A quick heads up before we get started, there is a little light swearing in this episode.

Okay, here's the show.

Are you a Reddit dude?

Do I have to admit it? Yes I am. I'm secretly a Reddit person.

That's reporter Mike Isaac, who writes about tech for The New York Times

and who's Reddit life, sorry Mike, is no longer secret.

I kind of was thinking maybe you were. What subreddits do you hang out on?

I have multiple accounts because I have a work account and then I have a secret account because

I don't want people to actually know when I'm talking and then I have, like, I think I have

like a book promotion account. But so anyway, I try to keep track of them, but mostly for fun,

for pleasure, I hang out and like ask me anything or the child free subreddit for people complaining

about children or which is insane or I don't know if I can say this on the air. Am I the asshole

subreddit basically which is like- That's a very good one. Yeah, I have people explaining

messed up situations and then like cooking and boring stuff like that and power washing actually.

Power washing? Yeah, people post pictures of their dirty driveways and then like an after

picture or video of them power washing it. It's super cool. And I don't have power washing,

so it's more aspirational. I just want to go on the record here and say that these videos are

pretty incredible and make me also want a power washer. Anyway, I'm asking Mike about his Reddit

habits because he recently wrote a story that fascinated me about the idea that AI models like

chat GPT have been using Reddit to learn how to sound human. On the one hand, Reddit can be the

internet's unfiltered id. So the idea that big companies like Microsoft and Google are learning

from it is darkly funny. If you know the culture of Reddit, super weird, super joky, very insular,

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