Play The Spaces Podcast

Reality Perception Distortion Part 1 - The Capability Amplifier

• Nithin Cherian and Malcolm Moore • Season 1 • Episode 5

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In this episode of Play The Spaces, we trace the winding path from chaotic 90's music stores to the strange calm of reinvention in the AI era. What starts with “sup-dawg” greetings, misnamed gear like the legendary “Krog Sympathizer,” and House of Guitars mythologies becomes a deeper conversation about how the stories we grew up in shape the way we create, work, and see ourselves now. We swap tales about Junkie XL resurrecting an ’80s studio rig, dial-up pages loading slower than human evolution, and the moment AI stopped being a sci-fi punchline and became a practical creative partner. But the heart of the episode comes when Malcolm opens up about losing a 12-year teaching career and facing a future he literally cannot visualize. As an auditory thinker who feels creativity rather than sees it, he asks whether AI can help someone imagine the next chapter when their mind offers no pictures at all. What follows is an honest, funny, and surprisingly grounding breakdown of how technology can amplify the parts of us we struggle to access, why nostalgia messes with memory, and how confronting the truth about who we were opens the doorway to who we’re becoming. Vibrating beds, AI and reality...Oh my!

Referenced in This Episode-
House of Guitars Tony Levin Junkie XL Deadmau5 ASR-10 SP-1200 MPC 2000 

Books & Thinkers-
Andy Warhol David Bowie Beethoven 

Some Key Women in AI-
Barbara J. Grosz Fei‑Fei Li
Niki Parmar: Her work along with her collaborators (Vaswani, Shazeer, Parmar, Uszkoreit, Jones, Gomez, Kaiser, and Polosukhin) birthed modern AI.

Concepts
Analog chaos vs digital order
AI hallucination turned creative amplifier
Auditory learning vs visualization
Creative reinvention after job loss

Core Ideas
Nostalgia is a lens, not a destination.
Technology doesn’t erase creativity; it expands it.
Reinvention begins where certainty ends.
We all live different versions of the same story.

Please visit-
www.playthespaces.com

*Theme music composition and performance by Malcolm Moore.
**Photo manipulation by Caleb Moore.

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Instagram: playthespacespodcast

Malcolm's Other Podcast: Creativity is the Cure!

Malcolm & Nithin

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Nithin:

Living your life with intent to create magic in every moment is sort of the philosophy of this. And the way we go through this podcast is facing these really ugly conversations. And how facing those ugly conversations can you get you to these beautiful outcomes that constantly move your life forward into a place that you would rather be instead of in a place where you sort of stay still or even regress.

Malcolm:

Welcome back. This is Play the Spaces with Nithin Cherian and Malcolm Moore. Sup.

Nithin:

I had to. That was really good. I really wanted to throw a sub dawg in there.

Malcolm:

That's what I was gonna say. Oh god. I used to work at Medley Music in Philadelphia. Okay. And there was this guy there who would just give everybody a sub dog. And then this little little lady came up and asked for help and he just gave her a subdawg. And the look on her face of terror, it was just worth everything.

Nithin:

I I gotta say, music store people were very entertaining. The the amount of bizarre things that happen of that stage of life was just absolutely bizarre.

Malcolm:

You have to be there. Yeah. Obviously, we met because I worked at house guitars, and then you started, and we briefly were together, and one of my favorite things, because I ran the top floor that had the keyboards, drum machines, sequencers, all that stuff, and often people would come up and ask me for things they needed, but say them incorrectly. Two of my favorites were the Krog Sympathizer. That's awesome. Yeah. And then some guys said, I want the thing with the sloppy dick drive.

Nithin:

Man, you have the best ones. I never had them that good.

Malcolm:

Dude, at one point we had a list of our, you know, the parametric frequalizer.

Nithin:

Yeah, I I only used to get the you know, man, I need a beatmaker. A beat machine. I gotta, I gotta make beats, man. I gotta need a beatmaker. You know, get me one of them beat makers. I'm like, what the hell's a beat maker, dude?

Malcolm:

Yeah, and I've been I told you recently that I'm behind everybody. I've been watching Wu Tang American Saga, and one of the things I love about it is I'm around the same age as those guys, and when they're using like the SP1200 and the ASR 10 by EnSoniq, I sold those, and when I'm watching the scenes, I know how to use them, so that was kind of cool. And I tell my younger friends, we barely ever used computers. You had like 10 machines you had to connect with MIDI chords and then make them talk to each other, and it was not easy.

Nithin:

It's funny that you mentioned that because I just had a conversation with a songwriter friend of mine that is adapting his workflow to his 90s workflow.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

And he brought back out his SP1200. He picked up an ASR -10 that was working out really well. They're great. He has a couple, you know, Akai samplers, like an MPC 2000, things you know, like that, you know, and he even dropped like, you know, like you know, Kanye, the one that Kanye used, the one that these guys used, the that. He's like, it just it just makes me a different headspace. It reminded me when I worked for Steinberg, we went to Junkie XL's house.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

You know, composer, musician, whatever. And it was such a bizarre day because the dude was basically making chicken for his kids while they were at soccer, while he was having a conversation, like the nerdiest MIDI and like electronic music design conversation you could ever have. Right at the same time.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

Sitting in his, you know, we're standing in his kitchen, just sort of hanging out. And basically he decided for this new series he was doing for Netflix, which came out years ago, which was like a throwback series to like the 80s club scene stuff, it didn't last very long. He wanted to recreate his whole setup from the late 80s, early 90s.

Malcolm:

Oh, that's cool.

Nithin:

Using an Atari Falcon, cue-based sequencer. So we literally had come with some stuff. I didn't realize that my guy that was based in DC, this guy Greg, who's like the human supercomputer of how to do anything in Steinberg software.

Malcolm:

Right,

Nithin:

he had all of his own personal archive of Steinberg stuff since he'd been working with Steinberg in like '92. And he brought a bunch of that for

Malcolm:

I wish I was that organized.

Nithin:

to use just for doing that series.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

Because he wanted he basically figured out a way to bootstrap modern stuff to do larger channel counts.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

Because his current channel count thing that it was crazy, but getting the sound generation and like the timing variances and issues that would come up.

Malcolm:

Back then there was a lot of latency issues. That was a big nightmare, and that's why people use the step programming on the drum machines.

Nithin:

Yeah.

Malcolm:

Because it was so hard even with the quantizing to get it right. Yeah, it's sort of crazy.

Nithin:

I know that's all ridiculous to talk about, but really it's all a thing of a matter of framing perspective. When you brought up the first day we met, you couldn't stand me.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

Because me in my delusional reality coming from engineering school, working part-time at a music store, and I'm reading terms and manuals and brochures, thinking they're one thing because I know what science says they are.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

I didn't realize the context or musical adaptation. And at the time I couldn't help myself but talk.

Malcolm:

Well, looking back, you ... You were younger than me, but you were obviously way smarter than me, and it was just kind of arresting to see you coming up. And at that time you would take over conversations. I'd be talking to a customer, and you'd be like, No. And looking back, in general, you were right, but it was just kind of daunting because I had my thing going there.

Nithin:

Yeah, and and the f the sad part of it for me was my thing was never in a context of I'm trying to show somebody up.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

I was just always like, man, I've been guided wrong so many times by retail people.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

That if I saw it veer in a direction, even if I trusted the person, I'd insert myself to keep it on the rails. Now, fortunately, when I got better at it, people allowed it to happen.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

But especially when I started, it was just, what the hell are you doing? Why are you talking, kid? Shut up.

Malcolm:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You were definitely sincere about it and doing it for the right reasons, but the delivery was...

Nithin:

I was brutally honest and just unfiltered because I didn't know how to do anything else with any sort of skill. I just sort of knew this is what I understood. Here you go. You're welcome. Right. You know?

Malcolm:

And the the the other thing was the vibe of that store was very unique. And that I was good at. I was good with the personal connections with the customers and stuff like that. And when you would come in, I'd be like, wait, what?

Nithin:

Yeah. But I...

Malcolm:

But it took a it took years for us to understand each other. I don't think it was till we moved out here.

Nithin:

Yeah, I definitely confused you probably more than you confused me.

Malcolm:

Both guilty as charged.

Nithin:

I feel like you're like, I don't know why I'm friends with this guy, but I'm friends with this guy because I can't tell if he likes me or doesn't like me because he says nice things and says effed up things in the turn of a breath. And in his mind, you could tell he doesn't know the difference. He's just sort of going.

Malcolm:

Well, and I can say this now because I've been gone for a very long time. This is how unique the situation was. I don't know how it is now, but the owners wanted me to sell so they would get me anything that would help me sell, whether it's fill up my coffee cup with vodka. I'm not exaggerating, or get me chocolate-covered coffee beans. Like keep this guy awake because he's selling. He's selling.

Nithin:

At that point, I don't think I've ever seen a person that couldn't focus in a single point in time for literally the maximum you could focus in a direction with your eyes was like two seconds.

Malcolm:

I think you told me this, but you know what I was like. You'll probably agree. You know, Foghorn Leghorn, when he's got that crazy weasel, he's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was kind of like that guy.

Nithin:

Sort of like that with the intention span of a hummingbird.

Malcolm:

And just not a good combination.

Nithin:

It was so bizarre.

Malcolm:

He means well.

Nithin:

Well, I mean, you're actually a nice dude. I was definitely the worst in the situation of a human at the time, for sure. You know, I mean, shoot, I was so bad with the amount of words I would assault people with. They started calling me questions. Because anything I didn't understand, I'd have to ask a million questions about till it just made sense. And oh, I just remember the owner's brother, Blaine, nicest human on the planet, stuck with situations that you could just tell he wasn't really a fan of. But a sweetheart of a dude that was like a dude that you didn't want to cross at a bar.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

You know, that guy had a he had a three-bottle system at the bar. I don't know if he ever told you about that, his three-bottle system. You know, one one you drank, one in reserve, and one for the belt, so you can smash someone over the head with.

Malcolm:

I didn't know that, but that doesn't surprise me.

Nithin:

I mean, I remember he distinctly told me about it, and I was just like, okay, when you get that crazy look in your head, I'm gonna make sure I'm not nearby because I know he'll fight, and now I realize why his kids used to fight at bars and stuff.

Malcolm:

Yeah, but I agree, one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life, and a lot of people don't know this, but he is a great accordion player. Like I could sell accordions, but he would often come up and demo them for the customers. Oh, no way, I'd never seen that. That would I would have paid money for that. So cool. What a cool dude. And then we would do this thing that was like Dungeons and Dragons. He made up for that. Yeah, he made up his own game, and he was also a great artist. He would draw what was happening.

Nithin:

I thought it was hallucinating. I was just about to say, didn't he draw stuff? It was it was very good too. It was great.

Malcolm:

He would come over to our house, and my wife and I, Christine and I, and some other guys, we'd all gather around a table and we'd put soundtrack music on because it would get us in the mood, and then he'd make up these great stories.

Nithin:

I mean, that that whole situation is just like an assault on reality distortion, you know, of perception.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

I mean, every single person had a different concept of what that place was. Right. You know, it was evil, it was great, it was a trash heap, it was metal. It was counterculture, it was to this, it was to that.

Malcolm:

Where else can you meet Ozzie Osborne and Bill Bruford? Dude, and people that have gone through those doors, it was just absolutely incredible.

Nithin:

I mean, guitar throwing contests, literally taking racks of instruments to be played by the wind.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

At the whim of the owner, where I had to stop everything I was doing, didn't matter how much money I was making him,

Malcolm:

yeah,

Nithin:

just to let the wind play instruments in the front of the store on a windy day. I mean, the place was bizarre.

Malcolm:

And Armand, the guy who really started the store was friends with Andy Warhol. He put albums out. I mean, he and Bruce and Blaine are a trio of people like you'll never meet.

Nithin:

I mean, I can't believe we're talking about these guys, but you know, what's funny is like you see movies like Empire Records and stuff, and you go, people think that's like a crazy store or like it's super eccentric. I'm like, that place is the equivalent of like going to the library compared to the place that we sort of cut our teeth.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

In understanding music. I mean, the insane versions of reality they would spin to help their own lore. Then the various personalities of interaction with people, you know, people with tattooed makeup on their face, people that looked like they were homeless but worked there, uh, owner's kids, the owner that looked like Mickey Mouse out of Fantasia after he had a stroke. He actually used to come to the office literally with a wizard's cap and a freaking smock that looked like he was Mickey Mouse from Fantasia.

Malcolm:

Yeah, and just everybody knows this was the 90s and oh in the 2000s, early 2000s. When I was there, uh the owner asked me to do the on-hold messages, and we just made absolutely ridiculously silly messages. And back then, what he would do is he would fax me from home all the deals, and then I would read them aloud and act them out. I mean, it was just it was crazy.

Nithin:

And the bizarre thing is that dude, I don't know if he couldn't read anything or he just didn't know how things were pronounced because he'd write out this crazy script and then I'd have to record him reading it to go on the answering machine.

Malcolm:

I have a better example. Like one time he sent me a fax, and it said, you know, bass sale. We have all the best basses, we have one signed by John Entwistle, blah blah blah. Sends me the fax. I started recording it, and he walks from his house, which was across the street, over upstairs to see me. He goes, What is that word? And I said, It's bass, because you have a bass sale, and he goes, Looks like bass.

Nithin:

Oh, dude.

Malcolm:

And I was like, it's spelled the same way.

Nithin:

He he always would say bass guitar. Anytime there was a David Bowie record, it'd be David Booey. He would say the weirdest stuff. I'm like, is he joking? And it was never

Malcolm:

it was hard to tell. It was very deadpan.

Nithin:

You he was so good at holding a shtick because he's a very smart guy, yeah, that you couldn't really tell other than everything that they did had a weird, non-calculated, very methodical, calculated way of creating an air of pure confusion and chaos at all times, yet somehow having a semblance of imagine like

Malcolm:

Wait, what's that strategy? You know, because you have a masters in business. What's a strategy when you pit all the salesmen against each other in hopes that that will bring more business? I mean, it sounds like Glengarry, Glenn Ross, obviously.

Nithin:

Yeah, I mean, it's just literally creating a competition, it's a rival rivalry basically against everyone. But they did it in it, they did it from a way we don't really need to get into. But if you think about what they did with customers in general, I mean, they had the most analog ways, refused to transition, they didn't know what websites were at the time that we were working there.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

But the web was new, so that's fair. The the reason I keep don't coming back to it is this reality distortion. You hear people talk about people like Steve Jobs and whatever, but like it was a bizarre world. I mean, these guys used to sleep on the front desk, they used to only wear store t-shirts, one never got a license, his wife would drive him to work.

Malcolm:

But you know what's funny is I just had my drum teacher on that taught me when I was younger, and he's from Rochester, just like I am. And he told me a story that so I was on the second floor, and you know this well because you took over after me. Tons of drums for many years. And when I started, there was like this mountain of hardware. I'm not exaggerating, I'm the one that cleaned it up and organized it, but it was a mountain, and so my drum teacher comes up and he's like, I've got this ride symbol stand, but I'm missing a piece. Can you find it? And he said I disappeared into the mountain of gear, and then I came out and he's like, That's it. And that's what it was like when I started there. There was just years and years of not only did it have a lot of cool hardware, but I remember there were all these sonar kits that were up on the wall. And I realized when I got there they had been selling the hardware, and these are kits that hadn't been made for 20 years, so I couldn't sell the kits because I couldn't find the hardware, and it had been sold, and so they just kind of sat there, and then that's how wild and chaotic it was. I mean, but it was great because I remember finding a Roland 808, a Roland 909, Taurus Pedals. I mean, they had crazy stuff. You could it was like digging for treasure there for a while.

Nithin:

It was an active living museum in a lot of ways. Like I cleaned this one room there that no one went into, that room right in the hallway before you went upstairs. I'm trying to hold back on my information on that. I don't know if you've cleaned that room before. But when I got there, no one had cleaned it in a long time, and it was just a pile of old autographed records on the floor when I when I had to clean that room. And I remember finding a sealed copy of Metallica's Kill Em All, signed by the whole band when they recorded it in Rochester.

Malcolm:

And they were big fans of the house. They came in one time and they didn't want to be bothered, so we waited till the store was closed and then just hung out all night.

Nithin:

This this reality distortion thing and the uniqueness of how different people experience the same thing is super intriguing to me, especially with when it pertains to getting used to technology. So, like with music, the big thing was analog to digital forever. Analog to digital. Shoot, there's generations of people, multiple now, that have, unless you proactively do it, have never touched anything that wasn't digital.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

You know, and if they heard something analog, they wouldn't really know it, kind of thing. Versus the argument of it's not real, it's not this, it's not that, it's it's not genuine to the art form, it it sucks the soul out of things, whatever. And with the super changing paradigms of when internet came first.

Malcolm:

And this is how archaic it was. I was so excited to have the internet, but I would go up to my desk where I had a computer, start the dial up, and then I'd go downstairs and work for 45 minutes, because that's how long I remember Tony Levin had one of the first websites, and I was so excited to see it. But I have to wait like half an hour to 45 minutes for the page to load.

Nithin:

Oh gosh, I hated that.

Malcolm:

By the time you got there, it was a little bit better, but not too much.

Nithin:

It was it was better where there was finally e-commerce websites just starting to appear, you know, early stages of Amazon.

Malcolm:

Well, and then you brought up the fact that when I was there, we went from the customers knowing nothing and we could charge whatever we wanted till people would start printing out website things, going, Can you match this price? And and the the people at the store were in shock. And then I remember we started selling all the original software for computers like cakewalk and stuff like that. But then I remember when remember Gibson bought out Opcode and killed it on purpose. Like everything changed so quickly. So you're right, the perception of reality, and the it's almost like the singularity. We're beyond that now, it changed so fast.

Nithin:

And now you add AI to the equation, and

Malcolm:

it's changing every month, if not quicker.

Nithin:

Yeah, and you know, people are like, oh, it's taking the human out of this, it's taking that out of it. In certain ways, it's taking the human out of it. But the reality is in most ways it's being used, and where it's getting its most effect is being an amplifier of your own capability. I mean, there's things I've always wanted to do, and I didn't have a team to do it for like a side project, a fun project.

Malcolm:

And also remember, you didn't have the patience because you could visualize it in your head, but it took so long. And even earlier today, you and I were working on something, and I could not believe how quickly we did it.

Nithin:

Yeah, I mean, it's just the level of which you can get things if you know how to ask for it. Just like you first learned how to code a like an IBM punch card computer for like NASA when they figured out how to do that. Even though it looks like it's a natural interface, it's really like the punch card thing. Once you get how to structure things and then build these inputs, right? What you can get out is so ridiculously useful if you know what you're looking for, yeah, and how to structure it into common methods or modalities. It's crazy. The stuff that I would I'd have teams take months to do five minutes.

Malcolm:

I remember when you were at Yamaha.

Nithin:

Five minutes. And and the stuff I used to come up with my head in five minutes, I can actually give people documents in 15 minutes that have my head to paper to where they I can actually bring them along, which is crazy. I mean I mean,

Malcolm:

people have to get away from adapt and die and get to adapt and live because the the potential is just limitless.

Nithin:

I mean, you don't even have to write manuals. There was a there was a thing I learned how to do, so I had to have my team do it. I go write me a manual step by step that shows pictures of how to do this, and it did it for me. It was crazy. So I didn't even have spent hours doing my own like operating procedure, figuring it out, making sure it was logical. I didn't miss all of them. That's why you could help IKEA. Those are like the worst directions ever. The integration of what you can do like visually and see. Yeah, like Google's got this version of their AI that most people don't. Know have all these robotic stuff they built, they just haven't released that it can literally identify the direction a splash came from or tell you how to move an object from here to there without any instructions. It can just see there's an apple, there's a bowl, take the bowl out of the apple, put it here. Right. And just say, I want the apple to be over here out of the bowl, and it'll actually have an arm automatically programmed to do that. You don't have to write the code to do it. You don't have to give these word instructions the sequence, it'll know how hard to grab the apple. Yeah. Because it's an apple and not a piece of ceramic or not a balloon. Like it is trippy.

Malcolm:

I got a question to ask you though. So when I was younger, there was no autotune, beat detective, all this stuff. You had to really play. Going back in time, you got someone like Beethoven who had to notate and write his music out. But as time went on, during my lifetime, it went from you have to use all these machines and connect them, like I told you, to everything's done on the computer now. So my younger students, when I was a teacher, they did everything on the computer. And we started to see people like Billy Eilish and Finneas recording in their bedroom. They didn't need a studio and stuff like that. Now, those guys are very talented even with straight singing and playing instruments. However, there's a lot of great musicians that only make music by programming their computer, right? Yeah. And a lot of older people are like, that's not real music. And I'm like, no, these people grew up with it. These people would not have been able to express themselves a hundred years ago. So I bring all this to the head to ask you do you think AI is going to bring creative people to the forefront that could not express themselves like this before this technology? Do you see anything hopeful like that emerging?

Nithin:

So what's interesting is like the most prolific example of no quote unquote pedagogical musical skill, so traditional skill with an instrument. Right. But makes popular music is DeadMau5. He uses a mouse and literally draws in everything on his own. He's absolutely incredible. And he does some very, very impressive things. And that was quite a long time ago. Even under his ultra-ego, yeah, when it was harder to do.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

I I would look at it like what PowerPoint changed reality for people in making presentations where at first, like the older people that had it had a hard time, but like their kids saw it and went boom and they could do things like ten times better than them. Yeah, we grew up in a school where they used an opaque projector. Yeah, because it wasn't just as foreign. It would it there wasn't the roadblock mentally of the obstacle because they're just like, oh, it's a it's a different tool.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

I can play with that. Plus, they were used to screens where a lot of us had to learn to be in front of a screen. Like it took me years to be comfortable to read a book. You're almost like a digital.

Nithin:

On a digital screen.

Malcolm:

You're almost like a weatherman. You have got it behind you and you got to figure out how to make it work visually.

Nithin:

So what's interesting is there is a lot of potential for AI to democratize a lot of different knowledge-based skills. So if you're bad if you're a bad writer,

Malcolm:

that's a cool way to put that.

Nithin:

If you're a bad writer, you won't be a great writer, but you can be a mediocre writer that can write stuff for being formatted in the tone of this magazine, that magazine, structure you're writing as an op-ed versus like an editorial.

Malcolm:

How about those people that are great vocal storytellers, but they don't know how to sit down and put it to paper? Does this kind of help them?

Nithin:

Well, not only that, it'll transcribe it.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

Once it transcribes it, you can edit visually by copy and pasting and moving things around. Even better is you could take that information and you can have it extrapolate a series of stories off of the story that you told.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

And make up your own fictional series about a story that you told and animate it and make you full-on content.

Malcolm:

It's almost like that thing we did, like in your in kindergarten, where I draw a line, I give it to you, you add something, and we come up with this great photo. But now AI is gonna do that with you're sitting by yourself in a studio and you're gonna be collaborating, right?

Nithin:

The pureness of ideas and idea execution for people that can explain what they want to execute creates a lot of potential for a lot of people.

Malcolm:

Now, granted that didn't have that potential before. That's what I was getting at, right? There's gonna be a whole new group of people that didn't have the ability to express themselves.

Nithin:

Well, it's just like the drum machine. If someone could hear a pattern and they knew what the patterns would break down, they could get a drum machine to get you a decent rhythm track. Then they needed they realized they needed to be imperfect, so they added swing into the drum machine. You know, there's these different things that it did that once you really understood that, you could actually make it feel more natural when it was doing it when you had no drumming skills.

Malcolm:

And even if you have no sense of rhythm, that's why I brought up the step programming because someone could visually look at it and go, okay, I want eighth notes on the hi-hat. Yeah, you know.

Nithin:

I love step sequencers. They were great when I first started out. I go, wow, I could literally make anything that's interesting in like no seconds, no time. It felt like you were cheating, relative to your friend that was a drummer. Or if I could hear in my head, this is what I want, I could go to a drummer here, right? Paint outside these lines, but this is sort of where the vibe was going. It's just wrong. Make it better because I like how you do you, just do you in this context.

Malcolm:

Right. It's like my friend Dony Wynn, who was Robert Palmer's drummer, he said what would happen is Robert would program everything on machines, and he could also play every instrument, but then he'd hire even better players to execute the original idea.

Nithin:

Yeah, the the the scariest thing about AI in its current form for me is they're all programmed to be nice to you by default. So what it's the trip is people are trying to use it as like psychotherapist, which it's got a lot of great resources for psychology to sort of analyze you, but it's always going to be nicer to you by default unless you tell it to be brutally honest for now and throw straight facts. Yeah. Or in some of the AI models out there, you can actually tell it to be rude to you and it'll be rude to you too. But if you just go by default operations, yeah, it'll actually lead you down the path of wrong information just because you're going with it and engaging with it.

Malcolm:

Yeah.

Nithin:

And it's like, oh yeah, and you're like, oh yeah, it like it'll make up magical reasoning.

Malcolm:

You were saying earlier, what if you have the cheaper version of Chat GPT, it can end up hallucinating. Can you explain that a little bit?

Nithin:

So all of these bigger products that are large language models, the AIs as normal people know them, yeah, are ChatGPT. For nerdier folks, Anthropic's Claude. For people that have heard of Elon Musk, you've got Grok. And then for also nerdier, less relevant to most people, but he'll he's spending lots of money to make it not as irrelevant as Zuckerberg with Meta, has a thing called LLaMA.

Malcolm:

Okay.

Nithin:

All of these are just like imagine them like different guitars or different microphones or different flavors of ice cream. They're all at its core the same thing. So think of it like Baskin Robbins, they're all ice cream. But one could be gelato as ice cream, yeah, as a vibe, one is frozen yogurt, one is custard, and one is like traditional ice cream. At its core, it has a lot of the same ingredients, right? But they have a different vibe and a definite feel of the outputs, different texture, all kinds of kind of thing, and they have different variabilities. Now, they can all sort of sometimes change and act like different ones, but they can all be a myriad of flavors and information, that kind of stuff. So what's interesting is you think of like those old school video games that at the arcade that were time limited that you have to keep putting quarters in because the time would run out.

Malcolm:

Yeah,

Nithin:

so you only have this much time.

Malcolm:

Like a vibrating bed. Yeah.

Nithin:

Okay. I didn't want to go there, but okay.

Malcolm:

Hey, that was a thing.

Nithin:

Yeah.

Malcolm:

When I was growing up, yeah.

Nithin:

I was trying to keep it clean, but okay. Vibrating bed. If you want it to keep going, you gotta give it some money. Right. But that is the title of this episode. Well, what's funny about this is all of like these models that have pay options,

Malcolm:

right?

Nithin:

They have a small amount of information they can handle. It's fairly large in a nerdy data sense, but for normal people, like say you took a chart of music that was like 10 pages long, and you're like, hey, analyze this and make me this, because I heard AIs can do everything.

Malcolm:

Right.

Nithin:

On the free version, even if it's possible in the system,

Malcolm:

yeah,

Nithin:

on the free version, it'll just make up random stuff that's pure crap because it can maybe process one sheet for the free version, but they won't tell you. It's in the fine print somewhere. They can only handle like that one sheet.

Malcolm:

I want you to put more money in.

Nithin:

Right. For it to function, it's like it's like having a transformer half transform and not fully transform until you give it more money to complete the transformation. It's uh so it'll tell you I'm done. This is all I can do.

Malcolm:

It was like Jude Law's character in that creepy AI movie. He was like a pleasure bot

Nithin:

a gain. What is wrong? What is with you today? Oh my gosh. Oh my god. So I was I was talking to this woman who is a composer and she's a professional singer, worked in this town that I was in, and she's like, Yeah, I went to this thing. These things are horrible, they just do garbage. I'm like, Well, which version are you using? Well, the free one. I'm like, what'd you put in there? I put like 20 pages of music and supposed to do this, and it didn't give me anything that made any sense. It was garbage. I'm like, right, well, because you're not paying for it. And I found that I had to go up to almost pro levels for how much I was using it,

Malcolm:

right?

Nithin:

Because the amount of information I needed it to process so it was processing properly,

Malcolm:

right?

Nithin:

It just couldn't do it. It was limited on by design to get you into at least the first level of paid tier. You can do a lot in the first level of paid tier on all these things. Then it's just understanding how to ask it correctly and put in garb rails to prevent it from hallucinating. And that's its own art form if it's really serious stuff. That's why they all have a disclaimer. These things can give you errors. On the bottom of every page of ChatGPT, it says ChatGPT can make mistakes. Ah check important info. Even when I know what I'm doing, more than 95% of the people, and I could I had to do some crazy stuff with these things. It would literally make up websites that didn't exist. Right. It would say it referenced something, and then I go and check that exact website, it definitely didn't reference it. Doing it by all best practices because there's something else still missing in the chain that it didn't like how I asked it. And it's also the complexity. So it's great at singular tasks or things that have like three steps. Anything that's more than three steps, they sort of mess up on you. Right. Unless you break them up into individual processes and it does one of them at a time. And that's an own its own art form of teaching it how to do those things.

Malcolm:

Right. So it's and in the grand scheme of things, it's still in its infancy, right?

Nithin:

Technically, in November twenty two, when ChatGPT came out to the normal people, even though it'd been around for like eight years, it was sort of an accident how they got it to the level that it was. Sort of, I say, because this woman that was their one of their top tech uh technology people figured out something no one in the whole space of AI could figure out. And once she had it do this thing, all of a sudden you could actually ask it a question and give you a reasonable answer. And that's when they decide to go public and then just sort of make up features. It was crazy. It went nuclear. It went from like it's gonna be a research tool, it's gonna be free to everybody for life. And the instant she figured this out, they're like, nope, we're making money, we're changing the whole business model at a time. Of course, we're announcing it to everybody, and that's when this whole AI assault on life came. But with that, it's absolutely empowering to people that don't have teams, people that maybe you're not good with the anxiety of team collaboration, but you know what you want to get done. And imagine if you have the perfect analyst or pretty darn close to the perfect analyst that had access to more information than you could imagine, or you could get access to more information than you can imagine from all sorts of data sources, current, past, whatever, you know, patent documentation, scholarly books. You know, if you could quickly summarize any article that you had in like two seconds, right? Because you don't have that much time, but you sort of want to know and be current. Like there's there's a ton of ways you can do all sorts of things that you never knew you could do. But with it, the more people get dependent on it, the less functional they are at a lot of things. It's sort of like remembering phone numbers.

Malcolm:

I I have a personal theory that I think, like when I grew up, you did have to memorize everybody's phone number. I think that part of my brain has been replaced by passwords. There's so many passwords, and I think that same little tank that held that information before has just been replaced.

Nithin:

Well, surface level studies in the short time that these things have been there with these AI things are now having the same problem with just basic memory because of how people are pulling information. They're like, I don't need to remember anything, it's all here.

Malcolm:

As you know, and we talked about this in the last few episodes. I my teaching job has ended after 12 years, and I've been going through this the last few months trying to figure out what to do next with my life, and I've been trying all kinds of things. Everybody keeps telling me, Malcolm, figure out what you want to do in manifest. The problem is I am one of those few people that cannot visualize anything. In fact, I'm a very auditory learner. You know, I I have dreams that are powerful, but I can't remember what they look like. I constantly compose music that's really cool, but I don't see it in my head. I don't see it ahead of time. It kind of just materializes. So for somebody that's trying to grab the reins and figure out the next part of their journey, but they can't visualize things in their mind, do you think that this AI technology can help somebody like me?