First Cup of Coffee – June 12, 2026

I'm getting weepy about Jane Yolen's passing on the podcast today, talking about how kind she was to me. Also about my hijinks attempting to use my new espresso machine , changes to the podcast schedule (yet again, but for the last time now, I think), and the future of "AI."

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Transcript

00:01.59
Jeffe Kennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy. Also writing is Jennifer K. Lambert, author of epic fantasy romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. And I have to tell you about this coffee. But before we do that, today is say with me people. It is Friday. 12th.

00:25.30
Jeffe Kennedy
ah june twelfth And I probably spent an hour making this coffee because i got fancy dancy.

00:36.57
Jeffe Kennedy
big, fancy, can't think of another word, complicated espresso machine. And it has like the steamer wand on it and everything. And it grinds the beans for you. And I did this because when I was on writing retreat, my friend had one and the coffee was so much better.

00:55.83
Jeffe Kennedy
So I thought, since I'm made of money these days, or in other words, splurging on myself, I decided I'm just going to get a real espresso machine.

01:08.34
Jeffe Kennedy
And for reasons unknown to humanity, i decided I'll just set it up this morning and make my coffee and reader. It did not go that smoothly. Um, I thought maybe this is too much to take on on a Friday morning. I should just wait till tomorrow, but oh, tomorrow's gone. I'm going to want to go to yoga and that, oh, I could do it Sunday. And I'm like, no, I want to just do it now. And And they have those guides that are like the quick setup guides, right? Where it's like, oh, it lulls you into this false sense of optimism um where you think quick setup. I could just quickly set this up.

01:47.67
Jeffe Kennedy
We did not quickly set it up. Um, I probably did things out of order. I like you have to prime it the first time. And i also wanted to put in, they give you a water filter with it and you could test your water to see how hard your water is. And if you need a water softener and you put a setting on the machine, I mean, this thing is rocket science people.

02:14.93
Jeffe Kennedy
Ah, so I I know we have hard water. It's like I don't need to test it. I know we have really hard water here. Ah, so I know I'm gonna want to put in this filter. So I just skip and I go to the putting in the filter part and then I'm trying to teach the machine that I've put in a new filter but I think I didn't do the right initial setup correctly And then even worse and you are all invited to laugh at me.

02:41.85
Jeffe Kennedy
I put the beans in the wrong part. I it seemed like such the perfect shoot for it but it turns out I put the beans in the ground beans part instead of the beans to be ground part and it took me a long time to figure out like what.

02:58.81
Jeffe Kennedy
The signal said like the warning light I did like get out the real guidebook which to be fair I should have done on the first place right. Just don't use those quick start guides because they lie. They lie to you. It's not quick and you're not going to start. So everything about it is a lie.

03:15.45
Jeffe Kennedy
Uh, but look at this if you're on video you can see I actually have very pretty espresso. And I want to say that it's perfect and delicious but it's not quite because I have to monkey with the setting still and my morning is just going to be a wash because i got up and took a shower and put on makeup so I would look pretty for you all for this podcast and speaking of it's working out well I loved having my business day on Wednesday. I'm going to start doing podcasts on Wednesday just once a week on Wednesdays I know I keep messing this around.

03:58.65
Jeffe Kennedy
But I think I'm going to stick with that. So no Monday podcast Wednesday. want to do that today. Besides, there was something else I wanted to talk to you about today. So I'm like, got to do podcast.

04:10.26
Jeffe Kennedy
But last night I lost a contact lens. ah Almost always I can find them. I could not. I was putting them in the case and I like huffed a breath at the wrong moment and it went flying off.

04:23.67
Jeffe Kennedy
And so it goes.

04:29.27
Jeffe Kennedy
So contact lens is gone. I looked and looked. I even looked again this morning. I have an old one in right now which is wrongly powered. I've got the deal where I've got distance in my right eye and close up in my left which is actually like computer distance and and it's not right and it's yeah bugging me. So I call first thing this morning My next appointment isn't for like five weeks my annual exam and so I called and I say I need to just order a replacement lens because I can't make it five weeks and she says well actually we had a cancellation ah for this morning. Can you be here at 10 a.m. and I said absolutely. So absolutely I can and which is fortuitous. It's great. Yeah, you know, I get to go in and have my exam today get fitted for a new lens get a new lens which won't come for a little while but whatever.

05:22.45
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, but I hadn't recorded a podcast yet. I've been setting up this machine and it's now 9 23 and i have to leave in about 20 minutes to go to the eye doctor and none of this has to do with writing books unfortunately.

05:46.05
Jeffe Kennedy
Arguably having coffee. Oh, you know what? It's tasting better all the time now. I'm going to make another cup and we'll see how it goes. And and I thought about just skipping podcast today, but I wanted to explain about that even though I know you all are so flexy and you don't care and you're all like whatever you is good for you Jeff because you're all wonderful and delightful. Uh, so you don't care that I'm going to just start doing this on Wednesdays, but I wanted you to know in case you were looking for me on Monday.

06:14.69
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, but I decided so I was going to punt on today's podcast but I'd already put on makeup and also I wanted to talk about something that is um, less I don't know less giddy.

06:31.42
Jeffe Kennedy
So I wanted to talk about Jane Yolen who passed away yesterday. Ah, I'm verklempt I was so sorry to hear that she passed away and I know a lot of us in the community were also sad so cheers to Jane.

06:53.40
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, I was not close to her I did not um. Yeah, I wouldn't have said that we were friends. I didn't expect to know that she was declining. I got the impression it was somewhat sudden. I don't know if anybody else knew that this was coming.

07:13.46
Jeffe Kennedy
But um, so I'm going to show you here's a book by Jane Yolen called Briar Rose which is a simply brilliant book. I mean you know how I love fairy tale retellings. Um, this is a retelling of sleeping beauty.

07:31.77
Jeffe Kennedy
ah it's but also set in the Holocaust so that the briars are like the barbed wire fences and it's it's a freaking brilliant book. Um, I just I adore it and it is signed to me.

07:48.98
Jeffe Kennedy
it says. oh it's gonna make me for clipped. You know sometimes I forget to look at what people sign books to.

08:01.24
Jeffe Kennedy
ah or maybe I just forgot but it says for Jeffe one writer to another Jane Yolen in twenty seventeen ah but' sorry.

08:12.93
Jeffe Kennedy
Didn't mean to get all weepy but how kind of her.

08:18.10
Jeffe Kennedy
ah sorry about that. Just pushed me right over the edge.

08:25.11
Jeffe Kennedy
But that leads right into what I wanted to say about Jane is she was just a lovely lovely person and a very prolific fantasy author that I feel like didn't quite get all of the.

08:43.32
Jeffe Kennedy
I don't know the notice that others have maybe others would argue with me about that. She was SFWA Grandmaster and when I met her in 2017 she had been named Grandmaster that year and I was working at the SFWA suite And I asked her I was being door dragon, which means I was checking to see who was allowed in.

09:10.94
Jeffe Kennedy
And I asked her what was the secret to becoming a grandmaster? And she said live a really long time. And I thought that's that says a lot about her.

09:27.83
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, and I think that maybe she was named grandmaster before that and I'm conflating those things. But when I got to meet her, that was one of the questions I asked. Um, and then because i was working like a double shift as door dragon, she was hanging out in the suite and she said, well, she said, I'm just going to sit here and talk to you.

09:52.82
Jeffe Kennedy
And she did. She sat and talked to me for a couple of hours.

10:00.79
Jeffe Kennedy
And I really didn't expect to weep this much. Um, we just had this great long-ranging conversation and she was really known for that. She was known for mentoring people and I was fairly new as a fantasy writer at that point.

10:24.47
Jeffe Kennedy
And so it's very nice of her to say that to me and.

10:31.29
Jeffe Kennedy
I don't know. One of the things that we bonded over was that I have always been sorry that I never got to meet Anne McCaffrey. And Jane and Anne McCaffrey were friends. And so I got to ask Jane about her.

10:48.28
Jeffe Kennedy
And we got a little maudlin and weepy. And she said, well, enough of that.

10:55.19
Jeffe Kennedy
But by... meeting Jane and talking with her I felt like I kind of got to know Anne McCaffrey too and so it's this these generations of people who come before us and how they are willing to give up themselves.

11:23.10
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, in such generous ways. And so I hope to follow in her footsteps. Uh, and I know that this is something I try to do.

11:35.67
Jeffe Kennedy
Ah, forgive me I'm sorry I'm like snotty all over the place here anyway. i I felt kind of bad at the time that I had obsessively read everything and McCaffrey and had frankly never heard of Jane Yolen. And then I've since gone back and read a lot of Jane Yolen and just a wonderful writer. So I'm going to suggest that you read Briar Rose, read some of her other books.

12:10.18
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, you know, she went to Smith College. Isn't that cool? Um, it says that she won the Caldecourt Medal to Nebula awards, the world fantasy award, the national Jewish book award and two Christopher awards.

12:24.76
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, yeah, so amazing person. The world is poor for her loss, but richer for how her having lived.

12:39.67
Jeffe Kennedy
I thought that I would talk longer about Jane Yolen, but, um, apparently I'm too weepy to do so. Maybe I should have waited, but I wanted to say something, um, while her passing was still fresh. And I knew that a lot of people would be ah talking about her today.

12:58.58
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, a little bit on AI. Are you tired of hearing from me about AI? I feel like it's never, I wish it would die. um a couple of very interesting things about generative AI and large language models. Uh, I've been catching up on the fifth and final season of hacks. I love that show.

13:23.96
Jeffe Kennedy
And they had a an episode on, uh, AI and wanting to use, oh Jean smarts character I can't think of the characters name. Uh, wanting to use her for like a comedy app an AI app and the uh, of course Ava does the research and is against it. I thought it was funny that they like had her do the research and then be against it because I'm sorry Ava would have already known but it was a good storytelling device. ah

13:58.68
Jeffe Kennedy
So it was, uh, it was very, it was cool the way that that came out. I feel like there's stuffing a lot into this season, but, um, you know, that last season, that's, that's how it goes. Right.

14:12.31
Jeffe Kennedy
Uh, But the other thing that I was reading about was a new study that just came out showing that some of the generative AI models, like like the chats, we won't name it. and I always name it, I guess, chat GPT, um that they're getting dumber because, and this is something that every scientist knows. And I feel like maybe lay people don't know this anymore, but there's a term that's

14:44.22
Jeffe Kennedy
gi jio Giggle, whatever people want to say, garbage in, garbage out, which is basically that any model you create, any mathematical model or predictive model or statistical model or experimental model, if...

15:00.54
Jeffe Kennedy
What you put into it is garbage. What's going to come out as garbage. And this feels like a very intuitive, obviously logical thing, right? And yet it's it's an ongoing issue. Because if you're, for example, if your experimental setup is bad, if you don't have good controls, if you um don't have a big enough sample, if your sample is wrong, then it's garbage. And that means that anything that comes out is also garbage. And so you you can't expect to get good results unless what you're putting in is quality, right? Well, because these

15:43.96
Jeffe Kennedy
you know, like chat GPT are scraping the internet for information and the internet is being increasingly flooded with information generated by these very same applications, computer models, modeling systems. I don't even know what to call them. Computer thingamajigs.

16:05.94
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, they're just because they are creating all of this, what we call AI slop, The swap is then going back into the machine and it's getting dumber.

16:19.74
Jeffe Kennedy
So what they're putting out now is even worse than what they were putting out six months ago, a year ago. And it's absolutely predictable and really interesting to see what's going to happen now because all of these tech companies built their model on being able to steal information, right? To scrape the internet, to steal the good stuff so that they could then make it as good as possible. But now it's all their crap that they output and they're going to have to pay us.

16:55.86
Jeffe Kennedy
ah to have our information now. And they all say that their business models won't cover that. So we shall see what we shall see. um i did see a really interesting post. Uh, I don't know who was being interviewed.

17:14.07
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, because it was someone saying, I heard an interview today, but I really liked this, that AI is data and data can only look backwards.

17:24.73
Jeffe Kennedy
Creativity looks forwards. And I thought that's really important. You know, creativity is by definition, making something that has not yet existed. Right. Whereas,

17:38.46
Jeffe Kennedy
AI, should be putting my quotation marks around it. All it can do is look back and take what's fed into it. So I love that idea of that. It's looking backwards. Whereas creativity is looking forward and we need to be looking forward. Um, it's getting dumber. Nobody wants the data centers. Uh, I don't know the times we live in.

18:06.01
Jeffe Kennedy
So on that note, I'm going to go get my eyes fixed. um I have had a decent writing week. I've written more this week than I have since April. So making good progress, getting started on Never the Roses 3.

18:22.23
Jeffe Kennedy
Thank you for all of the kind notes on social media, all of you being excited about this book coming. of Yeah, I'm working on it. So I hope you all have a terrific weekend and a terrific beginning beginning of the week. And I will talk to you all on Wednesday.

18:41.14
Jeffe Kennedy
You all take care. Bye bye.