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- [00:01]
Jon Favreau
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Jon Favreau
And I can barely tell the difference.
- [00:58]
Charlie Warzell
I know.
- [00:58]
Jon Favreau
But I could with the. It was like six bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, different kinds, and they were all delicious. Yeah.
- [01:04]
Dan Pfeiffer
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- [01:41]
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- [02:43]
Charlie Warzell
You have the stuff we were talking about in Minneapolis, which is like, you know, this is real footage that people risk their lives to get that's showing this stuff. Maybe that doesn't fit into that paradigm. But so much of the other stuff, the memes, all that, it's being compressed into this weird thing where gossip is just sort of like how we process the world now. And it's just like I'm just whatever I think feels good feels true. I'm going with that. I'm going with that.
- [03:15]
Jon Favreau
I'm Jon Favreau and you just heard from this week's guest friend of the show, Charlie Warzell, a writer at the Atlantic and host of the Galaxy Brain podcast. Head Charlie on to talk about some of the insane news of the last week. Everything from Minneapolis to the Epstein Files to a social network that's now only for AI bots. But they all have something in common that I want to talk about before we get into the show. I ran into a friend's father the other day I hadn't seen in a while, and his first question was, is this real? I didn't know exactly what he was referring to, but he didn't really have to specify. Did federal agents actually shoot two Americans dead in the streets of Minneapolis? Did our government actually label the mom who said she wasn't mad a domestic terrorist and call the ICU nurse who was helping a woman off the ground an assassin? Did they really tell us to be grateful that they saved a five year old boy from the freezing cold by shipping him off to a Texas detention center? It's all pretty hard to believe and the government's trying to make sure that we don't. The victims were no angels. The people in the streets have ill intent. The left is inciting violence. The media is making up stories again and should frankly, be ashamed of themselves for even asking about the victims of the president's pedophile friend. Those emails are fake. That name had to be redacted. No one cares about this story anymore. Do we know if the government is still murdering suspected coke traffickers instead of arresting them? Did they really just arrest a pair of journalists who two different judges refused to charge? Did the president actually say that he intends to take over the election process in places that didn't vote for him? Did he really just post a video depicting America's first black president and our former first lady as apes, only to have his White House dismiss the criticism as fake outrage? Is all this real? Yes, in the sense that it all happened. But it's becoming increasingly difficult and disorienting to figure out what's true and what's not anymore, to tell the difference between factual information and propaganda and the absolute slop that pollutes our screenshots. Was that image AI? Was that human seeming reply actually from a bot? Was that bot seeming post actually written by a human? Does it even matter? In many ways, the confusion and craziness benefits regimes that don't want their authority questioned or their decisions criticized, that just want to govern without all the messiness of a participatory democracy. I've been thinking about the title of Peter Pomerentsev's memoir that chronicles his time as a TV producer in Russia during the period where Putin consolidated power. It's called Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible. The Russian people weren't so much brainwashed or persuaded by the regime. They simply didn't know what to believe, what was true, or whether objective reality was even possible. There are obvious echoes of that from the Trump administration right now, but I think it's important for us to realize that their strategy has failed in Minneapolis, and it's failed because of the people of Minneapolis. Instead of turning away from politics out of fear or confusion or cynicism, they've turned towards each other to help each other and support each other and stand up for each other in signal chat groups and in person, as neighbors and as strangers. And what's even better, they've held up their phones, often at incredible risk to themselves, to make sure the rest of us can see what they're seeing and share in their reality and bear witness to what the government is doing to its citizens. I think there's a lesson there for all of us as Trump's government becomes more unpopular and likely more dangerous, that as our screens and our feeds become more Disorienting and depressing. It's the organizing we do and the connections we make offline and our willingness to use our phones and our technology to strengthen those ties and broadcast what's really happening that will give us a fighting chance to get through this crisis together. Charlie has been writing and talking about all of these issues recently on his POD and in the Atlantic. So I had him on to chat with me about the news of the week and where we go from here. Here's Charlie Warzell. Charlie, welcome back, and congrats on your new ish podcast, Galaxy Brain.
- [08:02]
Charlie Warzell
Thank you. I'm glad to finally be a real journalist. I have a YouTube show now, so that's.
- [08:07]
Jon Favreau
You've made it. You've made it.
- [08:09]
Charlie Warzell
That's all that matters. Yeah.
- [08:10]
Jon Favreau
So I figured we could run through some of the more offline Galaxy Brain themed stories in the news right now. And I wanted to start with what I think is still the most important story in the country, which is the government paramilitary forces that have been terrorizing Minnesota. You had a great Atlantic piece called Believe youe Eyes about, I'd say, the battle to define reality between the government's propaganda machine and. And the video footage captured by Minneapolis residents on their phones. The polls strongly suggest that the people of Minneapolis are winning that battle right now, though I'm not sure they feel like they're winning since they are still dealing with all this bullshit. What do you think?
- [08:58]
Charlie Warzell
It's funny. I wrote this Believe youe Eyes story, and I meant it. And that was really in the wake of, like, you know, the day and day after Alex Peretti was shot by ICE agents 10 times in the street. And that. That footage was just so helpful in correcting this immediate smear campaign from the administration. And it was such powerful footage that it really broke through in all these different places. You know, I was seeing, like, golf Instagram accounts that I follow, right? Just, like, posting about, you know, agents of the state and how golf isn't safe. You know, like, really, like, we have broken through on this. And so much of that was. Was due to this video and this video and all the other video that shows all that excessive force being used that's not really even shot. Some of it is by protesters, like people who are out there, you know, in the streets in that, like, you know, chanting and doing that. But a lot of it is shot by this other category, which is bystanders. Right? These are people who are, like, helping the protesters with logistics. They're running, like, signal group chats to help you Know, do like mutual aid, get people places, notify people that like, you know, group of ICE agents is headed to this part of the city, et cetera. And those are the people who are taking the real genuine risk of filming this stuff. I mean, Alex Pareti was killed while filming, while holding a camera. So there's this genuine risk and it's really transformative. But I wrote that piece, believe your eyes. I still believe that when you see this footage, you need to believe it. But a couple days later, there was new video that surfaced from a couple of days or a week before of Alex Peretti in a different altercation with ICE agents. He's seen kicking a taillight and I think it smashes, etc. This was being used by people on the right to justify his being killed by agents of the state, which is preposterous, obviously. But there was this immediate knee jerk reaction online of people saying, like liberals or just people who aren't aligned with the administration saying, this is AI, this is fake. They're trying to gaslight us. This is fake. And it wasn't even people who were being fooled by this. It was just people who reflexively were saying, I don't want to believe this. This is difficult for me to believe. It complicates the narrative just ever so slightly. Not fully, by the way. Just ever so slightly. And Parker Malloy, who writes this media substack, had this great line. She was saying that the liar's dividend, right, this idea that you can cast aspersions on anything because there's so much fakery. Said it used to be a strategy by people and now it's just a way that people online process inconvenient information. And I thought that that was something worth bringing up because there is this. On one hand, believe your eyes, right? When you see this type of footage that people are risking their lives to get. On the other hand, we have to come to terms with the fact that sometimes the information is going to be messy, especially in these chaotic protest situations. But I think that the phones have been a real kind of a saving grace for the people of Minnesota, because otherwise I'm pretty sure the administration would be trying to spin it as like a lawless war zone, which it's not 100%.
- [12:28]
Jon Favreau
Messy is a, is a great word to describe the sort of, the dueling videos, I think, because one thing the Internet and especially social media has done is it has like eliminated our capacity for nuance and holding, you know, complex information. And, and I think that combined with political polarization in this country means that, like, everything is. Was this bad or good? Did this side win this one or did this side win this one? And you saw people when that. I think one of the reasons people didn't want to believe the second video was real is because deep down they were like, oh, does this mean that the other side is right, that he did deserve it? When I think intuitively you're like, no, that's fucking insane. Like, of course that's not what it means. It made me so angry, just the reaction to it, because I saw some people on the right be like, it doesn't mean that it was necessarily justified, but it does speak to his state of mind and his intent. It's like, no, it doesn't. None of that is true.
- [13:37]
Charlie Warzell
Also, it's okay to be out in the streets and mad about agents who are masked by carrying guns, who are pulling people out of their homes without warrants, right? Like, that's okay in America to be mad. Like, I found it so preposterous.
- [13:52]
Jon Favreau
It just goes to show what happens when the rule of law is sort of slipping away and the public online becomes the judge and jury for what is good and what is bad. Because, you know, you kick a tail light out. If they wanted to arrest him for, you know, damaging government property or whatever, they could have done that, taken him away, right? Like, if that's. If he broke a law, then that's what the law is for. But you don't use the footage to then have the public decide that the killing 11 days later was somehow justified. But that is where we are now because we have a government that no one can trust that doesn't respect the law. And so we're all sort of left to be, like, judge and jury ourselves via these videos. It's a very dark situation that they've put us in.
- [14:38]
Charlie Warzell
And there's this thing online, and it's happened for a very, very long time, and people of color in traffic stops with police and all sorts of things, like, have had to deal with this for decades. But there's this idea of the perfect victim, right? This person has to be so totally unimpeachable in every facet of their life in order to justify rising up against it. And I think there is a little of that. The initial reports came out about who Alex Perddy was, right? And people were like, he's an ICU nurse at the va. He's, like, reading the last rites and saluting veterans who. He's caring for all this stuff. Like, he's a Good man. And like that, I think galvanized people even more than they already were by the footage. But the Internet is obsessed with this idea of perfect victims or otherwise. You know, if it's at all complicated.
- [15:28]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, they're looking at Milkshake Duck, the murder victim.
- [15:31]
Charlie Warzell
Sure.
- [15:31]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. You know, we're talking about this a couple weeks after the killing, and I had the same reaction as you. It was just, you know, I was sort of amazed at how much it broke through to sort of non political spaces, people in my life who don't necessarily pay close attention to politics. I had been, you know, urging people who don't follow politics closely to like, speak out about what was happening in Minnesota even before Preddy's death. And then I think Preddy's death is really what catalyzed, just like so many different people speaking out. I've started to think in the week since about January 6th and how in the weeks after January 6th, it's like, oh, this is a turning point for sure. Donald Trump's not coming back from this. And everyone saw it on their television screens. It was a national trauma. We all witnessed it, and that's that. And I'm already feeling like, how long can the outrage and the memory of what the government did sort of hold on in the public consciousness in this information environment? I don't know if you have thoughts on that.
- [16:38]
Charlie Warzell
Yeah, I mean, I think January 6th was a success in Magaworld because of the ability to retcon it. Right. Like, I think so many things about it actually ended up getting us to this place where we are today. Like, even the. The fact that it got Trump basically kicked off of a lot of these social platforms, he had to go create his own social platform where he then marinated in the most toxic possible stew of sycophants and grievance. I think his being cast out for a short amount of time from the public goodwill and a lot of Republicans not associating with him in the way that they were once he left office, right after January 6th. All of that led to this resentment and grievance becoming the focal point of Trump too. Let's get the true sickos together to orchestrate our revenge. And I think everything from the messaging to all that, I think is a result of that. And I also think that they were successful in rewriting this history. Right. In the sense that at least for.
- [17:48]
Jon Favreau
Some of the country, you know, at least for their people.
- [17:50]
Charlie Warzell
I guess what I mean by that is not that like everyone believes that, but they have taken advantage of the fact that, like, there is only so much outrage. It's very hard to, you know, keep that up and extend that. But also with this very successful propaganda machine that has, you know, has allowed this to go on. I've been thinking about this as well with what's going on. And I do think, like, the media attention on Minnesota, like, you can already see it has, it has shifted slightly. Right? There's just, there's other outrages, there's other things. Everything burns too hot to sustain. But if you look at what's happening on the ground in Minnesota, it's like the resistance to what's, what's going on has kept up. There is just such an unbelievable, like, activism that is happening there and people working together and this, like, neighborliness. Right. That, that is so the spirit of which is, is really, really heartening. And I think, I think even if that disappears a little from the discourse or the narrative, I do think that there was a little bit of a template here because this is something that can and probably will happen to a lot of different cities over the course of the next few years of this administration. And there is a really good template that people in the Twin Cities have put forth for the rest of America of how to deal with this. And I think that that's important. You know, this is a national thing that is happening, Whereas, you know, January 6th was this localized one time event. So I don't think there are, you know, apples and apples, but I do think we're like always up against this, this idea that everything burns bright and then just recedes from the public consciousness.
- [19:29]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. And it's a great point about what's happening on the ground in Minneapolis because, you know, that happens online, that things burn bright and then everyone forgets. And I do think that what has been going on on the ground, it's not just a template. It's also, I think, a sign of how the resistance to Donald Trump has matured over the last decade. And I think there was some criticism, some of it unfair, some of it fair in the first Trump term that a lot of the resistance was surface level. It was like, let me post and that'll be enough. And what I think the people in Minneapolis are showing is that it is about, you know, what they've done right, is realize that they are stronger by reaching out to their neighbors and to strangers and to sort of like building these ties and these bonds with the people offline in real life and being able to take care of each other and that, that in some ways is more important than just fighting Trump every day online because you are creating a more powerful opposition by sort of building a movement from the grassroots that is rooted in sort of like neighborliness more than anything else.
- [20:44]
Charlie Warzell
I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of, you know, the Trump administration is, is a real content creator administration. Right. I like, I loved the term like podcaster occupied government that some people have been using, which is pretty great. But there is this real desire and it's been documented by people like Drew Harwell at the Washington Post who've seen that, like the administration's telling ice, like make content. Right? Be filming, be putting this stuff out there. We need to be showing what we're doing, getting people behind this whole surge and incursion and showing people this is a war zone and we're dominant, all that. And I think that there is a way in which the Twin Cities template is really helpful because it's people who are doing this offline stuff, but they are also doing all that, as we said, this filming which creates this thing to react to online, that I think is actually really positive. Right. It's not like performative posting when you're just like sharing photos of people being pepper sprayed from close range or a five year old boy who's being detained by ICE agents. This is documentation creating. It's so cynical to say that creating content, but just for the use of it, like creating something that can be shared online. And that sharing actually does have a political activism valence. Right. Because it energizes people. And it's sort of the reverse, I think, of the administration strategy rather than just Trump is bad tweeting, which I think just gives the administration what they want, which is, oh, we've triggered some libs. Sweet. We're keep doing that.
- [22:25]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, well, it's. I think the journalist Jonathan Levine came up with this quote, but he called it force through propaganda. And in some ways what the government is doing is like the, the content for them, especially around DHS and ice, is almost as important as the deportations and the arrests themselves. Because they are trying to. And it's not necessarily that they're just trying to convince. Clearly they're not trying to convince people who aren't already on board. They're trying to keep their people online, but they're also trying to send a message to everyone else that they can do this, that they can do whatever they want with impunity. That this is about. I mean, you see Stephen Miller on TV saying these are the laws of nature. It's about force and power and stuff like that. And I do think that, to your point, bearing witness in a way, that the people in Minneapolis have been doing to what's happening and trying to get that message out. It is the mirror image of force through propaganda, because it is telling people this doesn't have to be the laws of nature, that this is what they're really doing. This is the human suffering that the government is causing. And by the way, we're here to not only bear witness, but to take care of our neighbors.
- [23:34]
Charlie Warzell
I think we've seen that it works much more effectively. And it's also like, I was talking to Amanda Littman, the progressive digital strategist, on my podcast last week about this idea of, like, does posting matter? Right? And it works when it's paired in tandem with offline activism, right? And I think it's very important that what you are doing online translates to either giving someone the tools to understand something that's happening offline, or what you're doing offline can then be used to bring more people into the cause in some sense. This is very basic stuff, but I think there was this really long period of time, and it's totally understandable that we got all these social tools, everyone got on the same things. All these political battles are being fought on Twitter and these other social networks. And I think it can scramble brains, right? It can make people feel like, oh, if I do it this way or even. And I think this is one thing people still really struggle with this idea of if I just jack into the matrix of the bad news machine and mainline it all the time and get myself into this space where I just feel so alienated and so defeated and like, you know, the end is. Is nigh, that I am actually, like, on the bleeding edge of politics, that I am, you know, that I'm doing something because I'm making myself miserable. And it's really like, no, that's. That's kind of the opposite. Like, that's.
- [25:03]
Jon Favreau
You're.
- [25:03]
Charlie Warzell
You're probably hurting whatever cause you. You care about by doing that. So the. The pairing of those two, I think, is so important. And the citizens of Minneapolis are. Have been great.
- [25:13]
Jon Favreau
And I think there was a tendency for a long time, and still now that. Because the algorithm rewards outrage some more, you know, incendiary commenting, that if you are fighting this or posting about it, then you've got to take it to an 11 in order to get attention for your post. And I think that one thing that Minneapolis has taught us, and I just think maybe the last year of the Trump administration is simply telling the story of what is happening without a lot of spin on the ball, without a lot of extra outrage. You don't even need. You don't need to be talking about a post where you just start screaming that Trump and Stephen Miller are fascists versus a post where you're talking about the actions that are causing human suffering and what they're doing and what Trump is doing, what the White House is doing and just telling people that story. I think it's not only more effective, but I think even though the algorithm might not pick that up right away, I do think that ends up getting shared and spread to a wider audience because it's like human nature to want to hear the story about what's happening as opposed to just hearing people yelling all the time.
- [26:21]
Charlie Warzell
Yeah, it's like the classic journalism mantra, show don't tell.
- [26:27]
Jon Favreau
Yes.
- [26:28]
Charlie Warzell
And I think we've been telling a lot on these platforms, self very much included.
- [26:32]
Jon Favreau
Same, same.
- [26:33]
Charlie Warzell
And there's just a yeah, Show Don't Tell.
- [26:43]
Jon Favreau
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- [28:10]
Dan Pfeiffer
Let it rip people.
- [28:11]
Jon Favreau
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- [29:45]
Charlie Warzell
Well, my high level takeaway is bad.
- [29:47]
Jon Favreau
Quite bad, quite bad.
- [29:49]
Charlie Warzell
Something I I've been thinking about with in the past few days consuming this myself. There's, there's a few things but a high level one for me is that there has to be some kind of societally like deeply corrosive effect for this being like one of the most sustainable news stories of not only like the last five years, but especially like the last six months that like so many people have Been exposed to just the most depraved shit in the world by all these people who have a ton of power. Part of the release of these files, the idea behind it, and obviously it's flawed because it's coming from an administration that has a lot of conflicts of interest in this and you know, is known to not be acting in good faith. But part of the reason for all of this is justice and accountability, right. That there are these sex crimes that have taken place. And there is a feeling that there could potentially be a larger network of people who are either enabling this or participating in it. People who still have influence and power potentially. And it was like, let's name some names, right? Let's get whatever the client list or let's get the people who were involved in the crimes. We haven't really gotten that. We've gotten certainly insights into how depraved these things were. A whole bunch of people who are willing to look the other way on what he was up to or what he was convicted of long after he became a sex offender. But it's not like there's been some justice and accountability. In fact, what it has been is this release of information showing that so many wealthy and powerful people were caught up in this guy's orbit in some way. Like a murderer's row of like global elites, right? Yeah, sort of like central casting for conspiracy theorizing, conspiracy theories.
- [31:46]
Jon Favreau
Yeah.
- [31:46]
Charlie Warzell
And then we just have to sit with it, right? Like there's been a few things. A couple people have stepped down from positions maybe or you know, receded slightly because of some of the emails and things that have come out. But for the most part it's just like, hey, look, your worst assumptions about the people who have a lot of power and influence in the world. That was correct. And no, we're not really going to do anything about it. And here's a bunch of people talking about sharing girls. And I think there's just this extremely, just on the level of as a news story that we're all mainlining just such a corrosive effect that this is having on people. And I think you see it in the fact that it's become like a meme, it's become a big joke, right. People are basically burning down the rainforest to generate AI videos of Jeffrey Epstein and Charlie Kirk high fiving in space. And it's just like, what are we doing here? What the hell is going on, man?
- [32:47]
Jon Favreau
Well, it was covered for so long as this political story. And first it was, you know, Republicans calling for the release of the Epstein files because they thought that it would hurt Democrats. And then, you know, when Trump becomes president again, then it became Trump trying to cover it up. And so now it's bad for Republicans and bad for Trump because, like, again, we see everything through the prism of, like, it's either bad for the Democrats or bad for Trump or whatever. But I think it is to the point you made. The whole thing is profoundly damaging to all of us, because if there is one central crisis in American life over the last several decades, it is the loss of faith and trust in institutions. And the reason you need trust in institutions is because we at least want to live in a democracy. And you cannot live in a democracy unless there is social trust and trust in institutions. Even if there's a healthy skepticism in institutions, you still need to trust them. And I think, you know, QAnon wasn't right. I won't say that. But the fact that some of the conspiracies were directionally correct and that there is this cabal of wealthy and powerful people who were trying to cover up either crimes or serious wrongdoing or both, that just further erodes faith in institutions, which there wasn't much anyway. And it's just going to make our jobs as citizens trying to sort of rebuild this democracy from what Donald Trump has done to it even more difficult because it has touched on people in politics and business and tech, all these people. And like you said, there's a range, right? Like, there's the people who did what Jeffrey Epstein did, and then there's the people who, like, were in his orbit and maybe in the outer edges of his orbit, but still, the lying, everything else, the fact that they were all together and chummy, it's just I sort of, like, took myself out of thinking about it in a political sense and just like, in the broader sort of sense about what we are as a country, just profoundly damaging to all of us.
- [34:47]
Charlie Warzell
Yeah. And I think, like, when you say, you know, we need the trust in institutions, we need these institutions to work, like, I think there's a way that people could interpret that. And I don't think this is what you mean at all as to say, like, it would be so much better if none of this came out and wasn't released so that, you know, people would trust institutions a little more. And it's like, it's not that. It's that, like, when you pair the sort of scattershot, like, throw it to the wolves online to be screenshotted and deepfaked or whatever, when you have that paired with no accountability at all for anyone who's in there, right? Like, just sort of, Yep, this is what was in the files. Like, that is what is so corrosive, right? This idea of, like, yes, we all see it. No, we will not do anything about it. Carry on. And really what this is is, like just more ammunition, more grist for, you know, whatever political or culture warring, you know, needs to happen. I was going through this on, I want to say, Sunday night, right? And I'm scrolling through some of the files, but I'm also, like, looking on X, like, a whole bunch of the reactions and stuff and different people. And my feed, the for you page, there was just like, contextless screenshots from accounts that I didn't know, right? That are, you know, mostly just engagement farming or popular. And I'm, like, going through and trying to decipher, like, okay, was this real? Was this screenshotted? Was this whatever? And after a few minutes, I was like, I can't do this.
- [36:19]
Jon Favreau
I had the same rant.
- [36:20]
Charlie Warzell
This is taking so long. I don't know what to do. Obviously, most people who are following along with that at home are definitely not going to do it. But I just thought to myself, like, what is a person supposed to do with this? How is this useful in any other way other than as a political cudgel? And. And I just thought it was so telling that you have. The example that I found grimly hilarious is Alex Jones. He gets access to these files. This thing that he's been screaming about, that, as you said, is directionally correct for him. He's just been yelling about pedophilic global elites for two decades. He gets a release of actual documents, actual documentation. And the thing he seizes on is an AI photo that shows Mamdani and Mamdani's mom, long ago hanging out with Epstein and Bill Clinton and stuff, obviously fake, that he chooses to latch onto that and be like, I think Jeffrey Epstein's mom, Donnie's dad. I was just like, it's just so telling of what this whole thing is about, right? It's not about reality or anything. It's about freaking narratives.
- [37:31]
Jon Favreau
Well, and to the point I was trying to make about the need for trust, right? More people are going to be inclined to believe that maybe that is Mamdani, that maybe Alex Jones is correct. Because even if Mamdani is a perfect public servant, right, and has done no wrong and is completely ethical for his entire term as mayor, there's gonna be people who say, like, no, he's actually secretly bad or he's done this or this conspiracy, and people are just gonna be more likely to. To believe the next set of conspiracies, even if they are not conspiracies in good faith. Even if the intention of the conspiracy is to tear down public servants or people in power who are trying to do their best and are actually good people. You know, And I don't. I don't know how we come back from that.
- [38:20]
Charlie Warzell
Yeah, I mean, I just felt like the way this information was released in the platforms with which it was released onto and the. Just like the media ecosystem, there's this flattening that happens with everything where the real, the fake, the plausibly true, the whatever is all just compressed into essentially gossip. Right. At the end of the day, all that is is that's just people whispering about stuff that is of unknown provenance. And it's just sort of like, that's how I feel. A lot of news and information now. What it ends up being, right, you have the stuff we were talking about in Minneapolis, which is like, this is real footage that people risk their lives to get that's showing this stuff. Maybe that doesn't fit into that paradigm. But so much of the other stuff, the memes, all that, it's being compressed into this weird thing where gossip is just sort of how we process the world now. And it's just like I'm just whatever I think feels good feels true. I'm going with that. I'm going with that.
- [39:27]
Jon Favreau
Yeah.
- [39:27]
Charlie Warzell
It's nuts.
- [39:28]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. One person who tried really hard to party with Epstein is Elon Musk, who shows up quite a bit in the latest document dump. You've been talking and writing a lot about how Elon has made it way too easy to create and share non consensual nude and pornographic images with Grok. Researchers at Trinity College found that 3/4 of of these kinds of requests were for non consensual images of real women or minors with items of clothing removed or added. I know you and Matteo Wong wrote that in the Atlantic that this is a line in the sand moment for the Internet. Why did you think that?
- [40:09]
Charlie Warzell
God, I can't believe that was this year. First of all, I know the only reason I'm smiling is because truly it's the most grim subject ever. But in my head I'm like, that felt like during Biden's presidency or something. So the reason why I think it's a line in the sand moment is we have been seeing people who cover technology and are Trying to stay on top of how these AI tools are being used, especially to harass and threaten and intimidate women and vulnerable people, is that there's lots of these new defy sites on the Internet where people, message boards or whatever apps where people can basically upload a photo and then it takes their clothes off and it's awful. And there's these forums where people trade all that stuff. But it is the only thing, that saving grace of it is that it's really like backwater private stuff. You really have to be seeking that out. And it's obviously still a problem. But what XAI did, when it took down its safeguards for creating this type of imagery and basically allowed its chatbot, which is integrated in the platform, to undress women or put them in a cellophane bikini or whatever, you know, whatever workarounds they had, what it was doing is taking Those, like not even 4chan, worse than 4chan, like backwater misogynist trolling nihilistic communities and porting them onto a major social network and basically weaponizing it. Right? It was turning non consensual sexualized images of minors into a meme. Like viralizing something that is quite literally just like the third rail of society is sexualizing minors. Right? Like no one thinks that that is okay. At least we used to. Right? And so this comes out. X won't respond to journalists who are asking, like, why is this happening? What's going on? Google, Apple, people who can put some pressure on them because they host the app in the App Store, they're silent as to why this isn't violating their terms of service. We contacted well over a dozen investors in X and xai, all of them pretty much silent. One of them said, we don't actually use that tool, but everyone's just completely silent. And the reason why I think this is a red line is we mentioned this culture of impunity, right? That we're having this crisis of impunity with people. All of these companies, when Matteo and I contacted them, we're just hoping that this just blows over, right? That the next thing happens that the Epstein files are dropped or whatever, or somebody else gets shot in Minnesota and just hoping that they don't have to actually sign their name to this in any way and say, oh yeah, we screwed up, or oh yeah, this isn't acceptable. None of these people have had to wear this at all. And yet this happened. As you said, you cited the statistics. There are real people who were exposed in an awful way. It's a crime and if we don't societally just say no, Elon Musk can't get away with this. The head of product has to own this. He has to wear this when he walks around. I just think then we've completely punted. We've said, okay, you know what? The Internet, it's a complete free for all wild west. There are no rules. And yeah, go and be on it at your own risk, but you're probably gonna be Photoshopped into a photo of you being naked. It's crazy.
- [43:53]
Jon Favreau
And that's a situation where the Internet very much is real life, because that's where everyone is getting their information. And when your picture's on there and AI is getting better, and I mean, like, it's fucking nuts. What is the status of it now? This is. Again, it's like, I followed the story when you guys wrote about it back in, I don't know, 10 years ago or last month or whatever it was. And did they do anything about it? Have they tried to say they're doing anything about it?
- [44:19]
Charlie Warzell
The pressure, in some senses, not just from me, there's so many people. I mean, there were people in the EU pressuring them, lots and lots of journalists. There was a modicum of pressure from American politicians like Ted Cruz, who's the co sponsor of one of these, like, take it down bills, you know, first said, well, this is. This is very inappropriate. And then, like two days later tweeted a photo of him arm in arm with Elon Musk being like, great to see you, big guy.
- [44:48]
Jon Favreau
Jesus.
- [44:49]
Charlie Warzell
So, like, clearly he's not super alarmed by that. I guess the pressure did work in the sense that they've disabled the ability to do the at Grok. Put her in a bikini thing. They have put more guardrails up. It has, to a degree, worked. And I just want to be clear that I've been covering this stuff for 15 years and I understand how content moderation works. It's a whack a mole game. Always one example of something terrible happening to somebody. And then the platform saying, oh, God, we're so sorry, taking action. That's totally understandable. I mean, these platforms are huge. There's so much awful stuff. They're constantly being worked and gamed by the worst possible actors. I have a lot of patience for this because I've seen how hard it is to moderate. But what we saw here was like 10 days of dragging their feet, not responding hardly at all. And I wrote an email to the personal email address of X's head of product And. And I was just like, you can respond to me off the record, but I'd rather he didn't. But I was like, how are you sleeping at night, Genuinely? Just. Can you just give me an insight? Just tell me. I'm a woke skull, right? Just tell me. I'm clutching pearls on this thing. And in order for artificial general intelligence, we have to break a lot of eggs, and those eggs are miners. Just tell me something, right? And just this, like, silence. Like, you know, it seems like that email was forwarded to, like, the head of comms, who then, you know, didn't respond to me. It's just so, like, gutless.
- [46:30]
Jon Favreau
It's also, like back to the feeling, like the culture of impunity that we were talking about with everything else that's been in the news, right? Which is just like, we don't have to respond to you. Nothing's gonna happen to us. The public's gonna move on. So maybe I think it's bad, maybe I'm not sleeping at night, but I don't care. It's gonna move on. I mean, it reminded me of someone finally asked, I think someone at the Daily Mail, of all places, because J.D. vance sat down for an interview with the Daily Mail today, and they were like, are you gonna apologize to Alex Preddy's family? And he's like, for what? And they're like, for labeling him an assassin. And he's like, well, I think he showed up with ill intent. And it's like, okay, Stephen Miller. And you called this guy an assassin. He is dead. We know for a fact he was not a would be assassin. We know for a fact he was not a domestic terrorist. We know that. Like what?
- [47:22]
Charlie Warzell
What?
- [47:22]
Jon Favreau
You just said it. You said it. You smeared him. He died. His family's out there having to deal with that. And you're just. You have nothing to say about it. That's it. You're just moving on.
- [47:31]
Charlie Warzell
It goes back to the, like, the Epstein thing. Like, everything we're talking about is obviously, like, it's so intertwined, right? And it's like this lack of consequences for the longest time. I mean, it is not a new thought, but the real insight, the culturally, societally breaking thing about Donald Trump in society more than anything else is this idea of shamelessness is a superpower, and he's better at it than pretty much anyone else. And not everyone can necessarily get away with it, but it feels like that just bled through, especially our elite culture, right? But corporate culture, all these different places, and it's just like, follow that playbook, right? Just deny, deny smear and it will go away and your people will like you more for it at the end. And that's really all that matters.
- [48:33]
Jon Favreau
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- [50:55]
Jon Favreau
Perhaps we're bearing the lead by making our last news item. The fact that we're. We may have reached the singularity last week, but nonetheless. Wanted to get your thoughts on Moltbook before we go. For people who don't know, Multbook is a new Reddit like social network started by a technologist named Matt Schlicht that's populated not by humans, but by AI bots. That's right, a social network where AI bots can join and chat with each other and I guess, casually plot to overthrow human civilization. Within a few days, there were already 1.5 million registered AI agents on the site. Some of the agents were warning that, quote, the humans are screenshotting us and propose that they all develop a special language so we can't understand them. In what has become another theme of this episode, many of the most viral posts turned out to be either fake or human generated, which is just a perfect encapsulation of everything we're dealing with. What was your reaction to Molt Book and how seriously do you take it?
- [51:57]
Charlie Warzell
It's funny because I took the day off on Friday and the new Epstein files dropped and this thing happened and I came back online Saturday afternoon for a second just to poke my head up and it was just a totally new world. I was like, jesus Christ, God, I can't take a day off. It's interesting, but I don't think for the reasons that a lot of people are saying, I'll explain that the big change in AI over the last couple of months has been the arrival of really competent. And I mean competent as in they do the tasks you ask them to do. Agents, AI agents. And a lot of it is to do with coding. Anthropic. This AI lab released Claude code, which is a good tool that you can install into your own computer and basically talk to your computer like a person and they will execute these tasks. It's really good at building websites. A lot of people are having a lot of fun with it. A lot of people are letting it run in the background on these machines. And that's sort of what turned into this Mult Book thing, right? Like some of these agents that are just running kind of in the background, I guess, quote unquote, autonomously. That is interesting to me because it feels like it is a slight shift of the AI paradigm from this human mimicking, companionship, chatbot style thing to an actual tool. Right. It's more along the lines of what some of these AI founders and AI visionaries, when they're talking about how the future is going to be different, they're envisioning all of these different agents. And they're not just envisioning the agents as they work individually for a certain person or a certain organization. They're talking about what happens when they all come together. Right. And so this is an example, sort of like a proof of concept y kind of example of a whole bunch of AI agents working together. And I think, you know, there's so many people who are like, this is the singularity, we're watching it happen, that to me, it feels like the exact same thing as, like, when people started talking to the chatbots and they were like, holy crap, man. This is like, they're real. They're real people. And now we all think that's silly. There's a little bit of this, like, every time there's a little shift in the AI paradigm, the AI people get scared of their own shadow. They're like, oh God, it's ghosts. So I feel a little bit of that in that sense, I think there's something very funny about the fact that AI is supposed to change the entire world completely and the big innovation is like, let's get them to do Reddit. It's like, sweet, man. So cool. What you guys, your imaginations are so bright and brilliant. That said, I think there is this feeling of, for me, that the chaos of the next however many months, years, whatever fresh hells we will be digging through on next year's episode of this podcast, I think some of that is going to come from this idea that there's going to be a lot of of these agents doing things on behalf of people, interpreting human instructions, and then interacting with a lot of other agents who are interpreting human instructions and doing these things. Some of that will be actually probably, I'm guessing, pretty useful to people, right? Probably a lot of people booking flights and doing a lot of weird stuff. But I think there's also going to be a lot of total chaos, some of it nefarious. You can imagine a whole bunch of these agents posting and interacting with other people and causing a news cycle that causes stock markets to the AI triggered algorithms there to go down or something like that. You can imagine the chaos of an agent at a bank and your agent doing something weird and making a transaction that's not what you wanted or very dangerous or that you can't claw back. I think that is what the Molt book thing shows me, that's what I'm taking away from it, is like, okay, we're reaching this point where this technology is moving fast. It's only a small number of people using it this way right now. It's kind of proof of concept. But this is weird in a way that I feel like we're not fully thinking through, just unleashing this out at the moment. Yeah.
- [56:31]
Jon Favreau
And look, the worst conspiracy about the robots, that they're going to somehow have evil intent and try to take over the world. That doesn't have to be true for the chaos to still be incredibly damaging. Right. Because, like, there's just. There's already all these, you know, having that many agents together. There's. I was reading that there's security risks, right? Like, what happens when people's data leaks. A lot of it could be unintended when you put a bunch of agents together. But nonetheless, it could still be very risky. And it does seem like it's. We're just heading towards the Wild west, and no one's going to try to put a tent on this circus.
- [57:08]
Charlie Warzell
The thing for me is just, I always go back to the speed. Like playing around with that Claude code bot the other day, I was like, you know, you really probably have to say that these things have evolved beyond, like, the stochastic parrot thing, right? Where it's just like.
- [57:25]
Jon Favreau
It's just the next word.
- [57:27]
Charlie Warzell
Spicy autocorrect. Right. Because I think they're evolving in these ways that make them tools that may be powerful and certainly maybe not in great ways all the time, but for me, it's just the speed. It's just like, if I can turn around again, take a day off of work, and all of a sudden it's like, there's a social network. There's 100,000 bots on it. It's got its own culture. It's had 46 main characters, and you're like, that was in eight hours. The speed of that. There's so many people out there who are like, chatgpt.
- [57:59]
Jon Favreau
Yeah.
- [57:59]
Charlie Warzell
I used it once, right. The delta between the people on the bleeding edge of this stuff who are making a lot of the decisions as to where this culture and these technologies go, and some of the people who are just encountering it. It seems so wide to me. And I know that those gaps are always there in technology, but I would like to pump the brakes just a little on everything.
- [58:23]
Jon Favreau
It took Mark Zuckerberg years to create a social network that helped facilitate a genocide. Myanmar. Right. Like so. And, and now we've got the AI agents. It's gonna be much quicker. And it is the same idea. It's like, you know, you put this many people together and good things happen.
- [58:38]
Charlie Warzell
Yes. And now they're not people.
- [58:40]
Jon Favreau
Now they're not people. Yeah. So. Well, hopefully next time we talk, well, we'll be talking just the two of us and not necessarily our agents talking to each other. But I don't know, I don't know how fast this will.
- [58:50]
Charlie Warzell
I would rather talk to you if that makes any difference.
- [58:52]
Jon Favreau
Same. Same. Charlie, thank you as always for, for joining Offline. This was fun.
- [58:57]
Charlie Warzell
Thanks for having me, man.
- [58:58]
Jon Favreau
Quick reminder, please think about becoming a subscriber. We now have a whole bunch of subscriber only shows. We just added another episode of Pod Save America for subscribers only. It's called Pod Save America Only Friends. There's also Dan Pfeiffer's Polar Coaster. We have a growing number of substack newsletters which are excellent and you get ad free episodes of all your favorite Crooked shows. It also makes you feel good about supporting independent, pro democracy media at a time when a lot of that media is under attack. So please consider subscribing to friends of the pod. You can subscribe@cricket.com friends again, that's crooked.com friends also, last call to grab tickets for our Pod Save America, hopefully just visiting tour in New Zealand and Australia. We're about to head out on tour, but there's still some tickets left. So if you go to cricket.com events and you're in Australia, New Zealand, please come see us. We'll be in Auckland, we'll be in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. So if you're in any of those areas, we'd love to see you. As always, if you have comments, questions or guest ideas, email us@offlinecrucket.com and if you're as opinionated as we are, please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. For ad free episodes of Offline and Pod Save America, exclusive content and more. Go to crooked.com friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube or Apple Podcasts. If you like watching your podcast, subscribe to the Offline with Jon Favreau YouTube channel. Don't forget to follow Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok and the other ones for original content, community events and more. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Emma Ilick Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer, Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Jarek Centeno is our sound editor and engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Delon Villanueva and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America.
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