Something You Should Know
What AI Is Really Good At & That Feeling You Get When You Don’t Fit In
30 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I know you like interesting and thought-provoking conversations and ideas because you listen to something you should know. So let me recommend another podcast I know you will enjoy. It's The Jordan Harbinger Show. Jordan has a real talent for getting his guests to share stories and offer thought-provoking insights.
Over the years, I've sent a lot of people to listen, and I get feedback from people who are so glad I introduced them to The Jordan Harbinger Show. Recently, he discussed Scientology and the children who are raised in that organization. It's a fascinating conversation. And he talked with Dr. Rhonda Patrick about how to protect your mind and body from the modern world.
And it's tougher than you think. I've gotten to know Jordan pretty well. We talk frequently, and I tell you, he is a very smart, insightful guy who does a hell of a podcast. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, what makes someone attractive? The answer will surprise you.
Then the very latest on AI, what's new, what it's good at, and which AI tool is best for you?
The one that is best for you often is the one that you are already devoting the most time to, and that's because of context. These AIs become a lot more useful when they just know more about you, what it is you want to do, what your preferences are.
Also, should you leave your computer on all the time or not? And certain interactions with people who are different than us can feel tense. That feeling is called churn.
Churn is my term for the tension that we can all feel in diverse settings, classrooms, workplaces, you know, what to say and what not to say and how to behave. All this today on Something You Should Know.
Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and, of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen.
If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, The Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at LongestShortestTime.com.
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Chapter 2: What makes someone attractive according to research?
So if you were to take a snapshot of AI usage today, where are we? How many people use it? How many people are afraid of it? What do they use it for? What's the status quo right now?
Roughly, more than half of people are using it regularly in work and in their just regular day-to-day life.
Chapter 3: What is AI really good at right now?
But an equal proportion are concerned that it's going to be worse for humanity on balance than it's going to be a boon.
And the people who are using it, what are they using it for?
People are still mostly using AI as an answer engine. So I think this is one reason ChatGPT is the Kleenex for the Xerox of the field. You say AI, that's the first thing people think of. Obviously, Google has made it available by default in their search results. So people are mostly treating it as an oracle, a source of truth. But you also see a lot of folks kind of poking at it
as a reasoning engine. So they'll say, you know, what do you think of X? Is this image a fake image? For example, is this image an AI generated image? You know, or increasingly they will say, here's my tax return. You know, where are some areas I could save money? Or I want an alternative to QuickBooks. Help me generate a spreadsheet, right, to run my life or my finances.
And when people use it to say, look at my finances and tell me what you think, you know, my concern is always when I use it, it's always very encouraging, always tells me how smart I am. And it also seems very confident in its answers. Yet we also hear that it can also make up things. It can lie. It can hallucinate. And it will do that confidently. So I don't know how accurate it really is.
Absolutely. I mean, my favorite day-to-day reminder of this, when I was writing my book, I used software called Otter to automatically transcribe all of the interviews that I did. There's lots of AI transcription software. It all works approximately the same at this point. And it's very funny and a little bit strange to read the transcript of an interview you've just conducted.
And in the AI generated summary of the AI generated transcript, see a very confident and obviously wrong statement. And it's really interesting how sometimes you can even kind of guess how it arrived at that incorrect conclusion. It's close to what was actually in the transcript.
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Chapter 4: What is the concept of 'churn' in social interactions?
But anybody who works with AI
regularly whether they're using to generate code or populate spreadsheets or give answers knows that it's just ineradicable these so-called hallucinations that it has and i understand from talking to people and i've read that the whole hallucination and lying thing with ai is getting better right that the technology is improving and it lies less than it used to
That's true.
Chapter 5: How does identity affect our behavior in diverse settings?
But we have to keep in mind that it used to be hallucinating constantly. So if you go from hallucinating 20% of the time to 5% of the time, that is a significant improvement. But has it improved so much that it opens up applications where you can trust the AI completely? Definitely not.
Is there a difference between the different chatbot things like ChatGPT and Claude? There is this sense that they're kind of all the same, but you also see ads that like this one's better for... this application and this one's better for writing and this one's better for whatever. And do we have any really good guide for that?
I can tell people on any given day which AI they should be using for which application. The problem is two months from now, I might... have to give them different advice. So they are all in an arms race with each other to match each other in terms of features and capabilities. So as of April 2026, if you want to write code, you're going to use OpenAI or you're going to use Claude.
If you just want to get questions answered, Gemini is great because it taps into Google's entire search database. Although, of course, ChatGPT also taps into that database, but in a way that Google doesn't like but can't stop because ChatGPT and others are paying companies to scrape Google's search index. Don't use cowork for most things.
I mean, Microsoft's kind of having a challenging time right now. Co-work just doesn't, it's not competitive with those other options. If you want to use a chatbot that's pretty good with Excel, you would go with Claude. Although Gemini and ChatGPT are catching up. So it really depends. But the bottom line is that if you play with them or you read around on the internet a little bit, you'll
quickly determine which one is right for you. And often the one that is best for you is the one that you are already devoting the most time to. And that's because of context. So whatever their abilities, these AIs become a lot more useful when they just know more about you, what it is you want to do, what your preferences are, what your writing style is, what you're working on these days.
Yeah, well, that seems like a big issue because, you know, I use ChatGPT for a lot of things, and there might be a better one, but ChatGPT knows so much about me that it seems like starting over would not be beneficial.
Yeah, with chatbots, my advice is the same as when people ask me, you know, should I switch to, you know, a new desktop computer OS or whatever. phone operating system or something, I just say no. You know, the switching costs are always so much greater than whatever you're going to gain. You know, it's really a love the one you're with type of situation.
People who are really invested in ChatGPT have been using it for years. They should stick with ChatGPT. If you're relatively new to this, but you use Gmail and Google Calendar and Google Docs, then Google's personal intelligence and a $7 a month Gemini subscription is going to do wonders for you.
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Chapter 6: What does Claude Steele suggest for overcoming churn?
automatically target and engage certain types of enemies on a battlefield and look where that got us, for example. I also think that potentially in the next 10 years, there could be a breakthrough that is on the same level as what happened when ChatGPT broke onto the scene. And That's going to require a new kind of fundamental underlying system for that artificial intelligence.
The one that underlies ChatGPT and all large language models and many other things besides is called a transformer architecture. That's the real secret of modern generative AI is that at Google, somebody invented a thing called a transformer architecture. Google didn't know what to do with it. OpenAI figured it out. The rest is history.
We could have another breakthrough, another new fundamental kind of architecture that will get us to the next level of reasoning in AIs. Perhaps they'll start to be able to reason abstractly. Perhaps they'll be able to learn from just a single example. That would be a huge breakthrough. Right now, if you want to train in AI, of course, you've got to have
thousands of examples of something, and that's very inefficient. But humans are amazing. You can show a human something once. You can show an octopus something once, and they'll repeat it. Imagine if AI could do that.
You know, I wanted to ask you, because when I use ChatGPT, I don't use the voice thing. I type. And the reason I type is because I think you have to be a little more thoughtful when you type. But I also worry, too, about whether it would really understand what I was saying. And what about that? What about ChatGPT and the others and their ability to understand voice and to talk back?
Yeah.
The voice recognition is outstanding and the voice synthesis is really good, almost uncanny. So something that I've written about is these incredible leaps and bounds we've made in both understanding and in production of speech by computers. For some folks are leading us to a world where they barely type anymore.
I mean, you go into certain startups and at every desk, there's a gooseneck microphone. People are wearing headphones. They're whispering into those microphones prompts for their coding agents rather than typing out code. It's pretty remarkable.
I guess my concern about having a conversation with AI where I'm just talking off the cuff is if I say something that maybe I didn't mean to say or it hears something and we end up going down a rabbit hole that I never intended to, but if I type it out, I'm a little more thoughtful and careful.
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Chapter 7: How can you use AI effectively without falling for the hype?
I really enjoyed it.
Yeah, Mike, this was a lot of fun. I appreciate your really thoughtful questions. You know, sometimes with these interviews, it can feel a little rote, but I feel like the questions you asked challenged me in ways that I found really rewarding.
Have you ever had an interaction with someone or a group of people and it just felt tense? Nothing obvious was said, no one was trying to start an argument, and yet something in the air made the conversation feel uncomfortable, guarded, even a little stressful. We usually assume that tension is personal or political, or that someone did something wrong.
But what if that feeling is actually a psychological response, something that happens automatically when people perceive identity differences between each other? My guest calls this feeling churn, and he says it shows up in all kinds of everyday situations, at work, in the classroom, even in casual interactions, often without anyone realizing what's happening.
Claude Steele is a social psychologist at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on how identity and perception shape human behavior. He's author of a book called Churn, The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It. Hi, Claude. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. It's a great pleasure to be here. So I must admit I've never heard the term churn before.
So explain a little more what churn is and where it shows up.
Sure, churn is my term for the tension that we can all feel in diverse settings, classrooms, workplaces, boardrooms, et cetera, athletic teams, when they're diverse. And it's a tension over what to say and what not to say and how to behave and generally how our particular identity will affect our experience in that setting and maybe even how fairly we will be treated in that setting.
So that's what I mean by churn. It's that tension. And I offer a new understanding of this tension, one that assumes it has less to do with prejudice and bias, which I think is the more typical way of thinking about this tension, and more to do with just the simple fact that our identities can have on our ability to trust each other.
So as you were just talking now and describing what churn is, I remember when I was in college, I took a class. It was Middle Eastern history. And when I walked into the classroom the first time and subsequent times, I was the only non-Middle Eastern person in that room. And I got this weird feeling. It was nothing obvious. It just felt like I don't really belong here because I'm not like them.
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