Leo [00:00:25]: So, Gary. Yeah. I'm having kind of an existential. Existential crisis. Oh, yeah, I've been using Claude occasionally for a number of things. I'll talk about some of the technical stuff later if we've got time. But one of the things I often do is if I'm kind of iffy on a question, I'll just take somebody's question verbatim, copy paste it into Claude and see what it comes up with. And over the last couple of years, it's been getting better and better and better to the point where, you know, no, it's not good enough yet. Leo [00:01:08]: But I can see the writing on the wall. Just yesterday, I think it was, or the day before, I updated an article how I use AI at Ask Leo, because I do. And there was a scenario in there where, you know, the old article, I threw in a question. It came up with answers that were. Answer adjacent to what I was looking for. Right. Gary [00:01:34]: Yeah. Leo [00:01:35]: It gave me some very interesting information that didn't really answer the question, whereas, and that was two years ago yesterday, I threw a such a different question because things have moved on. And it gave me an answer where I said, you know, this isn't how I would write it. And I quibble with a couple of minor points, but if somebody asked Claude this question and it gave them this answer, I would not feel uncomfortable. I would, I would be satisfied that, you know, if they understood the answer, that they had gotten the answer that they want. Gary [00:02:12]: Right. Leo [00:02:13]: So that, like I said, I can read the writing on the wall. We're, we're. I don't want to say that we're screwed, but in the very long run, yeah, we're probably screwed. What do we do? Gary [00:02:34]: Yeah, I look at more as like, you know, there's, you know, there's icebergs ahead. Can't just, you know, go, keep going straight. We're gonna. You're gonna have to maneuver, right. Or we're going down. So there's going to be some work to be done to figure out what the future of sites like as Leo and MacMost are. Because it's going to change. That's the only certainty I think is it's going to have to change somehow. Gary [00:03:03]: Will it change in a way that our two sites are still there and that we're needed or not? That's the big question. Leo [00:03:12]: And I think, you know what? I honestly believe that the answer is no. Our sites will, at some point in the future, no longer be needed. I think that much is pretty clear. What isn't clear is when that happens and what things look like between now and then. I mean, we've already been affected, right, when as soon as Google started throwing AI summaries in the search results, our traffic went down because people, quote unquote, didn't really need us anymore. Gary [00:03:48]: Right. Leo [00:03:49]: They got the answer from Google. Now the same kind of thing is happening with AI. Although in your notes you raised some really good comments on or some really good points on the state of AI today. It's still hallucinating and it's still not quite understanding. I get this all the time where I'll ask a question about a particular piece of software and, and it'll give me an answer based on the previous version or the previous, previous version of that software rather than the version that I'm actually using the current version. Gary [00:04:24]: Yeah, and that's, I imagine, a worse problem for Mac users because of the yearly major updates to macOS. Which doesn't necessarily mean that like you, you know, things have changed so much that, you know, there's new things you can do or you can't do. It's just that where things are change. Leo [00:04:44]: Yes, that's exactly right. Gary [00:04:47]: The answer you would expect from me would be to what, you know, Mac OS right now. What is how do you do this? But the answer you often get from AI is correct, but correct for three years ago. It doesn't realize that there's been a change. Leo [00:05:02]: What's funny is that if you point that out to the AI, it will often go back and then come back with a right answer. Gary [00:05:13]: Oh yeah, it loves doing that. Anything it gets wrong, Anything it gets wrong, it will pat you on the back for pointing that out. I mean, it does a great job of that right of you saying, no, it doesn't work that way. It has to do this way. And then it goes and says, yes, you're right. And that really drills right to the point of the matter that you have to. The details are what counts. And let's get things straight here, you know, and it's like very positive. Gary [00:05:40]: It's like, you know, I always say that, you know, these large language model AIs, they're like having an assistant, like, you know, somebody you hire, like an intern. And it's like having the, the an intern that is never afraid to admit when it, when they are wrong, like they will do it. Like if you say no, you're wrong. Happily. Happily. Oh, you are so right. We, we need to get this straight. Let's create a new list and let's make sure that the details are correct, you know, and you're like, all right, all right, calm down. Gary [00:06:14]: You know. Leo [00:06:15]: But what's interesting is that, I mean, it's been accused of sycophancy for a couple of years now. Gary [00:06:20]: Yeah. Leo [00:06:20]: But it's actually one of those things where I believe in your redefined setup, right. The configuration for your account or in those AIs that support projects. You could also do it in the setup for a project. You could say, essentially you use different words, but you could say, don't suck up so much. Gary [00:06:41]: Yeah, I do that. And still. So I wonder what other people see, because I already have some things in there that should tone that down a bit. Right. But yeah, that's. That's kind of annoying that it does that. You know, it'll get things wrong, but it also. It'll not necessarily, like, get it wrong. Gary [00:06:58]: Like, it'll tell you to do A when you should do B, but it doesn't always give you the clearest path to what you know, because it's just learned on blog posts and what other people wrote and all that. So sometimes it gets stuff wrong like that, where it's just a little bit off. It's not incorrect, but it's leaving something out or it's giving you too much. And other times it's not so clear because I deal a lot with lists, right. A lot of my videos are lists. 10 ways to do this, 5 ways to do that, that kind of thing. And people like these lists because they give you options. When you say, here's the way to do this, and somebody says, ah, that's going to be a pain for me to do if they know there's actually three other ways to do it. Gary [00:07:39]: And one of them is like, oh, no, that fits in with my workflow. I'm always making lists and I always ask either Claude or ChatGPT for a list. Sometimes I will play dumb and just be like, I have no idea what I'm going to say. Please give me a list. Sometimes I'll give it the list and I. And I'll say, what else? And when I play dumb and do it, it's good because I. The reason I do it is occasionally it gives me an item that I forgot. Oh yeah, I should mention that. Gary [00:08:10]: Glad. Number seven in its list of ten is something I didn't think of. And I'll add it to mine. But the other. And the other ones are mostly ones I already have. It'll not. It'll leave out ones that I can think of. So it's not perfect in that. Gary [00:08:25]: And it'll repeat itself a lot. Matter of fact, it. I just was doing this today where I gave it a list of here's what I want to cover. And I. And I know how it works. I know if I say, here's 10 things. Are there any more? It says, oh, this is great, let's make a list. And it gives me my 10 things back to me, right? And then it gives me some more and it's like, don't both. Gary [00:08:45]: So I said, don't mention these again. I got them. Give me extras. And half of those extras were repeats, but in a slightly different. Sometimes there's two ways to say something. Leo [00:08:59]: Right. Gary [00:08:59]: You know, like you could say, like, for instance, what I was dealing with today, copy and paste. But you could say, oh, the clipboard. Right. You know, so sometimes it would. It would phrase it such way. It's like, yeah, you didn't use any of the words I said, but this is the same. Your number three is the same as my number four. You know, you just. Gary [00:09:16]: So it's not quite getting everything. It's not perfect yet, but it is, of course, just going to keep getting better and better. Leo [00:09:22]: This is the state of AI today. And as I said multiple times, this is the worst AI we're ever going to see. Which means that the kind of things that we're currently kind of grousing about are the kinds of things that are going to go away. It's going to get better. One of the things that I think about a lot when I think about what value do you and I bring to the table? Is that, honestly, our audience, a large portion of our audience, they don't know how to ask the question. Gary [00:09:58]: Yeah. Leo [00:09:58]: They don't have the vocabulary, they don't have the mental models that this is how things kind of sort of work. So their questions are frequently very far away from enough to actually give them the answer that they're looking for. That's something that you and I take care of by having essentially a conversation with these individuals and say, okay, did you mean this or did you mean that? You know, those kinds of things. And you end up narrowing it down to, oh, you're looking for this. Okay, here, this is what you want. Whereas AIs aren't there yet. I think a lot of people don't know to let the AI ask them questions. Gary [00:10:51]: Right. Yeah. Because I get that a lot where it's not. The question is incomplete. Right. They haven't provided enough details, basically, so there has to be a little bit of back and forth. And AI. Leo [00:11:04]: It's also language, right? I mean, they don't know the words. Gary [00:11:07]: They don't. Oh yeah, that happens a lot. So, and when there's a bit of back and forth, AI really attempts to try to answer the question immediately. Make some, I mean again, this is just how it is now. Right. But it tries to like make some guesses and jump right to it. It wants to give you an answer, whereas I don't. I mean, I want to give you an answer, but if I recognize that I don't have enough information, even if it's just, oh, they can mean two different things here, I will often be like, well, I'm not going to bother. Gary [00:11:37]: First of all, I'm not going to give them both answers because they only want one. I'm not going to bother writing the one answer until I know what it is they want. So I will ask, do you mean this or this? Right. And, and then of course the thing is, as you probably know that you know that 80% of the time you never hear back again, which then it's a huge time saver because you never had to actually come up with the answer. Leo [00:12:00]: A great example of what I face on a semi regular basis actually is people say, you know, I don't have enough memory in my computer. What they really mean is disk space storage. Gary [00:12:13]: Yeah. Leo [00:12:14]: And that's the kind of stuff that AI is going to take you at your word. Gary [00:12:20]: Right? Leo [00:12:20]: Yes. Gary [00:12:21]: Yeah. Leo [00:12:22]: Whereas today I should say AI is going to take you at your word. Whereas you and I will know much, much more from the context of how the question is phrased. That. Oh no, they're really talking about this other thing. But again, that is the kind of thing that eventually the AIs are indeed going to get better at. Gary [00:12:43]: I actually, I, I think that that's a good example of something they already are better at. Like this specific example we're talking about. I bet you that if I asked a question and I said that I had eight gigs of memory and blah blah, blah, question draws from that. It would assume I meant memory. If I then went and said I have one terabyte of of memory, it would then assume event storage. I bet you it already does that. Leo [00:13:11]: That could, it could absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gary [00:13:13]: Because that's the sort of like context clues it's good at. But when it's a completely different term. You know, when somebody says, for instance on a Mac, they say, oh, in the taskbar, what do I do? And I'm like, there's no taskbar. You could mean the menu bar, you could mean the dock one looks more like the taskbar one sounds more like the taskbar. They both have a lot of overlap. I'm not answering question until you clarify what it is you want to. Leo [00:13:37]: And yeah, you know where that person, what system? That person. Gary [00:13:40]: Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. So. Or like, you know, when somebody asks like, how do I print screen? It's like, oh, yeah, okay, you don't, you don't mean print screen, but yeah, I know, I know you've been using computers for a while and they've been on the Windows side, but yeah, so there's. In the, in the future, I think we're going to have to look at things and I already do a lot of this teaching the things that people, they're not actually asking questions like, how do I do this or that, I'm having a problem or whatever. But we come up with things where you didn't know, you wanted to know that. You know, here's a post or a video that is like something cool you can do with this piece of software with your computer, know whatever it is. And the person had no idea that they were going to learn that today. But as soon as they see it, they're like, oh, this might could be interesting. Gary [00:14:37]: This could help me. I didn't know it could do that. And now that's going to save me some time or allow me to create something I didn't know before. The AI is not going to be for a long time. Be good at actually just telling you, hey, guess what? I think you know. Leo [00:14:53]: Yeah. Gary [00:14:53]: Did you know this because, you know, just based on, like me spying on you and what you're doing on your computer, I think you would probably benefit from knowing that you could do this on your computer. I mean, at that point, you know, at some point you're getting to the, the intersection of if the AI is good enough to figure out what it is you need to know and then tell you about it, at that point, it's probably just good enough to do it for you, you know, which is what we're already seeing with things like Claude, cowork and everything like that. So, you know, the idea is if there's some cool technique and AI is going to say, you should know this technique because of what you do, at that point you would just be asking the AI to do things for you and it would be doing it, the cool technique for you instead. You know, would it be the real thing? And I mean, we're getting to that. Like, just as an example, something to do in a graphics app. You know, right now you could go find a tutorial that says like, how to make, you know, eyes pop in a portrait in a, you know, thing. And it's like 17 steps, you know, doing this and there's a mask involved and there's, you know, brightness controls and color and all this. And you could see that and say, oh, that's cool. Gary [00:16:06]: I do a lot of portraits. Let me see if I can learn something from this. But there's also going to be the thing where at some point you're just going to ask AI make this portrait look good. Leo [00:16:16]: Right. Gary [00:16:16]: And it's going to say this could benefit from the eyes, you know, being brighter and it's going to do all those steps. Leo [00:16:22]: Yeah, that kind of stuff is happening today. Gary [00:16:24]: So we're already, yeah, we're already seeing it. And then it's just going to expand to cover most things until eventually we're Star Trek and we just, we don't even have keyboards anymore and we're just telling the, you know, telling our computers to, you know, do things, you know, get me the engineering specs for the, you know, the nacelle so we can boost the warp coefficient. Leo [00:16:47]: One of the things we never saw in the Star Trek keyboards, I guess whatever you want to call those touch panels. You never saw a QWERTY keyboard. Gary [00:16:58]: Yeah, yeah, they were gone. They were outlawed in that war that happens later in the century. That's probably what it was fought over, honestly. Leo [00:17:05]: Probably one of the things that AI will not do to go back to our memory versus storage discussion is I think you're right. I think that from the context, it may do a better job of understanding what it is you're talking about, but it will not correct you when it should. In other words, you know, you say, hey, I've got, you know, terabyte of memory and it'll assume you mean storage. Gary [00:17:31]: Yeah. Leo [00:17:32]: But it won't tell you that that's not really the right term. Whereas, you know, given, given that I see it so often, it's like one of my go to answers is, well, you know, before I answer this question, terminology matters. And you know, in fact, I've actually got an article, what's the difference between memory and disk space? It comes up that often. But that's the kind of a thing that, like I said, AI right now isn't necessarily going to correct you on. Maybe if you asked it to, it would, you know, maybe if you asked the question in such a way that said, hey, you Know, I've got this, this and this going on and I'd like to be able to do this. What's the answer? And by the way, please tell me if I'm using my terminology correctly or if there's a, a more efficient way to ask this question. That's the kind of stuff that I think AI is able to do. Right. Leo [00:18:21]: If you know, to ask for it. Gary [00:18:24]: Yeah. And I know that, you know, the double, kind of the double AI thing for people that do images and video with AI, that's a big deal, is actually not creating the prompt to create the video or create the image yourself, but first prompting the text to get the prompt to then send to the image or video generator. Leo [00:18:46]: Right. Gary [00:18:47]: And yeah, that's a really common thing to do. So, yeah, and we're going to get there eventually and we already see it. You know, if you use Claude like I do, you see how it's, it shows you what it's thinking, right. As it's going along the way. And it's basically reprompting itself a lot. You know, it's taking your seven sentences for your complex prompt and it's expanding on that based on things it finds in the steps. So it's, it's getting, it's getting pretty interesting now. You know, like I said, we could still come up with these topics that people didn't know they wanted to know. Gary [00:19:25]: And AI is not going to just wake them up in the morning and tell them this. They're gonna have to ask. So that's like one place that we could, we could still be needed for. Leo [00:19:34]: Interesting. Because I've mentioned that, you know, while we're, we, we play in kind of the same pool. We're at different ends, right? Gary [00:19:41]: Yeah. Leo [00:19:42]: You basically do a lot of feature exploration and discovery, right? How tos. And you know, look, here's this new feature. Whereas I'm more problem driven, right? People come to me with problems and we come up with answers to those. In your case, your channel is essentially all about education, showing people new stuff that they maybe weren't familiar with or didn't know about completely. My challenge has always been to answer the question while sneaking in some education at the same time. Because especially when people have questions, what they're looking for is the answer to the question. Damn it. Right? They, they want that answer and they want to be able to just solve the problem and move on with whatever they're doing. Gary [00:20:33]: I get that. I get that a lot. I, I love get. I love fielding the comments from those. Oh, yeah, when somebody Sundays, you took seven minutes to answer my question, oh, when I see those, I light up and I respond with something like, oh, I will try my best to teach less in my next video. Leo [00:20:51]: I'm gonna have to remember that because I get that exact same comment. Gary [00:20:55]: Yeah. Leo [00:20:56]: On many of my videos, teach less. Gary [00:20:58]: Or I say something like, I'll try to leave out details and alternate ways of doing things and limit your options in the future. You know, stuff like that. I mean, it's just like less clear, you know? Leo [00:21:09]: Yeah. Gary [00:21:09]: And it really comes down to, like, I. Sometimes if I'm feeling like the person actually is. Is not just being snarky and, you know, I'll say something like, the point of my channel, the goal of my channel is to educate and teach you about how to use your Mac and get the most from it. And that's what my videos are going to be about. I'm not going to do straightforward. Here's a problem, here's a solution. I'm done. I want you to understand the problem and learn more things. Gary [00:21:35]: So if you don't want that, I guess my channel is not for you. Leo [00:21:39]: Okay. I have. I have actually said that in a couple of comments over the past couple of weeks, said, you know, this is the way I do things. This is why I do them this way. And if that doesn't work for you, then maybe this is the wrong channel for you. Maybe there are better channels that you should be looking at. Gary [00:21:55]: Yeah, indeed. Leo [00:21:58]: So one of the things that. So everything we've talked about so far is essentially about the written word. Even though we both do videos, all of the things we're talking about with respect to AI have to do with text. Whether it's the prompt for an image or an outline for a video or just an outline for an article or whatever it is we're using it for. It answered your question. But you and I both do a lot of demonstration. We don't just necessarily talk about what we're talking about. We. Leo [00:22:33]: We try to show what they're talking about. We both do demonstrations of what we're talking about. And I can see that on the radar again. Right. The writing is on the wall, but that wall is a long ways away. Gary [00:22:51]: Right. Leo [00:22:51]: We're not going to be able to say to an AI, please generate a video that discusses this topic and shows how to do a specific thing. In Windows, the prompt would be overly complex. Heck, it would be faster to record the video than it would be to craft the prompt that would be required for AI to generate that video, especially since our videos are usually in the, you know, like the 10 minute range. Yeah. So. And there's so many nuances to what we're demonstrating that I just don't see AI being able to do that yet. Gary [00:23:31]: Yeah, and that's true. The I, It'll get there though. I, I have seen some things and I've tried some things and it's not there, but it will. Yeah, it scares me a little bit. I've been definitely thinking about all of this that we've been talking about and trying to realize that. I mean, I'm already not very oriented on problem solving. Like, I don't like to do the videos like you do that are like, this is broken, here's how to fix it. I don't do you know how to videos. Gary [00:24:01]: But I already, I think of, you know, the TV programs that used to be on in the 60s, 70s and 80s, you know, like, you know, a science guy talking about science or Bob Ross talking about painting or something like that, where you wouldn't necessarily tune in because you saw that this week it was going to be on a certain topic. Leo [00:24:23]: Right. Gary [00:24:24]: You would just tune in. Leo [00:24:25]: Right. Gary [00:24:25]: Regardless and say, I'm going to learn something. And I really, I'm trying. I want to gear my show more towards being like that, where you'd come in and just watch what I'm going to talk about because you may learn something because you're interested, because you're interested in what I'm talking about. Leo [00:24:39]: And then you're saying you're the Bob Ross of Mac. Gary [00:24:44]: I'm the mischievous or whatever of, yeah, Bill Nye of Mac stuff. So there's that. And that's like the pivot, you know, that I'm talking about. There's always been pivot in everything that people like us do. Right. We have to keep changing. MacMost has changed over the years in lots of ways. Ask Leo as well. Gary [00:25:09]: We pivot here and there. This is kind of unusual and that we see the pivot. We see that it's a big pivot and it's coming. Right. Because it's something. AI is coming for our jobs. Leo [00:25:20]: It is. And what's different though, is that I was thinking about that because you use the word pivot and that makes a tremendous amount of sense. But the pivots we've been facing over the course of the last and like in my case, 20 years, they haven't been massive, they haven't been existential. The biggest pivot I suspect I've ever made is my focus on video. Right. Originally, ask Leo was 100% written content, and then eventually I ended up adding more and more video. And now it's like the most important thing that the site offers. The pivot that's coming, I don't know what it looks like it's going to be much, much bigger. Leo [00:26:05]: And, you know, part of me says, you know, let's, let's ride what we're doing for as long as we can. Because I do think it's going to be years before there's something that I would comfortably say replaces us. You know, write it as long as we can and then, you know what? Wish it a fond farewell. And the pivot is also referred to as retirement, which of course, in our business, neither of us, I think will ever actually do. So in my case, my pivot might be to be spending more time on 7takeaways.com or something like that. Right. Some of the non Q and A stuff that is much more, I don't know, reflective, you know, opinions and, and, and insights rather than just answers on how to do things. Gary [00:26:59]: Yeah. And who knows, it could be. Sometimes pivots lead in interesting directions. I mean, pivots are. That term is used a lot in the startup community, whether it's tech or not. You know, it could be anything. Could be farming or restaurants, whatever it is. And a lot of time people are forced to pivot their business because it's just not working, or there's a big competitor that's getting in the way or something like that. Gary [00:27:22]: And the pivot is never what you want it. If it was what you wanted, you Leo [00:27:27]: would have started with, you would have done that. Gary [00:27:29]: But so, so often the pivot ends up being good. Leo [00:27:34]: Yes. Gary [00:27:34]: Like it leads in this direction and then it's like, oh, this is great. And we would never have gotten here if I didn't start off with idea A that led to the pivot that went to idea B or even further down the line. So who knows, maybe your idea of how Ask Leo might end up could be something that's for, you know, in many ways could be better than what you have now. It's just, it's hard to see it now. I feel this the same way with MacMost maybe. I mean, I even think of pivoting to a smaller audience in a way. I already have done things where I'm not prioritizing my YouTube videos as much because, you know, YouTube goes out there to lots and lots of people. A lot of people see my YouTube videos that have never seen me before. Leo [00:28:17]: Right. Gary [00:28:17]: They just. They come in search results and they stumble upon it or whatever. Whereas my Patreon videos, everybody seen me before, they wouldn't be a patron if they, you know, wouldn't be there. But it's a much smaller audience. But I'm not so sure that, you know, I. I'd probably rather post to my Patreon audience than my YouTube audience. So I've already started to think in terms of. Instead of just attracting more people to YouTube, the main thing about YouTube is to get more people over to Patreon, and that's where my real audience is. Gary [00:28:49]: And if at some point my, like the YouTube, you know, kind of funnel from YouTube to Patreon goes away or gets reduced significantly, I would have no problem then just continuing with my smaller audience, making the videos that they want in the way that they want them and without having to feel like I'm like, you know, I don't know, doing stuff that may. May go viral on YouTube or something like that. Like, I don't have to worry about that. I could say, is this useful? Yes. Then I'm going to do it. People will like it because it's useful. I don't have to say it's useful, but it's not going to get as many clicks. I could focus more. Gary [00:29:26]: There's one last thing here which I put down, which I think is kind of a good way to end this. You've probably heard the joke that has the punchline, I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just need to run faster than you. And by you, I don't mean you, Leo. I just mean that the idea is. The idea is like, if you're being chased by a bear and it's like. And you're in a group of people, you don't need to run faster than the bear. You just need not to be the slowest person because that's who the bear is going to catch. It's the same thing here. Gary [00:29:56]: I don't think if you look at sites like ours, like, whether it's YouTube channels, blogs, however you want to look at it, I don't think anything, even AI is going to wipe everybody out. There's always going to be some room. We still have radio. Leo [00:30:11]: Yes. Gary [00:30:12]: You know, we still have. We still have AM radio. Right. You know, so, yeah, we still have magazines, you know, we still have, you know, things that have been around for. I mean, vinyl never went away and it's probably bigger now than it was 20 years ago. Right. It's probably grown in 20 years. So these. Gary [00:30:30]: So things that work well don't necessarily go away, but they do shrink if something comes to replace them. So it may not be that whether or not, like, MacMost dies because AI takes its place. It may be that there's 100 similar things out there and 90 out of 100 are going to die. There's just not going to be a big enough market. Leo [00:30:54]: Right. Gary [00:30:54]: I don't necessarily have to figure out, like, how to beat AI. I just need to make sure that I'm one of those survivors. Leo [00:31:02]: It's interesting because both of us, we've been doing this now for long enough that I think the fact that we've been doing this for as long as we have gives us the highest chance of continuing to do it for as long as is reasonable. Whereas somebody that's only been doing it for a short period of time and there are always newcomers in all of the spaces. They're the ones that I think are going to lose out first. They're the ones that aren't going to get the YouTube traffic or whatever other traffic that they're trying to do. They're the ones that the bear is going to catch. Gary [00:31:36]: Yep. So. So, yeah. So that. So it's. It's not always. It's. It doesn't have to be doom and gloom. Gary [00:31:42]: Like we might be able to just survive basically, on being persistent and good and staying true to what we do. Leo [00:31:50]: I think, honestly, what it all kind of sort of comes down to is that we're going to survive because we're real. Right? Gary [00:31:58]: Yeah. Well, there's the vinyl. We're the vinyl. Leo [00:32:02]: The vinyl of tech support. Gary [00:32:03]: The vinyl of tech support, yeah. Leo [00:32:06]: You know, in the. In the sense that already we get people who are rebelling against AI that I think will go down, but I think it will end up becoming a matter of preference. Things that are obviously AI and solve your problem, great. If that works for you, great. But some people are simply going to prefer seeing a real person writing. Real writing. And that's the kind of stuff that I think, again, for channels that have been around for a long time, because we've already got an audience carrying us forward, I think that gives us by far the biggest chance of surviving for the longest period of time. Gary [00:32:53]: Yep, exactly. So, well, we'll see. Leo [00:32:58]: Speaking of AI. Gary [00:33:00]: Yeah, yeah. Leo [00:33:01]: Rather than it being a threat, let's talk about it being a tool. I've talked in recent episodes about my use of Claude, specifically Claude coworkers to do things. It's been interesting to throw Ask Leo articles at it, or have it analyze log files from my server and point out that, oh yeah, you're under attack, you should want to do this, this and this. So to back up a little bit, being who I am, my machines, three of them run a script every night in the middle of the night. Each machine a batch file. Yep. And each does something different based on its role in my world. But it's mostly about doing things like backing up, making copies of this, archiving that, grabbing a copy of my server image once a month or something like that. Leo [00:34:05]: What I noticed, it didn't even occur to me until I was telling it to somebody else. I have three machines that do this. One is my desktop PC, the other is a PC running Linux, and the third is my old MacBook, my old Mac Pro. So I've actually got scripts running on a Mac, Linux and PC and literally running in the Mac runs a PHP script, the Linux box runs a Bash script, and the Windows machine is running a script written in Python. So it's also my learning exp. You know, how I. My learning excuse for each of those different languages. Right. Leo [00:34:43]: I've known PHP for a long time. Then I decided that I wanted to rewrite stuff in Python and, you know, all that stuff. Each of those machines sends me an email every night that says, here's the tail end of my log, just so you know, a, that I ran and if there are any gross errors, you're going to see it. Of course, it's not the entire log, so I've been missing things. So what I asked Claude Cowork to do is every morning at 8am, grab these three logs, get me the most recent log from this machine script, from that machine script, and from this machine script and just tell me what's happening, tell me what's going on. And of course it prioritizes pointing out errors. And indeed there was an error that had been in there for a couple of months that was preventing a piece of download from working, said, okay, great, I went in and fixed it. But it's also telling me, you know, hey, this is, this is working, everything's working, but you'll want to keep an eye on the disk space on this drive and you know, all that kind of stuff. Leo [00:35:56]: It's been fascinating because this, I think, is the first time where I've actually started to use Claude Cowork to do something for me that I would normally do myself. Scanning those logs. Just look for errors and do it better than I could ever do it. So I just thought that was A fascinating use of the technology. Like I said, Claude's ability to just sort of chew up log files is kind of interesting. It. It kind of sort of understands what they are and what they contain. What's fascinating about my log files, of course, is that they're not standard. Leo [00:36:37]: These are just like print statements in a script where I just print out random stuff along with the, the output, the natural output from some of the commands. And yet Claude chews it up, spits it out and tells me what I did wrong. It's kind of cool. Gary [00:36:55]: Yeah, I'm becoming a big fan of Claude because I use it, you know, as I've talked about before, I've been using Claude code a lot. I have several personal tools now that are Claude code created and maintained. So I'm always thinking of new features and I ask Claude code to add them. And then I'm building a whole site of Claude code coded gizmos and having a blast doing it. Mostly games and having so much fun building it and focusing on the game design. It's actually answered a big question for me because in the past, you know, I've developed so many games. That was the main part of what I did for so many years. And I loved coding and I also liked coming up with the game ideas. Gary [00:37:43]: And I always wondered if I only did one of those two things. I was pretty sure if I didn't come up with the game ideas, I wouldn't enjoy the coding as much. But if I didn't code, it would. I enjoy coming up with the game ideas as much, it turns out. Yeah, I know that now. I know that I could come up with the ideas. I mean, in a way I'm still kind of coding because I'm really thinking about things like the data structures, I'm thinking about the platform and what's possible. I'm thinking about how to work things out in the game. Gary [00:38:18]: But then instead of actually going to the nitty gritty of like the little lines of code, I'm just telling Claude code to build it and then I give it some instruction about how I want it built to be able to. Leo [00:38:30]: Was it here that I talked about the progression of programming languages? Gary [00:38:36]: Sounds familiar. Leo [00:38:38]: The concept is really simple. In the beginning, so to speak, we programmed by flipping toggle switches on the front of the machine. Then we were able to enter in hexadecimal machine code. Then we were able to use assembly language, slightly higher level representation. Then we were able to use programming languages like C, which allowed us to abstract things a little bit. More. And we didn't care quite as much about the under the hood details. Then we went to programming languages like C. Leo [00:39:06]: Then we went on to scripting languages like Python and all these others. This, what's happening now with AI is really just another step in that exact same evolution. We've created a new programming language and it's called English. Gary [00:39:24]: Yeah, Leo [00:39:27]: that's all that's happening. Gary [00:39:28]: Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, the level on top of it. I was always fascinated because I started programming just past the machine code part of things. There was still machine code was there. And there were people telling me, oh, if you really want stuff to run fast, you got to go down to the count. Leo [00:39:46]: Those clock cycles. That's right. Gary [00:39:49]: Just enough for me to dabble, but not really ever make anything. Then I was building on the stuff that was on top of that. But then more and more layers kept getting added on IDEs, and now we have things like SwiftUI and all on my side of things that just take care of lots of stuff for you. It's building up to that or building up to this thing. But I do love, and I still hope that I have an advantage knowing how to code. And then maybe the stuff that I'm finding really easy to do with Claude code maybe isn't as easy for others because they're not asking. Like, at this one point I had this very difficult problem to solve because Claude code wasn't getting it. What it was doing is it was not putting, oh, in this game it creates these little random dungeons and in the dungeons there's these little random rooms and they have space inside, you know, number of squares, like 6 squares or 9 squares or however many it's random. Gary [00:40:47]: And I said, okay, put a, put a monster in each room, but don't put it near the door. So, you know, you can walk into the room, right. And the monster's not blocking the way. You couldn't get it. Like I kept telling it, okay, it should be more than one square away from the door. It kept not doing it. So eventually I said, here's what I want you to do to place the monster. I want you to make a list of all the available spaces. Gary [00:41:11]: Then I want you to take the space that's right in front of the door and remove it from the list. Then pick one of the other spaces at random. And it was like, okay. And then it worked from that point on, but it didn't. It was like, you know, okay, so it helped out a little bit. You know, it's good. Leo [00:41:28]: The Same model is true though. The fact that you understand coding and data structures and all that kind of stuff makes you a better, for lack of a better term these days, a better vibe coder. Right. Gary [00:41:40]: Yeah. Leo [00:41:41]: People that don't have that background won't have that advantage. That's always been true. Back in the day when we were coding our programs in C, those people that understood assembly language, especially the assembly language that the compiler would generate, had a better time debugging their program, understanding what was going on, choosing more efficient algorithms, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, understanding what's going on under the hood will always be an advantage, even if you're programming in English. Gary [00:42:17]: Yep. So. Leo [00:42:22]: So I mentioned earlier my Mac Pro. Yes, the 2013 paint can version of the Mac Pro. It's still chugging along. I mean, it's a nifty little machine still. And I use it for some, like I said, some backing up and a few other random things, but I heard that the Mac Pro is no more. Gary [00:42:48]: Yeah. And yeah, you actually have the one that, you know, the prior model, Apple came out. Leo [00:42:56]: They went back to a box, didn't they? Gary [00:42:57]: They went back to the big box. I had. I had two of those big towers previously and love them. I went to the, I always call the trash can version of it. Somebody found like a, like a, you know, Scandinavian design trash can that it's almost identical to it at one point, you know, so they were like, put them side by side, the. And I had that one. What a great machine. And I actually, they came out with a tower later, but it was still intel and I upgraded and I wish I didn't. Gary [00:43:30]: I wish I had kept just for a few years that one, because it really worked well. And then they went to a M1 Ultra Mac Pro or it was an M2 Ultra Mac Pro, the last version. So they did come out with it. And the only real substantial difference between a Mac Studio and the Mac Pro was you had this big tower that was adapted to have these, the old PCIE cards. Right. But those are just. I mean, you have Thunderbolt now. You could plug Thunderbolt devices into it. Gary [00:44:05]: You don't really need it for very much. And the market, which is shrinking and shrinking for that kind of thing and PCIe is kind of a technology that works hand in hand with intel. So there was some big adaptation they had to do to get it to work with Apple Silicon. So it was probably the right call to get rid of it. The Mac Studio is now the high end and it's extremely similar to the one you're talking about, the cylindrical Mac Pro. Most people like me would say that the cylindrical Mac Pro in capabilities and price because it was also about a $3,000 machine that went from there to the Mac Studio. There's a couple year gap and that's because the studio, the Mac Pros, the big tower ones, were much more expensive. What they did with that cylinder is they said okay, it's just going to be external devices but they allowed you to upgrade the memory and the storage but still you attach external devices to it and they brought the price way down. Gary [00:45:09]: And I think that's basically what the Mac Studio is now. You can get a really powerful Mac Studio. It was really hard to justify spending the money on a Mac Pro unless you had a very specific use for it over the Mac Studio. And I've had an M1 Ultra Mac studio. Now it's five years old now, which is incredible. And the rumors are there'll be a new one out. And the problem is I still, I'm not feeling its age at all. Like I've got 64 gigs of RAM in it. Gary [00:45:40]: I got a 2 terabyte drive in it and it's the Ultra. So it's the double max 2 max processors in it that are like mirroring mirror to each other and doubling everything and it just handles everything I throw to it. I pretty convinced that if I got an M5 Ultra, you know, if that's what comes out and I would definitely see like a boost in speed but it wouldn't be something that would be like life changing, right? Like, oh, it's a bit zippier. I thought it was zippy before. It turns out there was a speed above zippy, you know. So I don't even know if like if I'm in the market for one if Apple comes out with a new Mac Studio this year. So anyway, I had a large wide variety of the Mac Pros and before that the Power Macs there were, they called a lot of things Power Max, but there were the higher end power Macs like The Power Mac 8500, that kind of thing that were kind of the precursor towers to the first Mac Pro. So I had a long line of those. Gary [00:46:39]: So my first thought is, well, just because they said it's dead, it's, you know, it's like Cher doing a farewell tour. It's like there's probably more, you know, there'll be more opportunities. Leo [00:46:50]: There was an interesting observation I read from somebody though is that, is that Apple has made it clear that they don't want you to open their machines. Right. That Pro, that's being discontinued, if I understand it correctly. That's the only one that's designed to be opened and upgrade. Gary [00:47:11]: I'm trying to think now if there's anything in the Mac Mini. The strange thing is The Neo, the MacBook Neo is very repairable and openable. It's not bent. No. Well, so it's not. So it's not meant to be. Right. But they. Gary [00:47:31]: Apparently there's been, you know, several people that have taken it apart. They didn't use glue, they didn't use tape. Everything screws and lashes, and it comes apart very cleanly. Leo [00:47:42]: Nice. Gary [00:47:43]: The drive, which is only, you know, you can get the 2. The 256 or the 512. Leo [00:47:49]: Right. Gary [00:47:50]: You could pull that out and somebody has tried sticking a bigger one in there and it works. Leo [00:47:54]: It's a standard. What, M2? Gary [00:47:56]: Yeah, I don't factor NVE or whatever. Yeah. I don't know. So it's. Yeah, somebody's tried it now, you know, it's not technically supported, so I don't know. I haven't heard anything about, like, somebody using it for a long period of time like that. But, you know, it is surprisingly repairable. Apple didn't have to do that. Gary [00:48:16]: Right. They could have said, let's cut more corners, put more tape, more whatever into it, you know, but they seem to have made it easy to repair, probably for themselves. I mean, they were probably like, hey, we're producing a $600 Mac here. Somebody's going to drop bowling balls on them. Somebody is going to spill stuff on them. Somebody's going to, you know, we're get. They're going to come in and they're going to be broken. One out of every 5,000 is going to have some sort of manufacturing flaw. Gary [00:48:39]: Whatever. We're getting them in, they're going to start coming into our shops. Let's make it easier on ourselves and the authorized repair people to fix them. So they have made it like that. So it's kind of like. Yeah, it's not. They're not making it. So it's. Gary [00:48:56]: They're welcoming you to open it up and. And change it, but they're also not going out of their way to, you know, lock them down. Like, I think they may be more used to like maybe 10 or 15 years ago. Leo [00:49:08]: Right, Interesting. Gary [00:49:10]: Yeah. So. So, yeah, the. There's that. And of course, there's a whole thing. You know, speaking of Apple, I guess we didn't have an episode last week. But April 1st marked Apple's 50th anniversary. So that was 50 years since April 1st, 1976. Leo [00:49:32]: 76, yeah. Gary [00:49:34]: I can't remember. You know, I've read so many books on it, I can't remember. I think that was just when they incorporated, you know, when they created. Leo [00:49:40]: Right. Gary [00:49:41]: So, you know, they were working on stuff before then and they were about to or had come out with the Apple one. Leo [00:49:47]: The original 1976. Gary [00:49:50]: Yeah. Leo [00:49:51]: I was starting my first year at the University of Washington. Gary [00:49:55]: Yeah. Leo [00:49:56]: And I had not yet touched a computer at all. That didn't happen until the. The sophomore year there. A requirement of Engineering 141, introduction to Fortran programming. Gary [00:50:12]: Yeah, I definitely told you that my Leo [00:50:14]: first computer, the first computer I ever purchased was in fact an Apple II. Gary [00:50:19]: Oh, okay. I definitely wasn't. See, 1976, I was very young. I do remember since I grew up in Philadelphia, 1976 was a big year. And I have lots of fond memories of things going on downtown for the bicentennial as well as Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where there were reenactments and such and all of that. So. But yeah, 50 years. So I, you know, I did. Gary [00:50:43]: Well, I'll talk about it later. But the video, I did about it. But it is, it is interesting that it's been. It's been that long. I mean, in some ways it feels like, oh, yeah, wow. It's been a long time. In other ways, it's like, wow. I mean, from the Apple One to the MacBook Neo, you know, to the iPhone 17 Pro Max, you know, that would have wozniak a job sitting in the garage there. Gary [00:51:10]: You know, somebody from the future had come back and shown them the iPhone 17 Pro Max. That probably would have blown their minds more than the MacBook Neo. Like the MacBook Neo, they probably would open up and immediately knew what it was and how to use it. The iPhone 17, the latest iPhone, they would probably be like, what? And then maybe the AirPods too. They would have. That would have been incredible to them. But 50 years is kind of a short period of time when you think about it. Leo [00:51:39]: Well, it's an amazing period of time for what Apple has been doing and what the industry has been doing in general, for sure. Let's see. So what's cool? So you got to do yours first. Gary [00:51:52]: Okay, I got to do mine first. So obviously I have to talk about Project Hail Mary. I've talked about it before. You know, it's a three piece. Yeah, you mentioned it. Leo [00:52:01]: I mentioned it. Gary [00:52:03]: How great the book is and how. It's one of my favorite books of. Of the last decade or so. I've read it twice. Really excited about the movie. Went and saw the movie, thought it was wonderful. I. I thought actually, and I've said this immediately afterwards, and I still believe it now, three weeks later, it is the best film adaptation of a science fiction novel I've ever seen. Leo [00:52:31]: Cool. Gary [00:52:32]: The reason for that is because first, it didn't make any substantial changes to the story. Leo [00:52:39]: Okay. Gary [00:52:39]: None at all. Right. Leo [00:52:40]: Nice. Gary [00:52:41]: No. Which is like. It's so remarkable in that it's not perfect, but it, for the 95% of it, is exactly the same as the book. Right. The other thing is the book is filled with lots of scientific details and explanations about how things work, why things are. All of this, which makes the book really interesting. There's no way they can get that into a movie. First of all, the movie would be 10 hours long. Gary [00:53:07]: Second of all, most of the audience would have no idea what was going on. Right. You really got to be into the science and the engineering. They, instead of saying, we'll just take that stuff out, they did the opposite and said, we'll leave all of that stuff in and just not bother to explain it. So the ship, all these details of the ship are from the book, right? They don't bother to explain it. There's screens and things in the background that are there from the book. They don't bother to explain it. Little details, things that are said, things about, you know, what's going on on Earth. Gary [00:53:47]: All this stuff they leave in without explaining it. So that if you didn't read the book, you could just think they're background things. I mean, there's got to be something on the screens. There's. The spaceship's got to look some way. Right. There has to be some reason. Special effects have to pick some color for this thing and that thing. Gary [00:54:03]: Right. So they did it. And, you know, you don't care. But if you did read the book, you could look and say, ah, they left that in. That's what you know. I know why that is like, it is. I know why this happened. They didn't explain it, but I know why, because I read the book. Gary [00:54:19]: Which makes it incredible to watch as somebody that loves the book, because they leave that stuff in there for you. And I think they did that on purpose. So the book lovers will love the movie and the people who didn't read the book won't be burdened by it. But then as a side effect, it basically made all those things, Easter eggs. So that now there's all these videos going on. Right. If I made entertainment type content, it's like such a huge resource, you know, source of cool videos you could make. You could say, you know, here's something I bet you didn't know when you saw Hail Mary. Gary [00:54:58]: This is why this thing is in the ship, you know, and you can explain it. And it's there so it turns into like an endless treasure trove of Easter eggs for people to explain online and people that liked the movie to go and say, oh, there's a, there was a reason for that, you know, tell me. So anyway, so it was great. And then, and you know, it, it, like the book, it succeeded in giving you the, the feels. And also, it's not. It is such a non Hollywood movie. There's no love story. There's no love interest. Gary [00:55:31]: There is. I mean, there's no villain. There's no villain. You could, of course, you could make a case for, of course, you know, but really, there's no real villain in it. I mean, how is there a major blockbuster movie that is no villain and no love story? But that's what Hail Mary is. Leo [00:55:49]: It's a buddy movie. Gary [00:55:51]: It is. It's very much a buddy movie. And even the buddy stuff, the fact that they're friends, there's stuff in the book that explains that. Right, Right. So the thing is, it's like you, you know, people can leave the movie. I've already heard this. I've already heard people say, like, oh, but, you know, so what are the chances that, you know, Rocky and Grace were. But it's like, that's explained in the book. Gary [00:56:16]: I can tell you why. I can tell you why. They're about the same level of intelligence. I can tell you why they were both there. That's all explained in the book. And they didn't take it out. They just didn't explain it to you. So I could tell you, or you can go read the book, which is what you should do. Gary [00:56:33]: Go read the book and then go see the movie again. Leo [00:56:35]: Again. Yes, exactly. Yeah. It's funny, that just reminds me of kind of the opposite in the sense that, you know, if you could watch this movie, either way, having read the book or not, and it is still a good experience, you'll enjoy it, right? I haven't seen it yet, by the way, and I am glad to hear your review being so positive. But yes, see the movie, read the book, see the movie again and you'll learn so much. Reminds me of My original experience with 2001, A Space Odyssey. Saw the movie, read the book, saw the movie, read the book, saw the movie, still didn't understand the ending. Gary [00:57:16]: All righty, so it was six. That was what was so great about the movie 2001. You don't understand the ending at the end of the book. And the movie didn't explain the ending either. Yeah, perfect. Well done, Kubrick. Yeah. Leo [00:57:33]: My. Ain't It Cool is something that my wife and I stumbled onto on Amazon Prime's Britbox, Although it's actually a BBC program called qi, which apparently stands for Quite Interesting. It is a comedy trivia show with basically British stand up comedians and other notables that. That, you know, being from over here, I recognize, like, maybe 1 out of 12, you know, just. But it's one of those things where in typical British fashion, it's very dry humor, it's very good humor. It's a lot of fun stuff on there, but you end up learning stuff because you're watching this silly trivia program. The. The trivia that they present, the knowledge that they present is truly random, truly interesting, and truly something that. Leo [00:58:30]: Okay, I actually, unlike so many other programs, I feel a little smarter after having watched this. So, yeah, Qi, there are 20 some odd seasons of this program. We're watching them in reverse season order just because we stumbled on the most recent one and we're working backwards. The interesting. They have an interesting quirk. Each season is designated by a letter. So the first season is season A, then season B, then season C. We're currently watching season T. Leo [00:59:10]: But what they do then is they use words beginning with that letter as, like, the theme for each episode. Oh, so kind of cool, huh? Gary [00:59:20]: That is cool. Yeah. Leo [00:59:23]: Like I said, we watch it on Amazon Prime's Britbox subscription, but it's on the BBC. Gary [00:59:30]: Cool. All right, so speaking more cool stuff is the stuff that we've got. And I'll start off with. I did do a video, like I quickly mentioned before, on Apple's 50th. I actually did a video on the Mac's 40th anniversary a little over a year ago. That was a timeline with music and animation and everything. And I worked. I worked for, like, three weeks on it, and like, 2,000 people watched it. Gary [01:00:02]: It was like, it was a total flop. So I was like, I'm not doing that again. So I decided, well, let me do the opposite. And I basically just turned the camera on and just talked about, like, the products, you know, going with the idea that Apple's a product Driven company. What are the products that I appreciated the most over the last 50 years from Apple and just made a. Just kind of a personal video saying, this is what I got from Apple the last 50 years. Like my favorite things. And then I invited people to comment about their experience, and it got a much better response than my timeline. Gary [01:00:38]: Yeah. Leo [01:00:39]: Now, the first one could have been AI generated, but this was a real gift. Gary [01:00:42]: Yeah. Now. Now I probably could just say, just make me a timeline of all the Apple products and it would be like, okay, done. Leo [01:00:48]: Set it to music and. Yeah. Make a PowerPoint presentation. Gary [01:00:51]: Yeah. Leo [01:00:53]: So mine. Well, is the one I mentioned earlier how I use AI at Ask Leo. It's recently updated because over the course of two years when it was originally published, the tools have changed. The process hasn't changed that much, but the tools have gotten better. So how I'm doing it, some good examples of ways that you might consider using AI yourself. So that's askleo.com 168449 cool. I believe that brings us to the end of this episode. As it turns out, we'll be on a slightly extended break. Leo [01:01:27]: We expect to be back next month. But until then, as always, thank you very much for listening and we will see you here again, well, in a month. Take care, everyone. Bye. Bye. Gary [01:01:39]: Bye. Leo [01:01:42]: Caught the wave to the camera. That's funny. Gary [01:01:44]: Yeah, I know. It's just habit. Leo [01:01:49]: Cool. Gary [01:01:49]: All right. Leo [01:01:50]: Yeah. Good episode. Lots of stuff. Gary [01:01:54]: I. Yeah, I guess it'll be a while. I'm trying to think if there's anything else. Leo [01:02:04]: Yeah, no, and I. I did want to say. I mean, I didn't say it at the beginning, but today's been a really crappy day on a number of fronts. Mostly physical, just because, you know, arthritis, knees hurt, hips hurt. Everything hurts. Getting old, parts are falling off. We're also having a couple of discussions with people that we care about, about their lives and the decisions that they're. The improper decisions that they're making and so forth. Leo [01:02:31]: So I was really looking forward to today's episode and. Gary [01:02:34]: Oh, good. Leo [01:02:35]: I appreciate it. Gary [01:02:36]: Well, good. Yeah, this is a nice way to. Yeah. Break away from all the. Some of this stuff. And I don't know. Leo [01:02:44]: And God only knows what Trump is doing in Iran. Gary [01:02:46]: Oh, my God. Yeah, I know. Well, I actually, I have been obsessively checking the news just to make sure, you know, something major didn't happen. And now. Now you got me nervous. Now it's like, I need to check again. Leo [01:02:58]: Sorry, man. Oh, sorry. Gary [01:02:59]: What is going on? So yeah, that's been, that's been a concern too. I'm going to be happy. I'm going to be happy to get away from it. I am only just like when I went to Africa last year, I only taking my iPhone and only that. That will be it like. So I'm going to try not to do very much. I have my new Claude Code created YouTube comment handling thing that makes it easier for me to. Because it's also low bandwidth which is really neat. Gary [01:03:29]: Like I can ask it to fetch all the new comments and it's just a list of comments with the text and I can dismiss the ones very easily that I don't need to respond to. So it should make it easy on the phone to be able to keep up my YouTube comments. Everything else I shut off. Try to just not worry about stuff in the news and have everything on auto. And then later this year when I do the Grand Canyon, it's even going to be further because I won't even have my phone. I mean I'll have my phone for pictures but I won't have any contact. I'll have, I'll have a satellite, you know, the iPhone, satellite messaging. Leo [01:04:02]: Oh, emergency stuff. Yeah. Gary [01:04:03]: So I will be able to, I will be able to do. The only thing that really I need to do is just say goodnight to my wife each night and good morning to her each morning. Most of the time it will work. Sometimes it may not. Leo [01:04:13]: Right. Gary [01:04:14]: But that's it. I won't be able to check my email, I won't be able to check the news. It'll just be that. Leo [01:04:20]: Yep, that's pretty fun. Gary [01:04:22]: That will be a nice thing. And that'll just be. The election is really heating up too, so it's funny. Leo [01:04:29]: I don't know if you've been paying attention to Randy stuff but they've been impacted by what's going on over there. Gary [01:04:34]: Oh yeah. Leo [01:04:35]: Basically the fuel prices. The ship is having to maybe not make quite as many or they're traveling slower so as to use less fuel. It's very bizarre. It's very funny how something literally on the opposite side of the planet is affecting them. Gary [01:04:51]: Yeah, no, I see it. I paid 429 for gas the other day, which is like say, you know, it's when it goes up a little bit. I shrug. I don't really drive that much but it, but if it went up enough for me to be like, oh, then Leo [01:05:07]: you know, all I can say is I just plug my car in. Gary [01:05:11]: You plug it in. I know we're we're thinking that we may, instead of our next one, instead of being a hybrid, might be a plug in hybrid. We still can't really do just pure because we don't have. Leo [01:05:26]: You don't have a place to plug in? Gary [01:05:27]: Yeah, we don't have a place to plug. We have. In downtown Denver, we have actual stations that are electric stations. Leo [01:05:34]: Sure. Gary [01:05:35]: Matter of fact, the Whole Foods just a couple blocks from our place has four plugins and you pay and you. And it's a charger and you go in. Leo [01:05:44]: Use those. When I travel, if I'm traveling a long distance, what's nice is that Kroger apparently is working on being very electric friendly because a lot of the charging stations, high speed, are in Kroger parking lots or out here. It's a different company, a different name on the store, but they're all owned by Kroger. And I've noticed this across elsewhere as well. Gary [01:06:10]: Yeah. So, you know, there's that. But the plug in hybrid thing would allow us to use those stations or other things. And since we do don't. We don't really drive long distances. It may work out like. It may work out really well. Might be the right thing to do. Gary [01:06:26]: But yeah, we'll have to see. Leo [01:06:28]: When do you leave on your trip? Gary [01:06:30]: Leave Friday morning. Leo [01:06:32]: Oh, wow. Okay. Gary [01:06:33]: So, yeah, so it'll be two. Two weeks and like two days. And it's actually going to be, I mean, like Lima is like New York City, you know. Right. And I'm there for like a day and a half at the beginning and a day and a half at the end. So it's like hardly a, like out in the middle of nowhere. And Cusco is someplace I'll be for two or three days in the middle. And that's a pretty, you know, it's not a city city, but it's, it's got everything right. Gary [01:07:01]: So a lot of that. But then there'll be times when I'll be on like Lake Titicaca or out in the Amazon or on the Inca Trail. So it'll be a mix of things, but still. Yeah, it'll be, It'll be interesting. Looking, Looking forward to it once again. Leo [01:07:14]: I'm looking forward to seeing the photos. Gary [01:07:16]: Yeah, I'm just, I'll be bringing one lens because it's all about the landscapes. The wildlife is probably llamas and they will probably be standing right in front of you. Right. Or there's a rare chance you'll see a condor, but you don't want to drag around your telephoto lens for two and a half weeks on the rare chance you may spot a condor and then be good enough to zoom in and capture. It's like. No, forget that. You're not going to buy a postcard of a condor when you're. When you're at the airport. Gary [01:07:51]: So, yeah, one bit, one nice landscape lens on my camera and should cover just about everything. So. Leo [01:08:01]: Well, have a good trip. Gary [01:08:03]: Yeah, thanks. Leo [01:08:04]: We'll see you well in a month. Gary [01:08:07]: If you want, I'll include you on the list when I do post some pictures, please. Gallery. Leo [01:08:12]: Yeah, I appreciated that last time, too. Gary [01:08:14]: Okay, sounds good. Leo [01:08:16]: Take care. Gary [01:08:16]: All right. Bye, Leo.