of these do I sell to my friend? And like, no one could answer. No one could answer it.

Christopher Weeks: Well, what- Yeah, yeah, it's very true. As I'm looking in the background, I see a bunch of Apple products that you have.

DJ: Yeah, the one right me here is actually one of ⁓ last ones with their inside. It actually has the signatures inside. So I'm pretty excited that. It's not it's the Macintosh Plus. So the one that came out, I think, when they trying to ⁓ basically get more units off the shelf, like the Macintosh was starting to slow down, so they were like, what can we do to get more of these out of here? And they stuck a big plus sign on it and it like a little more ram, I wanna say. And that one was made in 92, last I looked inside of it.

Christopher Weeks: Right. Mm-hmm.

DJ: It still works. Some of the gears are broken on the floppy drive unfortunately but you can order you can have people 3D print those in ABS plastic and the for outlast the loud the now and a hard drive ⁓ sitting it's sitting on it's the actual one that came with that system from what I understand ⁓ but I not been able to hook that up. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Wow. And that thing is, that thing is huge.

DJ: It is, yeah, it's, I don't know, 20 megs maybe. The whole computer sits on it.

Christopher Weeks: Wow, wow, yeah, yes, yeah, I mean we laugh about it, but think about how far we've come with RAM that we have today. That's the equivalent of the entire storage that was available back then.

DJ: You Yeah, and now it's cost as much as a car.

Christopher Weeks: Yes, yeah. I was, yes, no kidding. But on the day ⁓ Apple's 50th anniversary, I got a copy of David Pogue's book, ⁓ Apple 50 Years. ⁓ is actually the iPod, the iPod Click Wheel.

DJ: Thank you, capitalism. Look at that. What's that on the front?

Christopher Weeks: They, the interviews that they gave, they attribute their success to the iPod. That if it weren't for the iPod, they wouldn't have been able to do the iPhone and ⁓ wouldn't led to the iPad. which I think you can draw a map there saying that the success of one led to the other. ⁓ There was a good chapter in the book that I've read so far about early days of Waz ⁓ the operating system that he was working on and somebody had told him that he should make a backup.

DJ: Yes. Definitely.

Christopher Weeks: of the operating system that he had on this floppy. ⁓ he was like, that's a very good idea, because I'm the only one that has this copy of the operating system. And this is the only one that ⁓ have in existence. So he starts to make a backup of it, except he's copying the empty floppy on of overwriting the ⁓ operating system that he wrote. ⁓ And he ⁓

DJ: you No way. I've never heard of this.

Christopher Weeks: He realized that he had just formatted, erased the entire operating system that he had written. he didn't tell Steve in the next morning that the operating system that they had was gone. And in Was fashion, he said he stayed up till 3, 4 o'clock in the morning rewriting the whole thing from memory.

DJ: Wow.

Christopher Weeks: everything that he remembered and he said he every two or three hours ⁓ during night he was making backups onto other floppies so that he wouldn't have to start over again and he made sure like primary disk A was recording to primary disk B there was no chance B was going to A you know ⁓

DJ: that right there goes to show you too how far we've come just in terms of like data safety you remember before if you had two floppy drives I want to say it was it was tough to do that like your operating system would yell at you hey did you sure you want to do this

Christopher Weeks: Yes. Well, along to your point, I got in trouble with my father when I was like 10 years old. I used to play around on his computer when I got home from school and he was at the University of Chicago getting his MBA in business. And was trying to format a three and a quarter inch floppy disk and I typed format, did not type the drive. a letter name or anything and it asked me are you sure you want to do this this was like ms dos three point one or whatever it was and i said ⁓ it's nice of you to ask me if i'm sure but i'm like sure i want to do this and there's this long what a light on the hard drive that stays on and starts working and i'm like it should really be illuminating there should be a light that's going on above the hard drive the the floppy floppy disk and i'm like what's going on here? Something's gone wrong here. And I was like, yeah, you know what? When in doubt, just turn it off and restart it. So I turned off the computer and next moment I turn it back on, there's nothing. Nothing boots the whole thing at all. It's just like not even a blinking light. It's just dead. Nothing there. And my dad comes home from work in the evening and he's like,

DJ: you

Christopher Weeks: I'm gonna go work on my ⁓ MBA stuff in his office turns on the computer and there's just nothing there. It won't do anything and He all evening long was like, ⁓ I didn't have any backups of my Business stuff that ⁓ my MBA that I had been doing Somehow it's all I don't know what happened and I was like That was me. ⁓ ⁓ I did

DJ: ⁓

Christopher Weeks: I made a mistake. I typed format and I was just trying to format the drive and somehow the wrong drive got formatted. I don't know how this happened. Anyway, ⁓

DJ: Ouch. You learned that lesson early and

Christopher Weeks: I learned that the hard way. If ever there was a time where in my life I feared a spanking from my father or that he was gonna pull out the belt, it was that moment and he resisted, didn't do it. He probably had a plethora of reasons to how about you don't screw around with things that aren't yours and ⁓ all and yeah. Anyway. So that was a good story about Woz. Woz stayed up till four o'clock in the morning rewriting the operating system code, ⁓ told Steve there were no problems and that the whole thing was going to launch without a problem. how fast were you on the, did get an iPod?

DJ: ⁓ I a Zoom person for long time. I was sure Microsoft ⁓ had in the bag. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: You were a Zune. Yeah, but did you eventually join the iPod bandwagon or didn't?

DJ: Yes, I don't remember exactly what it was. think my wife now, girlfriend then, had iPhone, had converted me over to an iPhone. ⁓ And then was like, well, I've been seeing these iPods everywhere. Let me get one of those because the Zune I went bad, I want to say, and they ⁓ didn't come out a Zune 2. So I was like, well, what? What can I get to replace this? And I actually ended up getting, think it was the ⁓ gig ⁓ you know, the chunky ⁓ at I didn't get one of the little small ones with flash memory ⁓ and that up. ⁓ Cause the had been ⁓ fairly large capacity. And that's the main reason I went with it. I, ⁓ plus was windows person at time.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah. Right.

DJ: I had never used a Mac until 2011 actually, well after I had some iPods.

Christopher Weeks: ⁓ huh, right, right. ⁓ I had this Nike fitness running, it was a circular thing, and I think it had like 64 megabytes on it. You maybe hold like 20 songs on the thing. ⁓ I had a...

DJ: You? Well, your story must be different, yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Weeks: three disc changer in the trunk of my car that had gotten stuck during winter in ⁓ Ohio and I couldn't get the CDs out and the CD player became inoperable. And I was like, there's gotta be a better way than for me to be doing this than listening to radio. I found the audio in jack on my radio and ran the audio in from my head, my Nike

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: MP3 player to the car and I was able to play those 20 songs like on a random repeat and I thought this is awesome, this is almost better than having a CD changer. And then I saw the iPod announcement had just come out with this black and red U2 version of, they called it the iPod video and.

DJ: I remember this.

Christopher Weeks: It did a 320 by 240 video. It like, I don't know, like three hours of battery life if you were watching video. But all I wanted to do was just put MP3 music on it. And that held like, I think, 5,000 songs, which was a huge monumental upgrade for my 64 gig. Granted, the Nike one was flash memory and the iPod Pro was a spinning hard drive. But that...

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: completely got rid of my CD changer completely because then I had 5,000 songs that were all on there and it was just I think it's I think it revolutionized changed everything ⁓ You know, I was I go ahead

DJ: night and day. Yeah. I going say you never went down the route of mp3 cds then with your car cd player

Christopher Weeks: ⁓ I did for a little while and I would make annoying CD cassette romance CDs for girlfriends. And I got really technical with it with trying to normalize and levelize the audio in ⁓ all of the mp3s because it seemed like the audio levels were all different on all of them.

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: I would get one that would play perfect and the next one would come out louder and I super nerded out on this stuff and I would give a girl that I was interested in the CD and she did not care at all that the were all amazing on all of

DJ: hold on, are you talking about burning your own CD or burning the MP3 to CD and then the player recognizing that?

Christopher Weeks: No, would, well actually both. remember, I don't remember the name of the software that I used, but I would use Kazaa to rip off Pirate the Music in like 128, 92, or 96 kilobits. And then I would import it into this audio, I think it was, I don't remember the name of it, import it in and it would normalize the.

DJ: in the Euro per chance?

Christopher Weeks: the levels on the audio. And then it would out the MP3s to a different piece of software that I could use to burn the... ⁓

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: Burn the CDs. And do you remember the days of, I don't know if you were this nerdy, where you had to the disc at a slow enough level, slow enough level for it to be recognized by your car?

DJ: Those were the days. You mean in terms of like burning this in audio CD?

Christopher Weeks: Yes.

DJ: I wanted to, I remember getting burners that were I think like 32 or 48 times and I would have to burn it slower or else I would have issues with the ones that were burning the mp3 files onto the disc with the car stereo not recognizing them. But other than that, if it was just an audio CV, it didn't matter.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah. Yeah, so you're talking about you had a car that played direct MP3s? Okay, so I had to convert everything to a WAV file so that it recognized like a CD track. ⁓ It played it absolutely ⁓ like a CD track. ⁓ But, yeah. You know, and then my car wouldn't even recognize a rewritable CD.

DJ: Mm-hmm. Yeah, those were horrible. ⁓ wow. One of those two, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: Didn't work at all and I remember I bought like a I think the company was like called Plex something that I just bought this Drive that was like a 48 12 for It was like how fast it could read how fast it could rewrite a rewriteable and then how fast it could read DVDs and then Anyway

DJ: Yep. you Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, we've come a long way since the iPod got rid of that market fast.

DJ: I will one story. So my parents had ⁓ computer they bought just a ⁓ after 2000. So this was when the gigahertz wars was kicking in and like six months it would up substantially. And I recall computer my parents from Dale had a just a normal IDE ⁓ I want to say the format it was called. And was before the the serial cables we have now, right? It send data in parallel. And I the cable not fast enough, essentially, let's say big enough wide enough to support the drive and that we would burn would corrupt at faster speeds. So we actually to buy a special like double with cable that were twice as many connections or twice as many wires it was that big flat wire if you remember that one in the computer back then and would give it enough throughput to actually burn a CD at the correct speed ⁓ but the first time I ever encountered an issue with the cable it actually being a legitimate case of it's the cable ⁓ and your disk drive or not your ⁓ your using to burn the CDs and that fixed it for for many more years until I got a new computer

Christopher Weeks: Wow. Hmm.

DJ: Such a weird one to troubleshoot to back then.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, yeah. was trying to remember where did I go from the iPod. I think I did go to the iPod Touch for a little while. ⁓ then I actually wasn't ⁓ to the iPhone. had Palm Trio that I kept for the first six months, maybe a because I thought the iPhone wasn't gonna pan out, wasn't gonna work.

DJ: Mm-hmm. remember seeing an iPhone first ⁓ I was ⁓ this girl I was overseas she just bought one and they were really hard to get overseas they were crazy expensive too because ⁓ they weren't sold in the Middle East so everything you basically had to be kind of like smuggled over to be resold. So you would pay almost twice as much as what they were actually going for in the state side if you bought it without a contract. So you were paying almost $1,200 a iPhone. She had original.

Christopher Weeks: Right. Yeah.

DJ: and I was just blown away like they were literally no other phones like it at the time I had an old Nokia literally the bar phone indestructible ones ⁓ seeing this for me ⁓ just ⁓ whole new world and I went and bought the 3gs so not even the 3g I the 3gs when they went to that like curved smooth back

Christopher Weeks: Wow. Yeah.

DJ: And it was just the most amazing thing I had ever, most amazing technology transition I'd made at the time. was like, this is ⁓ of this world. This is crazy. And then later I learned about Android and all this. you know, I, ⁓ when finally did see that Android phone that they had come out with, I was like, they'll never be able to compete against ⁓ Apple. Little I

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, right. Have you had any the Android phones ever?

DJ: Yeah, so I've had two along the way. Three. One of the galaxies, ⁓ like their Samsung's big galaxy, like S3 or something, way, way back in 2010-ish. I put... what they call it back then, not ROM hacking but you could switch the ROMs out pretty easily so I was always trying different ones from downloading from I forget the name of those websites but basically people would put their own up with like special software and stuff on it so I'd try that but then I went back to iPhone when they came out with the 4 because I think it had Siri on it which was really nice then I did try it one more time when the was 2015 when I last tried it and that was the the one with the pin the Samsung I forget they call that one now it's still available ⁓ the ⁓ pin the one you could write on ⁓ the the ⁓ one I'm to remember back when I ⁓ did but that was

Christopher Weeks: Right. Right.

DJ: way way back so maybe right after the S3 I had tried it one more time just always came back around to ⁓ especially ⁓ I got an iPad it just completely sense and then when I got ⁓ a Mac I really never look back ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Right, because everything so... well together.

DJ: Precisely, yeah, especially now. Especially now.

Christopher Weeks: Right, so congratulations, Apple, on making it ⁓ 50 years. I recommend the book. David Pogue, we didn't have you on the show. Maybe next week.

DJ: You

Christopher Weeks: What else? What else has been going on in the world? Some AI news?

DJ: ⁓ a lot of AI news, yeah. have been playing with OpenClaw or anything like that?

Christopher Weeks: I installed it and then uninstalled it. I know there was a big security vulnerability wasn't there?

DJ: A lot, yeah. I mean, won't go too far down the rabbit hole, but ⁓ theory, like it is ⁓ a security nightmare depending on how you've hooked it up, right? Because especially in enterprise where they even want certain third party providers to get that data in the first place. Now you're at an agent that can talk to almost any provider regardless ⁓ of who made the, know, the source itself, open call itself. But the big one is like they've started releasing scanners now, like security companies have released scanners and will tell you, this ⁓ skill may dangerous. This skill isn't dangerous depending on what binaries they try to bring in or ⁓ where data being sent out to with certain commands. So at least you have a little bit of warning, but ⁓ there's still nothing to stop you from installing a If Ultimately want to install it, but I will say ⁓ one that came out if you're more security minded is Hermes Hermes call or sorry Hermes agent. from the Hermes How do you say it Hermes Norris Nuez Foundation they make models, but they've put out a ⁓ more secure version of an agent tells you like things that it does. They have their own subscription go with it. 10 bucks a month. If you want to pay that, that gets you really a lot of usage with their open source models that they ⁓ serve as well it's, ⁓ they get lot of updates. ⁓ It just across as a lot more secure. It comes with a lot of built in skills that have been vetted by them. something along the lines of 80 of them. if security has been something that's been kind of holding you back and you didn't know to go ⁓ of open claw or NeoClaw or iron claw or something like that, then this Hermes agent comes as a really good alternative solution. ⁓ Although if an enterprise, I still would not recommend you using them on an enterprise device.

Christopher Weeks: Right. Because of all the potential future security complications. Though there was a RSA event in Northern California last week and I was reading that the dominant talk, everything was AI, AI, AI, but they're figuring out ways and lots of companies are promoting ideas how to grant tokens to third party

DJ: Exactly.

Christopher Weeks: to third party apps without having to authenticate directly like OpenAI or Claude to have a third party middleman and ⁓ it the token, but your credentials aren't, your credentials in your API key aren't fully in the open. ⁓ Yes, yes. ⁓ they feel ⁓ is a...

DJ: like a gateway, ⁓

Christopher Weeks: That's been a missing security hurdle that hasn't been available yet.

DJ: If you think about it, that's exactly what Apple's been doing when they talk to OpenAI.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, and they keep everything very anonymous, right?

DJ: Yeah, some level irritation. I think we mentioned this on the show before. ⁓ If talking to Siri and you say, ⁓ you what is middle name? And it tells you, and then you ask immediately following that, how tall is he? It'll be like, how tall is who? Like he just completely forgets literally between questions.

Christopher Weeks: Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully with iOS 27 that gets announced at WWDC this June, and it's gonna have the Google Gemini Siri merger together, hopefully, hopefully, they can extrapolate.

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: personalized data from what's been said on the phone or at the very least allow you to have an opt-in where you can I'm good with this amount of privacy going out there as long as it provides me with a more personalized experience.

DJ: Yeah, or basically back to can they anonymize it without context right? Like the model just ⁓ not things between turns.

Christopher Weeks: Right.

DJ: On that point though, have you seen the new information that came out of, I think it was Google I.O. yesterday, of the new Gemma 4 model?

Christopher Weeks: No. No.

DJ: So these are four new models in the family. There's a 31B27 and then there's a 4B and a 2B. And they're talking about, some people are speculating that with this potential move that Apple's doing with Siri, that the alignment of this new 4B and 2B model could be, that's a lot of Bs, could be the model that if you need local inference on the next iPhone, kind of like they do now with their own internal 3B model, that like you would basically be getting Gemma locally. And then if it was anything more complex, they would send that off to, the Google, whatever Google is going to be using for inference for Siri, it needs to know something that's complicated or ⁓ do that's more, ⁓ now Google is talking to me in the background. Hey Google, ⁓ But ⁓ there's talk about these models being so small and so intelligent that they would able to handle a lot of these local inference things with those personalizations that you're talking about. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Haha

DJ: without having to actually go off device, which I think be incredible.

Christopher Weeks: Yes. fact, I think there was a Google research document that one of the Google research AI team said that they figured out a way to make these large language models about three quarters of the size. ⁓ Right.

DJ: to have.

Christopher Weeks: Go ahead.

DJ: Well, was going to say, the one you're, I think you're probably talking about ⁓ ⁓ cache compressing. That is, that is from ⁓ making the smaller though, but it is compressing the context window.

Christopher Weeks: Correct. So it compresses the context window and just makes them run a little bit more efficient.

DJ: Way faster, actually. Because when you send a message and it becomes inferred, then gets cached in ⁓ ⁓ cache we're talking about. ⁓ if you can make that smaller, then you can fit a lot more context into the same space and becomes more efficient.

Christopher Weeks: Right, ⁓ mean, I think if you had to make a prediction, ⁓ do think we're at in five years with these models?

DJ: think there's a couple different we could talk about this in terms of like AGI is one way, but in terms of edge compute another. Like, so what we're talking about exactly right now, I think that the models are to continually get, I think the... I look at it this way, the big frontier models are not making the huge leaps we were making before. I feel like the huge leaps that we're going to see in the future are going to be these small models getting ⁓ more intelligent ⁓ smaller at the same time.

Christopher Weeks: Right, right. I mean, that makes sense. I mean, there's lots of talk about that the future is going to be these world models. I don't know if you're familiar with what they are, like all the top guy from Facebook that was doing the Facebook AI left and got upwards of, I think, a couple billion dollars.

DJ: Mmm, yeah.

Christopher Weeks: He did several interviews with Matchable and Ars Technica where he said in three to five years time, all these LM's aren't going to be even talked anymore. It's going to be the world models because the world models, he thinks that they're going to be capable of learning from real world data.

DJ: Mm-hmm. Well...

Christopher Weeks: I don't know. Whenever people talk about AI, AI people lump it all ⁓ From a book that I was reading, there's really three levels of it. There's AI, which is really ⁓ just learning. It gives you ⁓ a general consensus answer. Then there's which is able to figure things out on a small level. extrapolate, do small tasks its own. ⁓ then there's artificial sentient intelligence that is we're probably never going to see in our lifetime. The Hal 9000 gone insane and all that stuff. ⁓ But always tell my friends we've had general machine learning AI for like almost the last 10 years, 15 years. If you look at the original iPhone.

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: it was taking pictures and they had an that was correcting every picture to brighten the faces, all that stuff. That was machine learning. You would look at where the shadows are and the levels on every photo and ⁓ brighten all up. You weren't an amazing photographer. There was a bunch of machine learning that was going on in the background.

DJ: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. it, mean, machine learning, think was the most ⁓ version of AI because machine learning is a subset of ⁓ intelligence. ⁓ the, I, what I mean by opaque here is ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Correct, yes.

DJ: the things like the notification when you would get in your car and it's like, Hey, I see, do you, think you're going to the, you know, your music class at this time, right? And it would pop that up to, put you there in the GPS. ⁓ ⁓ could learn that after only a few trips. And that was AI, right? That was machine learning essentially. ⁓ that's been going on for ⁓ on all, all smart devices like that. But you even realize that that's a, a, part of AI. Most people don't. It's it's invisible and that's like I've always thought that these large language models are going to start to roll into existing products instead of being the product they will be part of a product that is just no longer they're no longer visible to us right they're just going to be like writing a book like edit this paragraph for me it's going to be or it'll start making recommendations of how to like word your sentence better or whatever. ⁓ also seeing that with, with ⁓ predictive right? ⁓ Those bits are going to sneak into our life and we won't even notice it.

Christopher Weeks: Right, right. In fact, I was listening. There's a huge amount of drama amongst the writers community about this. Should you allow AI ⁓ to help you write finished books? I to an author talk about that AI is just a tool. It's a companion, very similar to like having an editor that gives you feedback, can help you through maybe a writer's block on a certain section of a book.

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: Now where I draw the line is if you're just having AI try to write something completely from nothing. you know, that's just kind of plagiarism or some form of, I don't know, at the very least it's unoriginal. but, you know, it like... I don't know, what do you think about AI helping you write?

DJ: I have some, I guess, philosophical thoughts about it. Like, ⁓ if, you're something, how is it an amalgamation of things that you've learned or you've read or ⁓ maybe you've researched write a particular chapter of a book of something that you're writing, if it's factual especially, right? But, What separates that from what a model is doing if you put it in the same scenario, right? Or even had it go off of its training data the same way you could write something based off of what you know as a human. my brain has a hard time tearing those two things completely apart from one another. They feel almost very similar.

Christopher Weeks: So you're talking about everything that you have saying in your mind, your language model that you have would write a certain way and do something. And if you ask a different language model to come in and write just something. It might have a very different voice than your own.

DJ: Yeah, yeah. mean, what what's in my brain not language model and what makes a language model ⁓ not brain? Like, where do we divide that line between how these two things work? Because in my mind, they feel very similar.

Christopher Weeks: Right, right, that's a good point. That's a good point.

DJ: And Daniel Measler-Messler has talked about this a lot actually, like, in terms of can language models understand? Like, do they have actual comprehension? And you stop and think about, you know, what a language model does, it predicts the next token or next word. ⁓ If want to dumb that down a little. Well, what we doing as humans? ⁓ Are we just predicting the next word or thought? Because when you start a sentence, you probably don't know how it's going to end.

Christopher Weeks: Right. So we get into a completely different scientific ⁓ philosophical discussion of, know, do you believe that you have cognitive thought, that your mind isn't already chosen its opinion before something's even already given or not? In that aspect, it's very similar to a language model that it just looks for keywords and gives you an answer that is the dominant most used one.

DJ: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and if all I've ever learned is the same thing you've learned, let's say we went to the same school, we grew up in the same house, we've read the same materials. Would you give me a different opinion than one I would have if all were the same?

Christopher Weeks: Right, right. You know, and then you get into the whole discussion about whether something is environment, whether how much that affects ⁓ you've maybe grown up with, ⁓ things you've gone through, whatever. ⁓ long as, long as, yes. And long as we're kind of ⁓ not too far away from the realm of AI.

DJ: Mm-hmm. the whole nature versus nurture.

Christopher Weeks: Have you been following this Artemis launch?

DJ: Yes and no. Well, watch a guy's channel called Joe Scott. He mentioned the movie by the same name, right? So that's why I feel like I know, ⁓ like I like it's familiar, but I also know that NASA had an actual launch to go to the moon, right? So ⁓ I feel my brain is confusing two things, the movie with the real life event.

Christopher Weeks: You can say no. You can say no. Hmm You know, it's kind of I don't you know, and I can't really figure this out why If you were to ask my parents and especially those that are of a certain age right now 60 70 year olds 80 year olds ask them how big the 1969 NASA space launches were, first man on the moon, the subsequent ⁓ getting the ⁓ mission to Earth, how big those were. They were huge events that daily news updates. It seems like a lot of that is lost right now. Do you think that we just have become so inundated with news that is just on the back burner? Because if you look on the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNN, for a short while, the launch wasn't even on the very front page ⁓ of it

DJ: Hmm. Mmm.

Christopher Weeks: And I kind of made a little bit of a punchline about it. I was talking with friends. In my social circles, no one seems to really care about it. It wasn't like, oh my god, did you see the launch? It happened. Oh my god. And I made a little bit of a, it was probably a bad taste joke. I said, hey, did you see the launch? No, I missed it. What happened? I said, we didn't blow up. And they were like.

DJ: Yeah.

Christopher Weeks: Oh, we haven't been back to the moon since, uh, like, you know, whatever it is, 72 or whatever it was. And I hate to be this guy, but why do we need to go back to the moon?

DJ: Hmm. Yeah. So are you kind of saying that we're at Mars? would be different?

Christopher Weeks: I mean... Yes, I think if we were going to like a somewhere we've never been to that maybe there would be a heightened interest. But the fact that we're going there and they're just gonna fly around the moon and then they're gonna come back here.

DJ: Yeah, like not even land.

Christopher Weeks: I mean, why do you... They're not landing. I guess the 2028 mission or whatever it is, they're gonna land and spend some time there, you know. I don't know.

DJ: I see what you're saying, yeah. It is so... I would actually want to go back and ask this because I'm not familiar enough with it, but did the same thing back in the sixties. We sent people ⁓ to orbit. sent people around the moon and back like, but then we landed someone on the moon and that was the big one that everyone remembers. So even then ⁓ was trip around the moon as big the one that landed us on the moon.

Christopher Weeks: Right. Right.

DJ: I mean, maybe we're just looking at we're looking at something where happened the same way decades ago. It's happening the same way now, but ⁓ I actually argue that it's not of it not being such a big ⁓ exploratory event, something never done before, like going to Mars. I would actually argue maybe we're just bombarded with more choice. ⁓ Right? Because if you think about how life was back then, you had maybe three channels Walter Cronkite was on ⁓ at least two of them, if not all three. And, ⁓ know, everyone sat down to watch news at either five or 10. ⁓ were going to see it either way. Like you, you literally just couldn't get away from it. And because of the, let's say it control of the media, but lack of choice. ⁓ and what you were going to watch. could argue that even you didn't see it, even if you didn't watch TV or have a TV, your friends were going to be talking about it. People at work, people at school were going to be talking about it just because it was so ubiquitous at time where now you could ⁓ me, I it by just not. It wasn't in my recommended YouTube stream, right? ⁓ I only saw couple of videos about the movie. ⁓ and then I looked further into the movie and that brought me around to seeing some videos of the actual launch and I realized that it was even going on to begin with now ⁓ could be just because your algorithmic didn't surface it to you

Christopher Weeks: Right. I also think our attention spans have gotten far less. know, in this age of social media now that we live in and algorithms and algorithms giving us stuff that we want to see, you know, if people are into sports, politics, their brand might be, all of a sudden you're not going to get pumped a bunch of shuttle launch ⁓

DJ: Yeah, it's going to surface you what not only what it thinks you're interested in, because it'll because they think it'll make them money based on that, right? ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Right, right. Yeah. My oldest stepson and I get into this kind of discussion over and over again about that new media versus old media, what's here to stay, what's going to happen, especially as there was a statistic that came out that said for the first time ever, podcasts are now equal listening to radio. ⁓ I for the first time ever,

DJ: I won.

Christopher Weeks: mean, radio's been on its way out for a long time.

DJ: See you. I haven't listened to radio in decades.

Christopher Weeks: ⁓ It's just a matter Yeah, FM. ⁓

DJ: Yeah, like... I don't know. ⁓ I tuned to it by accident. Yeah, exactly. In my car. Like, wrong source. Sorry, guys. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: unless you accidentally hit the channel by accident. Yeah, everything you do is CarPlay and it's what you want to listen to on demand. You want that right moment. of CarPlay though, did you see ChatGBT added a CarPlay app?

DJ: Pretty much. Yeah Exactly No.

Christopher Weeks: Yes. Yes.

DJ: Okay, I've got a toy with this now. I couldn't play with this.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, it's kind of, you have to sign up for the beta to install it. The official one might already be out, but the late have been doing jokes about it, like talking with ChatGBT asking, I'd like to go to Krispy Kreme Donuts, and ChatGBT's saying, are you sure you really want to go to Krispy Kreme Donuts? It's high in sodium and all this stuff. It's trying to talk the driver out of going to get a donut. And it's like, give me directions to the Krispy Kreme donuts. And he's like, no, how about instead we go to the and you get a lettuce wrap. And the chat GBT says, re-write in Maps directions to Vaughn's now. ⁓

DJ: Sorry. love to something like give me directions to Krispy Kremes now setting to ⁓ local gym

Christopher Weeks: would ⁓ pretty funny. I no longer allow you to start the car until you've exerted this many calories from your sinking Apple Watch. ⁓ Yeah, it's ChatGBT gone insane.

DJ: Yes, exactly.

Christopher Weeks: know what's interesting that they're Yes, yes You know that they're not talking about the AI functionality that is on the ⁓ Artemis They're being very very cagey about that

DJ: ⁓ better yet if that's what Siri starts doing. I never even consider that. I mean, it makes sense now that you mentioned that it would be there, but part of me also, like my brain goes back to the sixties where like don't carry what you don't need. It's like, you're not going to need AI, right? But yeah, there you go. AI on the Artemis.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's the ever there's the long joke that Neil Armstrong said, you know, they asked him he would like to take with him or if he has anything special, a gift ⁓ ⁓ to remember family by during the day with everybody. And his was more fuel.

DJ: ⁓ don't recall that one.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah Yeah, I mean he was a man a few words, but he tried to make the words that he used count know you I Guess he did take something that was kind of poignant him and ⁓ whatever But, of that, you know the Artemis launch is gonna come back here to San Diego where it's gonna land. That's where ⁓ gonna land off the coast of San Diego here. So we're gonna be kinda for a little while in the news and hopefully all that goes well. I hear that so far the ⁓ toilet has malfunctioned.

DJ: That is honestly not the equipment you want to malfunction. sorry. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Well, you know, there's a joke in there that ⁓ the astronauts have said for like last 30 years that you're flying to wherever you're going, the moon, whatever, by the cheapest bidder that could put things together.

DJ: Yes.

Christopher Weeks: So I guess they've had to figure out ways to circumvent, do different ways to make the toilet function. It's not like broken broken, but I don't know if it just can't evacuate number twos and only number ones or ⁓ whatever, the toilet. ⁓ And they were saying this mission is a little bit different. They actually have a separate room where the toilet's at. Before... ⁓ In other space capsules, would all just, there was just a general quarters area where they would use a facility to, ⁓ it goes, vacuumed out to space.

DJ: Yeah. wonder if they have to go ⁓ ahead.

Christopher Weeks: I just picture some alien spacecraft flying around in our space and a bunch of our ship landing on the view screen or something.

DJ: would be frozen, yeah. I'm sitting here kind of thinking like, I know that once you're in space, the smallest little bit of, let's say ejecta can change like rotational speed, can change where you're headed and everything. I wonder if they have to account for ejecting that out of the system in overall trajectory or have to correct for it somehow.

Christopher Weeks: Yes, yeah. Yeah. There was a guy from Cal Poly that called into my neighbor's radio show that was talking about how this actually works and how it's done. actually creates a suction vacuum to pull the air off of your buttocks and vacuums it into space. Once it has enough force and starts going into space, just keeps going. And then you're saying you're... you're affected by temperature of space and all that stuff. I guess the vacuum broke on the space toilet. No vacuuming.

DJ: The little door outside won't open anymore. not the toilet, it's the door.

Christopher Weeks: Yes, the door is malfunctioning. The door won't open. All of the shit is staying there inside and it's going to get backed up. It's going to smell terrible for 10 days.

DJ: It's just backed up. I was going to say those diapers have a capacity limit. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, Like watch them come on the way back and then be like, hey, the door finally opened. ⁓ going into reentry, they look outside and the opens and shit's spraying everywhere. ⁓

DJ: they're re-entering. ⁓ You

Christopher Weeks: Good news, NASA, the door finally opened. ⁓ ⁓ while leaving and fixes itself on reentry.

DJ: Like, ⁓ gives... ⁓ Well, it splashdown a whole new meaning.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, yeah, yeah, hey the whole module is covered in ten days worth of shit yeah ⁓ yeah be very careful about putting this one in the museum for authenticity

DJ: we're going to clean this when we get back. ⁓ Right. So much for it being reusable.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The heat shield, we've put a layer on top of it.

DJ: You You

Christopher Weeks: I wonder what advancements have been made in the whole heat shield thing. That was the big problem with the previous ones that all that stuff would come apart and they were worried about too much heat getting in.

DJ: Yeah, the ceramic tiles would literally come off the lander. remember the, ⁓ back the ⁓ 90s, shuttle, ⁓ the would come off that after replacing? ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Yep. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. How about our wonderful president talking about that we're gonna be done with Iran in two to three weeks? How serious of a war is it when we're really willing to tell them when we're leaving, when we're done?

DJ: and it his idea of bluffing them perhaps? ⁓

Christopher Weeks: I don't have any idea, you know.

DJ: Well, I will say, I will say this. It has been a very well-known thing with him, this whole two week thing. Everything is two weeks with him. Everything. Everything. If you go look back in the past, everything he says, ⁓ yeah, this will be done in two weeks. This will be two weeks. Two weeks from now, this will happen. It never does. He just loves saying that phrase.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah. Yeah.

DJ: So I'm sure that this will not over in two weeks. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Well, I mean, if you look at the polling, the polling on this is extremely bad. The majority of Americans wonder why the hell we're there at all. So, you know, he's seeing midterms get worse and worse and worse, and his polling numbers are eventually going to go south of 38, 30 percent. I don't think he wants to see how low his polling numbers can go.

DJ: I was going to ask if they go negative and would he be the first president to try?

Christopher Weeks: I mean, you know, there's always gotta be a certain percentage of the bass that's gonna stick around. know, he might have... might have, you know, 5 % or whatever it is. knows? I ⁓ he's determined to test that limit.

DJ: It would seem so, yeah. Because he ran on not going to war.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah. Are you a fan of, or do you know what polymarkets are?

DJ: No, I've heard them in passing, but I don't know what they really are.

Christopher Weeks: ⁓ It's kind of like a of like a betting site with odds except give you ⁓ percentages and because There's actually money involved and money that's changing hands. They view it as that. It's a little bit more accurate because there's ⁓ bets being placed on it so if you look at a polymarket odds of

DJ: Hmm.

Christopher Weeks: the Democrats winning the House. It's like 82%. of the Democrats winning the Senate used to be 48, but now it's like 52%. Yeah.

DJ: Wow. interesting but this is also like can anyone here or or is this like a representation of maybe those that have money

Christopher Weeks: Yes. ⁓ it's it's those that have money and can bet and they where they bet on things. So essentially it's they view it that it's potentially more accurate because people are putting money on what they think is going to happen versus people that are just speculating randomly without any ⁓ quote dog in the fight.

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: without betting on anything. You're not invested in anything. The polymarkets were the people that had Trump winning and winning large about a month before the election.

DJ: Right. I recall that I do recall that I had a friend telling me he didn't call it poly markets he called it something else but he did tell me that like I didn't even know this before before that point in time that you could do this because it felt like gambling it felt like it'd be illegal but

Christopher Weeks: Mm-hmm.

DJ: Yeah, he was telling me about how he was like, ⁓ Trump's going to win this one. And I was like, really? How? And he was telling me about, well, people were betting on it and they're going this direction. And then he ended up winning. that was the first I'd ever heard of it. And now you're bringing it back up and it's stirring up that memory. ⁓ seems like these, these things are pretty big around elections now, huh?

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, they're getting bigger and bigger and people are looking at them. Can you see the screen over there?

DJ: Mm-hmm. we see it. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, so You can see party will win the house in 2026? It's got the Democratic Party at 87 % But granted lots of things can have between now and then so who really knows?

DJ: Yeah, it looks like, what month was that that it was kind of almost starting to diverge, like it might cross and then it went back out or they went away from each other.

Christopher Weeks: see

DJ: that's all. So that could be. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, this is December of, you know, mean, yeah, you get back.

DJ: Mm-hmm. Also it was kind of right after the election or right around it.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, the interesting one is the Senate one. Can you see that now? Yeah. Yeah.

DJ: Mm-hmm. ⁓ whoa. Wow.

Christopher Weeks: Yep.

DJ: That was a huge difference back before.

Christopher Weeks: Right. Yep. So if you go from November of just last year ⁓ look how much momentum has been gained.

DJ: Yeah, especially very recently in the last what maybe few months, two or three months.

Christopher Weeks: Yes, know for a while it was I mean, know if you're looking at this odds wise ⁓ still pretty close to 50-50 It's not like my god, there's in such complete control and they're a sure win for anything No, it's still like if you're flipping a coin, it's one half of the one and one half the other

DJ: Yeah. Yeah, but I start to question how representative is this? if what we I guess question is, ⁓ okay, it be 52%, but it also shows a momentum at the same time, right? And like, ⁓ how representative that small number ⁓ of the whole voting population? Like, could the number be further apart in actuality?

Christopher Weeks: Atmo. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's kind of a growing sentiment that ⁓ just, ⁓ mean, the number one issue that people have is the economy. And tired of feeling like they're paying more money than they should for everything. And they're tired of everything being more expensive. Speaking of, speaking of, and interest rates, but speaking of that, we are three days away. ⁓

DJ: Yeah, and interest rates.

Christopher Weeks: from this being the one year anniversary of Liberation Day that Trump promised us we were going to make great deals and Americans were going to profit from this and we were going to get grocery prices the lowest that we've ever seen because of the amazing deals that are going to come in. And there was a giant chart that was presented and all that's happened since then prices on just about everything have gone up.

DJ: Okay.

Christopher Weeks: You know, at, yes, even more so. And president thought when asked about tariffs during the November election or October before then, the people from the Wall Street Journal, ⁓ some of top economists that they have on staff asked the president when he was talking about tariffs, don't you think that the American companies that are charged tariffs, ⁓ duties at

DJ: even more so.

Christopher Weeks: the ports, that that's just a tax that they're going to pass on to the American consumer. And his answer ⁓ the time wasn't much, and people didn't really take him serious that he was going to do these tariffs. And then on Liberation Day, he said that American companies are going to eat those tariffs.

DJ: alright.

Christopher Weeks: I do think to a small degree ⁓ has maybe happened for large companies like Apple where they can, where they can afford it, where the margins are huge, the vast majority, mom and pop companies and ⁓ and everywhere else, they're just passing that buck onto you and me.

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: I mean, if you go to McDonald's, their prices are, since last year, have gone up 10, 15%, 20%. I'm sure they brought back a couple items that are affordable, but by and large, it's more expensive.

DJ: Well, it's actually funny you mentioned McDonald's in particular because I remember reading somewhere article not too long after the tariffs kicked in that were one of the companies that had, guess, some of the better margins in the fast food industry ⁓ that absorb some of this. And now they haven't been able to absorb all of it. ⁓ Neither will neither will all the other big players. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Right. Right. Now I question whether McDonald's really from business point of view, want to absorb ⁓ those the tariffs, the tax, literally just, we've essentially put a European tax on top of our existing taxes that we're already paying. It's a good tax that you're paying ⁓ on this. You a federal tax, you have a state tax.

DJ: Yeah

Christopher Weeks: and now you've got an Independence Day tariff tax that is on everything that you're buying. If it's a cheeseburger, McDonald's, whatever, it used to cost this much with federal tax, state tax, and now you've got your Independence Day tariff, Donald Trump tax, that's put on everything, and it's two, three, four percent, whatever it is, and that's all there.

DJ: That's the exact way all Democrats should be out there saying this, by the way.

Christopher Weeks: actually take it a step further and I'm like, I want my check back. I want my money back. You know, the estimates are that Americans each one roughly paid $2,000 ⁓ for an entire year in tariffed goods. I take back. I think the Democratic playbook should be, where's my fucking I want my check. I want my money back.

DJ: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: 2000 bucks I can spend that better than the government can didn't ask for a 200 billion dollar War in Iran that you know just three months prior was ⁓ their nuclear were obliterated. It's gone. It's not existent, but now we need to go back because Yeah, it was decimated. Yes, but now it's in danger You know and now we're leaving in two or three weeks, but who knows it's

DJ: All right, decimated.

Christopher Weeks: whether they're gonna regroup again, because lord knows they're getting all those billions of dollars in oil money and you know if we didn't piss them off before to have a nuclear weapon, now we've really pissed them off and now they really want a nuclear weapon. So all we've really done is like poke the bear and run away. We might as well have just taken a bow and arrow, shot a bear in the asshole and then ran away and see like hope he doesn't find us with a pissed off even more.

DJ: ⁓ yeah. Mm-hmm. right right well i mean we did kind of write our home address on the arrow it's just you know he doesn't have hands that's all he's asking other bears to look at his asshole

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, mean, if I were ⁓ president and I were in these shoes, you you pissed off a country with a lot of ⁓ financial well-being, and you're gonna have to like ⁓ over your shoulder for the rest of your life. Like, ⁓ just.

DJ: Yeah. It's the John Wick problem. You can never get out.

Christopher Weeks: Yes, absolutely.

DJ: You just can't. You think you are, but you're not.

Christopher Weeks: Right, right. you know, I'm just like my neighbor will say to me, ⁓ what do people on the left want? I'm like, well, we had free trade. Free trade is really good. It's what Ronald Reagan wanted. It's what conservatives wanted. ⁓ We had free global trade that gave us the prices that we liked. And now you guys decided that we're going to have a Liberation Day, tariff, no longer free, you guys are gonna pay for trade. I don't want that. That's what I don't want. I want, mean, seriously, what's better than free? So I go back to the basics. Free is good, I want my free back. I also want my minimum $2,000 check back. I want it in the mail, I want it tomorrow. You can write me an interest check for all that shit too, because we're.

DJ: He he he he he he he he he

Christopher Weeks: ⁓ let's see january ⁓ you we're four months into four months into this new year so that two thousand bucks is probably gone up to twenty four hundred dollars You know, how is every Democratic candidate not going to just run in the next election and be like, I'm going to get rid of all these tariffs. Prices are too expensive for all you guys.

DJ: Exactly. 2,000 a year is nothing to shake a stick at. mean, ⁓ you've got insurance companies saying they can charge, they can save you a couple hundred bucks a year ⁓ people switch insurance just for a couple hundred dollars a year. 2,000 a year, ⁓ a big number in comparison ⁓ something you, I have to assume you get a lot more value out of insurance than you do your ⁓ government. Like I'm just going to be real here.

Christopher Weeks: Well, plus, you know, I mean, it's been a while since I've done it, but you guys are, what, a family of four going out to eat? You're paying that liberation day tax on every good you buy for the kids and for your wife and for everybody. I ⁓ I don't know, what does it typically cost when you guys go out to eat ⁓ or go through a drive-through and get food anywhere? ⁓ What it cost now in Louisiana? ⁓

DJ: Mm-hmm. ⁓ it's bad. Yeah. I remember this. remember when going out to eat, ⁓ people, it'd be like maybe 30, $40 at a ⁓ decent restaurant. This was like a decade and a half ago or so. maybe around a decade ago, but now two people, it's well above 60, $70. So that's more than doubled. But if you're going with a family, just four and you're buying, you we got two kids, one of them is old enough to eat like an adult. One of them is still getting a kid's meal. You're looking at 110, $120, which is that used to be even just a few years ago, easily six people are

Christopher Weeks: Right.

DJ: eight people if you went to a cheaper restaurant. Now that's four people and one of them is a toddler. And we're not even talking drinks here. We're talking about just food, just sodas. If you add drinks in, you're getting up around 150 plus. Easy.

Christopher Weeks: Right. Right, right. mean, bunch of my friends, they'll go out to eat, family or wives, like about once a week, twice a week, and if they drink like liquor or anything, they're doing it entirely at home. They just ⁓ can't it. ⁓ They'll get a 12-pack at the grocery store or whatever and sit around the television and watch it at home. ⁓

DJ: And then drive to the restaurant, yeah.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah. But like my oldest stepson drives for a grub hub and he's talking about like people just don't have the expendable income to have like food delivered all the time anymore. It's not like it's not like covid where they didn't want to go out. So they're having a bunch of food delivered all the time.

DJ: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: Flip side of Uber Eats is the company that is reimbursing some people for gas that the drivers are using. If you drive so many hours, you get five bucks for the drivers, which I think is good, especially with rising gas prices. I don't know what are the gas prices where you're at.

DJ: It's over $4 a gallon now here in Louisiana. And we're one of the cheapest states in the union, typically almost all the time.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We just hit, think ⁓ hit six bucks.

DJ: You Wow. ⁓ that in like some areas or average?

Christopher Weeks: ⁓ Yeah... ⁓ Uh, that's, I mean, it's definitely about 580, 575, 590. And if you're premium gas, if you need that for your car, you're definitely already at 650. So it's just, and we have a convoluted system here with different types of gas that we have a summer blend and a winter blend and companies are trying to not make the... the different blends anymore so different companies are threatened to leave California which will shorten our supply that we have which has increased the gas price and it's it's a mess and know we have these road and paving taxes the gas tax ⁓ that's ⁓ on gasoline and think that with this gas tax and what we pay that our roads would just be immaculate everywhere we go and instead You know, potholes, galore, everywhere go there's potholes. I don't know, what were the roads like where you're at?

DJ: I'm just as bad, but at least we have cheaper gas.

Christopher Weeks: I'll take my crappy roads, take my crappy roads and take your cheaper gas, is what should be

DJ: Well, the crazy part is you go to Texas, you kind of get the best of both. Like you get the cheaper gas like we have here, but they definitely spend on roads. I will give Texas that. Because if you go there, and if you ever have, they're in a constant state of repair. Like you can hardly go anywhere in Texas where they're not fixing some roads somewhere you're going to drive through.

Christopher Weeks: Wow, wow, that's amazing. Anyway, I think we've kind of talked about a lot tonight, or this afternoon, we're at an hour 15 going here. So I think we did a good job with this episode.

DJ: Yeah. I did want to raise one thing real quick. You talking about gas like that. Have has California seen ⁓ the ⁓ ⁓ or just the tariffs, the taxes, an increase electric car ownership?

Christopher Weeks: Yep, go ahead.

DJ: or do you know?

Christopher Weeks: actually there's been a little bit of a ⁓ ⁓ in electric car ownership. That's because the president got rid of the subsidies that were given for electric car purchase. ⁓ same was, same is also true for putting, ⁓ solar panels ⁓ houses. So the, kind a topic that ⁓ will drive me to no end.

DJ: See you.

Christopher Weeks: getting rid of renewal subsidies that would have benefited so many people. But my friends that I golf with that were fortunate enough to buy an EV car have EV solar panels, they're essentially, whenever the electric prices ⁓ gasoline tends to go up, they just start laughing in my face because they literally don't give a shit. They're like, I... I charge my car at home with the sun that's outside. Gasoline can go up to $14 a gallon. don't care.

DJ: It creates a whole new breed of apathy, almost.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, a little bit. you know, we had these high efficiency fuel standards that were in place for hybrid and for gasoline cars. To the most out of gasoline, and the Trump administration scrapped those standards so that, yes, that cars or car manufacturers

DJ: ⁓ I was unaware of that.

Christopher Weeks: They had a date, a timeline that they had to make cars that had such and such fuel efficiency. And ⁓ way that they did this in SUVs to keep selling them was to create the hybrid SUV, is good. ⁓ wife bought one of those and got, she gets like, I don't know, think almost like 30 miles a gallon for an SUV. If it hadn't been for that mandate, like, I don't know, six years ago.

DJ: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Weeks: ⁓ for the car companies to have to reach a certain fuel efficiency the hybrid engine it would have taken much longer to get into the SUV car and now i think we're just going backwards just like we're not re... we're not making future progress which is what we should be doing with with the automobile industry ⁓ go ahead

DJ: Yeah. I do recall. I just going mention, I recall those standards starting to get set in the Obama era. I don't recall Trump rolling them back in his first presidency. Then they continued in Biden. But now Trump has just said, screw it, done with all of it.

Christopher Weeks: He didn't. Yeah, got rid of all the efficiency standards that were in place for the auto, there were supposed to be penalties that were going to be given to the automobile companies for not meeting such standards and they got rid of all that. So I mean, gasoline oil is such a yesterday technology from 30 years, 40 years, 50 years ago that there's better ways to do things. I mean, it doesn't have to be completely electric, but the best of both worlds is hybrid engines. In California, you even see some fuel cells that run, they get 500, 600 miles to a tank of hydrogen. Anyway, it's crazy. Anyway, anything else?

DJ: Wow. ⁓ And you would think, well, it's just going to mention like, you know, him and Elon being on such good terms again, you would think that him cutting those subsidies would hurt Elon. I mean, obviously it has.

Christopher Weeks: Oh, absolutely has. Yes, it absolutely has. mean, he's talked about, mentioned that Tesla sales are down. You know, that was a $15,000 subsidy that was taken off the top of a Tesla car for the majority of people telling them you're going to pay $15,000 more for a car is kind of a deal breaker for buying one or not.

DJ: ⁓ wow, I didn't realize it was that big. Wow.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah, might only be 10,000, but I mean, still. Anyway, anything else you wanted to talk about that's on your radar?

DJ: That's what she said. no. I just want to mention if anyone is interested in playing around with like OpenClaw or Hermes agent or any of the other spin-offs, Neoclaw from Nvidia, anything that. If you're looking an efficient way to do it, I just wanted to throw in a couple quick plans that ⁓ can get you going. So there is OpenCode Go, which is $10 a month, really liberal plans for open source, really smart agentic models. Kimi Plan, ⁓ GLM Plan, Minimax Coding Plan, those are all three Chinese companies. give a of usage, especially the Minimax Coding gives a lot of usage ⁓ per hour. I think like 100 messages an hour. And then GPT codecs can be used with them as well. Don't use Anthropic plan. Don't use Anti-Gravity or Google coding plan. They will ban your account. Anthropic is banning accounts for life. So you try to use the same credit card, ⁓ they also ban your account if you ⁓ use same card, address, ⁓ whatever. match it. ⁓ So use those two. ⁓ Yeah.

Christopher Weeks: for using it with OpenClaw?

DJ: They don't want you using them. They actually change their usage policy or whatever it is to state that they cannot be used outside of Claude code. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Really? Okay.

DJ: Yep, so you don't want to get banned.

Christopher Weeks: Whereas open AIs like go ahead, use this for whatever you want.

DJ: they bought the, I won't say they bought OpenClaw, they hired the lead developer. Yeah, yeah, precisely. So we might see, because they said they were gonna keep it open source, but I mean, I'm sure one day we'll see a direct competitor to OpenClaw from OpenAI, which will be nice. But yeah, that's all I wanted to mention.

Christopher Weeks: Didn't they bring the lead developer over? Right, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

DJ: here at the end of the show. if people, want people to be able to get into this and not spend a small fortune. ⁓ you can. ⁓

Christopher Weeks: Absolutely, you know, and if you or I or anybody can save somebody a buck not get their accounts banned, even better.

DJ: Yes.

Christopher Weeks: Yeah. Anyway, we'll be back next week. We'll do this again. As always, thank you for listening to the Insanely Great Podcast. I'm Chris, and that's my DJ buddy, DJ. Yes. Until next time, thank you for listening, watching. Bye.

DJ: Steve was snack. Bye.