The Real Ticking Time Bomb with Michael Cembalest

**Michael Batnick** (0:00)
I feel like there is deflation in the summer. It's getting shorter.

**Michael Cembalest** (0:04)
Hold on.

**Downtown Josh Brown** (0:05)
It's the middle of July already.

**Michael Batnick** (0:07)
But, what's wrong? Oh, no, you know what? I think he might be backwards.

**Downtown Josh Brown** (0:10)
He's backwards.

**Michael Batnick** (0:11)
He's backwards.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:12)
No, that's right. That was right.

**Michael Batnick** (0:14)
Is it right?

**Downtown Josh Brown** (0:15)
No, it's not right. It's the cord is on the left side.

**Michael Batnick** (0:17)
Come on, Nicole.

**Michael Cembalest** (0:18)
Oh, okay, I know I just did this. Sorry.

**Michael Batnick** (0:21)
There we go.
Well, we lost May. Michael and I were talking on his birthdays, and May, he used to be able to fish in shorts. May is gone.

**Michael Cembalest** (0:29)
Yeah, May is very cold now.

**Downtown Josh Brown** (0:31)
Oh, in New York, the thing that people don't realize is September, October is better than April and May, weather-wise. And people forget, like people get excited. Oh, it's spring. Spring is not great in New York.

**Michael Cembalest** (0:42)
No, it's not.

**Downtown Josh Brown** (0:43)
Fall is wonderful in New York. What is the Latin term that you use to describe the eagle octopus?

**Michael Cembalest** (0:50)
The Aquila cef.

**Downtown Josh Brown** (0:51)
So Aquila is Latin for eagle?

**Michael Cembalest** (0:54)
Yes. And cephalopod is in Latin, which is the prefix used in Latin and in biology for octopi.

**Downtown Josh Brown** (1:02)
It's a little bit of a disturbing image, but it catches your attention for sure.

**Michael Cembalest** (1:08)
Yeah. The GPT is amazing now in terms of, you can give it very specific guidance in terms of what you wanted to draw.

**Michael Batnick** (1:16)
I was going to ask if this was AI-generated or you had an artist inside of JPM.

**Michael Cembalest** (1:20)
We used to use external artists, but it's so much easier now. And even compared to a year ago, the degree to which you can continue to layer on additional instructions and have it create whatever image you want.

**Michael Batnick** (1:33)
How much does that frustrate you when people are talking about or complaining about what AI can't do, when it's evolving so, so fast? Like we're looking at this in a vacuum as if it's a finished product sometimes when people are talking.

**Michael Cembalest** (1:44)
Yeah. Look, I like the fact that when people do empirical analyses, they track how it's doing.
You know, it's still getting better at certain things. But think about it this way. When the cost of being wrong is very high, I think the hurdle should be very high. You know, there was a time a few years ago when people felt like radiologists wouldn't be needed anymore. If you are at risk of breast cancer, you still want a doctor plus AI instead of AI by itself. And so it's still not ready for prime time on certain interpretive things in medicine. But it is getting better at things that have low value, like making drawings of eagle octopi.

**Downtown Josh Brown** (2:26)
I actually like that it's not perfect because I like to yell at it. I get a lot of satisfaction. I can't say the things that I can say to my Claude, to other people. So I like to just put it all there. And I find it to be...

**Michael Batnick** (2:41)
This poor AI.

**Michael Cembalest** (2:43)
Well, I'm shocked.

**Downtown Josh Brown** (2:44)
I'm going to definitely get kicked off of this Claude.

**Michael Cembalest** (2:47)
I'm not easily kind of surprised, but I am very surprised about the number of people that use it as a psychiatrist or a counselor or for marriage advice and things like that.

**Downtown Josh Brown** (2:58)
My wife is talking to it about nutrition all day and used to pay a nutritionist, like go every week, here's what I ate, here's what I should have ate, here's the choices that I made at this Italian restaurant.

**Michael Batnick** (3:12)
That makes sense, that's mostly fact.

**Downtown Josh Brown** (3:14)
She much prefers talking to Chachi BT.
It's not that it's her nutritionist, it's tracking the minutia of what she eats and doesn't eat each day and she just likes that experience better because it's whenever she feels like it. It's not I have an appointment, it's like anytime I feel like talking about what I'm doing, I could talk to it.

**Michael Cembalest** (3:36)
I mean these things are slavishly trained to be so obsequious to you that you have to be careful exactly what you do rely on. Although I do have this, like a lot of us, I have this fancy Manhattan internist and whenever I call him and I'm describing my symptoms, I can hear him typing them into the computer and giving me a readout from Google Overview.