Reality Perception Distortion: Part 2 - Schrödinger's Cat & Pavlov's Dog

Reality can get weird fast when your brain is wired differently. In Part 2 of Reality Perception Distortion, Nithin Cherian and Malcolm Moore riff on what happens when perception becomes your operating system—especially if you can’t “see” images in your mind the way other people can.

They use AI as the flashlight: not as magic, but as rapid prototyping for ideas, worlds, and next steps. Along the way, they spiral into a monkey/banana/grape “reality distortion” bit, the anxiety of walled gardens (Apple vs Android energy… but for AI), and the uncomfortable truth that sometimes the “food just appears” because we’ve been trained to expect it.

It’s playful, philosophical, and practical—ending with the cleanest metaphor button: Pavlov’s dog vs Schrödinger’s cat. (And yes, you’ll probably laugh while questioning your own defaults.)

Referenced in This Episode (go deeper) 

Aphantasia, Classical Conditioning, Schrödinger’s Cat, Sphere (Las Vegas)

Core Ideas - Perception isn’t just a lens—it becomes the whole room if you’re not careful. - AI can function like “rapid prototyping” for thought (especially for non-visual thinkers). - Platforms won’t magically unify—interoperability is a choice, not a guarantee. - Conditioning is real: sometimes we don’t notice what trained us until we miss the reward.

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www.playthespaces.com

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

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Malcolm & Nithin

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Transcript

Nithin 0:22

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 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 0:49

Welcome back. This is Play the Spaces with Nithin Cherian and Malcolm Moore. Do you think that this AI technology can help somebody like me?

Nithin 1:03

Yeah, it's sort of like uh rapid prototyping technique. So a lot of people that manifesting is a hindrance for, you know, how do you what are like practical tools that you can sort of bring in and replace to try to help you with manifesting things better?

Malcolm 1:21

Right.

Nithin 1:22

If if that if that makes sense is

Malcolm 1:24

I mean, because I've been stuck in that thing. I'm like, okay, I can't visualize. I need to kind of speak this into existence. This is not like a weird mystical thing.

Nithin 1:32

I mean, to help Malcolm... it's a disorder called aphantasia, which is the inability to visualize mental images. And if you go by the basic research, it probably affects less than 4% of people. There are surveys of just perception. Like there was a big Ugov survey in the last couple years that 33% of the people said they had some sort of issue with mental imagery, but in general, it's less than 4%. Depending on how rankings are in the scientific studies, it's less than 10%.

Malcolm 2:03

Do you think it's like one kind of thinker, though? Because I've had a lot of students that that have synesthesia, and you know, and they they see the colors and stuff like that. Am I just a different type of learner?

Nithin 2:12

So it's it's not a learning style, it's not a weird disorder, it's actually a it's a cognitive brain type.

Malcolm 2:20

Right.

Nithin 2:21

So it's it's nothing disorder-based, it's just the way that your brain processes you have all these aptitudes that work a certain way and that work to your advantage a certain way. And so, you know, some people that have these issues have face recall problems or diminished face recall problems. Some people have issues with like memory recall or like things like spatial reasoning. Well, a lot of us sometimes be a problem.

Malcolm 2:50

A lot of us like this,

Nithin 2:51

we you say depth perception all the time, but that's actually part of the issue. Forget the issues you actually have physically, part of the issue is also related to your aphantasia.

Malcolm 3:01

Yeah, I have to see something in front of me. And a lot of times I wake up from a dream and I was like, was I dreaming about Nithin or his dad? Because a lot of times in my dreams, I remember that somebody phases from one person to the other. And then when I wake up and I try to visualize what happened, it just dissipates and goes away. But I can remember the emotion. I can remember why I was upset and kind of what happened, but I can't visualize the house I was in or the person I was talking to.

Nithin 3:31

Well, so the the greatest thing about the issue you have is if you can speak it and describe it, you could actually take it to an image model and have it recreated.

Malcolm 3:42

 That was what I was kind of asking, that we be fascinating for me.

Nithin 3:45

So techniques that they try to teach for problem solving for people with this visualization issue a lot have to do with what you would call what I call rapid prototyping in the manufacturing world, which is how you just quickly take from idea to something physical you could look at. So if you think of like a 3D printer, if I wanted to make a 3D printer of a new phone case, I could just take that draw, take a drawing, take it to a printer, it would make it for me. And 30 minutes later, 10, 5 minutes later, whatever, whatever it takes. I don't know.

Malcolm 4:14

Right.

Nithin 4:15

It won't take months and go into a tool shop and whatever to do it, it just creates it. In a similar way, you can describe anything as long as you learn to describe in the way it's most advantageous for the systems currently, and it'll get better. Every year it's gonna get better. Honestly, every six months it's been getting better.

Malcolm 4:33

Right.

Nithin 4:33

You you may not need to translate it, but right now, if you can get good at speaking things into existence the way it likes to hear it, you can get really close for it to recreate worlds based on your description. What would be actually super sick, and what I mean by sick is super cool, is I'd love to see someone do this, I'm sure someone will. Is imagine taking a book on tape, having one of these things analyze it versus like the movie that someone made that actually used the original writer to help doing the screenplay and see how different or the same the parallel worlds would be if it just took the descriptions of the setting environments from like the novels, right? And you put it into one of these things and see what the world it would be.

Malcolm 5:17

Illustrate it. Yeah, right.

Nithin 5:18

Yeah, have it illustrate an image of the world or rendition of the world, have it even animate the characters' movements based on what we think these character things are. I mean, it's sort of crazy you can do that. Like right now, some things you could take a you can take a singular image and it can make it 3D, and then you could make a person move in space. You could make people do different things that they didn't do from one picture. But the greater thing is if in your head, if you're not a visualizer and you're trying to get something visually communicated, you can describe it and literally like a sculptor, re-edit what you explain to fix little parts of what are built right or wrong when it visualizes it for you and get it to a point that's close to you know

Malcolm 5:57

I know myself well enough. If I could do that, I know what would happen. I would get it close and then it would do something incorrectly, and I go, Oh, I like that better. You know what I mean? It would it could turn into this great creative thing where you're trying to visualize it, you're trying to ask a computer to help you with it, but then these unexpected things that it does, you accept and grab that and add it to what you originally thought of. It's like playing jazz.

Nithin 6:24

One of the most interesting platforms I've seen in in recent years is there's this one company that they've gone to prolific people that are still alive. Right. And they make a virtual version of that person they can rent out, that speaks in their mannerisms, that answers in the modalities that they do for the specific thing that they're famous for by taking hundreds and hundreds of documents, hundred you know, hours and hours of interviews they can find online, and they use all of that to aggregate a thing that looks and sounds like them as like a virtual head and can basically talk to you.

Malcolm 6:57

Sounds like something from Futurama.

Nithin 6:59

Sort of. It's it's like

Malcolm 7:01

You know who you're making me think of is my favorite living piano player is Mike Garson, who's known for playing with David Bowie. I know you got to work with him briefly at Yamaha. Now there's a prolific guy. Ridiculous. Because remember, he composes live.

Nithin 7:17

Yeah.

Malcolm 7:17

It's nuts. And so that's a prolific guy. So what if we applied his skills? I mean, you could.

Nithin 7:24

I mean, if he could slow down enough to have to learn a new method of expression. Yeah. I mean, you have to look at these things like musical instruments when you learn a new version of, like, say, a keyboard. Right. Keyboard version one had just piano keys and sound sort of like a piano. And then over the years, they added sequencers, they added samplers, they added modulators, they added synth engines that would move for manipulate, like they did sample engines, all these crazy things, and they had them abstract by working within each other. So you had learned all this stuff.

Malcolm 7:53

Going from monophonic to polyphonic.

Nithin 7:55

Yeah. So multiple notes triggered at a time, whatever, mono stereo, yeah, all these insane things. In the same way, the computer is a different this tool is a different way of expression that now is sort of like a factory for ideas. So democratizing ideas in anything. Like if you wanted to explain a patent idea and then have it search against the idea you have to see if there's patents exist instead of having to deal with the patent actual website, it can search the patent website for you and do the work for you. And infer

Malcolm 8:30

and save you time.

Nithin 8:30

So you don't even have to do the right way of searching and learning the way to do the syntax right. You can just be like, okay, I have this crazy idea that every time you see a monkey, you really see a banana. But when you see a banana, you see a grape. But every time you see a monkey, you only see a banana. And it's this new thing that I don't know, some weird lens filter that's just it's monkey C, and monkey only sees banana because it's always hungry. I don't know. I decide I want to patent this idea. Does anybody have this that exists?

Speaker 1 9:07

Right.

Nithin 9:08

You can have it give you a framework of what this concept is, yeah, and get it really a theory abstraction of the weirdness of this and it'll give it to you. You could have it frame it like an idea and make it into a product and say it's this thing, and it's gonna work like this and go search the patent database against it. Okay. I didn't find anything that's super similar, exactly the same, but they're similar. But this is why it could be more novel or not. Would you like me to write a patent for you? And be like, sure, write the patent for me. It'll write the patent for you. Would you like me to do the rest of the application steps? Because you need this document, you need this. Yeah, sure. It can do that document.

Malcolm 9:44

What I would love it is if they could help write grants. Those are so intimidating to me.

Nithin 9:48

There's a couple companies that specialize in grant writing that do that stuff. So you don't have to do the homework to do it for certain types of grants. And as long as you're willing to pay the fee, there's absolutely services that'll help you apply for grants.

Malcolm 9:59

With AI.

Nithin 10:00

Yeah, absolutely.

Malcolm 10:01

Wow, that is really cool.

Nithin 10:02

So if you know sort of what you want to do, you can go to their platform that'll tell you what grants exist and it'll help you apply for them.

Malcolm 10:07

Well, it's interesting because they say some people are right-brained or left-brained, or some are well balanced. But I wonder if this will fill the gap of someone like me who's like very creative and head in the clouds, but the practical logistical parts of life are difficult. I wonder if it'll help or somebody that's the other way around.

Nithin 10:25

Well, it's like when we we talked about it on your like before when we were talking about creativity a long time ago, not in this podcast, but in general, we've talked about this. My current business partner, I got to working with him because he figured out AI could do the one thing that made him nuts when he was going to school for music production, which is when I'm writing music, I want to be in a creative headspace. I don't want to worry about this button, this key switch, this keystroke, this key command, this click this, do this, do this, do this.

Malcolm 10:54

Right.

Nithin 10:55

I just want to create while I'm vibing in the moment and the flow of it, I want to stay in the flow.

Malcolm 11:00

Right.

Nithin 11:00

So he literally wrote his own protocol to make the software allow him to talk to it like he was talking to a buddy of his.

Malcolm 11:11

Right.

Nithin 11:11

So he could stay in the flow of creative space instead of having to worry about all this mechanical stuff. And then he'd refine it later. But at least he can get really close and keep the idea down so it wouldn't ruin the vibe of whatever take he was what thing he was trying to create.

Malcolm 11:24

R ight. By the ti me you got everything up and going, you forget the initial idea, and that takes that out of the way. That's brilliant.

Nithin 11:30

So for him, it was I just want this thing to keep me in the creative flow, and I think everybody else should have the power for that. Within that, there's so many tools that we can make, and at some point we will make. But that idea of democratizing these abstract things by making them palpable, because most people want them in traditional frameworks anyway.

Malcolm 11:49

Right.

Nithin 11:52

Almost anybody can write a book now. If you needed a great editor, you can even ask it to edit in the style of books published by this publishing house in this time period because it has a record of all these books. So it'll analyze all those books. You could probably even figure out who the editor was and say, edit in the style of this editor in this period of years. I want my book to be edited like that. Tell me why it's possible or not, and if it is possible, do it. And it will do it.

Malcolm 12:20

You could write your story about the monkey and the banana in the style of Charles Dickens.

Nithin 12:25

And then where's the grape? I mean, because can the banana see? I don't know. But when you get banana, there's a grape. I don't know. Monkey sees banana. It's the greatest app ever. It doesn't make any sense. You try to touch it, it turns back into it turns into a grape.

Malcolm 12:41

Wow.

Nithin 12:42

But monkey only sees banana. Everything's banana. Everything comes up banana. Again, reality distortion.

Malcolm 12:51

Bananas and pajamas.

Nithin 12:52

Didn't even do that on purpose. I didn't even do it on purpose, and I created a reality distortion app of the monkey seeing banana, and it's a grape. Who knew? Never what he wanted, but he thought he did the whole time.

Malcolm 13:07

Now you totally fucked me up. Now I've lost my train of thought.

Nithin 13:10

It's like that job you think you want, you don't really want until you get it. Then you're like, I hate this job. This is awful. I don't even care about the money. It's so bad. Everybody has their own sense of reality just like they do their own voice, this reality distortion. So with me, I think my voice sounds like this. But in reality, it sounds like this. And it's crazy to me every time. I swear it sounds like my nose is plugged when I hear a recording of myself all the time. So I definitely sound way less smooth than I realize than in my brain that I do, which is awful.

Malcolm 13:44

Part of that reality distortion to me though is I've learned as I get older, just get over yourself. I mean your perception of yourself is pretty much there's not too many people I think that their perception of themselves is what everybody else sees. You may try to get there, but I don't know if you can always get there.

Nithin 14:02

Well it's like we said in the other episodes, it's the reality of it all comes down to why is it important to have a certain semblance of understanding of your perception and how you affect space.

Malcolm 14:13

Yeah.

Nithin 14:13

But more importantly, why I wanted to bring it up in this context was it's also having empathy of someone else's existence of what they're getting into. If you think of the music store paradigm, it's a place where to everyone it's a different thing. For some person, it's a job. For some pre people, it's discovery or bring something to life that only existed virtually. For some people it's community. For some people, it's that paycheck. I mean, some people it's a place you come to learn, some place you get things to fix. For every single person that comes in that day, there's some different reality to them.

Malcolm 14:53

Right.

Nithin 14:54

And

Malcolm 14:55

or how about many within one person, too?

Nithin 14:58

And the purpose that it fills. And you know, when you pass people in the day, when you realize that you have these things or that everybody's trying to do these things, even though you're doing similar things, a lot of times you're doing similar things for different purposes.

Malcolm 15:14

Right.

Nithin 15:15

And, you know, it's like learning how to reserve judgment, not to get stressed, not to get triggered, all these things. But also the way it can broaden you and center you and even help you find people once you start recognizing their similarities and the differences.

Malcolm 15:33

Right.

Nithin 15:34

That, you know, these common threads, you know, for anything of perception should make you understand that a lot of things are also very translatable. You know, skills are translatable, understandable, learnable, even though it doesn't look the way you think it should, or you think it looks one way and it's really another in the case of the monkey and the banana,

Malcolm 15:56

right?

Nithin 15:56

And it's a grape.

Malcolm 15:57

Right.

Nithin 15:58

You know, because monkeys see banana. That's such a great app.

Malcolm 16:01

Look at the dog with a bone. I just want to say drop it.

Nithin 16:06

Because I just I keep seeing this hologram of the banana that the monkey's chasing around, and every time it goes to touch it, it turns to a grape, and it just wants to gag a little.

Malcolm 16:15

Wow, dude. I don't want to look into the metaphor of what that really represents.

Nithin 16:20

I mean, it's like the dangling carrot that people put, you know, or the dog on a treadmill with a piece of steak hanging over its head or something, or a bone.

Malcolm 16:30

I wonder if this whole advent of AI, though, is going to eventually bring people together because it's going to compensate for I don't want to say weaknesses, but areas of your that you struggle with. And if it can fill the gaps, maybe people will understand each other more because they'll be able to realize you know, you you're a pretty well-balanced, smart guy. And when I say that, I mean you you know a little bit of everything. And but not everybody's like that. So if everyone could kind of even out, maybe understand each other more and get a more realistic perspective.

Nithin 17:08

Well, the the great thing is if you think of a corporation where you have a team of ten people and half your day is spent doing these reports and things that take hours to collate,

Malcolm 17:15

yeah,

Nithin 17:16

and you can run one in five minutes,

Malcolm 17:17

right?

Nithin 17:18

You can actually have more team time that becomes more positive time or even away time from your team or time in the field. So you can actually create more chances for human interaction without losing productivity. So there is a unique opportunity to restructure what a day can look like in the positive of increased human interaction and actually being really effective, positive human interaction versus just wasted banter on gossip around the water cooler because you're just annoyed by all these annoying things that you have to do,

Malcolm 17:51

right?

Nithin 17:51

Versus, oh, I just hit the oh, it's done button. Boom. Because like somebody figured out how to do it. I hit a button, gets me what I need. Now we just sort of talk about it. We discuss it through, we go through iterations together, and then we go have it do something again based on that stuff, and comes back, and all of a sudden you have this rapid prototyping thing that brings everybody on the page together because you might not be visual, but you can talk about it, but now you can create visuals that you can talk to a person that's only visual, that doesn't get the words.

Malcolm 18:23

I spent a lot of my life helping the special needs population, and now I'm wondering if the things that artificial intelligence offers are gonna help people that struggle with things like dyslexia.

Nithin 18:38

You hope. You think you could, you know, actually a great thing like that, it's not dyslexia, but there's a mode on some cell phones that changes how the screen visualizes to reduce dizziness if you look at the phone while you're driving, to reduce motion sickness. There's actually a mode you can enable on some phones.

Malcolm 18:56

So everybody can customize what their computer and their phone does so it works better with their. I mean, you know, there's always this person wants Android, this person wants an iPhone, this person wants a Pixel.

Nithin 19:07

But it was sort of part of a decision, it's actually part of an accessibility function where you can turn it on to actually reduce motion sickness when looking at the screen.

Malcolm 19:15

That's really cool, but you know how like when Steve Jobs was alive, he made sure that Apple products didn't work with PC products and things like that. Do you see any competition between AI companies that could end up making things more challenging for the customers? Does that make any sense?

Nithin 19:35

Yeah, I mean, right now, all these big companies.

Malcolm 19:37

Like, like, and let me just say an example everybody would know. If somebody has an Android phone and I have an iPhone and I'm and I say, Can you send me the video of your kid playing in that performance last night? It's gonna be all blurry.

Nithin 19:50

So yes

Malcolm 19:52

on purpose.

Nithin 19:53

So, well, yes and no. It's actually without getting nerdy, how the Android texts is different. Than the Apple text, and that was a Steve Jobs thing.

Malcolm 20:02

Right.

Nithin 20:02

Use a different texting thing. But that's why you could use WhatsApp and do it without a problem. Use a different messaging service.

Malcolm 20:08

Yeah, I mean, everybody knows that you can run it through like Instagram or Facebook. But what uh the the gist of what I'm saying is, do you see any harmful competition between different AI companies?

Nithin 20:22

No, but I you're you're seeing strengths that happen right now. So certain companies they can do this function better than other companies figured out how to do it.

Malcolm 20:30

Right.

Nithin 20:30

So you're finding reasons to use one platform for certain tasks and other platforms for other tasks,

Malcolm 20:37

right?

Nithin 20:37

So on and so forth. Will they put guardrails in? Possibly. There's there's new well, the hallucinating.

Malcolm 20:44

That's kind of like a guardrail that's already there, right?

Nithin 20:47

Yeah.

Malcolm 20:48

Within one company.

Nithin 20:49

Well, all of them actually have hallucinations in the same way.

Malcolm 20:51

Yeah.

Nithin 20:51

They they all work the same way with that once you exceed a thing. But because Chat GPT has sort of become like the Kleenex of tissues, you know, for AI, right? People don't realize there's other ones for normal people that just don't care about technology.

Malcolm 21:08

Yeah.

Nithin 21:08

So they've spent five minutes in it. But on that thing, when you try something something complicated, because the implication is they're easy, they're not really yet. They're getting there, but they're they're not there yet. So it's a little early for people that don't want to be super heady.

Nithin 21:24

With all of these things and all the things that are abstractions when paradigms change, there are potentials for increased fear, there's potential for some to be increased increasingly isolated, but there's a potential for also for people to come together more often. And there's potential for expression in different ways than were before. If you just think about people that could only draw, and then all of a sudden there was image editors on computers where you could digitally draw.

Speaker 1 21:57

Right.

Nithin 21:57

If you could think about you could only make film photos or videos, because you could maybe do a still picture, but there was not enough memory on these things to do video more than a couple minutes.

Malcolm 22:10

Right.

Nithin 22:11

And it was at crappy quality to do it. You know, now I mean the countless hours, slow-mo, different filters, these crazy things. If you think of what that's done to video, it's definitely changed the landscape of jobs. We know people that have been affected by it extremely, especially in the professional sense.

Malcolm 22:28

Absolutely.

Nithin 22:29

Now what became a consumer thing that there was still a bridge and a gap between consumer and professional technologies. AI in certain spaces, especially in media creation, because so many people create content now that one of the first places AI has been applied to is in vastly improved abilities of content creation. So creating good still images, sceneries, cityscapes, virtual scapes to creating video has totally shifted the whole professional landscape of what people had as protected jobs that were very difficult to do. And these things are

Malcolm 23:08

I've talked with a lot of friends about journalism and how that's changed.

Nithin 23:11

Yeah.

Malcolm 23:11

I recently talked to my friend J.C. Gabel, he's a book publisher. He used to work for Pitchfork magazine, and he said he kind of got out of it because in the modern world, if you're a journalist and you're writing an article, to make sure enough people read it and gets out there and gets the advertising and everything, you're going to spend most of your day online on social media getting your stuff out there, and it takes time away from the actual writing.

Nithin 23:37

Yeah. I mean, that's anything. You make music. How many people have to how many hours are you spending time really making music if you're a professional musician anymore?

Malcolm 23:43

Yeah, it's really the dichotomy between things being oversaturated, but also giving people a chance that never did before.

Nithin 23:50

Yeah, because now how many thousands of people? I mean, you mentioned Billie Eilish and her brother FINNEAS.

Malcolm 23:55

Right.

Nithin 23:55

They wouldn't have existed.

Malcolm 23:57

No.

Nithin 23:57

They might have

Malcolm 23:58

And it doesn't mean they're not talented, they're phenomenally talented.

Nithin 24:02

But to get a polished, a fairly polished product, yeah, it got finished at a label, a good mixer had it, and mastering engineer. But even to do a solid demo that was convincing enough with the complexity of stuff, some of the stuff they had.

Malcolm 24:12

I remember it wasn't too long ago, early 2000s, we were at my house in upstate New York, and remember that what was it, a Korg recorder? We couldn't believe that we could record and that would spit out a CD when we were done. It was my D16XD. Because before that, you'd have to pay so much money to get a master CD. And remember we played, we mixed and we there was the CD.

Nithin 24:33

Remember the duplicator the HOG had? It was a big deal that was in a magazine kind of thing they got published, an article. They bought a duplicator that could make multiple copies of your CD. I mean, I mean, that's when Kodak had a whole CD division.

Malcolm 24:47

Yeah.

Nithin 24:48

You know, and then that went by the wayside. Yeah. You know, it went out. So many formats. Like anything, I mean, the different thing is there's the potential of democratization of so many knowledge-based skills that it's gonna be like, you know, so I I can't believe I'm gonna say this out loud. I I joke around with one of my partners that my brain, especially as a kid, was a lot like an AI. I understood how to quickly infer statistical things to make understandings, but I had no contextual awareness because I didn't experience them. So, like I was giving dating advice at 13 and I never dated before.

Malcolm 25:29

Right.

Nithin 25:30

I was giving relationship advice, I was giving career advice, and it made sense, and a lot of it worked for people, but no context.

Malcolm 25:38

Right.

Nithin 25:39

I just understood the practice, I understood the nuances of the practice, and I knew I could break things down in a way people couldn't, so I could help them see and solve the problem. But that lack of contextual awareness that took me it depending on the topic, some took a few months, some took decades to have contextual understanding of what I didn't know is a lot like where these tools are right now.

Malcolm 26:05

Right.

Nithin 26:05

There's all this information that's accessible, but the beauty is it none of it has the contextual awareness. So if you as a person has a certain skill set or an understanding or a unique blends, you can use these to bring that information to you faster instead of using the Dewey Decimal system to find books. You know, no card catalog required. No microf- Oh my gosh, was that stuff a nightmare? I mean, it's sort of cool, old school, but still like weird horror movie kind of stuff. Now you can bring information to you very quickly.

Malcolm 26:37

Yeah,

Nithin 26:38

it's just what you do with it, and having a situational awareness that creates context that can create the magic for it is now very interesting.

Malcolm 26:47

Yeah.

Nithin 26:48

So that extension and the opportunity that it brings is great. But, you know, as they at Spider-Man would say, with great power comes great responsibility.

Malcolm 26:59

And I've often said you're like a super villain who usurps everyone's powers and you just take it into yourself, and now you're like you have everyone's tentacles all moving. You're like Doc Ock. There you go.

Nithin 27:14

Yeah, or if you remember that series heroes,

Malcolm 27:16

of course with Sylar.

Nithin 27:18

Yeah, I would be that character. Open their brain, you know, kill them and take their power, but I don't have to kill them to take their power.

Malcolm 27:28

AI is just like anything. There's good things you can do with it and bad things you can do with it.

Nithin 27:31

I like to think I'm more like Rogue where she takes her glove off and touches you and absorbs your power just temporarily. I sort of have that skill set. But but anyway, that that situational awareness and understanding and lack of perspective is what these tools have, but in that same token, powerful.

Malcolm 27:50

Right.

Nithin 27:50

Powerful, powerful, powerful potential if you're willing to put a little bit of work in to understand how to get it to get you what what you want out of it.

Malcolm 27:58

Right.

Nithin 27:59

And if you don't understand it, the greatest thing you can do is ask it, how do I do this?

Malcolm 28:04

Yeah.

Nithin 28:05

And it'll tell you how you talk to it.

unknown 28:08

I am sentient.

Nithin 28:10

It'll actually tell you how to talk to it better.

Malcolm 28:12

Right.

Nithin 28:13

It'll tell you about these things, it can create a step-by-step learning guide. It can do all these things. So if there's a topic you want to learn, there's a new study and learn function on ChatGPT. It'll take a topic, break it down, create a lesson plan for you, and teach you a topic if you would like.

Malcolm 28:28

But eventually it's gonna be like HAL 9000. It's gonna be like Nithin. I'm sorry. I can't do that.

Nithin 28:34

Yeah, or worse, it'll make up a bunch of random stuff and get me to do things just so I can become a battery, like The Matrix.

Malcolm 28:42

We'll be in the background going,

Nithin 28:44

yeah, pretty much. Oh my god. My I have a friend that always says we're in a simulation. You know, you just it's just catching up now. We're we're in a simulation.

Malcolm 28:56

Yeah, I just went to the there's a new place called Cosm here in LA. I went to with my friends Bella and Matt, and it's kind of like the Sphere in Las Vegas where you're inside the movie, and we saw the I think it's the 25th, 26th anniversary of Matrix. And it's just that the message of that movie was way ahead of its time.

Nithin 29:15

Yeah.

Malcolm 29:16

They were worried about the threat of AI. Back then we were like, what?

Nithin 29:20

Well, I mean, the Terminator is definitely a possible reality enough that these people that are developing the AIs all have bunkers now. And not just COVID bunkers, but bunkers to isolate them from the world. So if the machines take over, they can still survive and still be puppet masters of everything.

Malcolm 29:37

Well, and also it's turning into the reality of that movie Wag the Dog, where we're we're looking at the news and it's hard to tell what's real anymore and what's not.

Nithin 29:45

Yeah, I mean, you they're so good at faking things now. I mean, the amount of

Malcolm 29:50

It's getting pretty hard to tell, but when I drive around Hollywood, I I see lots of what I call robot baby carriages, these little things that are delivering food. All that you know, carefully crossing the street. And you know, as you said that when we moved to California, driving here is like playing a video game. You've got people with scooters, you've got drones flying, and it's just absolutely bizarre.

Nithin 30:12

People jumping out of their cars fighting each other. I wish

Malcolm 30:16

like ninjas? What are you talking about?

Nithin 30:18

Dude, I watched somebody literally bump another car in the road, they both stopped, got out of the car in the middle of the highway, and then I drove off so I wouldn't get shot.

Malcolm 30:25

Yeah.

Nithin 30:26

Because that's a thing that happens here regularly that doesn't happen at other places. Yeah.

Malcolm 30:32

The only thing we don't have is rickshaws, and I say we introduce those. We've got everything else. I think we need to add those.

Nithin 30:38

The last need thing we need to do is help people reduce their ability to be fat. Come on. We were talking about Wally or getting paid while exercising. No, there's no there's no need to do that. I mean, that reminds me of watching the biggest loser documentary on Netflix that just came out.

Malcolm 30:53

Which one?

Nithin 30:53

The biggest loser. They did there's a two-part documentary about the whole biggest loser TV show and how it came about.

Malcolm 30:58

Oh, I have not seen that.

Nithin 30:59

I've I've only seen the first half of it, but it I mean, it's just funny when you're remembering reality shows are so engineered that you know, like this one guy that was on season four, he's like, I had to apply like four different times, different ways for them to finally pay attention to me and like let me be on the show. But I wanted it so bad I just had to keep trying.

Malcolm 31:21

Listen, my response to all this is I want my MTV. I was so upset, and I know why they did it, but when MTV went from music to reality shows, I was like, I'm done, I'm out of here. It was so fun to watch music back in the day. I mean, we have YouTube now, I guess it doesn't matter, but man.

Nithin 31:40

There is a thing that I miss, even though you make it it programming on television or radio. It's like when somebody makes dinner for you but doesn't tell you what's for dinner, just the food appears. For some reason, it's almost always a little bit better as long as it's within things that you like. It's like, ooh, I didn't have to think about it. Something great just happened. I just got like a cookie, or I got like like... Ma made spaghetti today.

Malcolm 32:10

It's like a Pavlov's dog type of thing.

Nithin 32:12

You know, like there's days where if I was in a bad mood, I just put on the TV and just you know, you put it on one of those channels that always reruns like old school movies and stuff, and you just veg of like, oh cool, this one's on. Yeah, that's sort of good for this mood. Why not? I'll sit there and watch that one. But I would never pick to watch the movie. But if it got served to me, oh, I would absolutely watch it. And then as soon as I've gotten to the first five minutes, I'd have to watch the whole thing and burn a whole day after like two movies.

Malcolm 32:39

So basically, you're Pavlov's dog, and I'm Schrodinger's cat. And I think that's a good place to end this conversation.

Nithin 32:47

Yeah, but I mean, how many people that were listening to this know who either of those things are?

Malcolm 32:51

I don't even know. I'm the cat. I don't know if I'm in the box or not. I'm not sure. Maybe we'll find out on the next episode.

Nithin 32:57

I just keep eating from...

Nithin 32:59

(laughter) God.

Malcolm 33:05

All right.

Nithin 33:06

You're gonna force people to do research now and figure out what the hell we're just talking about.

Malcolm 33:10

I'm signing off, panda paws.

Nithin 33:12

Nice. Mint tingling. That wasn't yours, though. I think that was Christine's. That is a good place to stop, though. All right.

Malcolm 33:22

Awesome, man. See you next time.