Beautiful, Terrible Internet

Warning: This episode contains multitudes! Hosts Ben and Amory explore how viral clips of DOGE staffers' video depositions found a new life online after a judge temporarily ordered them removed. They also dabble in a Reddit thought exercise with a potentially dubious origin Show notes: DOGE staffer who flagged grants for 'DEI' struggles to define the term https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpbGF7l-t2w (The Independent) LPT: I started pretending my life is a TV show and it made me more productive http://LPT: I started pretending my life is a TV show and it made me more productive (Reddit) Credits: This episode was produced by Kalyani Saxena and hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Marquis Neal. Sponsor message: INCOGNI: Take back your personal data with Incogni! Use code ENDLESS at the link below and get 60% off annual plans: https://incogni.com/ENDLESS

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 0:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 0:32Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Try one.

• 0:35Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 0:39Speaker 05

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.

• 0:47Speaker 06

  Kayak searches and compares hundreds of travel sites. But unless I repeat the word kayak, Kayak thinks you won't remember that. So Kayak asked me to say kayak as many times as possible. Kayak! Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak, kayak, kayak. Kayak. Search and compare travel deals with Kayak. Got that right.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emery Sivertson, is this an internet is beautiful or internet is terrible story on Endless Thread today?

• 1:28Amory Sivertson?

  Mine is an internet is terrible.

• 1:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, man, mine too.

• 1:32Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, really?

• 1:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Double whammy.

• 1:34Amory Sivertson?

  Double whammy. Okay.

• 1:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, it's sort of, it's a little bit of both. So like, it's an internet is terrible, maybe-ish, but then also internet is beautiful as the closer?

• 1:46Amory Sivertson?

  Two things can be true at once?

• 1:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, it's, yeah.

• 1:49Amory Sivertson?

  Get out of here.

• 1:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  All possible futures in this multiverse, something, something.

• 1:54Amory Sivertson?

  Would you like to go first today?

• 1:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I'll go first.

• 1:58Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 1:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, so have you ever seen the time traveling meme that's like, women go back in time, men go back in time? Or, or, or whatever, like, women go back in time and they go back and they see their grandmother and they say, I'm your granddaughter, and men go back in time. And I don't know, it's like any number of different things.

• 2:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  I saw one recently that involved somebody going back in time to Japan and asking a woman not to take a picture of her dog.

• 2:30Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 2:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Does that, does that mean anything to you yet?

• 2:33Amory Sivertson?

  Well, isn't this, when we did our cuteness episode, didn't, didn't our guest for that episode mention like the quote unquote ugliest dog in the world, when actually that was a very cute dog and it was in Japan?

• 2:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, yeah, I mean, you're, you're, you're trying, but you're failing on this one so far.

• 2:53Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 2:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  We are talking, of course, about Shiba Inos.

• 2:57Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, okay, yep.

• 2:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Doges.

• 3:00Amory Sivertson?

  Yes.

• 3:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  And, and why, why do you think somebody might utilize a time machine to go back in time? And tell somebody to not bring the idea of Doge into existence?

• 3:12Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, because Doge has taken on a life of its own as the Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk's favorite word or digital currency.

• 3:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, that's, yep, you got it. Now you're back on track, Sivertson, you're back on track.

• 3:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  So everybody knows about Doge at this point, the Department of Government Efficiency. And what I will say is Doge popped back into my feed with

• 3:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  intensity last week. Do you know why and did it pop back into your feed last week?

• 3:50Amory Sivertson?

  Wait, this is sort of on the tip of my brain.

• 3:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Your brain has a tip?

• 3:57Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, you know, when it's not like on the tip of your tongue, it hasn't made it to the tongue yet, it's still in the brain.

• 4:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, fair.

• 4:06Amory Sivertson?

  I'm not remembering in this moment, so please

• 4:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 4:09Amory Sivertson?

  enlighten me.

• 4:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  At the time that we're recording this.

• 4:12Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  There was kind of an explosion of popularity of a set of videos online. These set of videos got posted to YouTube by scholarly groups who are essentially, I know it sounds ridiculous.

• 4:27Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 4:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I should say that's the, that's the New York Times's description. Scholarly groups. But scholarly because, you know, Doge helped essentially eviscerate all of this funding for, for, you know, many different organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, which, you know, gives money to scholarly groups.

• 4:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  So effectively, these videos showed two former Doge employees, one Justin Fox, another Nate Kavanaugh, in depositions for lawsuits, because of course, there's been a lot of lawsuits and counter lawsuits around all of this funding. And they both were talking about essentially what they did in order to identify grants that were not in line with this executive order that President Trump put out, you know, banning, quote, radical and wasteful government D E I programs. There's not a lot of action in these videos. It's basically young men being interviewed against a gray background. But I found them to be fascinating.

• 5:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  It gives you this kind of interesting window into how these people made decisions to pull funding away from organizations. And you get these glimpses of their worldviews or their political views. These employees were apparently using Chat G P T to identify programs and grants that included elements of D E I. And this had pretty mixed results. As an example, court documents show that a museum got a grant of about $350,000 to repair and update its HVAC system or heating and A C. One potential outcome of this replacement and update might, of course, mean more visitors

• 6:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  to the museum, or as it's described in the, in the grant, more access to the museum's collection. Chat G P T flagged this grant with the rationale that more access to the museum equals more diversity. And the grant was terminated. This is the kind of thing these Doge employees are being asked about in these videos. One of the interviews in particular, I found to be interesting. Justin Fox, a former Doge employee who's being interviewed, gets into it with the interviewer over the definition of DEI.

• 6:55Speaker 06

  How do you interpret DEI? There was the EO explicitly laid out, the details. I don't remember it off the top of my head. It's okay. I'm asking for your understanding of it. Yeah, my understanding was exactly what was written in the EO. Okay, so can you? I don't remember what was in the EO. So right now, do you have an understanding of what DEI is? Yeah. Okay, so what's your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition?

• 7:23Speaker 06

  Well, it was exactly what was written in the EO.

• 7:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  The interviewer is like, okay, well, I get that there's like a definition in this document, but how do you define DEI? And Justin Fox basically says, well, I define it as it's defined in the document.

• 7:36Speaker 06

  Do you have a present understanding of DEI? Yeah. Can you explain what that present understanding is? Well, it's just easier for me to be referencing back to the EO. Are you refusing to answer the question? I'm not refusing to answer the question. I just feel that referencing back to the verbatim executive order was the best way for us to capture all of the DEI language.

• 8:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  So videos of these depositions really popped off. They were all over Reddit and then they were gone. Hmm. A judge ordered these videos to be taken down temporarily, essentially, I think, because the government was arguing that these two people would come under harassment and death threats, et cetera, et cetera. Which I have to say is it's an interesting argument to me in a world in which this stuff is happening to people all the time for myriad reasons, if that makes sense. They're getting harassed online. And what you see here is the US government leveraging its full personnel and influence to protect these two individuals in a way that lots of people don't get protected after

• 8:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  getting death threats and harassment for being women, for being people of color, et cetera. So I think there's some inequity here in the way that we think about people getting doxxed and getting harassed for the work that they do. But something changed, which is that almost immediately after the judge ordered these videos to be taken down, we saw them reappear. Can you guess where they reappeared?

• 9:18Amory Sivertson?

  On Reddit.

• 9:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  They did not reappear on Reddit, but they did appear as a BitTorrent. Do you know what that is?

• 9:28Amory Sivertson?

  Loosely.

• 9:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  What?

• 9:33Amory Sivertson?

  Loosely?

• 9:37Amory Sivertson?

  That's one of those like terms that's like, oh yeah, it's the BitTorrent.

• 9:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, it's a BitTorrent.

• 9:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  BitTorrent is effectively an internet protocol that allows people to share files in a more distributed way. A bunch of different computers have copies of a file. They can share part of that file to whomever else wants to download it. So the downloader gets their file via a bunch of different places. That is my layman's description of BitTorrenting.

• 10:10Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, do we all have to download the 400,000 little bits? Or the little bits come together? Okay.

• 10:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, well, they automatically come together.

• 10:19Amory Sivertson?

  They come together automatically.

• 10:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  As a file. Yeah, you don't have to assemble the file.

• 10:22Amory Sivertson?

  Phew, much more efficient. That's like, like an internet jigsaw. No time for that.

• 10:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  But so that's one place. The other place that the videos popped back up was the Internet Archive, which I believe you know about. And this is a place where in recent years, a lot of things that have been erased from the internet for, you know, political reasons, potentially, one might say, have popped back up. So this is just, I think, a story that reminds us that nothing really actually disappears when you post it to the internet. It's on the internet forever, whether it's on YouTube or, you know, even the power of a district court can't really erase something from the internet.

• 11:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  It can make it a lot harder to access. But it's just, it's, it's gonna be really hard to get rid of this stuff. And there's a little bit of a, of a Streisand effect, I think, that happens with these things as well. Where as soon as you try to erase it from the internet, people are like, oh, no, no. And they, and they go and, and they make sure that it's available.

• 11:36Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, and, and, you know, on the one hand, nothing ever really disappears, as you said, but on the other, it could, like, I don't want us to take for granted the resources like Internet Archive and the people who are doing that archiving. Because it is, it is time spent, it is dollars needed to sort of power these archives and to, to keep them alive. And I myself have started taking a lot more screenshots of things that I don't want to see disappear or have a feeling might disappear. I've had a lot of stuff actually disappear on me that was not being protected and backed up by activists

• 12:20Amory Sivertson?

  because it was not crucial to our government or, you know, society at large. And so, yes, we have ways of backing it up and power to those, but also don't take them for granted. And if there is material that you feel like is important to people's rights or that people need to know that are important for accountability, which is so, feels like it's, it's maddeningly fleeting these days. You know, back it up. This is going to take, this is, protecting internet resources takes all of us doing our part.

• 13:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, well, that's one story about the internet being maybe terrible, maybe great in certain ways. So, what do you got for me? Do you have a terrible, beautiful story for me?

• 13:15Amory Sivertson?

  No, no, nothing terrible here. In fact, after the break, Ben, I'm gonna teach us how we can all be more productive.

• 13:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, boy. Oh, no.

• 13:26Amory Sivertson?

  It's coming up in a minute.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI? Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 14:48Amory Sivertson?

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 14:52Amory Sivertson?

  Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 14:59Amory Sivertson?

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Try one.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 15:10Speaker 05

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I'm Alison Aubrey, longtime health and science correspondent with NPR. And I've got a new podcast all about the science and wisdom of life after 50. It's called Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. We want to take you on a journey to help you explore all the opportunities to make change and feel good as you step into middle age and beyond from WBUR and NPR.

• 15:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Your Turn with Alison Aubrey from NPR and WBUR. Supported by AARP. New episodes every Thursday.

• 16:01Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, we're back. And Ben, I have a story for you from one of our favorite subreddits, Life Pro Tips.

• 16:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Love a pro tip.

• 16:09Amory Sivertson?

  This is a post, the title of which is, "I started pretending my life is a TV show and it made me more productive."

• 16:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 16:19Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, so the body of the post reads, "For a while, I had this weird habit. At the end of each day, I would give my day, men in bold, an episode title and a cliffhanger, like a TV show. Example, episode 21, The Day Everything Went Wrong. Cliffhanger, Tomorrow Might Fix It, dot, dot, dot, or Make It Worse. Strangely, this made life a lot more interesting. Even boring days started feeling meaningful because they were just another episode in the story." And that part's in bold. "Hard days felt like, quote unquote, 'character development' instead of failures. It also made me more productive because I started thinking like a main character.

• 17:02Amory Sivertson?

  Main characters don't quit halfway through the story. But there were a few problems." And then there's a bullet point list. One, I had to write the titles somewhere or I'd forget them. Two, coming up with new titles every day was surprisingly hard. Three, I'm lazy and forgetful, so sometimes I skip days entirely. So I tried building a small tool for myself that turns your day into an episode with a title, poster, cliffhanger, and summary, so I can look back on weeks like seasons of a show. Now I can scroll back through past days and it actually feels like re-watching episodes of my life. Curious about something, though, and then this line isn't bold. If your life was a TV show, what would the title of season one, episode one be?

• 17:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm.

• 17:49Amory Sivertson?

  So Ben, do you have any, any thoughts on this idea as a, as a productivity tool?

• 17:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, here's the thing I'll say, I, something that resonated with me was the idea that like, bad things are character development, actually.

• 18:03Amory Sivertson?

  Yes.

• 18:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Um, like I have a, I have a friend who says, good times are good times and bad times are good stories later.

• 18:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which, I like that. Um, I guess we are all main characters in our own lives. Um, and so like that's, we all have that right, uh, as individuals to feel like we're main characters. I could see that leading to some potential toxic behavior. But, you know, I, I guess I don't, you know, whatever, I, to each their own. Uh, better to be a main character than an NPC, I suppose.

• 18:39Amory Sivertson?

  Do you keep a journal?

• 18:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  I have several journals that I've been given over the years that have like one or two pages filled out.

• 18:45Amory Sivertson?

  Okay. I'm like, I don't mean do you physically keep a journal? Cause I, I like this, I like the idea of this as like micro journaling, you know? Because it's like, I'm not going to take the time at the end of the day to write about what happened. But if I could just, at the end of the day, write a little title for myself for the day. Um, that's, and then just flip back through all my titles, I think that would be. It, it's an interesting thought experiment and, and many Redditors thought the same thing. One person wrote, this is kind of genius. Suddenly doing laundry feels like a side quest instead of suffering.

• 19:22Amory Sivertson?

  And the OP responded, yep, and harder days feel like tough missions and more interesting to finish. It feels more like a video game than a TV show from this view.

• 19:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I like that, too. I mean, I had a parent tell me, like, a new parent tell me as I was becoming a new parent, they were like, being a parent is like playing a video game. Like, every level is different. Some levels are really hard, some levels are really fun, but every level is different. And you just like get through the level and you get to the next level. And that's kind of, so, and I think that's, that's life, too, right?

• 19:54Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Just with or without kids. So I'm into it. Yeah, I think it's good. And it's certainly way more doable than, than actual journaling, at least for someone like me.

• 20:07Amory Sivertson?

  Same.

• 20:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm much more likely to come up with a title than a full entry.

• 20:10Amory Sivertson?

  Same.

• 20:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  If that makes sense.

• 20:12Amory Sivertson?

  Totally. So I want to read a few more comments for you. Someone said, how in the world is this not a completely dystopian idea? OP says, because it's heavily based in your daily life and we are just adding a little creativity to it. And then someone responds to that comment and says, who is this "we"? And this is where, this is where things started to fall apart, for me. Someone says, sometimes the AI posts are so obvious.

• 20:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Uh oh.

• 20:46Amory Sivertson?

  And then other commenters jump in and say, there's always a list with exactly three bullet points. Someone says-

• 20:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, boy.

• 20:55Amory Sivertson?

  And always a weird question at the end. Someone else says, and totally random bold words.

• 21:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm.

• 21:04Amory Sivertson?

  So this post-

• 21:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Are there any M dashes in there? Any M dashes in that post, Amory?

• 21:09Amory Sivertson?

  There are no M dashes, but-

• 21:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, damn it.

• 21:12Amory Sivertson?

  Redditors now believe, in this subreddit at least, now believe that this post is just AI.

• 21:20Amory Sivertson?

  And someone said, it's as much scary as it is cool that we can now squint our eyes at a post and say with relative confidence, that wasn't a human. And they say, I mean, it's cool that we can do it, not that we have to. And someone else says, based on math, about 2 to 5% of people can do it. Eventually, as algorithms sort what is valued semantically, it will drop to less than 1%. So who knows where those percentages are coming from at this moment in time? But the point being that like, no, no, people are actually really bad at knowing that this post is AI, including me.

• 21:58Amory Sivertson?

  And including you, at least from the reading of it.

• 22:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 22:02Amory Sivertson?

  And the algorithms are only getting better and better at making posts that seem human, but are not.

• 22:10Amory Sivertson?

  And so other commenters jump in and, you know, someone says, what makes you think that this is AI? I would like to have this super skill. Then people are like, oh, it's the final part in bold and people are too selfish to care and ask, what would season one, episode one of your life be? Like, no human actually cares what your answer to that is.

• 22:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, here's my question for you. Did you look at OP's posting history?

• 22:32Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, so this is where we get to who this OP is. The username is fuzzy dash add 7685. So that does not inspire a lot of confidence that this is a human, at least as I'm viewing it.

• 22:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, that's like, what I would say is that's like a Reddit applied username.

• 22:54Amory Sivertson?

  Sure.

• 22:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  So.

• 22:54Amory Sivertson?

  Sure. They could have just said, generate one for me. I don't have any ideas.

• 22:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  People do. But it's interesting that a user whose suggestion is, you should come up with titles for your life, is not coming up with an original username.

• 23:09Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, yes. So I'll get to their history, but first, the very next day, this post was removed.

• 23:18Amory Sivertson?

  So I'm like, damn it, I saw this post. People thought it was AI. Where is it? It was not in the Internet Archive.

• 23:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  It was not on a torrent.

• 23:27Amory Sivertson?

  It was not on a torrent. But I had a feeling that if this was AI and some bot farm generating this, they probably made this post elsewhere on Reddit because there's no shortage of self-improvement subreddits. And indeed, they did. So I was reading you the exact same post, but this time it's on the subreddit Productivity Cafe, where at least last I checked, no one has called this out as being an AI post. That's a much smaller subreddit than Life Pro Tips, but no one has called this out as being AI yet.

• 23:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Interesting.

• 23:59Amory Sivertson?

  And it's posted there under a different username, which is future-swimming-1092. So we have a pattern, a pattern in the usernames here, word-word and then a four-digit number. So then I go to these users Reddit history. And I don't know if this is a relatively new feature then, but both of these Redditors have their post history hidden.

• 24:28Amory Sivertson?

  In the meantime, I did what we do and I reached out to fuzzyad7685, the OP of the Life Pro Tips.

• 24:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Alright, good for you.

• 24:37Amory Sivertson?

  And I just said, hey, fuzzyad, I see your LPT post was removed after accusations that you're an AI. Your Reddit username doesn't give me a lot of hope that you're human, but you know, I figured I'd give you a chance to speak for yourself. Even if you're not human, I want to understand how and why these AI posts are made. Who's behind this? What, what is there to gain or learn? And I, you know, I do not expect to hear back. I have not heard back from fuzzyad7685.

• 25:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 25:13Amory Sivertson?

  But in the meantime, like, I don't want to see AI-generated content on Reddit. I, I think a lot of people would agree that we don't want that. And so what can we do to to curb AI posts as both Redditors and social media users and moderators? And what is the responsibility of platforms? What can platforms do? And do they have any incentive to do anything when more content and more engagement means, you know, more advertising dollars, which is how these platforms survive?

• 25:54Amory Sivertson?

  You know, I personally, as someone who is trying to spend less time online, I'm always kind of asking myself, like, what is my red line for social media that would get me off of social media or get me off of a particular platform? And AI, bots are it, I have to say.

• 26:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Bots will do it?

• 26:14Amory Sivertson?

  The anonymity of Reddit, and you and I talk a lot about anonymity and think a lot about anonymity, but the anonymity of Reddit certainly doesn't do it any favors in the larger question of how we prove our humanity on anonymous platforms. And when when it starts to feel like we're swimming in a space and we can't tell what's real or not anymore, that's when I'm like, nope, give me real people right in front of me, who I know, who are not characters in the show Pluribus that are all tapped into the hive mind, like, give me real people.

• 26:54Amory Sivertson?

  So I still like the idea of like, micro journaling your life. And yet, knowing that it was potentially created by AI and not by a human, just leaves this taste in my mouth that's like, blech.

• 27:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Metallic?

• 27:13Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 27:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Is it metallic?

• 27:15Amory Sivertson?

  Metallic.

• 27:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Does it taste like silicon?

• 27:18Amory Sivertson?

  A little like that. Yep. So.

• 27:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Fair enough. Well, nonetheless, let's come up with our season one, episode one titles.

• 27:32Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 27:36Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, I know. I went to Providence, Rhode Island, yesterday.

• 27:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 27:42Amory Sivertson?

  Look, I live in Boston, and I love Boston, but Providence is like a cooler Boston right now. Or like Providence is what maybe Boston used to be and is no longer. And my husband and I saw a sticker in a store there that said, keep Providence a secret. So I would steal that as like the title of my day yesterday. Keep Providence a secret.

• 28:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's good.

• 28:08Amory Sivertson?

  What about you?

• 28:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, man. Yesterday, I, I won a pool tournament.

• 28:17Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 28:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  I, I led a meeting of a bunch of my neighbors going through bylaws changes.

• 28:27Amory Sivertson?

  Okay. We're micro journaling, Ben, micro journaling.

• 28:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, I know. I'm just trying to come up with the title, though. It's like,

• 28:37Amory Sivertson?

  Like, like, big wins in small places.

• 28:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Big wins in small places. That's good.

• 28:43Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. You have like a tight.

• 28:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  What about, but I want to get hijinks in there somehow. Hijinks, big wins in small places.

• 28:50Amory Sivertson?

  Hijinks, low stakes.

• 28:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hijinks, low stakes. That's good.

• 28:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right. Hijinks, low stakes.

• 28:59Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 29:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's a good name for our podcast, actually.

• 29:06Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 29:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right. Send us your season one, episode one titles, listeners, please. We would like to know, whatever day you listen to this episode, name, title your day or, or the full day yesterday and email us. Endless Thread, wbur.org.

• 29:29Amory Sivertson?

  We're going to disprove the AI watchers on Reddit in saying that real humans don't care about other people's season one, episode one titles. We are not AI and we do care. So send them along.

• 29:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, we do care. Send them to us.

• 29:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, and by the way, before this episode was set to air, The New York Times had an update on the Doge story. Earlier this week, a judge ruled in federal district court that, in fact, the videos of the former employees' depositions could live online after all. The judge, who had temporarily said the videos needed to be removed, cited a few key reasons for allowing them back online. For one, the government had not supplied sufficient evidence that the Doge employees were, in fact, being harassed. And number two, the internet and platforms, including Reddit, TikTok, and others, had supplied a nearly instantaneous global distribution of the videos, making in order to remove

• 30:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  them effectively moot. In other words, the Doge cat, it's already out of the bag. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR. This episode was co-hosted by myself, Ben Barak Johnson.

• 30:46Amory Sivertson?

  And me, Amory Sivertson. It was produced by Kalyani Saxena, edited by Meg Cramer.

• 30:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mix and sound design by Marquis Neal.

• 30:54Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Chiosna Bernado, Grace Tatter, Emily Jankowski, our production manager, Paul Vikes, and our managing producer, Suma Tajoshi.

• 31:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, and another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Threat at WBUR.org.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast From the Marotra Institute at BU Queston School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education. I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context. And just to claim why you're excited about it. Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities,

• 32:35Speaker 00

  for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm.

• 33:33Speaker 05

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.