Should we just shut AI down? One of you said yes, right in our comments, so we took the question seriously.

Cousins Luke Wiesner and David Cole start with a listener's holiday worry: what do you do when your uncle brings up AI at the dinner table? Then they get into how AI has made scams harder to spot, from fake online stores and fake romances to fake family members asking for money, and the one thing every family should set up before the holidays: a family code word. Luke tells the story of his run-in with a puppy scammer, and David shares the vacation rental scam he fell for. They look at a $2,490 humanoid robot, a real trial of AI tutors with a human approving what the AI said, and a new study on AI helping doctors with diagnoses, where AI plus a person did better than either one alone. Plus how to keep what makes your AI useful when you switch tools, and this week's inspiration.

Chapters:
0:00 Cold open
0:21 Intro
0:36 Welcome
1:13 A listener says AI needs to be gone
3:29 Has a boycott ever stopped a technology?
6:32 Why we'd rather be involved
9:51 Learning out loud
11:19 Listener question: AI and the uncle at Thanksgiving
14:32 AI scams: $21 billion lost in 2025
17:34 David's vacation rental scam
21:07 Make a family code word
25:27 The puppy scammer
26:37 FF Nova: a $2,490 robot
31:17 If I drove for Uber, I'd want one
32:51 Elon's track record
34:50 AI tutors: Eedi and Google DeepMind
37:45 One tutor, sixty kids
41:17 The hidden debate: how we support kids
45:25 A world where nobody gets the credit
46:33 AI diagnosis: smarter isn't safer
49:37 Doctors plus AI beat both
54:09 Tip: a train-the-agent document
56:09 Inspiration: Yeko and Yendi
58:22 Help us inspire others
1:00:26 Outro

New episodes every Thursday. Questions, stories and freak-outs: hello@late2thefuture.com. Get the weekly newsletter, The Catch-Up: late2thefuture.com/catchup. Find us at @late2thefuture.

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Better late than never.

Views are our own and not those of any employer. We're not experts, and nothing here is professional advice.