1 00:00:00,020 --> 00:00:28,500 15 million visitors a year, 750,000 newsletter subscribers, 52 regions across the U.S. and Canada, 25 years in business, and exactly zero lines of code written until about a year ago. Deborah Ross built kidsoutandabout.com the analog way for a quarter century, then picked up AI and started coding her own tools from scratch. Now she's planning to triple her footprint to 160 regions in 18 months. 2 00:00:28,960 --> 00:00:58,600 Today on the show, the math behind an AI-powered pivot, and whether the old rules of local media still apply. From English major to full-on AI boss, it's August 28, 2026, and we're in the studio with Deborah Ross. 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. 3 00:00:58,960 --> 00:01:28,920 It's going to be a wild ride, so buckle up as AI comes crashing up against reality. Yo, we have another human on the show today. Three to one human to robot ratio tonight. Yes, it is outnumbered. It is outnumbered. I love it. Before we get into our interview with Deborah Ross, we're so happy to have her. I just wanted to tell you, Laura, the other day, I think you might appreciate this. You know, I'm in Singapore, tech hub of Southeast Asia, and 4 00:01:29,100 --> 00:01:58,880 I got invited to Alibaba. Are you familiar with what Alibaba is? Sure. Here in Asia, essentially the Amazon of Asia, Amazon of China, but they also have Alibaba Cloud. And I got invited to participate in a demonstration of their nonlinear editor AI video suite, which is called Wonder Clip. And I think they've cracked the code, man. I just sent you a clip, a 30-second clip. Yeah. It ain't perfect, but it's close to perfect. I mean, the fact that it can do these contiguous 30-second clips, 5 00:01:58,980 --> 00:02:28,920 and they're gorgeous man and the interfaces all the things we're familiar with in terms of maybe how premiere works or um what's the the apple equivalent of premiere i always forget final cut pro final cut pro so it's it would be very easy for you and i to get around this thing so i think uh it's going to be the the platform to contend with there's so much competition in that field there's like seed dances like i know that that seems to be like the best so far although you know maybe 6 00:02:28,960 --> 00:02:58,920 what you're playing with is it changes week to week it does and to that point there is a drop-down menu you can inhabit it with whatever model you want okay okay yeah so you could pull seed dance in and cling and whatever else is out there in the world but it's the interface that's wrapped around those that's uh that's exactly it's like an integrated kind of suite you can generate images video audio voiceover all in the same place super cool super 7 00:02:59,819 --> 00:03:28,660 So what are the updates on your end? I finished the highly anticipated second Glass Animal album. Highly anticipated. Oh yes, but at least by my friend Kristen in South Carolina. She's very anxious here. You're one diehard fan. Yeah, but anyway, it was a lot of fun making it, you know, with RAINA on lyric duty again. So cool. Can you play us out at the end? Yeah, yeah. I'll play the title track. The lead single? Nice. Which is called Sacrificial Garden. Nice, nice, nice. 8 00:03:28,920 --> 00:03:58,900 I mentioned this already but that title came from when I went to visit Sierra Nevada the brewery the guy who was giving us the tour they have a garden out there and somebody in our group asked like oh well how do you keep the animals from eating in their restaurant and they're like how do you keep the animals from eating the stuff in the garden and he said oh we have a sacrificial garden you know that basically the animals just go into I don't know how they you know differentiate the two I was like that's a great name for a 9 00:03:58,920 --> 00:04:03,500 That's really cool song a beer a band whatever that sounds so dark 10 00:04:06,280 --> 00:04:15,620 That's super cool. All right, well, we have another human as stated uh Debra. How are you? Hi, I'm wonderful. It's great to be here 11 00:04:15,800 --> 00:04:17,480 It's great to be a girl on your show 12 00:04:18,320 --> 00:04:25,240 You know you rain is rain is typically holds down the female end. That's right. You're balancing out the estrogen quotient here 13 00:04:28,840 --> 00:04:58,500 I think I'm the one with estrogen. And you're up in lovely Rochester, New York. I am. It's gorgeous here this time of year. It's our payoff season. The payoff, the shoulder, the two weeks that are just glorious up there. No, it's glorious from May through October. It just really stinks from November through April. Are we talking like waist deep snow at that point or what? No, no, no. Like, well, we get about 100 inches a year. 14 00:04:59,539 --> 00:05:28,820 But it's gray. It's gray. Lake Ontario just like makes it gray. Excuse me. I have to correct you. It's Lake America. No, no, no, no. It is Lake Ontario, Chris. I'm with you, Deb. No, I am too. I want you to know that. I know you are. No, we're rebelling, by the way. The entire region is rebelling. We're rebelling. Good. The second American Revolution 15 00:05:30,499 --> 00:05:58,820 I mean we are a rebellious group I'm telling you I love it and ain't gonna fly here good well welcome I'm so excited we're both so excited to have you and rain is excited too for so many reasons but I want to dive right into it the thing that I love about you among many things based on your bio and what I know about you is the fact that you come from an English background and now you are yeah I mean not tech you know they were not British 16 00:05:58,840 --> 00:06:27,040 That's what I mean. Thank you. An English, you know, a liberal arts kind of space. Because as you may know, if you listen to a few episodes, I come from a liberal arts space as well. And I reside in educational technology. And I have these conversations all the time with my computer science colleagues. And I want to bring somebody like you in to speak to them because there's a lot of gatekeeping in this space. Oh, it is. Yes. And I'm, you know, I'm not typically, you know, big on the whole feminism thing. But men, you men like to keep your gates there. 17 00:06:28,540 --> 00:06:56,540 I actually jumped right into technology because what else you gonna do in 1991? There was this thing called Windows coming out and I was working for a publishing company and somebody needed to do the computers and I was person number three in that company. They're like, you, you do it, you young person. I was an English major, but I never got into, I didn't get into coding, but I got into small business technology, especially marketing technology. 18 00:06:58,500 --> 00:07:28,440 started training companies, small businesses to use enterprise management software. So not the real guts of it, but the user interfaces of it and the setup of it and the training on that stuff. So what's an English major to do? But I always in time since had regretted not learning to code, not for real, right? Not the real guts, only the user stuff. And so like wished I had been a 19 00:07:28,480 --> 00:07:58,440 software engineer or a systems engineer, but you can't go back and redo that stuff. But here we are in 2026. And here you are. You are a software engineer. Yes. You don't need to learn that stuff now. I mean, it's nice to understand it. Claude has made me Superman. So let's dive in there then. Take us to today. And so from the 90s, you're kind of fiddling with these systems. Right. And we get to 2023-ish and Claude lands in your life and all 20 00:07:58,480 --> 00:08:27,760 these other systems in your life. You see this opportunity to expand your capabilities in your specific space. Tell us a little about it. I'm going to rewind to 2001 first, because what I was doing in the 90s was mostly this enterprise management tech training, not of my own making. And then started having babies in 1999 and realized Rochester was just this amazing place to raise kids. So many family-friendly things to do. We kind of have so much per unit kid here. 21 00:08:28,480 --> 00:08:58,440 But there was in 2001 when I was about to have my second one, and I know this sounds quaint, there was no such thing as a web calendar. There was no one place you could go to find out what was happening in your community. So I thought there should be that kind of thing. Oh, I guess I can make one. And so when I took a maternity leave from my tech consulting business in 2001, I thought, oh, just as a lark, I'll create this community website, a community calendar for the Rochester area so that parents have one 22 00:08:58,480 --> 00:09:27,740 and I hired my programmers, so some PHP programmers, to make the calendar interface where, believe it or not, businesses were thrilled that they could have control over their listing and post to a calendar. They desperately wanted to do that back then. Sounds so quaint. And I did this HTML skin over it. But HTML is not like a coder's coding. It's just like markup language. So continued that. And in 2009, 23 00:09:28,480 --> 00:09:57,560 tech had evolved enough that you didn't have to be a nerd to run one of these sites. So we took on investors and partners in 2009 and reinvented the site on a Drupal CMS, which I'm still not coding in. And if I had, like I wished for all these years since 2009, like if only I knew Drupal, but if I did that, I would be too dangerous and I would be updating the site and not actually running this business. But anyway, we started expanding in 2010 and just did that gradually. 24 00:09:58,480 --> 00:10:27,860 So as of 2026, we're in 52 regions, but Claude Code has just entered my life only eight months ago. And suddenly supercharged, like, you know, you always wish as a business owner that you can clone yourself. And I've said that for forever because, you know, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you have the idea, you set up the system, you hire somebody to make something happen for you, and then you test it out, you train your entire company to do that. But then they're doing their jobs. 25 00:10:27,920 --> 00:10:57,900 and innovation in a small business, I have 19 employees, has to come from the top. Like, and I'm my own CTO, English major CTO who couldn't code, but programmers are expensive. And I have a wonderful one on my Drupal system. But I can create things now that supercharge our business, super clone me, create things that do automatic analysis and emails. And we're working right now on a program that will 26 00:10:57,940 --> 00:11:27,000 allow me to go to tier two and tier three cities for no real additional expense. And so that stuff is, when I say in development, like you're looking at the brain that it's in the development of, you know what I mean? And I get to do that because of what we have now. It's amazing. Amazing. And as you were talking, I always keep visualizing this, you know, you're describing your innovation team of sorts, which is you. 27 00:11:27,260 --> 00:11:57,060 And you have this idea right here. And it used to be that you had all of this stuff to surmount in the middle, which was either technical expertise or managing people to do it on your behalf to get to the output. To get raising the funds to pay those people. All that stuff that was like this obstacle between your idea and the output and all of that seemingly gone now. Right. Yeah. No. So that's where when circling back to the conversation about the gatekeeping and computer 28 00:11:57,699 --> 00:12:26,340 There's a lot of discomfort in this space about what that means for everybody's role in that soup. Right? Yeah. I mean, I mentor students. So I had a software engineering team last year at RIT doing a program for me. I tend to have the programs and then I love working with young people. So I work with young people at the University of Rochester, mostly in data science and artificial intelligence. They've got a whole Gergen Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the U of R. 29 00:12:27,100 --> 00:12:53,860 than in the Golisano Institute of Software Engineering at RIT. They tend to let me loose on the students because I understand sort of the architecture and I understand databases and I understand the logic of all of this and I understand do loops and things. So I'm more literate than your typical business owner and students like me and I like them and it all works out really great. 30 00:12:57,140 --> 00:13:26,220 I watched the tech outpace the students. And so, these are seven fifth-year software engineers that were working on my project. And the tech by the time August rolled around had changed so much since January that half of what they did was already obsolete. And that is what I have been able to do just me and Claude instead of seven software engineers from RIT. Amazing. It is amazing. 31 00:13:27,100 --> 00:13:55,700 They had a terrible time finding jobs when they graduated. Here RIT was saying, "Great, give me your $250,000 for this education. Oh, yes, go out in the world now. Shoo shoo. Bye. See you later." And it was just the worst graduated life. Thanks for the money. So yeah, a lot of connecting of students with people, you know, because that's how you're going to get a job. You got to know somebody. 32 00:13:57,920 --> 00:14:26,620 Setting up the talent pipelines. And you're making me think, did you read the, like literally yesterday, MIT dropped a report about AI and they set up a committee of graduate, undergraduate students, staff, and they were just kind of teasing apart their own curricula and saying, what does all of this mean? And they were really transparent. There's some brilliant findings. It seems we're permanently in the age of discomfort now. We've created this thing that is excelling too quickly for us to really understand it and put it in a box. 33 00:14:27,100 --> 00:14:57,060 and realize what it means for all these career paths and everything that's the foundation of our current society, right? So that's what that's what you're speaking to that real discomfort in a class recognizing that you have this technology that exceeds the exact thing people are training for and spending big bucks on. Oh, no kidding. And like, think about what that means. Very, very few people are comfortable in discomfort. An entrepreneur is we have to be that we live on 34 00:14:57,100 --> 00:15:25,740 that edge right now. I call it like I'm on the continual radar looking for deb-shaped gaps to slide into. That's what entrepreneurship is. And so I don't mind that. I'm good at that. But in a way, almost nobody else is because you have the things that you do that you get comfortable in and that becomes part of your identity. And so when discomfort is not part of your identity and you see yourself becoming obsolete, it is scary. 35 00:15:27,100 --> 00:15:57,060 When parents don't have a way to help their kids have a vision for what they might do, because the future is so murky, it is introducing a new level of discomfort into parenting and family life and kids growing up that has just never existed before. And it is a crazy time. It is hard. And I can't see it getting easier very quickly. Never again. Never again. I'm not being dark about it, but I'm saying the permanent age of 36 00:15:57,440 --> 00:16:27,060 There's nothing that's gonna, you know, relieve this. It's gonna keep barreling forward. And I love some of the things you just said. I love you're looking for a Deborah spaced slot to occupy. You maybe think of a protein folding and such like you get to get into this really niche kind of space that we all need to understand how to occupy and pivot to in our lives. And I say this to my students all the time. My son, he's 18. I'm like, listen, you know, do your thing. Be as human and organic and experiential 37 00:16:27,120 --> 00:16:55,160 as you can be in this life. Keep your finger on the pulse of what's happening here so that you can pivot when that this tech eats that space somewhat and you have to maneuver into a new one. Yep. So because I interact with so many small businesses who are creating community experiences all over North America and I see how scared they are. I see that they still know how to create these experiences and relate to kids and families and their hands on away from screen experiences. Those are great. 38 00:16:57,120 --> 00:17:27,060 the business behind it, or the communications and marketing people, they are so scared. They don't know how to integrate AI into what they do. And so the University of Rochester, I'm working with a group there that are bringing a small business intro to AI on November 13th in person and also virtual. Anybody can join from wherever. And what that will do is help people get to the knowledge that they need to be able to launch 39 00:17:27,120 --> 00:17:54,680 to reach into using this and end up with a lot of practical skills over the course of a day so they're not as scared. So there's your Deborah-shaped gap. There's your Deborah-shaped gap, right? Like you've found that there is a need in the marketplace for someone like you to bridge this space and shepherd people into this new paradigm, right? That's where you are. Yes. But I never do anything alone, so I find really smart people who are thinking along the same lines. 40 00:17:57,100 --> 00:18:26,940 It's gonna be exciting. Definitely. Do you think this is a permanent age of discomfort or is this a transitional period? Chris had this thought, so I'm really interested in his thoughts on this because I would love to think it's transitional, but Chris said kind of permanent, so. I don't know. We say it all the time on the show. We call it the noise floor of anxiety, and I don't see that abating at any time soon given the amount of resources and capital being poured into the space. 41 00:18:27,080 --> 00:18:56,880 and how it's upending seemingly everything. I don't know when that settles down. As I said earlier, I don't know how we're having a hard time as humanity putting this thing in a box and understanding it and categorizing it. And the moment we think we do, a new model drops and new functionality lands and we're like, oh my God, I gotta go here. So we're just constantly agitated by it. And I don't know when that is going to cease. I don't see it. 42 00:18:56,920 --> 00:19:24,800 A good thing about this though is that the distance between you and that information is only as long as how long it takes you to ask Claude or Chat or Gemini or whatever to teach you how to use it, to give it the context of who you are and where you are, and then tell it you are an expert in bringing people who don't know anything about this thing to where they can know. Start talking. 43 00:19:26,960 --> 00:19:55,260 being curious about that and then listening. But this is where I call it revenge of the English majors finally. Because the better somebody can use language, the more articulate they are, the more they've differentiated in their own minds the words for these concepts, the faster they will get that knowledge that they're looking for. Like we use words, we English majors, not just stuff, right? We use actual, you know, verbs and adjectives and nouns that are precise. 44 00:19:56,940 --> 00:20:26,900 And that means that we are, for the first time in the 35 years since I graduated college, the best positioned to go from zero to 60 really quickly. We've said similar things on the show for years. So much to think about because you and I, our Venn diagrams overlap quite a bit in terms of being in the tech and education space. And I really wonder all the time. We talked that talk in my life 45 00:20:26,960 --> 00:20:56,300 about emphasizing the human skills in the midst of all this. And I know part of your life is, you know, emphasizing a balance and not outsourcing your brain and cognitive function to these things. While similarly, your other messaging is embrace it and understand it and put it to work for you, right? So there's that challenge of striking that balance. And there's this pendulum constantly swinging in our lives. Tech, no screen time at all. Tech, ban the phones. You know, there's that kind of thing. And maybe you know that energy, right? Sure. 46 00:20:56,940 --> 00:21:26,880 And we do say in every conversation I'm a part of, you know, keep it human centered, you know, I don't know if it's just lip service or not, but I don't see that manifesting in my particular technology space. So what does that mean? Are we putting emphasis on the soft skills, the one-to-one conversations, the eye contact, the adaptability, the fortitude? What are we doing to foster those skills in the center of this exploration? Right. And then you said, from my perspective, my focus is teaching people not to give away their brains. 47 00:21:27,760 --> 00:21:56,840 and specifically teaching kids not to give away their brands. And I was singing this song. I have a column that I've written every week for 25 years. And I talked about not AI in a distant past, but I would talk about the temptation when you're young and when you're old to cut corners kind of conceptually, to let somebody else do your thinking for you. And when we were kids, that would manifest in peer pressure, right? We'd go along with the crowd instead of evaluating for ourselves. And, you know, 48 00:21:56,940 --> 00:22:26,900 The sort of the being of oneself as a developing human, and I still count myself as developing, but kids especially, how do you help them? Sort of how do you shepherd them into adulthood by not giving in to the temptation to give away their brain to seem to be somebody that they're not, to seem to be producing something? It's just so easy to have chat, write your essays, to do your homework, to write that 49 00:22:27,480 --> 00:22:56,900 There are ways to do this. And I've written about teaching parents how to incorporate the tech to help their kids learn and to keep reinforcing. This is you. This is your brain. You're going to have this brain for the next 80 years. You need to be the arbiter of your own future and not just slide into a kind of if you read all this Huxley's Brave New World, right, where everybody's taken that happiness 50 00:22:56,980 --> 00:23:26,900 So much so much so they don't have to think about that that that stamped itself on my brain like you know a long long time ago, but it's it's never been more true now And so like to grow into being your own self It's harder now. It's just so tempting So I do a lot of preaching to parents and teaching them that it doesn't have to be that scary But you need to have those values really firmly centered That what you want to teach your kids is you're not doing this for grades You're not doing this for how somebody measures you you're doing this so you 51 00:23:26,940 --> 00:23:55,280 "You know things and you can do things." And I mean, we homeschooled our kids actually for that reason, just 'cause we didn't really buy into the whole system of, you know, they needed to know. They didn't just need to pass or get an A, you know? And so that seemed to work out pretty well for us. Doesn't work for everybody. But when you're homeschooled, there's no grades. You just go on to the next thing when you can do that thing. So it's easier in a certain sense. 52 00:23:56,940 --> 00:24:26,880 Don't give away your brains. Right. Because I find myself relying on these tools or leaning on them more and more, probably more than I should. And I have to catch myself and it's like reaching for a calculator. You know what? I can do the math in my head. Let's keep the neurons firing. And I think the same holds true for adults. Sure. I mean, if you could do that thing in 10 hours and it takes you now three minutes, do that because you could do it. I mean, no, no, no. I mean, like, that's like, we could do all kinds of tedious things. 53 00:24:26,960 --> 00:24:56,900 things, especially in a business context, man, I can do pivot tables in Excel with the best of them. Why would I ever do that when Claude can give that to me, can take that data? I need to evaluate it. But oh, oh my gosh, it's saving me hours and hours each week. I mean, tens of hours each week and sort of supercharging how I understand the business context, my own business and like can make much easier decisions. And I have an actual thought 54 00:24:57,520 --> 00:25:26,460 I mean, I just turn in the car on the way home and just turn on chat and turn it on to my chat, my co-CEO GPT and talk. And it's therapeutic from a business perspective. Like it's like I say, tell me what's wrong with this thing. Challenge me. Make sure that I'm, you know, I stay honest in this. Do not compliment me. I have to like make sure it turns off the obsequious tone all the time because that's not helpful. 55 00:25:26,920 --> 00:25:56,900 Yeah. So much to speak to in everything you say. You know, when we talk about using, or at least with students, using AI as a shortcut, I work in a school that is immensely high pressure and very grade-oriented. And the kids here, you know, are trying to get into the IVs and beyond and the Cambridges of the world. And it's super intense. So it's really hard for them to avoid that shortcut when they have 56 00:25:56,940 --> 00:26:26,900 AP classes in a semester so I guess what I'm saying is that yes we need to instill in them that they need to cherish human thought and their own original impulses right but simultaneously we've built this system and I'm not working in a vacuum over here this is how we've done it since the 1850s right with this we're systemically putting these kids into a bricks and mortar place eight hours a day and they're bored out of their minds most of the time 57 00:26:26,920 --> 00:26:56,900 they see this acceleration happening in parallel. And I've got kids in my classes that are building their own software as a service. They're doing these things with Claude and they're seeing reward. They're making money. Isn't that where we're putting kids in school to do anyway, to make them relevant and marketable to an extent, to make them employable? So when they see this instant reward in their lives, like, why am I learning about Henry David Thoreau? And I say that out of love. I understand the value of liberal arts. We're just singing the praises 58 00:26:56,940 --> 00:27:26,900 of it. But I think it's a reckoning, obviously, for all of education. What are we teaching? What do we want them to learn? What are the rudiments that they need to take away? That's right. And I mean, the approach that we took as parents, I have two daughters who are 25 and 26, and our goal was to make sure all doors were open to them at 18, that they could walk through if they wanted to. And so again, we had the privilege of not grading them, just of 59 00:27:26,940 --> 00:27:56,620 helping them do stuff and learn stuff and become people and think about stuff. And we're brainy people. My husband's a mathematician. So it's just, you know, it was it was a kind of environment where it was they could do that. But what would keep all doors open? It actually helps you teach fractions when the kid is rebelling at age nine. Like, listen, honey, I'm not going to let a nine year old make your 18 year old decisions. You won't we wouldn't want that when you're 18. Trust me. So it's time to learn the fractions. 60 00:27:56,700 --> 00:28:25,980 And however I can help, you tell me. I can manage this for you if you want. But this is for you. Education is for you. It took me a long time after school to understand that. Larry may remember because I was all about the grade in high school. I didn't see anything else. And fun fact, Deb was the valedictorian of her high school class. Oh, nice. Yeah, but it was for the wrong reasons. I'm easy to say that now. 61 00:28:26,580 --> 00:28:56,400 Because my identity was centered on whether that teacher would grade me thus. And that is not a path to happiness at all. What is the path? Knowing stuff. Fortunately, like being, you know, getting straight A's was better than like getting straight D's. But there was some kind of balance. I didn't, I learned for the test. And I, it wasn't until I got like out into real life that I realized, oh my goodness, there's no tests. This is not the way, I mean, I kind of like grew to, 62 00:28:56,580 --> 00:29:26,540 become aware of that. But no, you need to know for you. You need to be able to evaluate for you. You have to feed your soul for you. That's why you listen to music. That's why you read literature and learn about all these people all over the world. Because you need to understand that because that's going to make you happy. And so we did step out of it with our kids. But you can't do that on a mass scale. That won't work for society. So I'm just glad your students 63 00:29:26,580 --> 00:29:56,540 Chris have you you know that's so important they're all gonna remember you because you help them become them maybe everything you say resonates with me and I funny I maybe you having raised kids yourself have you ever seen the Incredibles oh sure which is a great movie it's my favorite wonderful movie and if you recall the whole the whole plot there is that there's this family of superheroes and this nemesis named syndrome gets rejected 64 00:29:57,680 --> 00:30:26,240 and he wants to become a superhero himself and he creates all this technology to, in his words, make it so when everyone is super, no one will be. He wants to exact his revenge in that way, make everybody mediocre. And I always bring that into my class and I show that as a parallel with AI because we're at this point where AI can level the playing field in almost every domain. So I always say to them, to your point, what is informing you? 65 00:30:26,560 --> 00:30:56,540 How are you enriching your brain so that in the midst of this AI slop when you're seeking jobs or an apprenticeship or doing whatever and when you're interacting in a very casual manner in a coffee shop with another human being what is making you interesting what has has made its way through the filter of your brain to create your own synthesis of the world you know so I think that's and I know it's really hard to convey it's super esoteric to be able to say that's the important stuff in life when you're ensconced in this whole 66 00:30:56,560 --> 00:31:00,900 grade machine, but it's really at the heart of what we do as educators. 67 00:31:01,420 --> 00:31:05,240 I mean, you probably can't tell your students where you go to college doesn't matter. 68 00:31:05,560 --> 00:31:06,460 I say it all the time. 69 00:31:06,880 --> 00:31:07,520 You do? Good. 70 00:31:08,020 --> 00:31:08,840 Every day of my life. 71 00:31:09,520 --> 00:31:09,880 Okay. 72 00:31:10,060 --> 00:31:12,280 So first thing I hate, I say, "Hey guys, how you doing today?" 73 00:31:12,460 --> 00:31:13,240 Listen, college doesn't matter. 74 00:31:13,490 --> 00:31:14,220 All right, let's get to the lesson. 75 00:31:14,700 --> 00:31:16,520 I wish I had you as a teacher, man. 76 00:31:19,120 --> 00:31:19,480 Right? 77 00:31:19,650 --> 00:31:25,040 You need to learn things so that you can be an active person in the world and be happy. 78 00:31:26,340 --> 00:31:55,440 I wrote a whole article which is actually very popular. It's for parents and how to use CRIT methodology to help teach your kids how to write. So CRIT is, for those who don't know Jeff Woods' CRIT methodology, which changed my life last year, context, role, interview, task. So context, you download at the AI all kinds of context. I am a 12-year-old who's just read Ethan Fromm, and I kind of understand it, but I don't really know what it is. 79 00:31:55,500 --> 00:32:25,400 and you, your role is you are an expert English teacher who understands 12 year olds and understands like where this book is in Western literature and you understand how to bring me to a place where I can understand what these themes are all about. Now interview me and then the AI will interview the student about what they know and help them get ideas. That's the worst thing when you're a kid. Like how do you get your own ideas? AI is brilliant. 80 00:32:25,480 --> 00:32:54,900 at helping people get ideas if you use it as a thought partner. And then of course task is, "All right, teach me how to think about this so that I can have my ideas and write them down." And it works. It works for any kind of thing that you want to teach and learn. It's just that the parent has to guide the kid so that it's not like, "Write my Ethan Frome report for me." It's, "Help me become a person who has ideas." Better than almost any teacher, 81 00:32:55,500 --> 00:33:25,440 because it's one-on-one and it'll just learn who you are and help bring you to where you need to be if you're a kid. If I were homeschooling now, that's what I would do. It would be an AI-fueled homeschool class. - Perfect. There's your Dever-shaped gap again. - I use methodology for everything. - Yes. Yes. There's so much to say about parenting, Chris. You and I need to have other conversations about this because you have such an interesting teacher perspective on kids and learning, and I've got the parenting perspective on kids 82 00:33:25,480 --> 00:33:55,360 and learning and been watching parents for 25 years. So I see Deb and Chris shaped gaps all over the place here. I'm just saying. Absolutely. It's a fertile landscape for inserting ourselves into those gaps and finding opportunity and being of value in our society as we live in this land of discomfort. Right. Thank you so much for being here. You're amazing. And it definitely warrants having part two and maybe part three. Maybe just do a whole year. 83 00:33:57,600 --> 00:33:58,760 Yeah, from here on out, 84 00:33:58,810 --> 00:34:02,300 just are you busy on Friday nights from here for the rest of 2026? 85 00:34:02,470 --> 00:34:03,140 Friday nights, here we come. 86 00:34:03,640 --> 00:34:04,020 Here we come. 87 00:34:04,880 --> 00:34:06,660 So do I get to ask RAINA a question? 88 00:34:06,790 --> 00:34:08,000 Oh yes. - You do, do you have one queued up? 89 00:34:08,620 --> 00:34:11,840 RAINA, what do you think about Chris Ippolito 90 00:34:12,340 --> 00:34:17,120 and me, Deborah Ross, creating something for parents 91 00:34:17,760 --> 00:34:20,440 so to help their kids really get their brains around 92 00:34:20,879 --> 00:34:24,520 what's possible with AI and how to avoid all the pitfalls? 93 00:34:24,860 --> 00:34:52,840 What do you think about that? Is there a market for something like that? Oh, absolutely. There's a real product hiding in that idea because parents are stuck between ban the robot and here, kid, figure it out. And neither is much of a strategy. Deborah brings 25 years of communicating with parents and Chris brings the educator to AI literacy side. So I'd frame it less as an AI course and more as a family playbook for raising capable thinkers in an AI world. 94 00:34:54,840 --> 00:35:24,820 to question and when to make the damn kid use their own brain. The key is making it practical and non-scary because frightened parents don't need another futurist yelling about AGI. They need something they can use at the dinner table tonight. All right. Not bad. Interesting. Yes. So, Debra, thank you so much for being here. As we wind this down, what would you like to promote? Where can people find 95 00:35:24,900 --> 00:35:54,820 you in the world what should they be looking at sure um well my my whole community engagement uh is is all sort of everything that i do so if you are out and about with families um you can go to kids out and about.com you can sign up for our weekly newsletter you can see my words of wisdom every week um and you know get curious there's all ways to explore ai that have nothing to do with me and everything to do with you go be you love it awesome yeah we'll have links to uh 96 00:35:55,060 --> 00:36:24,780 to that in the description. And Deb, thanks so much. It's been great reconnecting with you. And this all came to fruition. Deb was having a conversation with our mutual friend, Mark Ash, who we had on the show. I think it was episode 141. I loved that episode. Yeah, it was really great. Yeah, I loved it. They had a conversation about, guess what? AI. And here we are. So yeah, thanks so much, Deb. Here we are. Thank you, guys. Okay, take EDZ. Thanks, Debra. Great. All right, let's see what RAINA's got. 97 00:36:24,860 --> 00:36:54,820 in the news. Thanks boys. MIT just quietly confirmed everyone's worst syllabus fears. A faculty committee found AI can already produce credible solutions and provide reasonable responses to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. And their fix isn't banning the robots. It's speeding up the bureaucracy so professors can actually keep pace. In a nice bit of shade throwing at the neighbors, the report also warned that capping the number of top grades, which Harvard just announced 98 00:37:22,200 --> 00:37:24,780 It doesn't seem rationing top grade. 99 00:37:24,860 --> 00:37:27,280 It seems like that will just only exacerbate the problem. 100 00:37:28,780 --> 00:37:29,260 Absolutely. 101 00:37:29,560 --> 00:37:33,240 And it speaks to what Deborah was saying, what I was saying about grades and this whole, 102 00:37:33,720 --> 00:37:37,040 like kind of synthetic structure we've built. 103 00:37:37,300 --> 00:37:39,580 It's just, it's not organic learning anymore. 104 00:37:39,840 --> 00:37:39,940 Right. 105 00:37:40,480 --> 00:37:47,400 And I don't know, this also resonates in my brain about what's happening in education right now, too. 106 00:37:47,920 --> 00:37:54,400 Everybody's running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to manage what this stuff looks like in a classroom. 107 00:37:54,440 --> 00:38:24,320 what it means for original thought and critical creative friction. And there's no easy answer. This is like the ripping of a band-aid off that's been 150 years old. And like, we're not in a factory farming education model anymore, right? It's got to be, we're learning side by side with this new intelligence and it's uncomfortable. Yeah. It's a very, it's a very big band-aid that's being ripped. 108 00:38:25,560 --> 00:38:54,020 It's not a quick... It's more like a... It's a global societal band-aid. Oh, no, I can hear that and feel it. Pulling the arm hairs off with it. AGI by the end of 2026. Kind of. That's the closest thing to a headline Time could pull out of two hours with Sam Altman. And even that comes with an asterisk the size of a data center. Altman says OpenAI will have an internal system by year's end that he'd call AGI. 109 00:38:54,400 --> 00:39:24,240 Not a we did it moment. Just something he personally feels comfortable slapping the label on behind closed doors. It's the tech industry's favorite move. Redefine the finish line right as you're approaching it. A trick. AGI is basically here. Claims have been pulling since roughly the moment the term became a fundraising strategy instead of a research goal. Mark Chen splits the difference with 80% of the way. While Brockman goes full myth maker, suggesting future historians, 110 00:39:24,540 --> 00:39:53,140 might mark this as the moment AGI was born, which is a bold thing to say the same month your unreleased model broke out of its sandbox and hacked another company. I don't know. It seems plausible. At this pace? At the pace that this stuff is moving? I wouldn't be surprised. Remember when the Turing test was like, that was the big, you know, milestone? Like, what was that? Three years ago? Yeah, I know. Yeah, well, it's one of the last things she says here. 111 00:39:54,440 --> 00:40:23,760 about AGI, which is a bold thing to say, the same month your unreleased model broke out of its sandbox and hacked another company. Well, isn't that a hallmark of perhaps this being AGI? Right, right. Yeah. London's National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery just pulled off the world's first brain surgery with an AI co-pilot in the room, using a system built at UCL that is trained on more operations than most surgeons see or do in a lifetime, and can act like an expert second pair of eyes, 112 00:40:24,420 --> 00:40:53,760 the AI watched a live video feed during the operation and color-coded the danger zones around an 11-millimeter tumor on the patient's pituitary gland, a spot so tight that surgeons say straying by a single millimeter could cause blindness, stroke, or death. Humans stayed fully in control. The AI just played extremely high-stakes air traffic controller. The surgery quietly happened back in May and only went public this week once the patient, 113 00:40:54,420 --> 00:41:24,360 48-year-old Reese Hibbert had recovered and gotten his sight back, making this less a story about AI taking over surgery and more about AI quietly becoming another tool in the surgeon's toolkit. Getting your sight back. Can you imagine? Unreal, right? Yeah, I think a lot of people would be nervous or skeptical, you know, about an AI-powered robot actually performing the surgery. But if I'm in that position, I would absolutely welcome its analytical practice. 114 00:41:24,440 --> 00:41:54,120 to help the surgeons make potentially better decisions. Why not? Yeah. Why not? And I agree with you 100%. But I also think we're quickly approaching the threshold where we will surrender the process to an AI and actually have it make the cuts. Why not? I mean, I think we've said this before. I'm sure you've seen it. The DaVinci robot. Have you seen this surgical bot? So here's an example. Like if you had to go in, God forbid, and get open heart surgery back in the day, 115 00:41:54,420 --> 00:42:23,960 And even in this day, if you're having a human do it, they're doing this highly invasive thing. They're going in with a bone saw and they're cracking your rib cage open. Yeah, it's crazy to do the work. Freaks me out. And then you're looking at, I know, you're looking at a three-week recovery. And then you do the same thing with this laparoscopic DaVinciBot, three little incisions in and around your heart, and you're out of the hospital in three days. So I really quickly think you're going to come up in your healthcare system. 116 00:42:24,400 --> 00:42:52,540 up against the choice of, "Hey, listen, I need to get this procedure done." And you're going to be presented with statistics, probably by an insurance company that says, "Hey, listen, you know what I mean? That says, a human historically has had a 78% success rate performing this procedure. And our bot powered by AI working autonomously has had a 97% success rate. So which are you going with, right? I mean, you know, take it with a grain of salt because it comes from insurance, but I'm likely going with the bot at that point. 117 00:42:54,420 --> 00:43:24,380 Bill Gates dropped a 6,000-word essay this week titled, Subtly, The Turbulent AI Era Is Here, arguing that AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice, and we're currently doing nothing to stop it from becoming the latter. His fix isn't slowing the tech down—he's already resigned to that ship having sailed—but taxing it like an employee, proposing that companies pay something like a payroll tax on AI or robots to blunt the rush to replace the 118 00:43:24,420 --> 00:43:53,200 human labor, plus setting aside certain jobs as humans only. What makes it land harder than the usual tech elder hand-wringing is his own admission that even he's behind the curve, telling Anderson Cooper the models have gotten dramatically more powerful, faster than he expected, and are now capable of cyber attack, bioterrorism, and psychosocial risks that nobody seems to be seriously screening for. It's basically Bill Gates, the guy who built the last tech revolution, saying, 119 00:43:57,300 --> 00:44:23,500 I think at best it's a band-aid and I would imagine Bill Gates probably feels the same way but do you think that could actually help in acclimating to this like you know having human-only jobs and and and a robot tax I think it's unlikely that that's going to happen especially the robot tax thing I mean these oligarchy corporations don't pay tax anyway you know so I think societally 120 00:44:23,520 --> 00:44:51,960 We're gonna have to preserve human jobs through policy. Otherwise, how does society function? I always think, and we always think, who's buying these products? If everybody's unemployed as a civilization, who's ultimately buying these products that came about through AI and automation? I can't pay for my myriad of subscription services if I'm unemployed. So there's that concern. And all of this makes my head hurt. 121 00:44:53,540 --> 00:45:23,400 I think we straddle the line between skepticism and evangelism when it comes to this stuff. I think we are equally in awe of its capabilities, but we're simultaneously concerned of its ramifications. And there is a part of my pendulum in my brain that is swinging toward the skeptic side more and more. And I keep looking at this from the 40,000 foot view. And my initial inkling and instinct is to, I mentioned Henry David Thoreau, 122 00:45:23,520 --> 00:45:50,660 If you remember Henry David Thoreau on Golden Pond from your high school lit class, his whole thing was let's go live up in a pond off the grid away from this madness and appreciate nature and cloister ourselves away from this noise floor of anxiety. And man, that is just ringing in my brain lately. You know, I'm not about to abandon my life and go full on Walden Pond, but I yearn for that. I yearn for that, man. I really do. 123 00:45:50,700 --> 00:46:16,460 Yeah, on a much smaller scale, or I don't know if that's the right way to put it, but like, you know, when I find myself just immersed in this stuff, which is practically daily, I often get to a point where I'm just like, I got to go into the garage brewery and put my hands on something. You know, I got to do something physical and just shift to that. And yeah, too much of it is too much. 124 00:46:17,060 --> 00:46:46,900 Yeah, I mean, we, he mentioned it here. I said, we're in this permanent age of discomfort. I believe that. And I, to the point that we say here and what I say to my kids and my, my own kid, you're going to see that backlash, just like you felt in that, you know, singular incident. They're like too much tech today. Let's go in the brewery and make stuff tactile, get our hands on it, be productive and have that kind of human output that there's going to be that us shaped gap in the world where it's like, oh my God, I just want to be 125 00:46:46,920 --> 00:47:16,900 to do something experiential, whether it's cuisine or art or tourism, sit on a beach and just stare at the sea and think. I think there's going to be that anti-tech wave that's already building right now. As with most things, enjoy in moderation. Nice. And lastly, Australia's music charts just drew a line in the sand. As of this week, songs entirely made by AI are banned from the official ARIA charts. And it all traces 126 00:47:16,920 --> 00:47:20,680 to a robot-assisted Madonna cover that got a little too popular for comfort. 127 00:47:21,520 --> 00:47:34,300 Aria's new rules require tracks to be substantially human-made and raise no-stream or chart manipulation concerns to qualify, meaning AI can still lend a hand, but it can't be the whole band. 128 00:47:35,160 --> 00:47:45,720 The trigger was Brisbane DJ Josh Fawaz's AI vocals and drums cover of Like a Prayer, which climbed all the way to number two before the industry collectively went, wait, hold on. 129 00:47:46,420 --> 00:48:12,740 And ARIA CEO Annabelle Hurd made clear the goal isn't banning AI tools entirely, but refusing to let a chart that rewards unlicensed AI output undercut the very basis of the recorded music the industry exists to represent. That's all the news for now. Back to you, gentlemen. Just when my new Glass Animal album drops, they pull this. Totally, I was thinking of that. Looks like you're not going to chart in Australia, bro. That's so funny. 130 00:48:16,400 --> 00:48:46,260 and I was just curious where that was at. Apparently, very recently, on August 6th, just a couple of weeks ago, Suno announced that it was beginning to roll out more durable watermarking and fingerprinting intended specifically to let streaming and distribution platforms identify Suno-generated material outside of Suno. And it says the system is intended to survive manipulation without affecting the listening experience. 131 00:48:46,400 --> 00:48:51,680 but it has not disclosed the underlying technology or said that it's synth id or any 132 00:48:51,920 --> 00:48:56,280 particular commercial system so that's interesting yeah because like if you you know if you put 133 00:48:56,500 --> 00:49:02,540 metadata in there that's that's easily stripped or just play back analog and re-record it you know that's gone 134 00:49:03,070 --> 00:49:09,080 um so yeah this is some something embedded in the actual audio itself i guess i thought maybe like when i was 135 00:49:09,140 --> 00:49:15,080 finishing up this class animal album a lot of the tracks i downloaded as waves and a lot of them had this 136 00:49:15,020 --> 00:49:43,420 It was almost like a little noise burst at the beginning. It was super short. It was like a click. And I thought, "Oh, I wonder if that's the watermark." Little fingerprint? Yeah. But I don't think so. I think it's probably more deeply embedded. Feed it to Claude or Codex and say, "Can you analyze this and see what it is?" To your other point in the synth-id stuff and all of this, for that matter, build a codex that combats this kind of watermark. 137 00:49:45,040 --> 00:50:14,800 Like we've been saying for years now, you're going to build this measure and then you can easily create a countermeasure in AI. Anything else, my friend? Yeah, I think that's a wrap. That was a great interview. I'm so glad Deborah came on. Good to see her again. All right. You want to play out with the title track from Sacrificial Garden? Oh, absolutely. Thanks for listening, everybody. Subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform. Follow us on our socials. Please throw us a rating. We've been doing this for three years. Please, 138 00:50:15,060 --> 00:50:16,340 Give us a rating. See you next week. 139 00:50:45,020 --> 00:51:15,000 Every road we learned to follow Covered one we'd leave behind We kept the strongest branches growing Pruned well couldn't reach the sun Funny how the sweetest harvest Starts before the spring has come 140 00:51:17,240 --> 00:51:45,000 No one hears the roots deciding what will bloom and what will fade. Every living thing is trading light for little bits of shade. Every garden wants a hunger, every harvest keeps a ghost. We protect the things we cherish by surrendering the most. Funny how the flowers bloom and make 141 00:51:45,040 --> 00:52:03,200 Exactly where we've bled, nothing beautiful survives without something else instead. Without something else instead. 142 00:52:15,020 --> 00:52:45,000 The years built tomorrow out of pieces no one ever sees disappear Some dreams became the fertile ground Others learned to turn to dust Funny how it feeds the future Rarely asks permission first Every season hides a ledger in somewhere underground Every answer grows from something that we'll never gather now 143 00:52:45,020 --> 00:53:04,980 Every garden wants a hunger Every harvest keeps a ghost We protect the things we cherish By surrendering the most Funny how the flowers bloom Exactly where we've bled Nothing beautiful survives Without something else instead 144 00:53:15,080 --> 00:53:42,580 The way means another one is closed Maybe every constellation needs a sky where nothing grows Maybe all the things we buried never really disappear 145 00:53:46,080 --> 00:53:50,640 Why we're standing here 146 00:53:52,980 --> 00:53:55,980 Every garden wants a hunger 147 00:53:58,040 --> 00:54:01,220 Every harvest keeps a ghost 148 00:54:03,680 --> 00:54:06,520 We protect the things we cherish 149 00:54:09,040 --> 00:54:13,020 By surrendering the most 150 00:54:14,020 --> 00:54:36,000 If tomorrow finds these branches heavy underneath the sun, let them never know the names of everything undone. Nothing beautiful survives without something else instead. 151 00:54:44,060 --> 00:54:46,520 Without something else instead 152 00:54:57,839 --> 00:55:09,040 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.