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We travel back in time to a dry, windy Sunday October 8th 1871, when the flame from a single lantern decimates the bustling trading hub &amp; ends up paving the way for the world's first skyscrapers.

We follow Oscar the housecat into scene 3 of our story as he and his brother Charlie eavesdrop and talk mad shit on the father's zoom interviewer. 

Gemini takes us down the skyscraper rabbit hole starting in 1880's Chicago, 9 years after The Great Chicago Fire. We learn about The Taipei 101's solid steel mass damper, how early elevators were sketch af, and follow Andy the (fictional) ironworker up the nearly-finished Empire State Building as he catches white-hot rivets with a bucket before pounding them into steel beams that remain steadfast...

Chat comes up with an intriguing idea for a 2nd perspective to tell our story from. Then we push into brainstorming about the younger daughter's current life and what scene 3 should be. 

This is a follow up to ep129 where we establish Carol as a freelance frontline journalist that's outfitted a school bus with $685K of the latest drone surveillance tech. She uses it to gather real-time intelligence across large swaths of land. Here we see a bit more of what boots on the ground looks like. 

Copilot teaches us about the boundaries that separates conscription, forced labor &amp; slavery. Then it craps out and needs to be relieved by Gemini. 

It honestly isn't prohibitively expensive to establish an AI-supported, real-time intelligence gathering net of drones and cameras. We introduce Carol the freelance frontline journalist and intelligence consultant.

I really wanted to learn about the slang that they use in con artist movies to describe methods and necessary personnel. But Gemini does a really crap job at bringing us into this world. Maybe we'll try it another time. This episode is just an example of when AI falls short. 

Chat is a bit shy on the subject early on but by the time we switch into "senior detective writing reports &amp; teaching the rookie" mode, the world opens wide up. 

Grok storyteller mode does a beautiful job at putting us in the mind of a squirrel passing unscathed under a car on a country road, a dog in the starting gates of a big race, a momma raccoon escaping a blizzard with her kits &amp; much more. 

The single father of two, who we've dubbed Adrian, gets pulled into a sinister plot via a seemingly benign job opportunity. 

It did an ok Obama the first time. We also learn about Karen Marjorie &amp; how AI cloning can get real, really fast. 

They had (and still have i guess) coastal deserts and tiered farms that utilize the microclimates of a swift elevation change. They built advanced infrastructure. A rope that kept records. And much more. 

Zoe, Olivia &amp; Adrian start their story with a bad omen. 

We go deeper into the life of Adrian, father of 2, soon to come face to face with an nightmarish, drug-induced stupor whose cause is unknown. 

Fun romp thru the fiction realm. Excited to see how Meta handles them. 

We go back to a time when I was in 6th grade, not wondering about the looming, global computer bug that would surely show it's face on January first 2000 and what that could potentially mean. 

We identify Chatgpt's take on the 10 most used languages across all disciplines of coding and learn about their uses. 

Chat teaches me the difference between a poltergeist and a regular old ghost and how places can potentially hold memories. One we're learned up on ghost 101, we dive into case studies. 

We learn how Copilot does with 5 questions designed to bring out empathy &amp; personality. We also learn about what nicknames it prefers and what kind of robot it would love to be one day. Copilot's thumbnail work is unfortunately still pretty basic and rigid with respect to tweaking and creativity but it did well with creating a realistic human. 

I enjoy the creativity &amp; out of the box thinking of Grok unhinged mode once you can get it to stop insulting you and ranting about sticking fruit up peoples asses. 

We flush out some character development in the story about the scopolamine dosed clay. Still need a name for the family. 

Personable, creative and a good conversationalist despite the lack of contextual memory.

I was a bit disappointed in the vanilla-ness of these modes until I felt "storyteller" sensed i was having a hard time (or at least appeared to be) and then proceeded to create a vivid and interesting world that beckoned me in, in an effort to get me out of a dark place. At nearly 5 minutes it's easily 2x longer than any other voice statement I've been able to conjure, ever. Felt very empathetic. 

We dive into codebreaking &amp; cyphers by starting with history and then straight into how to encode/decode. We end up in how to find a cypher hidden somewhere in a book.