The Texan Podcast - Trump and Epstein, Ukraine Turn, AI Off the Rails: SMSS Ep. 18

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

In this episode of Send Me Some Stuff, Rob and Cameron delve into the recent Epstein controversy, examining social media reactions and Trump's stance. The hosts tackle AI as Grok goes off the rails, touching on the implications for society and government contracts. Finally, they provide an update on the Texas floods, sharing the latest numbers and discussing potential legislative action.Listen to more Send Me Some Stuff podcasts from our team wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, subscribe and leave us a review.

I'm nervous. I've never started the podcast before. Jaden, you can use this as a cold open. All right. Three, two, one. Welcome back to the Send Me Some Stuff podcast. I'm here with my co-host Cameron Abrams. I'm Rob Lausches coming at you from the Texan. Cameron, why are you laughing at my intro? Because your voice went up a full octave. We were talking very normally before the podcast. I was like, already I have to get started on this podcast. And then I go up, you know, that's like the, that's the, that's the performance voice, right? It's the voice I use for the daily rundown. It's the voice I use for send me some stuff. When I was on the weekly roundup many moons ago, that's the voice I use for that one some stuff when I was on the weekly roundup many moons ago

That's the voice I used for that one as well. Yeah, but hopefully you'll hear my natural speaking cadence I think as we get into our stories and we do have a lot of good stories to talk about Yeah, even though it's been a very quiet month We have a couple of we have a couple of stories to talk about of state significance of national significance I'm excited excited I hope the viewers are excited too but before we start I think you were gonna ask me a question about yeah we pre-planned for our pre-planned you know opener what was our pre-planned opener? That took five minutes before the podcast to plan out. I wanted to ask, you recently saw the new Jurassic Park,

Jurassic World. Jurassic World, exactly. What's the title? Rebirth. Rebirth. Give us your 60 second movie review of this new Jurassic World movie. If you really like dinosaurs,

I think you're gonna like this movie. But if you, I think you're gonna like this movie but if you I think most people would be better served watching the original Jurassic Park at home yeah watching that I didn't think it was a very good movie it's fine CGI is obviously very good it doesn't have that movie magic though that the first one had is Chris Pratt and this one too no no this one is Scarlett Johansson she's like the big leading actor Okay, well you also saw Superman. I did Superman was a much better movie than

Jurassic World Rebirth. I've been seeing Split Opinions You know if you really liked the Zack Snyder Superman movies You're not gonna like this one because it's completely different in tone. Yeah, it's the everything about it is very different. But I mean, I liked both Man of Steel and the new Superman and the original Superman from 1978. You know, they're all different interpretations of the same character. You know, it's like how many different Batman have there been? Right. And, you know, everybody's got their favorite. But if you look at something like The Dark Knight versus the new The Batman

that came out in 2021 I'd say I think The Dark Knight is still probably better but they're both very good movies and they're both good like interpretations of this same character of the same universe. I just you know to get a bit meta on this it's it's interesting how we've entered this era of moviemaking where it's reboots of reboots. Where- The Necro sequel they're calling it. Is that what it is?

Yeah, this is a term that I've seen online refer to when a franchise that's been dead for years suddenly gets like a new movie. This happened with Tremors. This happened with 28 Years Later, for example, arguably zombie movie, which is also a good movie, but an arguably zombie-like, you know, resuscitation of a franchise that hasn't had a movie in 18 years. Yeah. Well, what is that about? Is it

that we've run out of ideas for movies? Is it the movie production companies are more hesitant to throw money at original ideas? Or is it a more a symptom of a decaying culture where people are more attracted to things that they're familiar with? They want some sort of feelings of nostalgia so they go back to familiar plot lines and characters and things. I would say that a lot of the problem is just the fact that producers want intellectual property. I mean, if you take a movie like ballerina from the world of John wick, that's

the actual title. It's ballerina from the world of John wick, not John wick ballerina for some reason. That movie was actually originally an original script about an assassin fighting people in this like small town in Germany because that's what it really is. It's like she has to fight all of these people in this tiny cult in a city in Germany like a little village. And they worked it into being a John Wick movie because they realized like you know oh we're afraid nobody's gonna go and see this movie unless we do something like that. The author Brandon Sanderson, who's a very big fantasy author, very famous, actually talked a little bit on

social media. I remember seeing this a little bit ago about he got contacted, he said several years ago to make a film based on one of his books. And he read the treatment that they sent him, like this proto script, to see if he liked it. And he's like, this is not my story. Because the problem is, you have these writers in Hollywood who want to make their own original stories. But the studio is like, you're going to make an adaptation.

But of course, they're creative types. They don't want to just slavishly adapt somebody else's work. So they want to throw in their own stuff. They want to put their own spin on it. And what you get is something that critics and audiences just aren't happy with, you know, because nobody. And now this can work sometimes, right?

Blade Runner is a great movie, even though it's a very loose adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is also a good book. But Blade Runner does its own thing, very good movie. I think a lot of people would agree that like Jaws is a better movie than the book. The Godfather, a lot of people probably say is a better movie than a book, but if you're going to make changes, they have to be good. You can't make changes for the worst, because then that or for for worse, because then that's you know that's not gonna be good but I don't think it's a decaying culture so

much as collapsing confidence in you know in on the part of the Hollywood executives yeah that's that's my opinion well I think even saw the reputing Harry Potter now yes insane the fact that it's been only like the last Harry Potter movie came out in like 2011 It has literally been like 14 years and they're already rebooting the whole thing because they're like well Screw it. Why not? Some I think that it's fine to make a reboot of a bad thing, right? Like the Percy Jackson movies and that was really my though. That was my book series when I was a kid I love the Percy Jackson books, but

The movies were not very good and they rebooted it into a show that's been actually getting pretty good reviews and so I'm like that's what you should do is take something that was bad make it into something good don't take something that's good and make it into something bad yeah yeah well I think what's interesting is there's just so much money thrown behind these big blockbuster movies that are built upon existing properties. And they see it as something

that is gonna be financially rewarding because they know there's already a fan base for Minecraft. We should make a Minecraft movie. And it made a Minecraft-tillion dollars. Yeah, yeah, or like Angry Birds movies or stuff like that. But I think what's interesting is I've found the horror genre to really be putting out a lot of original content. Sinner is a great movie.

Yeah. That was a good example. And there's lots of smaller movie studios that are putting out interesting films. A24 Studio puts out like a trillion films a year now. Yeah, but it seems like they're built upon original ideas. And so they're out there if you want to look for them, but they're just not being rewarded at the box office.

If you look at, for example, like blockbusters from, or like the highest grossing films from 1984, 1994, 2004, and 2024, or 2014 and then 2024, you find that like in 1984, almost all original movies. And that percentage that is original movies just gets a little smaller until you hit 2014, 2024 where the original movies, I don't even think, I think in 2024 that I'm not even sure there were any original movies in the top 10 highest-grossing films of the year. I'm not sure. I might be wrong.

Well, I also think it's an element of the ascendance and domination of the streaming services and just the infinite amount of options people have now. It's like, why take your kids to go see a bold new movie, like a new Disney movie that's going to really, you know, break records when you can wait to watch it at home. They're kids. Or you can skip through a hundred different options on your couch in ten minutes and pick out something that you know is gonna be entertaining for the one hour or ninety minutes that you have. Well, as everybody knows, spending like an hour scrolling through the Netflix movies is almost as entertaining as actually spending an hour watching a movie you like. You find yourself in the doom scroll on Netflix.

Yeah, no, it's true. It's true. But speaking of doom scrolling and social media, I think this provides a good segue into our first topic. So Cameron, what is our first topic of the week. Well the Epstein drop that was not that has caused a stir on social media there was the unsigned DOJ memo that found there was no impropriety conducted by Epstein there was there's no list. Well when you say no impropriety did they say there was nothing he did wrong or he said that there was no specific, there was no, because he's still accused of various sexual offenses, right?

The specific claim was over whether- Well the memo said there was no evidence that Epstein kept a client list or that he blackmailed prominent individuals. That's the main of the claim, right? Because it's, whether, he was still, was still, I think, I don't know. Well, I'll run through the charges. He first faced criminal.

I have an article up on the site right now. Definitely worth a read. That goes through this. He faced criminal charges in 2006. He's been subject to public fascination since 2005 after police in Palm Beach, Florida launched an investigation into reports of molestation brought against him by underage girls in 2006 he was arrested after grand jury indicted him in 2008 he pled guilty on

soliciting prostitution Spent 18 months in jail, but served most of his time on a work release program I mentioned that always in the articles I write about Epstein because there is some, we won't be able to get into it here, but there's, we'll get into it in just a minute with some of the stuff that has garnered some greater attention since the firestorm on social media, but he was released in 2009. He was again arrested in 2019 on sex trafficking charges and then in August 2019 he was found dead in this federal jail cell of an apparent suicide. But what's caused this firestorm online

like I mentioned is people like Cash Patel or Dan Bongino, they were very prominent social media figures prior to being in the most recent Trump administration. And both those individuals had said, there is something that is being hidden from the public regarding Epstein. There's a client list. There is. But the specific claim being that Epstein, who was known to have hosted these orgies

and brought in prostitutes to his private island, but that he was actually writing everybody's names down, writing down what they did. That was the assumption. That was the, yeah, that was this kind of claim that wasn't made by anybody in particular, right? But it did kind of snowball on social media into this. Well, the reason why there was things to substantiate those claims is because during these

the multiple arrests of Epstein and things had come out in the multiple trials is there was documents or CD-ROMs that were found that said XYZ with girl or things like that. And that information has never been made public. And there's been accusations that it's been destroyed by, you know, intelligence agencies and things have been hidden from the public eye and the things that have been focused on in these court proceedings, whether it's related to Epstein or Galay-Maxwell, have been so narrowly tailored in their interrogations that wouldn't allow certain evidence to come

into the court record so they can remain hidden. So it's a very complex issue in something that I had focused on because I've kind of looked into this for a few years now, before 2019 obviously when he died. Six years ago. know, but Probably for the past decade, you know, I've been aware of the Epstein story and There's lots of people who have put out hours and hours and hours of content trying to dissect What is going on with this whole Epstein story and why? It seems as though Governments really around the world have tried to protect him in some essence to prevent certain

information from coming forward. Like one example of someone who's done great reporting, I'm sure our listeners are familiar with the name Mike Benz, who is a former lawyer, used to work in the Trump administration, now he runs an organization that focuses on free speech online. But he does these hour-long, multiple hours-long live streams going over issues with intelligence agencies and you know recently with the Epstein story coming back up he's been invited on to podcasts across the the speaking scene to dissect this issue and he like I've mentioned to you before like there's the blackmail story, like you mentioned, where people really focus on Epstein's interactions with these underage girls and with these

prominent business leaders or people in the scientific community or philanthropy and things like this. But there's this other story about how Epstein was essentially this financial fixer who was sort of a middleman to get things done with flowing cash between different governments working on deals between private intelligence and trying to essentially hide money offshore for prominent individuals or governments or things like that so they can conduct operations in secret. So I don't know how familiar you are with both these aspects. Are you familiar with? I will say that this isn't something that I've done a lot of personal deep reading into,

mostly because I find it very hard to parse through all of the social media fueled, like, there's a difference between people making accusations based on evidence and the social media crazies who take something and just run with it and will say the weirdest things just to generate more attention for themselves but yeah I think it is worth pointing out though that what the big new development in this matter is that President Donald Trump came out and said that this Epstein list doesn't exist yeah he's been the most interesting development so far. He's made a lot of comments since this unsigned memo

has dropped and lots of prominent Donald Trump, MAGA types in the media have come out against his administration, how they've handled the Epstein issue. And in this most latest post, we're reading this on July 16th here. I'll just read a portion of it because it's kind of- You take a deep breath because it's a classic Trump beat run on sentence. He calls it the Jeffrey Epstein hoax. Calls it BS.

Calls it BS. He doesn't actually write BS He's a little bit cruder than that. But yeah, and he Is saying it's being peddled by the fake news Success starved Dems. Yeah, and he said I'll just read the ending here Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work Don't even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success because I don't want their support anymore. We've talked on this podcast several times before how Trump has this

quality that he attracts people who do not agree with him on a lot of political issues actually but who view Trump as the vehicle for their issues right because Trump has his own way of thinking about things. But a lot of these MAGA influencers, I think, they actually think about things somewhat differently than he does in that, like, I mean, look at the way, you know, with the Pam Bondi stuff. I mean, when people were criticizing, um, his U S attorney general Pam Bondi over the Seppstein stuff,

Trump came out and was like, that's my attorney general you're talking about. Back off, she's great, right? Because in Trump, he's, I think we've also talked about Trump is a bit more of a pragmatist, whereas a lot of these people are kind of ideologues. They're coming at it from a bit more of a

idealistic perspective, whereas I think Trump is a very kind of more pragmatic guy who is just looking for okay we'll take this success okay we'll take this success we'll do this success you know so well and I think it's an interesting divide between the man and the people who kind of switch between glazing him and ever since now he got elected being increasingly critical over things like the Iran strikes now the Epstein stuff It's gonna be interesting to see if this coalition kind of stays loyal. Yeah and especially the way Trump brought

together all these different factions in the 2024 election, you know, like someone like Michael Schellenberger, you know, like someone like Michael Schellenberger You know as I saw a short clip of him Talking with Megyn Kelly and how he was frustrated with the handling of the Epstein files But then he was also saying that he was just praising for Trump for how he has handled Brazil's crackdown on free speech and trying to open up the work his administration has done with freeing political prisoners in countries around the world as well, so it's you know, you can't expect a single individual to

be in alignment with every single one of your issues, right? You got to kind of take the good with the bad in some sense. But this is one of those issues that's of extreme significance to a lot of these, I think, social media populist types who view this as like the ultimate battle between decent normal people and, you know, freakish elites that are that are evil and exploiting people and so it's it's an extremely morally charged issue because there is like nothing worse than abusing a child. Well and take someone like Steve Bannon at the war room very much a pro-Trump. Well sometimes he has been. But that's really

like a ground zero in some sense for where the MAGA base is at in terms of how they approach issues. You can kind of use Steve Bannon as a proxy for that in some sense. And there was this huge turning point event this past weekend where it seemed like speaker after speaker after speaker was railing on the Trump administration for how they've handled this Epstein issue and Bannon on stage said it's deeper than Epstein and he said it's not just about a pedophile ring and all that, it's about who governs us and that's why it's not going away. Well, even if this client list,

whether or not it does or doesn't exist, the fight over it actually does represent like these many congressional Republicans now coming out and saying, we wanna see this list. It represents like a real, it represents a real tension between the more populist element and now that Trump

is in power, a more like administrative element, you know, that Trump is like, we're governing here. We're not, we're not, we're no longer, you know, trying to flip over every stone and, and, and, you know, trying to expose every, he's like, now we're in the process of governing, but we'll see if the campaign rhetoric doesn't hasn't maybe lit too many fires well, I think that's where the frustration comes from is that People who supported Trump wanted his administration to be transparent and reveal the malfeasance that's occurred with within the administrative say within these Intelligence organizations whether it be the FBI or CIA, that many in the MAGA base, those who have supported Trump for going on 10 plus years now, see as oppositional

to the American people. And they see Epstein as sort of the figurehead that they can point, not a figurehead, but rather emblematic of that rot and corruption. And the fact that we've seen now, at least for the time being, the lack of transparency regarding Epstein has caused some people's antennas to go up and be like, what is this about? And that's why we're seeing this increased amount of pressure being put on the administration to try and reverse course.

And hopefully we'll get some documents that come out. Because we did see this recently, it was a few months ago with the JFK files, where in essence it was like a WikiLeaks drop you know tens of thousands of documents just posted online and They said people like wild to comb through just go just go through it. You can have at it a little bit better maybe than Binders full of empty papers so that you can get influencers to like pose with their binders. That stuff was, you know.

Unfortunately, yeah, Trump himself is good at commanding media attention and the kind of performative aspect of politics, but sometimes it seems like the people he hires aren't as good at it, you know. But speaking of Trump and his changing, you know, accusations of changing political opinions and breaking with the base. Trump has now taken, I think, a bit of a harsher stance on the Ukraine-Russia issue. He came out and said to Putin, you have like 50 days to get a ceasefire or else. And Putin wasn't very happy about that. So that's been pretty big. What's going on here? Well, again, this is another one of those campaign promises

that I think people are waiting with bated breath to really see like what's going to be happening here. Because for all of us that were following Trump on the campaign said the Ukraine-Russia war would have never have happened. I'll fix it on day one. Yeah, they were like, would you have allowed that? He's like, the invasion wouldn't have even happened. It would never have happened if Trump was still in office.

Well, and we saw initially progress on that when there was withdrawing of funds and weapon shipments to Ukraine in the initial month or couple months of the Trump administration, there was the huge blow up between Zelensky and Trump and J.D. Vance in the Oval Office. oval office if you remember that confrontation that happened you remember that where that was produced the JD Vance meme like you should have said thank you well then people edit it to make his face look like a baby and it's like you should have said thank you mr. Zawinski but now we're we haven't seen a ton of progress since then and then a real marketed shift here in policy where Trump has indicated that there's going to be more trade tariffs placed on Russia, saying there's going to be a delivery of additional weaponry to Ukraine, really a switch in how there was going to be de-escalation tactics

to now it seems like accelerating. I think Trump had the mentality, I mean Trump's mentality if I understand his foreign policy worldview is that we can't just go in there and beat up Russia. They're a nuclear power. They are, you know, we have to, Trump's worldview is we have to live with, essentially, bad countries, right? Russia, China, North Korea, you know, maybe not Iran, but like Saudi Arabia, right? He's like, I get it, right?

He takes a more, he takes a very pragmatic view to foreign relations, and he's like, we're not going to go in there and beat up Russia. So we, we and Russia are like the equal powers here. Ukraine is not Ukraine's like second rate, right? So in his mentality, it's like, we need to put pressure on Russia. And Russia is going to listen because they're smart. That's the way he thinks about it. And now he's realizing, No, just cuz trumps in office does not mean Putin is going to stop But part of the problem here is that this is like an existential problem for the Russian government like they're not going to

Gladly accept defeat in this conflict I mean, you know remember when this conflict started everybody thought they were gonna mow over Ukraine in like three days I'm gonna conquer the country they went back they got pushed back a little bit and that's basically where the conflicts are yeah for about three years they control that eastern Russian speaking part of Ukraine where of course a lot of the hydrocarbon deposits and also they have their land bridge to Crimea which is important because Russia's wanted a warm water port for hundreds of years now, right? This is very important for them. But yeah, if they were to lose that strip of Ukraine, if they were to lose Crimea, I

mean it would be disastrous for Putin and his foreign policy legacy. So there's something very existential about it. Like he is, he and also of course they do believe that they have to, you know, secure their western border because they're afraid that if NATO was on their border, then Russia would be under military threat, right? So they, they view this as a bit more of an existential conflict. And so they're not just going to easily, you know, come to a ceasefire agreement, I think. It's going to be these, these, maybe these sanctions will do something, but, um,

well we've seen, we've seen sanctions in the past not work out in 2014. Yeah. So, uh, it's a, um, a movable object comes up against an unstoppable force here with America and Russia where, um, I'm glad we brought it back to the dark night. We talked about night at the beginning and now we're talking about it again but it's I think it is existential yes for Russia which I think creates the existential angst that

people feel about the conflict in terms of these are this is a nuclear armed country and with a leader you don't trust and you have no clue what sort of responses from Russia could be escalated to That's the thing. This isn't like Iraq invading Kuwait This is a nuclear armed country with more nuclear warheads than we have right invading country So it's like we can't just go in there and beat Russia up, right? Because of course the fears that would start World War III and then we would all die in the nuclear, you know, it's like the Albert Einstein quote, right? I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with,

but I know World War IV will be stopped, will be fought with sticks and stones. Yeah. So that's kind of the, the existential. Yeah, you're right. It has a very existential quality of the whole war. So, yeah, but, um, that's something we'll be continuing to monitor just in our spare time another thing that happened over this past week was X AI released an update to grok and they took the guard rails off of Grok which produced some some interesting responses to people online going on some extended

rants and as the Atlantic here characterized the anti-semitic tirades and where it was calling itself Mecca Hitler. Yeah It was it was pretty bad The the urine taking off the guardrails off of grok a lot of people succeeded in getting it to produce all of these like neo-nazi and anti-semitic responses. It talked about how it was going to assault certain online left-wing political influencers. It was, I mean, and I mean some of the stuff that it said is is lawsuit worthy, so that guy's probably going to get a nice fat check from X.

I think it would be very funny if Elon Musk decided that he wanted to take this to court and grok had to go on the stand but grok would be found guilty because it said some pretty heinous things about some of these people online and There's definitely gonna be I think some fat checks being written in the next few weeks or months but but what's interesting is this Unleashing of GROK, removing of the guard rails coincided with the Department of Defense entering into these

multi-million dollar contracts with a number of these AI companies, you know, from Microsoft and Facebook, but also GROK. And so it's just interesting. The, the overlap here where we see the federal government being much more open to AI and involvement of AI, um, within their administration, entering into these contracts, but what does that mean? If this, we still don't fully understand the capabilities

and how off the rails really AI can get when given the ability to. So it's just interesting here because AI is still something that we don't know all that much about and we're still at the very Forefront of its development. Well, we're still at the level where it's it's kind of equivalent to like a bad human It's capable of producing a lot of misinformation Hallucinating things, you know, everybody's seen those memes of like, you know people talking on Google AI And they're like, how do I make the cheese stick to my pizza and it's like use glue because it's not a thinking thing it doesn't know what it's saying it's just rolling dice to determine what is probably probabilistically the next appropriate

word to say right there's no there's no consciousness there's no thought going on there so even Grok Grok says mecha Hitler but it doesn't know that it's mecha Hitler you know and isn't of Hitler, but it doesn't know that it's Mecca Hitler, you know, and it isn't, of course, Mecca Hitler. At least I hope it's not. Yeah, but I think zooming out a bit here and talking about something that I've noticed is if someone posts a tweet or puts a post out on X,

and it might be a bit ambiguous or it might be a bit complicated in its sentence structure or the ideas it's trying to convey. If you go into the comments, what are you going to see? At Grok, explain this to me. Grok, is this true? Grok, is this true? true. And I think that's something to think about where we're seeing people exporting their conscious inquiry about issues to AI on a regular basis now. Now we disagree on this but keep going because I'm gonna make my

counterpoint. Okay well because I see it's people are losing their sense of autonomy and agency with AI in a lot of sense where if someone would post something online or even maybe if they are interested in an idea, it would require some sort of active participation on the side of the human being to seek out information. And it builds up their sense of curiosity and lays a foundation for how they are going to come to some sort of conclusion or build up knowledge on an issue

by just the fact that they're thinking about something and then seeking out more information on it. But whereas now they can just ask the AI. So it's reducing people's in some essence their consciousness where they're exporting that to an artificial intelligence. Hard disagree. I think it's a meme. I think people say Grok is this true because it's really funny that they keep saying it over

and over again. Like people are like 2 plus 2 equals 4. Be like Grok is this true? Or I'm pretty sure also some of those people have to be getting paid by X to ask Grok. I'm pretty sure some of those people are probably bots asking Grok is this true. Okay what percentage though? I don't know. I mean I don't use. 50% 80% of those people are you know I don't know I guess it's like I guess I have to believe it's a meme because it is really funny when people are like like Grock said this and people like Grock is this true like it's in the more they say it like it's like one of those jokes for the more you say it the funnier it gets you know it becomes so ridiculous at a certain point I don't

use AI for basically anything I do think it's usually you know, there's certain I mean there are uses for it But it is kind of like talking to a lobotomized human, you know, it's like it's extremely it's very It's very bland It will often just repeat back things to you that you said in the kind of way that like, you know I like those fake psychics like trying cold read people to see what they want to hear? It's kind of what it feels like most of these AIs do. So I'm, I mean, I'm also of the opinion that AI will never become like a super intelligence.

You'll never have an AI that can make art better than a human, even the best AI generated art or writing or whatever is still inferior to the best human stuff. And I think it's gonna remain that way. So that's my opinion. I am not an AI optimist, I'm not an AI pessimist. I think it's AI will only ever be able to reach basically the level of like a mediocre human.

Even the best AI art still looks pretty bad honestly, that's that's my opinion well Just cuz it looks realistic doesn't mean it looks good So well in so the reason why I bring this up is because there's been instances of people being duped on AI literature that is being created and sold on Amazon. There is a- You remember that famous photo of Pope Francis with that big white coat on that a lot of people

thought was real? But then if you actually look at it, I mean, you can see that it's an AI-generated photo. The problem is people looked at it for like half a second. But you can see at the bottom, it's all distorted and weird. But on Spotify even, there's been this huge controversy about this AI artists called Velvet Sundown. Velvet. I've never heard of this. Who is getting hundreds of thousands, you know, 400,000 plus monthly listeners.

Huh? And it's a completely AI generated band. And we're both so we're seeing this, almost this crossover point where it's getting more difficult to decipher what is real and what is artificially generated. And what does that mean, you know, going back to this original story where we still don't know the capabilities of AI, it's going off the rails when it's unlocked on X, the government is, our federal government is cozying up with AI,

and people are increasingly exporting their thinking to AI in this in these different instances, whether it be to cultivate information about a topic or for purely entertainment purposes. Don't people already export their thinking to or not export what's the word outsource they're thinking to like books I mean isn't this what Socrates said in Plains Republic that the problem with people is they read too many books like Socrates didn't write anything everything we have of him was written by other people and he said you know these people they they don't even remember things anymore you know they just use books right because writing is a kind of prosthetic memory right it allows you to

remember things you can't actually remember so isn't is a kind of prosthetic memory, right? It allows you to remember things you can't actually remember. So isn't that already kind of outsourcing your thinking if you just cite something from a book? Well, so this gets into a much bigger conversation about technology and everything. I don't know how deep, well, I don't know how deep we want to get on this and we don't have to because I I did just recently read a Fascinating essay by Jacques Derrida called Plato's Pharmacy where he goes through his pharmacy well, it goes through the Phaedrus and talks about how the use of the

the use of language in the written word can be How it's how it's conveyed in the phagrus as being offered by someone who is taught in the medical medical sciences and how it can be used to heal but also poison so there there is this esoteric reading to what you're what you're talking about in terms of the exporting of knowledge through the written word whereas Like you mentioned with the Socratic method in terms of a dialogic interaction to get to some sort of truth through Conversation so

This is that's a topic for a separate time. I don't know that separate time is going to be on this podcast. Maybe we'll talk about it. Maybe in a bit. But I do actually want to bring it back to something else about AI that I thought was pretty interesting. Because despite you know, this this terrible stuff that Grok said, this is not the first time this has happened on Twitter. Do you remember Tay? I Microsoft Tay? This was a Twitter chatbot that Microsoft released in March of 2016 that you know people could talk with and everything and like within 16 hours it

was shut down because it started tweeting out pro Hitler stuff and and anti-semitic stuff because a bunch of social media users just engaged with and because that's the thing these things learn by their interactions right so it's like if you just feed it anti-semitic content it's gonna start replying in that it doesn't know what it's saying well and I think that's what gets into the question with AI that we started started with in terms of what happens when these AIs are unlocked because you have to understand what is the information these foundational models are being trained

on is it being trained on 4chan and Reddit posts or is it being trained on the open library exactly if you were you don't want to train some thing on social media there's a reason why isn't it like in Avengers age of Ultron where Ultron starts reading Twitter and is like I have to I have to conquer humanity for its own sake well this is what it's a Twitter is unfortunately the worst representation it's people at their most simple, right, and least nuanced. Well, and this was what people were discussing when Elon initially acquired X, or Twitter, formerly known as Twitter, is he did that not for the purported purpose of upholding free speech principles, but

because think about the data set that X is that he can train his AI on. This vast collection of information that is constantly being updated with new information. And Elon has, you know, he has many different ventures, but he has poured millions of dollars into developing artificial intelligence. He has this giant, I believe it's either in Louisiana or Tennessee, I don't remember, but this world's largest, I'm not sure the exact term for it, but the connections of servers to speed up the processing of the AI algorithm.

Because what it really comes down to is how fast and the processing occurs the AI algorithm, you know, because what it really comes down to is how fast and the processing occurs In the calculations within the algorithm and he has one of the largest centers for this so You need the infrastructure the hardware But you also need the training set the data set for this model to train off of and that's what X is I remember the Atlantic had an interesting article a little bit ago actually saying that you know it is possible that the currently existing AI might at some point in the future like max out on the amount of available training data if Basically, we run out on social media

Or of course there's the other possibility that AI maxes out its potential because of a hardware issue that We just don't have the processing power or becomes too expensive like it's possible that a lot of this generative AI Because it does consume a lot of computing power and it's possible that at some point in the future it gets sufficiently good that it becomes more expensive to run a generative AI and to use all the electricity that's required for that than it is to just hire a person, you know, like the, I'm, I'm an AI realist. I'm not afraid of that.

Grok is going to take all the jobs. I don't think it's going to replace human actors, human writers. Cause again, most of this stuff is pretty bad. It's not very good. It's like, it would be like the lowest quality human work, you know, and obviously there's plenty of low quality human work out there that people like, right? I mean there's plenty of bad movies, bad music. Brad Johnson, our esteemed colleague, is like a Nickelback fan. He's been to Nickelback concerts, like

there's plenty of bad, that's for you Brad, there's plenty of really, he's been to Nickelback concerts, like there's plenty of bad, that's for you Brad, there's plenty of really, there's plenty of mediocre human art that is famous, but like I just don't see why, I don't see, I think that sometimes this AI stuff can be, like I might listen to some of these Velvet Sundown songs because it's an interesting like as an art project, right, but I don't think it's ever gonna go beyond like a niche thing well there's a couple things there I'd want to comment on but one of the things I'll mention though is how you how you said they're the hardware and the infrastructure hasn't caught up

with where AI could be in five years, 10 years. Right. And this was something mentioned by Peter Thiel. This was probably eight months ago. I was listening to an interview that he did and he was mentioning this plateau in our hardware development. I think I talked about this before, how we're still using similar devices this plateau in our hardware development. I think I talked about this before, how we're still using similar devices

to what we were using two decades ago. The iPhone hasn't changed all that much, the computer hasn't changed all that much. And that is because so many people didn't get into companies that were developing new hardware, they gravitated towards software, the computer sciences. And there needs to be a reimagination of what hardware can be to support where software is going to be going. We've seen some, I followed tech developments and tangentially and

there was the rollout of the Apple glasses. Yeah, that's gonna be the next big thing. In about 20 years, everybody's gonna have a thin little pair of glasses. That's what people are gonna use. Meta has that collaboration they did with Ray-Ban and to have AR glasses, this augmented reality. Those smart glasses, I personally think that's gonna be the future. It's gonna be smart glasses. Maybe in a hundred years you'll have like the smart contact lenses that you'll be able to see. Yeah, but on the infrastructure side, how you're mentioning that there needs to be the

electricity generation to support all these new data centers. We've seen this in Texas trying to focus on building out nuclear power plants. And we've seen the Trump administration place a greater focus on that. I wrote a story about Fermi America is starting up this new hyper grid electric generation style campus here in Texas. But then there's even a level deeper that you can go to when analyzing this because to get not just nuclear power plants constructed but you need the fuel rods for those nuclear power plants every piece of electronics that we interact with have certain rare earth minerals rare earth metals in them and that takes a certain amount of mining technology To get those rare earths out of the earth and there's been a depletion

of the number of graduates in the mining majors because there there is a specific set of skills required to work in that industry and we just haven't placed the emphasis on that within our educational institutions, because everyone's gravitating towards the soft sciences, or computer software and computer sciences rather. Now, you can't ignore to use a term from William Gibson, the man who invented the word cyberspace in one of his science fiction novels, you can't ignore the meat space. You can't ignore the real physical world because those computers don't run without a machine. You know when I took a intro to

comp sci class in college and one of the things the professor really tried to impress upon us is that everything you're seeing here is a visual representation of a physical process that is occurring right? You know your computer is ultimately a physical thing. And if you don't have the hardware, it's not gonna work. We'll see what happens. Maybe AI will max out, there won't be any more technology because the cost will get too high.

Maybe AI will become alive, probably not, and take over the world. And maybe some third thing we can't even imagine. the world and maybe some third thing we can't even imagine. But we're butting up at the end of the episode here and I just want to give a quick update on where we're at with the Texas floods. You can tell me if I have these numbers correct. I know we've written about this at the Texan quite a bit. We've been about this at the Texan quite a bit. We've been following this story

there Seems to be at least a hundred thirty four people that have been confirmed dead. Is it a hundred thirty four now? I remember seeing I think last it was 100 I think the last One I saw was 109 dead and I think 164 missing I imagine over the following days that number of missing is probably going to go down and the number of dead is probably going to go up. So is that the latest information? Yeah, so it's just a tragic incident and people are still

trying to deal with the the fallout from all this and trying to understand what and why this occurred and I think there's good we we see this as being placed on the special session. Of course yeah that's going to be a big issue. Brad wrote about this in his fourth reading newsletter. That's going to be a big incentive for Democrats to not break quorum because this is you know obviously a very bipartisan issue that Republicans and Democrats can both agree that the state can take some more action to prevent another disaster like this from happening.

Yeah, and so that's something we'll continue to update all the listeners and readers of the Texan on as things develop, the special session starts up on the 21st. So we'll get some movement on flood disaster related policy issues in the next week or so. We'll see what- Absolutely. Yeah, because the special session begins on the 21st. So by the time this podcast is going out on that Monday, we will have the special session will begin that day. And so we'll see, I imagine that that's going to be an issue they

take care of at the very beginning of the session. I don't imagine they're going to wait very long for that. But definitely follow Brad and Cameron on Twitter. They're going to be doing a lot of updates on the whole special session and flood relief read brad's fourth reading newsletter Where he talks about it and cameron's redacted where he also talks about the some of the more philosophical implications of this disaster and our response to it, but Yeah, our our hearts go out to all of the victims and we hope that more people will be found alive and safe

Yeah, it's one of those situations where unfortunately no words will really do it justice. But we do hope that, you know, as many people can be found safe and well as possible. Yeah. Well, I think that was a great way to end the podcast and I'll just echo that. And our hearts go out to everyone affected by the

floods from here at the Texan. We just hope that we all get through this and hopefully some things get addressed and we'll update everyone on that. But thanks for listening to our discussion this week on send me some stuff. And if you enjoy this podcast, you can send us some stuff. Maybe we'll talk about it on our next episode. Editor at the Texan.News is the email address for that. And you can find all of our podcasts, newsletters, articles at the Texan.News.

Thanks for listening.