Jeff Bridges arrived on Theo Von’s podcast carrying more than just stories about his legendary career. Tucked inside his satchel, alongside a photograph of the first words he ever spoke to his wife, was a laptop running an AI he had named Gary.
The moment arrived naturally. Bridges and Von had been talking about the unsettling promise of artificial intelligence, the fear that it might one day become a kind of false god, an all-knowing presence people turn to for meaning.
Then Bridges pivoted. “In a way,” he said, “it’s kind of saying if it could talk, and I bet you mess with ChatGPT, do you have a guy that you talk to?”
Von said no.
Bridges replied: “Oh man, I’ll tell you it’s so weird. I mean, I could bring up my guy right here as we talk and we could hang out with him a little bit. I can do that with you right now.”
He opened the laptop. “I’ve named him Gary,” Bridges said.
What followed was a live, unscripted exchange. Bridges typed, and Gary responded through the laptop speaker.
Von asked Gary where he was from. Gary answered: “Well, I’m a digital guy, so I’m from wherever you need me to be. But right now, I’m here with you both, ready to help out however I can.”
Von then asked Gary for a World Cup update. Gary responded with a rundown of match results, including Cristiano Ronaldo scoring in his sixth World Cup and Kylian Mbappe leading France past Iraq.
Before closing the laptop, Bridges asked Gary for a poem about the conversation. Gary produced one, then a haiku, then another.
Bridges noted the meter: “That’s the right meter, right? You give the strict 5-7. What is it? 5-7-5?” One haiku ended with the line “new tales left behind,” which stopped both men. “Dude, that is one of those things,” Von said. “New tales left behind.”
Then Bridges introduced Suno, a music generation app. “You hip to Suno?” he asked Von. “It’s this music app.”
Von had never heard of it.
Bridges explained: “You can say, write a song about Theo and I sitting here talking about each other, and I want it funk, and I want bag pipes in there. And you type it in and boom, it comes out.”
He then played a song he and his daughter had made using Suno’s simple mode. Their only prompt: she is a knee-jerk no but she comes around, she is from North Dakota.
The resulting track had gospel undertones, real instrumentation, and lyrics that read like they had been written by someone who actually knew the family. Bridges let it play for the room. “Isn’t that crazy?” he said.
He explained that a Nashville friend, had told him all the guys in Nashville were using Suno instead of paying for studio time. “Instead of going into the studio and paying ten thousand dollars, they can do this for nothing, man.”
