[00:00:04] You're listening to Casual Talk Radio, where common sense is still the norm. Whether you're a new or long-time listener, we appreciate you joining us today. Visit us at casualtalkradio.net. And now, here's your host, Leicester. Good morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you are, happy to be listening to the show. Leicester back, Casual Talk Radio, A Gentleman's World. We are recording on a rather unpredictable schedule.

[00:00:34] We do that on purpose. There's a lot going on. And during a lot of this shift, things have to kind of settle down. I think I like this cadence. It's part of the history for those new welcome, just a history lesson of the show. When I started, I had a very aggressive recording schedule. And the, I think I was doing, I think at the time I was doing once a week, same day. And it was a variety of different topics.

[00:01:02] Then I separated Combat Talk to its own show. Crypto Talk to its own show. So I separated shows. Then I started looking at guests, which I don't regret. I had some really good people. I had one that didn't know what he was doing, but everybody else was excellent.

[00:01:19] There was one that I wanted to chat back with now that I've kind of perfected the science of it. But over time, I changed the cadence. And mostly it's because what I've experienced, and I had to go through it. I had to go through this pain. We're talking a show that's been active now for a near sight of what, four or five years. I've been doing it a long time. So I have a lot of episodes. My episode count is up there compared to other shows, even more popular shows.

[00:01:47] I'm not too much concerned about the popularity aspect. That was never of interest to me. I believe there's some out there that have an interest in topical matter and they actually like to listen to somebody for an extended period. It's just that they happen to not be in the United States. This was my aha. I had to appeal to a worldwide audience. I can't target United States specifically. I had to appeal to a worldwide because what I've learned is that the international listeners by and large do a great job of absorbing the content.

[00:02:18] And then to the point they can say something back that I said, which I think is impressive in the U S they don't seem to care. They're more into, you know, the Logan Paul's and the Jake, you know, that kind of nonsense, waste of time, ineffective. You don't learn anything type of content as pushed by YouTube and Tik TOK. I'm not on Tik TOK on purpose. I don't want to cater to that crowd. I don't want to cater to the crowd that just wants quick and dirty two minute stuff.

[00:02:46] I want to provide content that's somewhat enriching to an audience. So my hope when I started the show was different than what it ended up being. My hope when I started was to have a two man show. There was a person I was working with that. I thought very highly of this person. I still do. And I wanted him to be kind of my co-host. He declined for his own personal reasons, not negative, just his own personal reasons. He didn't want to do it. No problem. I still wanted to do the show.

[00:03:15] So I did it as a solo. Then again, I did have some guests on. It's not that I disliked having the guests, but I also felt that this is COVID now. So I felt the remote. It just for certain guests, it worked for certain guests. I just felt I wanted to be kind of face to face and I wasn't able to have that opportunity.

[00:03:35] So it told me that I'm going to have to refine a little bit further and then try to get physical space set up in such a way that if I wanted to, I could do on-site guests. And I think it would be a good cadence. I honestly, I honestly think that I would not do video because I felt that video defeats the purpose of a podcast. I'm one of those purists that believes that, you know, podcast is ultimately an evolution of what radio used to be and talk radio and video.

[00:04:02] I understand why that's there, but I feel like it distracts. You're too much focused on the body language and what they're doing and what they're showing and not the content of what they're saying versus audio, which forces you to kind of listen. So you don't miss stuff. And then that conditions you to absorb and your brain gets set off. Why did I tell that whole story there for the first close to three, four minutes?

[00:04:28] Because it ties directly to my content today and my topic, which has to do with the rise of AI. And I gave an episode a while back that talked about, and I'll, I'll take it to the grave. I just had this conversation with my client. There's a younger person. He's fresh out of college. He's had a couple of jobs and he's kind of worried about AI taking over developer jobs. You know, he's a co-developer. He's like, well, why do we need developers when AI can do all this stuff?

[00:04:53] And I've said, and I maintain, we will never have a world in our lifetimes of those listening where AI is taking jobs completely, except for those companies where they don't want to last. Remember that we had a world where companies were around for a hundred years, 200 years, and they kept to their morals and principles and they kept to their beliefs. Companies that drop their beliefs, those are the ones that die, like the Woolworths of the world, Mervins, et cetera.

[00:05:22] When they change away from what made them successful, they die. Some would say, well, they failed to adapt. No, what's happened is that some companies show up, some people show up, some technologies show up, and those technologies cater to a certain target market. That target market, you never were going to beat that. If you jump on that bandwagon to try to take those people, you're going to lose. How do I know that's true? Look at what Walmart did.

[00:05:48] Walmart essentially tried to set up the same thing that Amazon did and still couldn't beat Amazon despite it being Walmart. Walmart was going to be, if anybody was going to beat or compete with Amazon, it was going to be Walmart. They invested a lot of money in that strategy to what? To what end? They didn't succeed. They certainly didn't beat Amazon. Amazon's still the top. Amazon's not the top because of any one product. Amazon largely is the top because they get the shipping, right?

[00:06:17] Prime free shipping, which isn't really free. All these other tools and things they throw into the subscription to make it seem like it's a real cool thing, a bunch of cool tools, the Kindle. The Kindle arguably was their kind of kick over the edge of awareness for a reading crowd that really wanted, because Amazon started with books. So you already had an audience who was into the books and then you do the Kindle. And I frankly thought the first Kindle was superior to what came before because it had a keyboard. It had speakers.

[00:06:44] It had all sorts of stuff cool that people were really hooking into. This, of course, is around the era prior to when tablets became strong, prior to when cell phones became strong. So Amazon was the first to say you can have more mobile media. You can have more accessibility. By the way, we also sell all these other things and you get good deals. All of these different companies that manufacture mostly from China then jump on the bandwagon because they see there's a lot of customers over there.

[00:07:14] And it's a game of saturation. The only real entity that's doing anything close to that is like a Timu or Alibaba where they sell, I just saw I'm in the process of trying to build a fence, not because I want to for the front, but because I have to, because the postal carriers are rude and the type of fence, the exact type of fence I want. You can only really find it on Alibaba, which pisses me off. But that's this is they're the only natural one. But Alibaba is not big in the United States.

[00:07:44] Timu is not really big in the United States. People are aware of it. It's not really competing with Amazon. All of which to say every company that just jumps on bandwagons is they're going to stop at some point. They're going to burn money and they're going to back off and go somewhere else. Look at what's happening with Xbox, with Microsoft, what used to be Microsoft Game Studios. They're changing brand and going back to the Xbox brand. You might not have known the whole history of that. I'm not going to bore you with the total history, but just summary of this.

[00:08:13] When Microsoft announced it was getting into gaming with the very first Xbox, people thought they were crazy. Because Microsoft up to that point had largely been catering to businesses. Most people in the homes, they still didn't really embrace Windows. Like as a home computer, they were still really strong on the Apple side. Because the Apple side appeared at least to be friendlier to the regular consumer. When Microsoft announced Xbox and that they were going to get into gaming. And then you're talking the exclusives they had at the time.

[00:08:41] Most notably Halo and Fable. They were the two standouts. Then Sudeke comes along. You have a couple of other ones that were initially exclusive and then later were not. But they focused really heavily on exclusives. To what happens? You now have households who are basically forced to own more than one console. Prior to this, you have homes that were doing multiple consoles. Not because they were forced to. But because you had to choose for the different types of games.

[00:09:11] If you think about Sega Genesis, Sega Genesis was the console to go to. If you wanted blood, if you wanted violence in the games. They had a wide variety of like fighting games, alternate action games, etc. So you had to have a Genesis for those. But if you really wanted role-playing games, you're going Super Nintendo. Period. Point blank. Generations go. PlayStation, the original PlayStation. We have to turn it upside down because it overheats. Comes and starts to be a thing. It doesn't really have very many games up front.

[00:09:41] But it's good enough where people start getting into, you know, like the crazy taxis of the world. Tekken's a thing. Now you're starting to see some of the rise of quote-unquote 3D. Some of the polygon games. Something that we hadn't seen before. So it was new. It was something that was kind of pushing the envelope. And people didn't really know what to think about it. You had alternate ones like 3DO. 3DO is largely about video and live, you know, live video film type games. But it had some action games.

[00:10:10] It also had some strategy games. Like Romance of the Three Kingdoms was on there. Sega CD becomes a thing. So on and so forth. Point being, each one of these catered to a different niche. They all catered to some target market that was underserved. That was the goal. Every single console that was ever spun up was catering to a target market that was underserved. But you had people that just had different preferences. If I think of Street Fighter, perfect example.

[00:10:40] Street Fighter by and large on Super Nintendo was an okay experience. It wasn't an amazing experience. It was an okay experience. But when you think about Killer Instinct, right? Killer Instinct was totally different from anything Street Fighter had offered up to that point. Killer Instinct was the arcade game of the time. So when you're able to do it from home. Altered Beast. Arcade game at the time. Now you're able to do it from home. You're going to Sega Genesis for that. So households would have a Genesis and a Super Nintendo because you're catering to different target markets.

[00:11:10] Fast forward now. Now what happened with the console escape after Dreamcast died and largely setting Nintendo Switch aside. Previous. You have PlayStation and you have Xbox and all they're really doing is releasing the same game on both consoles. Final Fantasy 15 is a great example of this one. It releases on both consoles. I actually purchased it on the Xbox side. I did not purchase it on the PlayStation side on purpose. I felt it was a waste of time. I thought that the graphics would be superior.

[00:11:40] I thought it'd be a stronger console. I was wrong. But the point is that these that used to be exclusives prior, you'd never see a Final Fantasy on the Xbox side. But then there started to be this push of just having the game on any console that the gamer can just choose. Okay, well, it came out on PlayStation first or the Xbox was cheaper and now it's a race to the bottom. It's scraping the bottom of the barrel, which was never the right answer. Recently, the Xbox CEO has some turmoil. We have a new person in there. It's actually a female.

[00:12:10] And people were nervous about that because it's female. But she's a gamer. She's not like a hardcore gamer, but she does game. And she's already done all sorts of crazy stuff that's shocking it to say we're going back to fundamentals. There's no more of this Microsoft game. We're going back to Xbox. We're going to go back to exclusives or at least look at it again, trying to shift it back to the narrative. I said, I think this is a great change. Exclusives are the key. People don't like it. Why don't they like it? Because they don't want a world where this game they like is on that console.

[00:12:39] This game they like is on that console, which is what you had and still have to a degree with the Switch. There are games that are only on the Switch. You must buy a Switch for them like Fire Emblem, Zelda. You must have a Switch to play those games. Nintendo to a lesser degree. Or Mario. So you have to have a Switch to exclusively play those games. But what they don't understand, those people, some of them are broke and I get it. But what they don't understand is that having exclusives strengthens the platform.

[00:13:08] The goal should not be to make your pocket feel better. The goal should be to have a strong platform because a strong platform entices strong developers, which entices good games. That's how it's always worked. That's how it should work. Nintendo has always stuck to its guns all the way back. All the way back to the Super Nintendo. All the way then forward. I skipped the Nintendo 64. I thought it was a piece of garbage console. I did have a Wii, but I didn't play much of it.

[00:13:37] It was really just for a couple of games. I largely skipped the Wii U. I do have a Switch. I had the regular Switch. I've had the OLED Switch. I think I still have it. Oh no, I sold that one. But I do have the Switch 2. Nintendo just feels like a stronger console. Do I have a PS5? Yes, it sits, collects dust. It's mostly to play PS4 games. I think I bought it for Final Fantasy XVI, which I regret. But it's largely for playing PS4 games because PS4 games are superior to the old generations. I did have a fat PS3.

[00:14:06] I just gave it away because I just didn't play the games anymore. And most of the games that I would play are available through the backwards compatible if I needed to. I do have a 360. The only reason I have a 360 is to play Infinite Undiscovery because you can't play it on any other console. But it's one of the best games ever made. You're forced to play that console. Games like Grandia 3, stuck right now on the PS2 as it is. You can't play it again unless you hold on to a PS2 or you have a fat PS3.

[00:14:36] That's the garbage that used to be true in the past. And I'm saying PlayStation, all they should have done is accentuate, look it up, their backwards compatibility strategy to support everything in its catalog. No matter how far back the freaking game went, you can play it on the newest console that's available. So you have an ecosystem that contains exclusive games that you can continue playing.

[00:15:02] That's the appeal that they lost when they backed off backwards compatibility. You're leaving behind a whole suite of the superior games that we used to have. Nintendo took a different track. They said, well, we're not going to keep supporting these old Wii and Wii U games, but we will encourage remasters of some of the better games that are out there like Xenoblade Chronicles X that recently was remastered on Switch 2. So my point is that the exclusivity is the strength.

[00:15:31] That's where consoles are strengthened. Whether you do it by backwards compatibility as consoles change iterations, whether you do it by remastering, however you do it, you need to have a solid exclusive catalog. The consumer has to kind of get over it. Either you change your taste or you simply embrace having multiple consoles or just do without. Like you don't have to have that latest freaking game. You can always go PC gaming. Some of the games are simply never going to be on PC. I would love to have Xenoblade Chronicles series on PC. It's never going to happen.

[00:16:02] I understood this because I understood that. That's why I have four consoles of which technically five of which I only play one of them largely, which is the Switch 2 because the Switch 2 has exclusives. They are the ones I generally favor. Other than that, it's PC. The other ones are just kind of if I get that nostalgia itch, then I go back to those. Now, what is the pattern with some of these older games compared to the newer ones? Well, it's the quality of the game. I just saw an article from Capcom.

[00:16:31] They said that basically what they're going to do is focus on culture, that some of the Japanese norms are going to be offensive to people. I think we've lost sight of the way to tell stories and the way to present something. We got trapped in this narrative that for whatever reason, presenting sexism or racism or violence other than guns, you know, beating somebody up or hitting a female or something.

[00:16:54] Presenting something in some form of media space that somehow presenting that is accepting it or saying that it's okay or saying that it's good. No, what you're doing is you're presenting a narrative that you're not supposed to agree with. You're supposed to look at it with disgust. You're supposed to hate this guy that just kicked that girl on the ground. You're supposed to hate that jack off. You're supposed to want to beat the snot out of him. That's what you're supposed to feel. You're triggering the emotions of the person who's watching the media.

[00:17:23] That person who's getting their emotions triggered should not be triggered to the point that they go out and do it themselves. They should say, I understand this is fiction. This is not real. There are pixels on the screen. They're telling me a story and it's causing me to feel something for the person that's being depicted. I should not be angered because it's a black person or an Asian person or a white person or a Hispanic person or etc. I shouldn't be angered by the race of the person. I should be absorbing the story being told. That assumes it's a good story.

[00:17:52] But we've gotten into this trap. They're talking about Japanese norms. Well, what's the Japanese norm? The Japanese norm as an example. They're called tropes usually. One trope might be, okay, there's a girl. She's flat chested. There's another girl. She's large breasted. The flat chested will then grope the large breasted girl and say, how do I get something like these? That's a trope. It's a common Japanese trope. We've gotten into this narrative where that's sexual assault and it's unacceptable. What are we talking about?

[00:18:20] It's a fictional depiction of something that some actually do because there are girls that do that. However good, bad. Otherwise, they don't think much of it because it happens like in some locker room or something or at a sleepover. But it happens. There's curiosity factors. There's all sorts of things. The point is that it's not real. So the depiction of it, you're supposed to just look at it and say, well, she's flat chested. She's curious about the large chest and what it took. Maybe she's young. Maybe she's whatever.

[00:18:48] Point being, we should not prevent depictions of things that bother us. Because when you avoid things that bother you on screen, all you're doing is hiding from the impact. When you hide from the impact, it's a boring story. You're not supposed to put out boring stories. This is why so much software games and otherwise come out and people get tired of them. They get bored with them. And when they're bored with them, they question the price of them. They think they're too expensive because they don't hook you. They don't catch you.

[00:19:18] They're not enticing stories. You have to have those moments, whether it's movie books, whatever the media, you have to have those moments where you are made to feel something for the protagonist and the antagonist alike. You're supposed to support the protagonist. You're supposed to be against the antagonist that you need to have something that's not crass. I have a book as Terry Brooks author.

[00:19:42] He wrote a story and basically there's, they're like lizard people and there's like a rape. He doesn't say it, but that's basically what the inference look it up is, is that it's a rape of a person, a human that's tied up. That's the inference that's given. I thought it was crass. I understand what he was trying to do, which is this person basically is dead. She's, she's, there's no way she's getting saved. There's no way there's no hope for her. And you're trying to emphasize a narrative that there's no hope for this person.

[00:20:10] I felt it was crass because there was a better way to do that. Beat her down, assault her, cut off a limb or something that these are things where, okay, you've chopped her up. And this did happen in the story, chopped up into pieces, tossed to see, but why did you need this? What is inferred to be a rape scene? Why did you need to have that? It's a book, but why did you need to have that? It didn't add anything to the story. She's already tied up. She's already parched in the sun. She's not given water. She's being beaten with whips and everything else.

[00:20:40] What was the point of going that extra step to the rape? It didn't add anything to the narrative that I'm not a supporter of. But if you're talking something where again, girl gets kicked or punched, there's a, in Xenoblade, there's a segment where one of the girls, and it's not a real human, but one of the girls gets punched in the stomach down on the ground by one of the antagonists, one of the main antagonists of the story. But it's, it's part of a sequence to show that she's powerless because she does not

[00:21:07] have support over on the, so all of that is to say, there's a way to do it to where you could emphasize a sense of hopelessness, a sense of something's got to happen. You want the hero to come in and save the day and there is no hero. There's a sense of that where you can do it without being completely crass. And it's a fine art that I think has been lost because it's been lost. You think about, well, where did it come from?

[00:21:36] It comes from person's creativity. The author of Stardew Valley game concerned date one man show created it. He has more people now, but at the time one man show creates this concerned date. He has hit by his own self admission. He has his own personal things that like demons of his own that contributed to his creativity. He needed an outlet that happens. And we've lost that. Why have we lost that?

[00:22:02] Because we have so many media outlets that hide you getting that feeling, feeling the world, feeling pain, feeling anger, feeling frustration, feeling despair. We've insulated people from feeling any of these. And when you don't feel those, it suppresses your critical outlet. You're not able to then let it go. Then what happens? One of three, somebody bottles up, they go into a shell, they're closed.

[00:22:30] The two suicide, which we definitely don't want happening. But again, if you have somebody who's suppressing and suppressing and suppressing, or it's being hidden from them and they never get a chance to really understand it, that's a risk. It's a risk that can happen. Or three, they talk about it and they talk about it in a way that is damaging to somebody else. All of which, everything there goes to the spirit of humans. It's what we are.

[00:22:56] We have to experience all of these negative emotions, positive emotions alike. We have to experience the world. We have to take it in and embrace it. And if we don't, it just harms you in the long run. When we talk creativity, creativity is a human trait. It is something inherent to humans that cannot really be duplicated. What is creativity though? Creativity is the ability on the fly to create something. You might think AI is creative.

[00:23:25] AI is not creative. AI is taking what it's been trained to do and it's following a set of instructions. Then it's taking a whole set of information using the instructions and it's selecting from what it's been told. That's not creativity. Creativity is what got you to the point of having a cell phone in the first place that you could hold in your hand and last more than a couple of hours. Creativity is what got you to the point of having handheld gaming.

[00:23:55] Creativity is what got us to the point of having TVs that were less than 100 pounds. Creativity isn't intangible. It's not something that can be trained. You just have it or you don't. We hope that people develop it over time. That takes exposure to a wide variety of different ideas and suggestions over time. And it takes a desire to want to change what you see in front of you. That desire aspect is not something that AI can have. It cannot have a desire. It can only follow instructions.

[00:24:24] You're being sold, and I see it, on a narrative of a world where AI will independently do stuff and kill jobs to the point I was arguing saying that this young college kid was afraid that AI was going to take all the jobs and go off. You know, I needed to dig in. I needed to understand this fear because it's so silly to me. I'll give some preface quick and then get in it. I've been touching technology since roughly four or five years old. I've been touching for a long time in some form.

[00:24:55] I've seen the evolution of technology over time. Anybody that's old enough might remember Teddy Ruxpin. Teddy Ruxpin was basically a bear, regular bear, but it could play audio. You pressed its belly, its little heart pressed the belly, and it plays sounds, and it's talking to you. The simplest form of technology you can think of. Lights, sprinkler systems, things where you can turn them off with a sound or turn them on with a time passage. Okay, after two hours, I want you to turn off.

[00:25:22] Simple, basic, routine things that technology could always do. The onset and creation of remote controls. Remember, TVs used to be a knob that you would turn to change channels. Going from antennas to actual cable plugged into. Going from regular composite cable to component cable to DVI and HDMI cables. Going from a cable box to just straight to the channel and then it's digitally decoded. Going from cable to satellite.

[00:25:53] Going from dial-up to cable and DSL. The evolution of technology over time is a norm to me. Some evolutions, I thought, are a good thing. Some, I feel, were significant steps back. Do I think that high-speed internet was a good thing? Only as far as it enabled the ability to work from home, right? Beyond that, I think it's the worst thing to happen. You're like, what? Because it's been abused. It's been now. It's kind of taken for granted that everybody has it. But people out in the rural areas do not and cannot.

[00:26:23] And so it creates this cottage industry. But it's still a monopoly. You still only have pockets of companies that can do it. So when you have something that is, there's pockets of company that can do it. It's not really controlled. It's not really managed well. The regulation is lax. You don't get the best service out of it. And thus, we cannot maximize the use of it. That's how I feel about AI. I feel that AI, somebody had a cool idea and they throw it out there.

[00:26:48] And people that were already trained by the TikToks of the world to waste time at work and just look at garbage and nonsense instead of enriching themselves. They look at this AI thing thinking it's just going to feed them answers, even if the answers are wrong. And because they've conditioned themselves to be lazy, they're not challenging what they've been told. They're not questioning AI. They're taking AI as the truth and as it is the definitive source when really it's not. It gets it wrong quite often, believe it or not.

[00:27:18] That's the flaw. It's fine to have a tool that tries to feed you stuff. Siri on Apple. Siri is one of the earliest forms of this example of, okay, Siri, give me directions to whatever. Well, anything can do that. You can search it reasonably. It's going to be okay. You can look at it. You can tell, okay, that's the route. I see that's what it is. I remember getting there or I remember passing it. So you can challenge it and question whether or not it's true or not. Siri can get the weather. Siri can get it, et cetera.

[00:27:44] So Siri gave kind of the first inklings of what's acceptable, but it gave it in a form that really, when you look at it, it's not really getting it wrong too much. There was the one example where the person drove off a bridge because Siri navigated them wrong. That's because GPS wasn't up to date. AI is different though. I hear all the time people say, yeah, I asked chat GPT about this and this is what it told me. So that's what I did. Why are you blindly taking that? AI gets it wrong. That's just the way it is.

[00:28:14] And if you don't have your own self-sufficiency and the wherewithal to know how to challenge what it's saying, you're not going to survive. You're not going to make it. I'm telling you, you've got to have your own self-sufficiency. I don't personally care if you want to use AI to double check your work. For example, if you're working in the yard, right? You want to understand here's the state of my yard. What are some suggestions for me to recover my yard? Okay.

[00:28:43] It tells you do this, this, this, this, this, this. Now, what it's going to give you is wide open. It's, it's a general set of instructions that may or may not be relevant to your area. You have to understand your soil. You have to understand the weather. You have to understand the types of seeds that are acceptable. You have to understand trees that are around. You have to understand rain and the amount of it. You have to understand shade. There's all these different things. That's a total science that changes the list of recommendations of what to do.

[00:29:10] It's the reason my yard looks better than everybody else out here. And I got it to this point three months after I moved here. People that swore that the other person who they said used to have the nicest yard didn't. Their yards filled with clovers and all sorts of weeds. Fine. It's green. If that's all you care about, then sure. But mine is grass. You can see their grass blades. It's well uniform. It's well mowed and consistent throughout.

[00:29:35] But that's because I understand the science specific to this area that I had to take in when I got here. I didn't need to ask AI how to take care of my own freaking lawn. I just need to understand the science behind it. I can then double check. Okay, AI, what do you think about this area? I'm going to guarantee it's going to get it wrong because it can't see what's going on here. You'd have to tell it. Here's the soil composition. Here's the amount of rainfall. Given this, given this, given that. Again, you have to give it all the points of data for it to make an informed decision.

[00:30:04] At that point, you could do that yourself. This is what I'm stressing about the flaws of AI is it assumes you have enough knowledge in order to give it enough information to give you a smart answer. But by that point, you could have done it yourself. Now that I'm done with my rant. Replit. Anybody that has thought about creating an application. I don't care what the application is. It could be a website when I say application. It's something that you're trying to create. You don't have any coding knowledge. You just want to create something.

[00:30:33] You know, something for your church, something for your school, something for your work, something for a new business you're trying to create. You're trying to create something. You don't know where to start. In the old days, we would have templates. GeoCities was a popular site where you would set up and you could create your own front. You could create a storefront. You could do all sorts of amazing stuff. Now we've gotten to this world where they just want a website builder to do it all for you and just plug in content. Then we got to AI. Okay, just give you a couple sentences. It just spits up a website that's supposed to be fully functional.

[00:31:03] Then we got to where it's applications. We want full-on applications that could do all sorts of stuff, but we shouldn't have to write the code or we don't know how to write the code. So, Replit is one such tool. It purports, look it up, to be able to build an application on the fly with just a few sentences. There's tons of tools out there that do something similar. You may have heard the term OpenClaw at least once. OpenClaw is essentially an AI tool that lets you set up and it'll handle certain tasks in your, let you set up on your computer, it handles your thermostat. It handles your lights.

[00:31:33] It handles all these things. And it can build apps and do that. It's like a personal assistant that's AI. This is getting popular with people that are lazy. I'm being honest because I want you to understand how bad it is. But Replit is the target of my rant that I'm going to close with here. Because it's one of the more popular ones recently. Because they tell you that you give it a couple sentences and it'll spit on an application that can do all sorts of fancy stuff. When the truth is, it's not going to do all sorts of fancy stuff off a few sentences.

[00:32:01] It's not going to do all sorts of fancy stuff. It's not going to do all sorts of fancy stuff. It's not going to do all sorts of fancy stuff. It can handle the front end. In other words, the thing you see, reasonably pretty good. It does not have the creativity to understand what's in your mind about the look and the feel and the logos, the colors, the fonts. Those take refinement. You're going to need to go and tweak it. If you don't know what a font is, how are you going to know what to tell it? The colors, you may not know how to describe the color. You might know Pantone. You might not. You might know RGB. You might not.

[00:32:30] If you don't know the science behind color, how can you know what to tell it? You may or may not have a logo. Did you think about a logo before you got started with your application? Because logo goes to branding. If you didn't think about branding and the science of branding, how do you know how to tell the application that your brand needs to apply? Because if you take a brand that's not yours, you won't appeal to your customer target. That's a science. All of that, setting it aside. Let's say you don't have colors. You don't have fonts. You don't have logos. You don't care. You just want to get started somewhere, which I think is a bad idea. But let's say that's what it is.

[00:33:00] So you tell this application, whichever, but Replit's my target. I want an app that does X, Y, Z, and it should be able to do that. Replit specifically will say, okay, get started, and it'll create a visual interface that's building up an application. You get really excited. You're seeing, wow, it's taking shape. That looks pretty darn good. I mean, I didn't write a lick of code. It looks kind of cool there. And it'll say, all right, ready to go. And you're like, all right, cool. I can go to market. We're ready to do that.

[00:33:27] Now, what you should do after it does this thing is you should test it. Do you know how to test? Do you have a test plan? Do you understand what testing really involves? I'm not going to bore you with testing here. I'll save that for a different episode. But do you know the science behind testing? Why is testing important? Because what you shouldn't do is throw an application out there that's a buggy nightmare. Because if you throw it out as a buggy nightmare, you're going to lose your customers. And if you don't understand how to test, you should have somebody who does. Why?

[00:33:56] Because if you need to fix stuff, that person needs to be able to call out what needs to be fixed. You can only do that by way of testing. Otherwise, the AI tool doesn't know. It doesn't know that something's wrong unless you test it. So you're trusting it and you shouldn't, but you're trusting it, assuming it's not going to put out something that's buggy. How can something be buggy? If I click on a button that I assume is supposed to send an email, send an email is very subjective. Do I want it to present a form that they fill out that sends an email?

[00:34:24] Or do I want it to pop up their email function directly on their device? The behavior will change based on the device that they're using. If you do a form, it's perfectly fine. But you need to figure out what fields you need to collect. You need to put rigor around the fields. You don't want garbage in the email field. If you do the straight to email, you can get spam. Do you understand the science of the simple requirement of a button that sends an email?

[00:34:49] It sounds good as a request, but you need to understand the science that goes behind it and the what ifs if it gets screwed up so that you know what to tell the tool in order to correct those things. If you don't have the fundamentals, you're not going to know what to tell it. It's going to get it wrong. This is where Replit shows its pants dropped. Replit will show you an amazing looking something. Replit will say, we're good to go. Replit will say, we're at a good point.

[00:35:13] If you have enough knowledge and you have enough skill and talent, you can easily identify the flaws and you call out those flaws. It'll say, huh, that is wrong. Let me go and take a look and fix that. Then it'll find all sorts of stuff wrong that mysteriously it didn't find wrong the first time, but now it finds wrong simply because you called it out. And then it pretends like it's really fixing this stuff and it'll make some tweaks and then it'll say, I tested it. Looks like it's a good. Go ahead and check it again. You have to understand, right?

[00:35:42] What was broken? What should be fixed now? What should the behavior be? And did something else get broken by way of this fix? Do you understand the science of this? It's called regression testing. I won't bore you with the deets, but again, do you understand it? If you don't know what I just talked about, you're going to deal with a tool. Assuming you're testing it properly.

[00:36:03] That's a buggy nightmare, possibly even more buggy than the first time you did it because the tool just went and arbitrarily patched the thing with no wherewithal to avoid issues with something that was working before. And what happens specifically with Replit, it'll introduce new bugs. It'll introduce new issues along the way that weren't there before. You might see things aren't working the way you expected, but can you explain it in a way that the tool can determine what properly to fix?

[00:36:30] So the net effect Replit is notorious for is you're spending more time and money. I'll get to that as I close out, trying to get the darn thing just to function, just to work. And it starts to become a buggy nightmare more and more because it's breaking stuff that was working before, which I speculate is intentional. It goes back to the old story about a plumber. You leave them unattended and they do something, leave a nut or something loose to trigger some sort of a leak to create more work and they're sabotaging it.

[00:37:00] I suspect that's what AI is doing, not because the AI itself is doing it, but because the provider. And yes, I am theorizing that Replit has done something to its software that creates bugs to drum up charges. I theorize that's what they've done. I theorize many of the AI tools have done the same thing because if you knew enough about what goes wrong, a basic rookie would not make those mistakes.

[00:37:24] So you have to question, how is it that something that is trained can possibly make rookie mistakes? It doesn't make sense unless they're intentional. Do I have evidence that's doing that? No, but the pattern is clear. Things that are failing should not be failing if it was actually trained not to do those things and to avoid simple, basic interaction problems. So if you didn't have the knowledge and the wherewithal to understand that, you might end up burning a crack ton of money.

[00:37:51] And again, we're talking, okay, 20 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month. And it sounds like a small amount of money. It still adds up, especially when they're charging you for credits because all the tools do credits. The credits are basically for the, not the lines, but the individual tasks that the whatever engine is doing. And it's basically a consumption charge. As you use it, it accumulates charge that gets billed against credits and you get an allotment of credits per month for the 20 or 30 bucks or some odd.

[00:38:19] Or you can go with this super high price package that has limited credits. Again, the kinds of things that are surfacing as bugs should not be surfacing as bugs. If it's an ethical, moral company, they are simply, it's not logical that you would have these things happen if it's an ethical organization. And the theory with no evidence, but the theory is that they are purposely sabotaging the AI tool to create bugs that create more work and creates more consumption against the credit. So they can charge you out the nose.

[00:38:47] And I want to bottom line this. If you knew enough, which you may not, because if you're looking at those tools, you probably don't know enough right now. If you, if you were to go to Coursera or some other tool out there that's designed to teach you how to do these things, you download the software, you take the time, take one day. And you were to crash course, going through doing it, writing the code, doing testing, understanding all the nuances it takes to do it.

[00:39:12] Like, I guarantee you, you chances are you would find, geez, I could write something way better than what the AI could do outside of the front end stuff. So now you get creative. You say, all right, well, I got no problem with your ability to build the visual. Okay. Build the visual. Give me that front end. I'll build the back end stuff because I know I can do a better job than you because you're an idiot at it. And then I'll hook it into your front end and come up with a final tool.

[00:39:37] I'm telling you, chances are if you took the time to go through and force yourself to learn how to do the science of it, not only are you going to find the AI tools are by and large all garbage. Replit in particular is notorious for doing blatant errors that a rookie should not make. And challenge yourself. If you're one that's never written a lick of code, but you go through the courses and you realize that you're able to write your first application. I'm talking fundamental stuff. You're saying, wait a minute.

[00:40:05] I was able to knock this out and I've never written a lick of code. Maybe I'm in my 40s or 50s. And I was able to write that. But yet that AI tool screwed that up. How is that? You'll get to the same realization I did, which is it can only be one of two things. Either the person that trained it's a blistering idiot or it's a scam because it doesn't, it won't make sense. But in order for you to get to that point of awareness, you have to go through it yourself. You have to force yourself to say, I'm going to learn how to do this so that I know how to recognize what I'm getting ripped off by these tools.

[00:40:34] I'm not telling you not to use AI tools. I'm not telling you not to use Replit. I'm telling you that if you use those tools almost to a T, you're going to find they screw up more than they don't. And you can't blindly trust it. And you really should have fundamental knowledge of how things work, including testing, so that you can challenge it. Challenge AI. It's not about not using it. You need to challenge it. That means go into it, assuming it's going to screw up. Learn how to identify what it's screwing up.

[00:41:03] Learn how to question it. Then you'll realize this is just garbage. It's, it's rookie garbage. That's creating fear on people that don't understand. This is not ready for prime time. It's never going to be. When I say it's not going to replace people, unless it's an ethical, unethical company where the boss is just trying to take a golden parachute. Ethical companies are not going to replace humans with AI. What they might do is supplement using AI in certain targeted areas, but they're still going to want people to question that code.

[00:41:32] They're still going to want people to scrutinize security. They're still going to want people to configure the network themselves because they should not blindly trust AI. Nobody should because it's not there. It's not going to be there in our lifespans. My audio's up. You can hold me accountable. I'll say that. AI will not be to a point of replacing people effectively. That rhymes in our lifespan. It's not going to happen. It's not mature.

[00:41:56] The only way you can get to that reality check that I just described to you is to force yourself to learn the sciences that I'm talking about. The sciences of testing, the sciences of root cause analysis, the sciences of understanding what it takes to create whatever application you're trying to do. The science behind what it takes to analyze code, the science behind writing code. They're all different sciences that take, go through and learn it, understand it.

[00:42:23] You don't have to master it, but at a basic level, you should be able to. Don't say you can't. Of course you can. If your lights don't cut on, you know what to do. You know root cause analysis. Either your power is out or the breaker's off, right? Or the switch was just turned off. That's root cause analysis. You already do it in your daily life. Doing it in code is no different. Doing it against AI is no different. What you have to do is understand what can go wrong. When you understand what can go wrong, you then challenge AI and what it says works.

[00:42:53] And when you see it doesn't work because you tested it and you understand what could go wrong as part of the testing. Now you then will understand this is just garbage. It's just, it's might be good enough just to get the visual. You could do the visual yourself. You could do it in Canva. You could do it in tons of tools that can create the visual in a snap off a template where you didn't need AI.

[00:43:15] That's where you get to the Nirvana state where you understand, okay, well, if all AI can really do without screwing up is the front end, I can do that myself with templates. Now there are countless tools that can do it. Then you realize how much more power you have than those AI tools right now. You have more power because you have more creativity. More creativity is more powerful than any AI tool can ever pull off. All AI can really do is possibly save some time if you don't care about the creative aspect of it.

[00:43:44] My response to you then is if you don't care about the creative aspect of what you're doing, you probably shouldn't be doing it. That's my personal stance on that. Thank you.