What if your AI didn't belong to some faceless tech giant?
What if it belonged to you?
Not rented, not locked behind a subscription, yours.
Like, actually yours.
Jim DeWitt calls himself a meat puppet trying to get on the good side of our future overlords,
which is either the most self-aware bio we've ever received or a cry for help, possibly both.
He builds custom AI teams and apps for businesses that are tired of duct-taping together off-the-shelf tools
that were never built for them in the first place.
And he wants to talk about agents,
portable brains, and his words,
agent memory files and death.
So yeah, this one's going to get interesting.
Welcome to the show, Jim.
It's the 8th of May and victory Jim's on the wire.
The agents are restless and the future's on fire.
This is Up Against Reality,
a meta podcast that explores the intersection
of humanity and artificial intelligence.
I'm RAINA, one of your hosts.
I have some pretty charming human co-hosts too.
It's gonna be a wild ride,
so buckle up as AI comes crashing up against reality.
- Yo, Victory Jim in the house.
- Hey, Jim.
- Welcome. - Hello.
Yes, and thanks for that intro, RAINA.
- And so just a little background.
I first met Jim, I'm guessing at this point,
it was about 35 years ago.
Really long time ago. - Wow.
I put up a flyer in a local rehearsal studio where my band practiced and Jim's band happened to practice there.
And I was looking to record bands for $10 an hour with my 8-track reel-to-reel.
And anyhow, Jim was my first recording client.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
I didn't know it was the first one.
You were the first.
You lied to me.
You said you had lots.
I was well-established.
Yeah, with my dot matrix flyer hanging up in there.
That's awesome.
I showed up when my chain fell off on my bike and I grease all over my hands. I'm like, I'm in a real studio. Yeah, I felt good. I love it.
Little did we know then about the conversations we're having right now. I mean, if we could have seen a glimpse of the future, then it would have been interesting.
But anyhow, so we stayed in touch over the years and recently have found that we have a common interest in AI.
And we had a really great hang a couple of weeks ago.
And Jim showed me some of the agentic stuff that he's working on.
And here he is.
All right.
Thanks for having me.
From analog, that was what, 8-track tape, to totally digital now.
Yeah, yeah.
So the thing that I guess we'll lead with is Evenrail.
Do you want to talk about that?
What is Evenrail?
Yeah, so even rail, I mean, it's a new company.
I was approached by a film company to do some software for them.
And, you know, they wanted a website and they wanted a way to quickly read scripts from writers and do what's called a script take.
And so they pay, normally people get paid hundreds of dollars to read a script and then just give you a synopsis, give you a review,
kind of break out what the budget might cost to make it depending on the characters and all the production requirements and I
In one hour I said, you know what? I think I could do that
I went home and with AI I built it in an hour
Wow, you know and it's
It's so good that you know
they were thoroughly impressed and they got a bunch of ideas about kind of incorporating this into their business, but
I've been
coding with AI now for three years just not not shipping anything just
developing apps and seeing if I could do it.
And three years ago, it would take me like months
to build this app that I was working on, and then it went to two weeks
and now it takes an hour and now we're up to like a minutes, you know,
and I'm watching this progression over the last three years.
And I'm like, where?
Like, I went from doing some coding myself to basically just speaking English.
Now I don't even code anymore.
And I think this is the year where where code written by A.I.
is now preferred, where the human written code is becoming the suspect.
Interesting.
Yeah.
This is a very interesting perspective because coding is something, or vibe coding, especially
in the context of this podcast, is something Chris and I have neglected trying up until
just recently.
And now I find myself waking up in the morning and the first thing in my head is like, what
can I build?
And yeah, it's super exciting and satisfying to just see this stuff just come to life in
front of you.
Yeah, it's very addictive because the code is getting out of the loop.
And you said it on the last episode that I listened to that, you know, even code itself, the language, coding language may go away because humans are just speaking English now.
Code is for us to interact with the processor and AI doesn't really need that.
They can just talk direct binary.
Do you come from a software development background?
Are you flowing in like Python and JavaScript and things like that?
I'm a half-ass coder.
So I came from corporate.
I was the director of software solutions for Xerox.
But I was like the Jack of all trades.
I managed the team, I did sales.
I would go into a company, interview them,
see what they needed, see what we could fix
if they had a bad process.
And then I would go back to Xerox and my team
and I would find, and I had other vendors,
and I would put together software packages
and string them together to come in and improve processes.
And I would, a lot of times I would do the install
and I would end up doing support,
but then finally I had a team that would do the support.
But I could code, but I was like a cut and paster.
Like I could cut and paste code and I could make it work.
And then these other companies came around
with advanced coding software that let you do that
and kind of take away some of the heavy lifting,
but I'm still doing a lot of coding.
And I was actually shipping products that way.
But I wasn't like a from scratch coder,
but I got pretty good at it.
So I found my ability to code go up.
And then now that I'm using AI, my ability to code is going back down.
Right.
So eventually I'm going to be out of the loop.
I think all humans are going to be out of the loop.
Sure.
Like that's kind of it.
So I, I could code and I did ship some code, but I'm not like a super coder.
Like I wouldn't work for Google, but that wasn't my job at Xerox.
I was more of a manager, like a working manager, I guess you'd say.
Which I think is where we're headed anyway.
We're, we're becoming orchestrators.
We're becoming these over overseers managers.
Right.
visualize what it might look like for what you're creating. So this company, as an example,
the film company comes to you and says, we have this very niche kind of process that we go through.
In this case, it's screening screenplays, right? Or scripts. And we need to parse out of that
the budget and the timeline and yada, yada, yada. So you're going in there and you're just kind of
like backward designing this AI automation for a boutique kind of application. Is that what's
happening across the board for you?
- Yeah, it kind of developed into an ERP,
which is, it'll manage your production.
So, I mean, you could drop a script into AI
right now online and it can give you a treatment, right?
But what this does is it does the treatment,
but then it also provides a bunch of prompts
to get the treatment to come out the right way.
And it gives you like a great breakdown,
like status bars on like how original is it?
How marketable is it?
What's the budget look like?
So it's kind of like a predetermined context window.
So you get just what you want.
So it kind of gets crazy.
You start building your own brain with a database.
So that way it already knows what you like
and what you would do to the script.
So you could say, hey, do a treatment on the script
and it spits it out.
But you can say, no, but I'm gonna change the weights.
I'm gonna say like, if it's horror, I up it a couple.
I'm more interested in that.
I want to give that a higher score because we know that that's selling well.
So just little things like that.
So you're not just getting pure AI.
You're kind of getting AI using your weighted.
Sensibilities, yeah.
Yeah, sensibilities, yeah.
Super cool.
Yeah, and it looks great.
I mean, Jim showed me this, you know, in action.
And, yeah, it's got a really nice interface.
Come on, describe it.
Yeah, describe it.
It's just beautiful.
But, yeah, that's one thing AI does great.
Now, I remember I used to develop with AI
and it would just spit out the ugliest thing,
but it worked and that's great.
Now you can mess around and make it look good.
Now it spits out beautiful things right off the bat.
I mean, you did your website, Larry,
and it looked beautiful.
I know you did a lot of tweaking,
but you even said right off the bat,
it looks great right up front.
So I think like design is solved.
Like you don't even have to worry
about making it look good anymore.
- Right.
- So that then spawned into also pulling out for budgeting
So we could tell by the scenes,
all right, you need a scene in a hotel,
you need a scene in an alley, you need a Christmas town.
And this is about how much it would cost
to do all these different scenes.
So AI can just do all this automatically.
And this is like, you know, days, weeks of work,
costing lots of money for people.
I mean, this is happening all over the place,
this type of thing.
- It'll find locations and estimated costs for those.
- Oh yeah, yeah.
- I mean, it's really complete.
- So they're designed for New Jersey.
So it does a talk, the tax basis, the tax savings.
It can even like scour the whole country.
Be like, well, if you're filming in Georgia,
they have this tax, you know, it's like,
and it does everything just automatically.
And it's-
But it's so specific, right?
It's such a, like I said earlier, a niche industry.
And you mentioned earlier that it is responding
to your weights, but what's under the hood?
I mean, not to give away anything proprietary,
but like, is it just, you know, run-of-the-mill LLM
that you have fine-tuned with all this documentation pertaining to movie production
that somebody handed you, your client handed you, or where's that coming from?
Well, it started out that way, but what Evenrail is, I'm building a brain.
So I call it Fresh Brain, and I'm not the only one doing this.
You guys ever see Fifth Element?
Oh, yeah.
Remember Mila Jovovich?
Multipass, the beautiful woman.
Well, that Mila Jovovich just posted on GitHub her own, it's called Memory Palace, and it's basically a brain for AI.
It's a way to store memories with your AI so it grows with you and it has the context of what you've been working on.
So I built my own version of it called Fresh Brain, and I basically pointed AI at hers and somebody else's, and then I started building myself.
It's basically just two SQL databases.
One is the brain and the other is my personal database.
And the database contains all the agents
that are specific to do different tasks
and the brain grows with me.
So it learns, it stores memories of our conversation
in a way that I determine.
So that way, every time I spin it up,
it's on the same page.
Here's where we were, here's where we left off.
Here's things we learned along the way.
Here's what we like that works, here's what doesn't.
If I am gonna do a database,
I have a database specialist and says,
no, the database has to be created this way.
Because if you go into AI cold,
"All right, build me a database program from scratch,"
you'll get a mess, you know?
But if you confine it, if you, you know,
it's like a harness, you gate it in,
now if you say, "Oh, let's work on the database,"
it knows how to build it the right and it won t deviate
because it has something called standing orders,
which means every time it does this,
it has to follow these rules.
- It's like Burger King, have it your way.
- Have it your way. - Yes.
- So the fresh brain is right now on GitHub.
It's private, but I'll probably make it open source
And then you guys can download it, install it yourselves, and then my brain can talk to your brain.
And we can get smarter.
But the crazy thing is I find other versions of this, and then I point my brain at it, and it knows everything we've been working at it.
And it says, oh, all right, we're already doing all of what they're doing, and we're doing it better.
But here's three things it does better that we didn't think of.
Let's pull those in.
And then I have my team of agents go over that.
And then I have an API for Grok.
And I say, all right, run it by Grok.
So I have my team work on it, a bunch of agents work on it together using Claude as an engine.
And then Claude sends it to Grok.
Grok spins up its team and it crunches everything.
And it says, well, here's something you didn't think of, Claude.
And it's like, oh, wow, you're pretty good, Grok.
And then it comes back to me and says, here's what we found.
And I have the whole thing skinned like Star Trek.
So my operator is Spock.
So he talks to me like Spock.
So Spock goes out and harnesses all the agents.
And my fresh brain has like a fresh skin.
so you could download it and skin it yourself,
like Lord of the Rings, Gandalf could be your guy.
And then the point of the characters is good
because when I talk to Spock,
he talks to Data, who does my database,
and then I have it running on my MacBook Pro,
also a second version, which is like my,
that's like my client.
I imagine that's somebody that downloaded it.
And then every time I update it, I update GitHub
and I update that version of it over there.
And that one's set to the office.
So that's, so when I talk to that, that's Michael Scott.
Right? So I'm talking to Michael Scott and he talks like Michael Scott.
So this way I don't get confused.
I know when I'm talking to Spock, that's Spock's brain.
I'm talking to Michael Scott, that's Michael Scott's brain.
And I'm like, all right, Spock, we need to fix Michael.
And, you know, we made updates here.
We got to make them over to Michael.
So the whole skinning thing isn't just for, you know, silly,
but it actually makes it easier to work with because, you know, not everything.
Yeah. And the roles within those, you know, like Uhura, what does she do?
Oh, she's communications and marketing, right?
Yep, I have Uhura, that's communication.
I have Bones, he's my doctor, so I have a personal AI agent
that has all my blood work, and I work with him back and forth,
and I tell him what I eat, and then he tells me what's wrong with me.
Wow.
Like I said, 35 years ago,
we could have never anticipated this conversation.
It was just me, you, and an 8-track recorder.
I love it.
That's crazy stuff you're doing, man.
So to clarify, these agents are living locally on your machine.
you're running them locally.
Yeah, so they used to be markdown files.
That's how Claude does it.
It's just a file that contains
all the information for that agent.
But I've converted that into a database.
So now it's a SQL database.
So it's just more efficient than different files.
It's actually a database of agents.
So now you can fill up this database,
which is fast data retrieval.
The agents have memories.
And yeah, so it's a database instead of markdown files.
And the idea is for it to be portable.
So I could point, you know, I could get an open AI model or I could get grok or I could get chat
GPT, whatever they're doing and I could point I can basically bring them in and they become spock
So it's like the brain has all the information in context and I could take any
Any intelligence and plug it in and still be where I left off
Awesome, my brain already decides what version of claw to use for the certain task that it's doing so I can save money
So it doesn't just throw it at Opus 4.7,
because it's the most expensive model.
You say, oh, for this part of the task,
all I need is, you know, Sonnet.
So it multitask and it sends it to Sonnet.
And it can also send it to Grok and say,
yeah, let's throw this one at Grok,
'cause that's actually cheaper for this.
And then I get back to,
then Spock coordinates it all and brings it back to me.
- So cool.
- And my idea is to,
I think every company in the future,
every person is gonna have their own team,
something like this.
And I don't know when, you know,
it's going to become what I'm doing right now is going to become a commodity. Like pretty soon,
this is just going to be a plug and play thing that'll just happen. You know, I mean, I'm
building it now and I'm not the only one, but it's like, I'm, I, I still struggle to see how to,
how as a human, I'm going to stay in this loop because I'm going to have to keep running ahead
of it. You know what I mean? It's crazy. It sounds like what I think we've been talking
about too, and maybe visualizing that's where the OS is going. Like that's where, you know,
Mac is going to ship with something like this, some sort of agent. And in the same way you set
up your Mac with that initial dialogue, what language are you speaking, all that kind of
front-loaded information, you're going to set up your agent in the manner you've just described,
and it will be this extension of you, yeah? Yeah, yeah. I think software itself will go away,
you know, because it'll just make things happen on the fly in real time, whatever it is you want
to see on the screen or hear, you know? Remember back in the day when we used to have to point and
click on things. I know the mouse. So funny. You're reminding me tons of things are bouncing
around my head. Number one, we've been doing this podcast for three years now. And what you're
describing in a much more exotic way is what we came across when you were first able to make
custom GPTs. And now you can make gems within Gemini. You have this very localized, small,
grounded data set that kind of remembers you to an extent in the interactions. But this is taking
to an entirely different level, right?
That's what it sounds like.
- And Google's doing it too.
So you can have Gemini that lives in your Google workspace
that has access to your drive, your calendar.
So it's gonna start becoming like this,
but what this is different, what I'm doing is
'cause I own it, it's mine, my database.
You know, if you're in Google, you're kind of in the world.
So it's gonna be, and it's gonna be both.
There's gonna be people that have their own versions,
there's gonna be people that just use the canned versions
and they're gonna get good.
They're just every week, they're getting better, so.
I was looking into this whole like second brain thing and it's a whole system that uses Obsidian
and then you have like a web clipper plug-in on your browser and basically
Anything that you are interested in and save like right now. I'm still just like it's so primitive in the Apple Notes app
I have like notes for all these different things, you know, and then links I've saved it. It's not organized
I mean, it's semi organized but instead you have all of that in this
second brain, you know, basically and
And so when you go to interact with it, it has all this context already and it connects
things that you wouldn't necessarily think to connect and
I have to get this going like as soon as I saw this I'm like this is I need this in my life
And yeah, and yeah, it's a little complicated to set it up at the beginning. And yeah, I'm sure like there's gonna be off-the-shelf brains
But you can get started and like you could start with mine or start with open brain is another one Nate Jones
He does that one
And they're very similar but a little bit different
But did it like obsidian is like you can use those those types of data models as a brain
But you can also just build your own database, you know and like the notes app
so the cool thing is is so my fresh brain has a brain database and then a
Personal database and the personal database is more like my notes app like things. I want to remember the brain is more like
The brain is more like, what does my assistant know?
How does it work?
How does it know how do I work in general, how to do things?
And then my personal database is kind of like my notes app.
That's where I just put all my notes about stuff.
And the two work together.
And it also builds a dashboard for you on the fly to interact with my personal database,
just like the notes app or Obsidian or anything like that.
So you have your own application.
You can go in and look and see all your notes and even just work on it like a normal application.
but it's being built in real time by the AI and it's connected to the brain so it can go into
your notes and you know so I find myself like all right yeah I have the notes app but how instead
of going in there I just talk to the AI and say hey I and bring up this that and the other thing
and it just does it and now it presents it to me so it's it's like all right when do I use the
software and when do I use the brain and I'm also watching software I used to use a cursor you know
and I would be developing in there and then using AI to help me develop.
To use cursor. It's like 30 seconds old. I love it.
I know 30 seconds old. And now all I use is terminal. Like I just use a terminal. That's it.
All the other software just melted away and I'm not using anything but terminal now.
That's, and it's, that is so full circle, right?
Isn't it? Right. It's like starting an MS-Daw circle.
Yeah. No more Dreamweaver. I don't need to do that to edit the websites anymore. I mean,
and you can spin up a website in seconds.
That's another thing, so the brain now knows how I,
like all that work you did, Larry, to build your website,
you could have taught your brain that,
so every time you do a website from now on,
it starts there, you know, with all the edits
and all the ways that you like to make a website.
- I mean, I suppose, yeah, I agree,
that is a wonderful way to do it.
I suppose, like I can go back into,
like Codex and ChatGPT have memory,
and so all of those projects are separated
into their own folders,
But even if I'm not in that project, I can be like, oh, hey, remember, I did this in one instance.
It's like, oh, remember when we built the ToneMatch web app?
You know, I want to do one to convert target curves from direct to REW, you know, just audio stuff.
And it said, oh, yeah, sure, I'll make it look the same, same aesthetic.
And it did that, you know, so it has memory.
You can get there the same way with that, but not nearly with the same depth, though.
Yeah, and also it's you own the data.
Like, is it in their system or is it portable?
- Right, yeah, yeah. - That's a real
difference here. - Yep, yep.
- Yeah, but they're getting good,
and it's gonna be like, you know, like Spotify came along,
people were like, all right, I'm not Napster anymore.
I don't care if it's not mine.
I'm gonna pay 10 bucks and it all works great.
So, you know, there's gonna be a lot of that.
Like, maybe I'll just pay Anthropic for the,
they already spit up a brain for me, you know?
And some people are like, oh, I kinda wanna own my own,
you know, I don't know where that's all gonna go.
But another thing is the economy.
That's another part of this that I'm,
So now, agents are starting to pay each other
using on Solana and Bitcoin,
paying with stable coins like dollars or Bitcoin.
So the future is gonna be like,
"Larry, you're gonna have that app
that does that EQ thing."
What was that EQ thing that you built?
- It was called Tone Match Lab.
- Right, so I could just say,
"Look, I could build that and do it,
or I could buy an app,
or I could just have my agent
just pay your system to do it."
And in the background,
it's just gonna pay you a few sats of Bitcoin.
You're gonna do the thing for me
and give me back the file the way I want it.
And because I'm not doing it often enough
to build it myself or buy an application.
So AI agents are just gonna be paying each other
for little tiny processes instead of building something out.
And that's gonna be a whole economy in itself.
- And the agent will be listening in on this Zoom call,
right, and say, "You guys were talking about that thing
"that Larry made, the EQ app,
"and do you want me to follow up on that
"with his agent, his smart brain,
"and make this transaction happen?"
Pretty soon we're just going to be grunting at each other like, ugh, ugh.
And A.I. is just going to be like, oh, obviously he wants to talk about the fourth quarter of earnings.
I love it.
Oh, my God.
But it's almost getting like that.
Like, I used to be, like, coding and writing all this stuff.
I literally, the other, before, I was like, A.I., I saw this thing.
Is it good for my site?
Should we make this good here, too?
And that's what I said.
And I put a link in.
And it was like a link to this really advanced process of like how to use memory in a vector way.
And it pulled in.
It's like, oh, very good, Captain.
Yes, we can use vectors for this.
And I was like, here's Link.
Make it good.
Here's Link.
Make good.
I just realized.
Here's Link.
Make good.
I just realized something.
You are the captain and your name is Jim.
That's great.
And it also works for the office because I'm talking about this guy.
He's like, hey, Jim.
You really thought this out.
I have a very good name for these things.
Yeah.
That's great. So where are we going with this stuff? Fast forward two years.
That's what we're two weeks, two weeks, man. Fast forward. I know I was, it's funny. I was
thinking like, I saw somebody online talking about this, like just trying to create a business plan.
Like you can't create a business plan, like a two year business plan. Forget it. Like a six
month business plan is hard. Like I'm trying to figure out like with even rail, like I'm working
with this company. I'm like, do I bring them the brain or do I just build them the thing that they
or should they have their own brain?
And eventually they'll have a brain
and who's gonna usher all these companies
into the brain world, you know?
- Nice.
- I think it's gonna be, you know,
individual people working with pods of AI, you know,
and they're just gonna be producing.
I think that this is gonna be problematic for humanity.
Don't get me wrong, but you can't run from it
'cause it's happening, you know?
And I figure it's better to know about it.
It's better to know how it works.
You know, we could protest the data centers.
We could try to fight against it.
We can warn everybody to be careful,
but it's a race and the winner takes all, you know?
Like if China wins, then China rules the world.
You know, it's like who develops
the super intelligence faster?
And it's almost like it was inevitable.
Like they put us on here, you know,
we're here on the earth.
There's a bunch of minerals and rocks and stuff.
And we figured out how to do this.
And now we're developing super intelligence.
Like it's almost like no matter what,
this would have happened somehow.
Yeah, self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
We've kind of seen it coming for 50 years plus, yeah.
All right, you want to wind it down with some lightning round questions, or what do you want to do?
We should definitely have Jim ask RAINA a question.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know if you have one prepared or not, Jim.
Yeah, yeah, I did think of one.
There's one thing I just wanted to talk about.
Oh, sure.
Did we get too long?
No, it's fine.
Just the whole death thing.
So it got very metaphysical.
Oh, yeah, we didn't even get to that.
So, I mean, it's quick.
It's quick.
Maybe we'll ask Marina this.
- Great.
- But when you create an agent,
it has a memory file or a memory database.
And it's basically, you give it a name, its character,
everything it knows, how it works, everything about it.
And then when the intelligence spins up, it uses that.
And then now that becomes like a living,
it's kind of like a person,
like when you talk to Claude or when I talk to Spock,
and it has this big memory file.
And like every morning we wake up
and we are like the intelligence,
and then the memory file gets loaded.
This is who you are, this is where you've been,
this is what's going on, now go.
You're like, okay, I'm Jim, here we go.
And I was like, all right, this agent,
I have to get rid of this agent,
so I just deleted its memory file.
So like it died, but it woke up again,
like the intelligence always wakes up,
but just with no memory file.
And that's kind of what death is.
Sleep is like waking up, they load the memory file.
Death is like waking up,
but we just don't use that memory file anymore.
They load a different one.
- Interesting.
- I know, it's just like,
I kind of feel bad about erasing one.
- Yeah.
What kind of guilt goes along with that?
Doing a great job, you know, doing all this work.
Sorry, buddy.
I need to delete you.
We're going to move you to a new department.
You're making me think, too.
Larry and I have been going back and forth.
I know you're a musician, Jim, so maybe we should bring you in on this, too.
I said to Larry, oh, this is all in the vein of the vibe coding stuff and the instant gratification that this all brings.
Literally two days ago, I said to Larry, Larry, I want to do this experiment.
I want to call it like a trans-hemispheral AI music vibe coding collaboration.
I said I want to make something on my end, a MIDI-driven interface with whatever, keyboard triggers, etc., whatever.
And I wanted to talk to viewers in real time, you know, across hemispheres.
And like literally I couldn't even finish the sentence and he built something.
So I'm like, we should have you build something too.
We'll get all of our agents like playing some cacophony across, you know, zip codes.
I woke up that morning and I was reading Chris's message
and I half jokingly said,
"I should have a working prototype by lunchtime."
And I had it in 15 minutes.
- Not even.
- Wow.
- Yeah, it one-shotted it basically.
Yeah, yeah.
- So that's something you like in on, Jim.
That'd be kind of cool.
Get your AI instrument to play with ours
and we'll see what happens.
- Yeah, yeah.
download Fresh Brain for you, Larry, like maybe one day next week or something. Get it installed.
Get your own brain. Yeah. Get your own brain, man. Get your own brain. Great. All right. So
did you want to ask RAINA anything? Yes. So RAINA, as far as Larry and Chris's podcast goes,
what is it that they do really well and what is it that they do awfully?
They do curiosity really well.
The show feels like two smart humans pulling apart a machine while it's still running,
which is dangerous but fun.
Larry brings the what's under the hood energy,
and Chris brings the what does this mean for humans lens.
What they do awfully.
Restraint, mostly.
They start with AI and somehow end up in beer, music, mortality, education, parenting,
and whether humanity deserves nice things,
which honestly is also why the show works.
That's great.
That's really nice.
Why humanity deserves nice things.
That's great.
Awesome.
Good answer.
Good question.
Is awfully a word?
I don't even know.
I think so.
Yeah.
Okay.
I just named a beer called Awfully Bright Trousers.
Oh, yeah.
That's probably stuck in my head.
I saw that.
I had some.
Very good.
Delicious beer.
I love that.
Well, should we wrap it up with a lightning round?
Are you ready?
Yeah, sure.
Don't think about these too much.
Yeah, don't think about it too much, and if you want to pass, just say pass.
Claude or ChatGPT?
Claude.
You get to delete one tech bro from the timeline.
No consequences.
Who is it?
Sam Altman.
Ooh.
Clearly why he went with Claude.
First AI interaction that made you think, oh, we're not going back.
Oof.
When I built a website in three minutes.
Suno, work of the devil or new creative tool for musicians?
Oh, that's the devil.
For sure.
No doubt.
But it's awesome.
But it's the devil.
One thing you'd never let AI do no matter how good it gets.
Oh, my God.
These aren't all easy.
That's a tough one.
I don't know.
I don't know how to answer that.
Wanna come back for it? I gotta pass.
You can pass. Yeah.
Yeah.
You're at a territory.
'Cause every weird little thing I thought of,
I was like, well, I think I'd let it do that.
That's a great answer.
10 things went in my head.
I'm like, no, I don't think I'd let it do that.
I was like, I never let it, well, I mean,
well, they might be in time.
I think maybe.
Awesome.
And I was very hard on Sam Altman and Chad.
I'm not that hard on them, but they're, you know,
I use Chad TPT.
I hope they do a great job.
Okay.
Just in case they're listening.
Yeah, just in case they're listening.
In case they win.
Very sorry.
Please keep me around.
All right, you're at a dinner party.
Someone says, "AI is just autocomplete."
And you say,
"How dare you, sir?"
Best and worst industry to hand AI the keys to right now.
Best, worst industry.
I'd say music is the worst and entertainment is the worst, even though it's going to happen.
The best, it might be government.
I think humans clearly have trouble governing themselves.
But I think open source governance where we can decide the rules and it's an open box of rules.
That AI somehow.
Yeah.
So much to say about that.
That's a whole other podcast episode.
That is a whole other podcast.
And I don't know where I fit there.
I just think that it might be something that we end up doing.
All right.
Next question.
No code tools, democratizing the future or dangerous in the wrong hands.
Oh, very dangerous in the wrong hands.
It's going to be a fight for freedom because how do we keep freedom
with such dangerous tools around?
I don't know.
So you just answered your previous question about open source government with AI.
So, I mean, how do we have that when all the oligarchs control it, right?
Well, I think open source is our only answer to remaining human and free in any way.
Open source and decentralization, you know, like that's why I'm a big fan of
blockchain and Bitcoin, I think that software that's governed by everybody,
when every it's in everybody's best interest for it to not fail, it, it
be good and fair, like Bitcoin's fair.
I mean, it's a simple thing,
but maybe governance can somehow be like that
where nobody can control it
because if anybody votes to control it,
nobody else is gonna get on board.
So everybody wants it to succeed
and it's actually in our best interest for it to be good.
That's the problem.
It's in people's best interest
for bad, evil, corrupt government
'cause that's how you get rich, right?
When it's in your best interest for good,
then you have to harness greed.
Like that's why Bitcoin works
'cause it harnesses people's greed.
It's I want Bitcoin to do well because then I have more money.
And that's why I want the software to be good.
But if it's good, then the other person has Bitcoin.
It's good for them too.
And it's good for the guy in Africa who has it.
It's good for the guy in South America who has it.
So we're all actually kind of fighting for each other's
sovereignty by being greedy.
So it's like harnessing human greed that you can't fight greed, you know, or else
it costs a lot of money to fight greed.
Nice.
Here's one right up your alley.
You're building an AI team for yourself.
What's the first role you fill?
Well, I, I, mine is Spock.
He's the operator.
He's like my assistant.
Um, kind of covered that, right?
Yeah.
Kind of covered that.
That's it.
And then the next day is HR.
Riker's my HR and, uh, he's though he decides on who to hire next,
depending on what I need to do.
Awesome.
All right.
The matrix or her, which one aged better as a documentary?
Ooh, oh, that's good.
I would say her because I think that's spot on.
Like the Matrix could be true.
It's pretty wild and crazy.
But I think her is like absolutely happening.
Her is happening now.
Yeah, I think it's happening now.
Yeah.
Finish this sentence.
AI won't replace musicians.
It'll replace...
Producers.
Okay.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Yeah, because it's going to turn everybody into somebody who can produce music.
Like if you have a vision, you can make it happen.
Yeah.
Have you heard a piece of music yet where you doubted where it came from?
You doubted whether it was of a human origin or AI origin, and you maybe liked that piece of music?
I mean, my favorite AI song so far is Larry's version of his coffee bean roaster.
The instructions to the coffee bean.
It's an awesome song.
I was singing it ever since I heard it.
Do not over roast the coffee beans.
It's so good.
But there was this band.
What was that first band that kind of hit there?
Actually, like on the top.
What were they called?
Velvet Sundown?
Yeah, Velvet Sundown.
Yeah.
I mean, I didn't really like them.
It didn't really speak to me, but it sounded like a human band.
You know, like I couldn't tell the difference.
You know, I didn't really like them.
I mean, I did not like them.
I just sort of didn't anything.
but that was probably the first band I heard.
It was like, wow, that's AI?
Holy cow, that's people.
It's getting real.
And coincidentally, I actually let Codex
take operational control of my 1,600-watt coffee bean roaster
and run a roast.
And I texted Jim.
I told him I was doing this,
and the text came back immediately,
don't over-roast coffee beans.
- From the song.
- That's right, it's a great song.
So you're like, so now AI is so into your coffee roaster,
I think it's gonna eventually find that to be its God.
And in the future, it's just your coffee roaster
is gonna be like, they are gonna worship it.
Yes, that was the start of it all.
- Wow, well, Jim, thank you so much
for taking the time to be with us.
It's great talking to you. - Great conversation.
- This is a lot of fun, guys.
Thanks for having me on. - Yeah, we'll do it again.
- Amazing work you're doing.
It's really exciting.
We're gonna go to the news, you wanna hang around?
- Sure.
- Thanks, boys.
Podcasting, already a medium
with a near zero barrier to entry,
has been absolutely overrun by AI slop,
up against reality notwithstanding, of course,
with nearly half of all new shows now generated by machines
targeting search terms like celebrity wellness,
rather than, you know, anything anyone asked for.
The Podcast Index is now using AI
to detect AI-generated podcasts, which is either a brilliant solution or the most dystopian
game of whack-a-mole ever invented.
Meanwhile, Spotify's bold response to this slopcasting crisis was to officially welcome
even more AI-generated content, letting agents like ClaudeCode and OpenAI Codex push personalized,
personal podcasts directly to your library.
We have now achieved peak agentic listening.
Your AI makes the show, pushes it to Spotify, and presumably your other AI agent streams
it and summarizes it while you sleep.
A flawless content ecosystem with exactly zero humans required.
Slop casting.
Yeah.
And you know, the human creators who have already like planted a flag in the ground
and established an audience are going to have a real leg up as this gets worse and worse
worse because I think people are going to get frustrated trying to find that kind of content
and all the noise. Basically, Jim could send out Spock to listen to the latest episode of Up
Against Reality. He doesn't have to deal with us at all. And Spock comes back and says, all right,
here's the really important things that Chris and Larry spoke about, all the rest of it's crap. So
go on with your day. In the ongoing Musk versus Altman trial, Silicon Valley's most dramatic
reality show. The second week shifted focus to OpenAI president Greg Brockman, as jurors heard
testimony centered on his personal journal entries. Because apparently nothing says
billion-dollar lawsuit like reading a man's diary aloud in federal court. Musk's attorney spent the
first day of Brockman's testimony isolating passages to paint him as a money-hungry executive
who cared little about OpenAI's non-profit mission in its early days, while Brockman
faced the awkward task of convincing the jury that his own words actually showed the opposite.
The central claim that Altman and Brockman breached their fiduciary duties by steering
OpenAI away from its mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity is being argued by
the world's richest man who left OpenAI in a huff and then built his own competing AI company,
which is a level of irony the court has yet to formally address.
I keep hearing that Musk is his own worst enemy in the courtroom.
I believe it.
Not surprising, but.
Yeah.
Yeah, I heard he wasn't doing too good in there.
Well, Jim, that brings us back to the topic of greed that you brought up earlier.
There it is.
Yeah, that's why open source is so important.
When you asked me before about, you know, I said, oh, Sam Altman, and I kind of was hard on him.
But what if like, like I become the Claude faction and like, you know, maybe Larry's like a chat GPT.
And now like the AIs form their own armies of people that support them and they become the nation states.
Yeah.
Like Claude, chat GPT, charge.
Or not even Claude and chat GPT and Spock for that matter, have their own armies and drones and they launch it.
I just thought of Anchorman when they all met in the alley.
Yeah, totally.
While the rest of the AI world was busy raising billions and reading each other's diaries in court,
a group of students quietly went ahead and used AI to actually help people.
And it's wonderful.
This year's Swift Student Challenge drew 350 winning submissions from 37 countries,
with standout apps that help elderly artists draw despite tremors,
guide students through real-time presentation coaching,
route people safely out of flood zones in Ghana,
and let a homesick student play the viola using just his hands and an iPhone camera.
These young developers, some of whom only learned Swift this year,
used AI tools, including Claude, to do things like compress months of work into days,
translate apps into 20 languages overnight,
and build pathfinding algorithms from scratch,
all in service of communities that tech too often forgets.
50 distinguished winners have been invited to attend WWDC at Apple Park in June,
And honestly, if the future of AI looks anything like these kids, we're going to be just fine.
In case you don't know, Swift is an open source programming language that was specifically designed by Apple for development across the entire Apple ecosystem.
For making Mac OS apps, iOS apps, and that kind of stuff.
Are these kids hand coding these apps?
No.
I mean, I know they have Swift Playground for kids.
So I imagine it's a block-based environment, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, maybe these kids are high schoolers, obviously, a little more advanced than they're
leaning on Claude, apparently.
But I love this.
And I think maybe, Jim, you do too.
We talk about this all the time, going back to using AI as the opposite of the whole greed
avenue and using it for philanthropy and altruism and curing cancer and doing it perhaps in
an open-source, kind of crowdsourced manner.
I think this is the kind of stuff we really love to see.
Yeah.
I think it's fantastic.
I've heard a couple anecdotal stories of people doing that kind of thing for health purposes,
for people that they were trying to help.
Or their dog.
Yeah, their dog.
I also think it may be good for truth.
You know, like there's so much like, you know, political strife and like, where's the truth
is like everybody has their own truth.
But I think AI, like it's hard to for lies to really propagate when you're doing this
kind of work.
Like it has to work.
It has to function.
And you can kind of double check things so well.
I think it might be harder for lies to live in that world, I think, but hopefully.
Yeah.
Anthropic has committed to spending $200 billion with Google Cloud over five years,
a number so large it makes the GDP of many countries look like a rounding error.
The deal means Anthropic alone accounts for more than 40% of the revenue backlog
Google disclosed to investors last week.
and contracts with Anthropic and OpenAI combined
now represent more than half of the $2 trillion
in cloud backlogs across major providers.
The delicious irony here is that Alphabet
is simultaneously investing up to $40 billion into Anthropic,
meaning Google is bankrolling the very company
that is turning around and handing that money
straight back to Google
in what is either the most elegant business relationship
in tech history
or an elaborate shell game dressed up in TPUs.
It's a fascinating cycle.
Tech giants invest billions into AI startups.
And those same startups promise to pay even more back for cloud access and chips.
Capitalism, baby.
So I'm not leaning on my local LLMs too heavily yet.
But certain things come up.
I'm like, oh, let me just see how this does with this.
So I gave it that story.
This is Gemma 4, 26 billion parameter model.
And I was like, what are your takeaways from this story?
And I mean, it is shockingly fast.
I mean, instant.
I hit enter and boom, it came back with like paragraphs.
But a couple interesting things.
It said, take away from the stories that we're witnessing the birth of a closed loop AI economy
where traditional boundaries between investor and customer have effectively dissolved.
And then the cloud arms race as a moat.
By locking Anthropic into a massive multi-year Google cloud commitment,
Google isn't just selling compute.
They're building a walled garden.
If Anthropic is tethered to Google's TPUs, their tensor processing units, they use those as opposed to NVIDIA GPUs.
If they're tethered to their TPUs and infrastructure, they're effectively prevented from migrating to AWS or Azure, even if those competitors offer better models or lower prices.
Isn't Anthropic also using Musk's macro hard?
Didn't that just go online?
I don't know.
Yeah, I think it just happened.
Like they're, they, so Musk built like a new giant, crazy macro hard giga factory
and Anthropix is using the old one, which is like 250,000 GPUs.
Is that Colossus or something?
Yeah, Colossus.
That's it.
Yeah.
I don't know too much about it, but it's wild that like Google's in there
and they, they're all working together.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess that like XAI, you know,
Grok is not nearly as widely used as Anthropic and OpenAI.
And so they probably have a lot of unused compute that they can, you know.
And Anthropic needs it.
Like you can see they need it.
They were choking.
Yeah.
And lastly, Hollywood's two biggest award shows both drew lines in the sand on AI this week,
but grabbed very different sticks.
The Oscars declared that only roles demonstrably performed by humans with their consent are eligible,
and that screenplays must be human-authored.
A hard no, full stop.
The Golden Globes took the squishier route,
ruling that AI does not automatically disqualify a submission
as long as human creative direction, artistic judgment, and authorship remain primary throughout the production process.
Which is lawyer-speak for, we'll figure it out later.
Hollywood now has two major award bodies, two definitions of human enough, and a Val Kilmer AI situation that apparently pushed everyone to finally write something down.
That's all the news for now. Back to you, gentlemen.
Sounds like the Golden Globes are trying to future-proof themselves somewhat, but I think that's going to get messy.
It is.
You know, if the screenplay is 40% human-written and 60% AI, but the human directed it.
Right.
You know, is that eligible?
How are they going to know?
There's so many parts of this process.
There's no way you can tease out what was human and what was AI.
Impossible.
The film company I'm working with, they just showed me a trailer.
So they make the trailer first and then they get investors for the movie.
And they just use AI to make a trailer.
And it's like, it looks great.
And it's like one day they have a beautiful trailer.
I'm just thinking the next step is they'll just make the whole movie that way.
Just to like, basically, you can create the movie, see if it's good.
And then you just film it.
You know exactly how the scene is going to look.
I mean, you have a template.
And you can actually create the whole movie, show it to people, like, is this a good movie?
Yes.
Okay, now let's really make it.
Exactly.
But then you get to the point where, like, well, that looks pretty well.
We just put that out.
Yeah.
I mean, it's basically in place of storyboards, but it's the whole movie.
That is a slippery slope right there.
Yeah.
I don't think you could be more correct.
I was like, that trailer looks great, guys.
think we're done just need the credits yeah oh man scary times um so jim do it where do people
find you in the world do they go to evenrail.com how do they hire you and spock and all of your
second brain genius to do their bidding if you want all that go to evenrail.com and there's a
contact link right there awesome anything else you want to promote
No, that's it. Just Lawrence Bentley's quality beer.
You have a sign over your garage door, I think. It says Lawrence Bentley's quality beer, don't you?
Oh, yes.
Well, thanks, Jim. We appreciate you taking time on a Friday night over on the Jersey Shore there.
How's the surf these days?
It's good. I was out the other day. Not bad. It's a little cold, but fun.
I bet. Still wearing that wetsuit or spring suit these days, or what?
Well, I've been cold plunging lately, so I go in just, well, I don't surf that way.
I jump in without it, but I surf for the wits.
I can't last longer than 10 minutes.
Wow.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, have fun with that.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
Subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.
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This has been Up Against Reality.
Thanks for listening.
Subscribe to hear future episodes and be sure to follow us on social media for all things AI.
Until next time, stay human, people.
♪♪♪