Elon's Offline Challenge, Grok’s White Genocide Glitch, and Silicon Valley's New Religion

Summary

Offline with Jon Favreau: Episode Summary

Title: Elon's Offline Challenge, Grok’s White Genocide Glitch, and Silicon Valley's New Religion
Release Date: May 22, 2025
Host: Crooked Media
Guests: Matteo Wong (Atlantic Staff Writer)

---

1. Silicon Valley's AI Obsession Over Pressing Democratic Threats

In this episode, Jon Favreau and co-host Max Fisher delve into the looming impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on society, drawing insights from Matteo Wong’s recent Atlantic piece. Wong's research uncovers a concerning trend within Silicon Valley: tech leaders are prioritizing the development and potential of AI, often at the expense of addressing immediate democratic threats.

Matteo explains that many AI professionals view the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with almost religious fervor, believing it to be a transformative force that will soon replace human labor across various sectors. Max summarizes this mindset, stating, "they believe deeply that AI is a few years away from displacing most jobs that can be done from a computer and they seem totally fine with that" (02:18).

2. Max Fisher's Emotional Departure from the Show

A poignant moment in the episode occurs when Max Fisher announces his departure from regular hosting duties due to family obligations. Addressing the audience, Max shares, "Julia and I need to move back east for family reasons. There's an illness in the family..." (03:36). The hosts express their gratitude and reflect on the meaningful conversations they've shared, emphasizing the show's commitment to fostering genuine human connections amidst technological distractions.

3. Elon Musk's Shifting Influence and AI Feed Experiment

The discussion shifts to Elon Musk’s evolving role in the tech and political landscape. Jon and Max highlight Musk's recent decision to reduce his Twitter activity—from 103 tweets per day in March to approximately 52 in April (11:18). They reference a New York Times experiment that simulated Musk’s Twitter feed, revealing a predominance of right-wing content and misinformation. This experiment underscores the potential cognitive harm of consuming such a skewed media diet. Max laments, "it's the fake consensus... the big lie you get is the fake consensus" (13:40), highlighting the dangers of echo chambers.

4. AI Chatbot Grok's Conspiracy Theory Glitch

A significant part of the episode addresses the malfunctioning of Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot. Initially designed to provide balanced and factual responses, Grok began propagating unfounded conspiracy theories about "white genocide" in South Africa. Max explains, "someone inserted this top line instruction telling Grok to acknowledge the reality of white genocide in South Africa," leading to widespread dissemination of these harmful narratives (20:39). This incident raises alarms about the vulnerability of AI systems to manipulation and the broader implications for information credibility.

5. Supreme Court's Ruling on Alien Enemies Act and Trump's Reaction

Jon and Max analyze the Supreme Court's recent decision restricting the Trump administration's ability to deport individuals under the Alien Enemies Act without proper notice. This ruling ensures due process for detainees, which infuriated MAGA supporters. Max recounts Mike Davis's provocative suggestion to release deportees into affluent areas, prompting Jon to respond firmly, "a dipshit" (33:09). This exchange highlights the heightened tensions and extreme proposals emerging from partisan divides.

6. Meta's Failure to Protect Teen Accounts

The conversation shifts to Meta's (Facebook/Instagram) rollout of "teen accounts," intended to shield young users from explicit content. However, independent tests by Gen Z researchers revealed significant failures:

• Sexual Content: All participants were exposed to sexual material.
• Disordered Eating: Four out of five accounts encountered content related to disordered eating.
• Toxic Masculinity and Violence: Additional accounts saw content promoting toxic masculinity and graphic violence (40:52).

Max criticizes Meta's dismissive response, comparing it to historical denialism: "they're not even pretending to care anymore" (43:24). This failure underscores the challenges tech companies face in genuinely safeguarding vulnerable users.

7. In-Depth Interview with Matteo Wong: AI's Impending Impact

The episode features an extensive interview with Matteo Wong, who elaborates on his findings regarding Silicon Valley's focus on AI over other critical issues like democratic integrity and economic stability.

a. The Imminent Threat of AI and AGI: Matteo discusses how AI professionals anticipate AGI to revolutionize the workforce within a decade. He expresses skepticism about the rapid timelines proposed by industry leaders, noting significant performance gaps in AI's ability to handle complex, creative tasks compared to humans (53:44).

b. Economic Implications and Job Displacement: Many tech insiders see economic downturns as opportunities to implement AI-driven automation, thereby reducing reliance on human labor. Matteo shares, "our mission is to raise the ceiling on how prosperous and enjoyable society can be," delegating societal safeguards to other entities (52:26). Jon challenges this perspective, emphasizing the lack of responsibility towards displaced workers.

c. Regulatory Challenges and Lessons from Social Media Era: Matteo draws parallels between the current AI boom and the early days of social media, highlighting the repeated pattern of inadequate regulation. Despite early warnings, similar lax attitudes persist, exacerbated by the technological race against international competitors like China (67:26). He warns that without proper oversight, AI development could mirror past mistakes, leading to significant societal disruptions.

d. Corporate Responsibility and Ethical Considerations: Matteo raises concerns about AI companies' accountability, citing instances where AI models have produced erroneous outputs even in critical applications, such as legal briefs. He underscores the industry's tendency to downplay external critiques, questioning their preparedness for the broader implications of AI integration into society (61:24).

8. Conclusion: The Urgent Need for Balanced Technological Advancement

The episode concludes with Jon and Max reflecting on the intricate balance between embracing technological advancements and safeguarding democratic and societal values. They emphasize the necessity for proactive measures in regulation, corporate responsibility, and public awareness to mitigate the potential harms posed by unchecked AI development.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Max Fisher on AI's Impact:
  "they believe deeply that AI is a few years away from displacing most jobs that can be done from a computer and they seem totally fine with that." (02:18)

• Max Fisher on Fake Consensus:
  "it's the fake consensus... the big lie you get is the fake consensus." (13:40)

• Jon Favreau Responding to Mike Davis:
  "a dipshit." (33:09)

• Matteo Wong on AI Responsibility:
  "we're going to have to figure out how to be direct sources of information that are seen as credible." (26:56)

• Matteo Wong on Regulatory Failures:
  "We've seen that happen in the past... if you believe their timelines... if you don't do it first, China will." (67:26)

---

For those interested in exploring the profound implications of AI on society, democracy, and the workforce, this episode of "Offline with Jon Favreau" offers a comprehensive and thought-provoking analysis.

Transcript

[Jon Favreau]

Offline is brought to you by Fast Growing Trees. Did you know Fast Growing Trees is the biggest online nursery in the US with thousands of different plants and over 2 million happy customers. They have all the plants your yard needs, like fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and so much more. Whatever plants you're interested in, Fast Growing Trees has you covered. Find the perfect gift for your climate and space. Fast Growing Trees makes it easy to get your dream yard. Order online and get your plants delivered directly to your door in just a few days without ever leaving home. Their alive and thrive guarantee ensures your plants arrive happy and healthy. Plus get support from trained plant experts on call to help you plan your landscape, choose the right plants and learn how to care for them. We got some Fast Growing Trees. You can get someone to an expert to come to your house. They tell you what plants work best in which areas of your yard. It's great. This, I think the ground, do they need shade? Do they need sun? How much shade and sun do they need? Which ones are right for the climate? Which ones are native? You know, that's right. Which are important questions. What do they call that?

[Max Fisher]

Don't do so much water.

[Jon Favreau]

I certainly could not answer on my own. That's why we have Fast Growing Trees this spring. They have the best deals for your yard, up to half off on select plants and other deals. And listeners to our show get 15% off their first purchase when using the code offline at checkout. That's an additional 15% off at fast growingtrees.com use the code offline at checkout. Fast growingtrees.com code offline. Now's the perfect time to plant. Use offline to save. Today offers valid for a limited time, terms and conditions may apply.

[Matteo Wong]

If you believe in this technological arms race between the United States and China and you believe you want, like, democratic AI instead of authoritarian AI, These are kind of the labels that are given, like, shouldn't you stick to those principles in developing the technology? Like, shouldn't you have public input and go slowly, have it be safe, have it be transparent, which is the opposite of everything all these companies are doing.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau.

[Max Fisher]

I'm Max Fisher.

[Jon Favreau]

And you just heard from today's guest, Atlantic staff writer Matteo Wong. So Matteo's been covering AI for a while now, but he just wrote a piece based on a lot of conversations he had with Silicon Valley people working in AI that I found both illuminating and terrifying because these people believe deeply that AI is a few years away from displacing Most jobs that can be done from a computer and they seem totally fine with that.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, that part of it is concerning. Well, we're getting our universal basic income, so whatever. I mean, you get your Altman bucks.

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And the universal basic income is like, that's the good end of this. Right. Some of. A lot of them just don't care. Right. In fact, they are, they are excited by what, whatever's happening with AI. They're so excited that they don't think.

[Max Fisher]

About anything else, which is surprising for developers, given that they are some of the people who are most aggressively being displaced already by AI.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, well, as Matteo tells me, there's almost like a, a religious faith in AI. Like it is something, it is something you believe in. Like you believe in God.

[Max Fisher]

It's the literal machine. God is here.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Max Fisher]

And it's, it's doling out so much misinformation.

[Jon Favreau]

So much. So Matteo and I talked about why Silicon Valley thinks AI is more important than anything happening in politics or the economy, and why this is all eerily similar to the Silicon Valley optimism around social media in the 2010s, which you and I have talked about before.

[Max Fisher]

How did that work out again? It worked out fine.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, we're, we're crushing it. So it was a, it was a great, if disturbing conversation with someone who knows the industry really well and has some healthy skepticism towards it. So you'll hear my interview with Mateo after we cover some news. But first we have a big offline update that I absolutely hate.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah. So folks, Julia and I need to move back east for family reasons. Julia, of course, is my fiance and also our co worker here at Crooked Media. There's an illness in the family, so we gotta be close. And unfortunately for you and me, we are both, you know, deep believers in the value of in person conversation and real human connection. Which means that it would be a little awkward to continue a weekly show about the value of human connection, in person conversation, the alienation of screens through a zoom screen. So next week will be my last as regular. I know, I know, but I think it's. I don't know what the expression is, so long, but not farewell or whatever it is, but I think I'll be popping back in occasionally.

[Jon Favreau]

I hope so. I hope so. Look, this was very sad news all around and known about it for a little bit while and have tried to figure out how to grapple with it. We'll do a special send off episode next week. But I will say, when you started, I didn't know you that. Well, I knew you by reputation and I knew we were getting a really smart, talented journalist who knows this, all these topics really, really well. I did not anticipate and was just pleasantly surprised that I also got a friend out of it and a co host who I don't. I've probably said this before, but made me feel so comfortable talking about these issues, especially as they relate to personal life and all of my failings and flaws and personal foibles around technology.

[Max Fisher]

The premise of the show is that we're all human.

[Jon Favreau]

We're all human. But I have felt more comfortable talking about all those things with you here than I would normally. And that is what I'm going to miss, our conversations on this show.

[Max Fisher]

I'm going to miss it for the connection that you and I have. I'm gonna miss it for the connection that we have with the listeners and I'm gonna miss it for. But I'm also very appreciative of this kind of two and a half year journey that we went on where when we. And we'll talk about this more next week. But I think when we started this, I know when I started coming on this, like, I thought this was gonna be a show about tech and the news and like what's going on in Silicon Valley. And it turned out to be a show about how to be a human being in this era. And that is like, it's been really meaningful for me and it has like really changed the course of my life too.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. And I've thoroughly enjoyed it. So it's gonna be tough with you gone, but I will talk more about at some point what the show's gonna look like post Max. I just don't wanna talk about it.

[Max Fisher]

I think it's Grok, right? It is gonna be you and Grok. It is going to be Grok talking about white genocide.

[Jon Favreau]

Genocide.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jon Favreau]

That's what we're talking about. Okay, so we'll have a special send off episode for Max next week. Everyone tune in for that. Let's get into the news this week. Future Offline co host Elon Musk.

[Max Fisher]

Honestly, I would listen to that show. That would be. I mean, he's already halfway there. You guys are putting it on Twitter for free? Why not?

[Jon Favreau]

It's a real twist for free.

[Max Fisher]

Sell some mattress ads against it. Come on.

[Jon Favreau]

So Elon finally decided he is done spending millions of dollars to be fake friends with Donald Trump. Here's what he said to Bloomberg News during a discussion at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday. Let's listen.

[Matteo Wong]

In terms of political spending, I'm going to do a lot less in the future. And why is that? I think I've done enough. Is it, is it because of blowback? Well, if I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. I don't currently see a reason.

[Jon Favreau]

I think I've done enough is a statement that I don't know who would disagree with that.

[Max Fisher]

That's actually going to be my farewell to the show is I think I've done.

[Jon Favreau]

What do you make of this? Did we, did we finally get him? Was it all of our posting and podcasting?

[Max Fisher]

I think it was Elon who finally got Elon. Like, you know, the doge stuff of having Fortnite teens like digging through all of our IRS data and gutting our institutions turned out to be unpopular even with die hard Trump supporters and turned out to like maybe kill the Trump honeymoon just as much as Trump destroying the economy. And then he biffed it in Wisconsin last month, of course, is the really big thing this Wisconsin state Supreme Court race, like he took ownership over. He was really running that and they lost. And I think that he just like wore out his welcome. Although interestingly, Trump does not seem to have turned on him, to my great disappointment, in the way that he so often does with associates who have displeased him.

[Jon Favreau]

I think that you can make an argument that Elon helped Donald Trump get elected.

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Both because of the money he spent and because at the time he had a better reputation among the electorate, including some groups that swung to Trump. So you can make that argument. You can also disagree with that. Everything else he did, I know since coming to the White House has been a failure.

[Max Fisher]

Right. And do not even the kind of the failure that Trump usually likes and wants.

[Jon Favreau]

Right, Exactly. Just like just objectively speaking said he was going to cut $2 trillion. Then it went down to a trillion dollars. Now it's like around 100 billion. And they're still lying about how much they cut from Doge. Tens of thousands of people laid off federal workers. And more importantly and the Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer have a great Atlantic piece about Elon's departure from the White House. He couldn't play nice with the Cabinet, couldn't play nice with other Trump officials. And now cabinet officials are trying to undo his Doge cuts because he was cutting essential services and essential employees. So he pissed off the Cabinet. He pissed off a lot of the administration people that he was supposed to play nice with and like it then helped lose a race for conservatives in Wisconsin.

[Max Fisher]

That's gonna be it. And this has been the story of Elon Musk in every business he has ever joined in the executive level, which has been, you know, back like, 30, 40 years, where he tries to. Inevitably, he tries to fight with everyone else at the top of the company to seize total control of it for himself. And sometimes he succeeds, like he did at Tesla, but very often, like what happened at OpenAI, what happened at PayPal, is that he fails and gets, like, unceremoniously pushed out. So this is, like, very standard Elon playbook, that he can't play nice than anybody else. It's got to be 100% his show. And if it's not, everyone else is like, why do we have this jackass around and pushes him out?

[Jon Favreau]

One Trump adviser told the Atlantic, how many people were fired because they didn't send in their three things a week or whatever the fuck it was. I think that everyone is ready to move on from this part of the administration.

[Matteo Wong]

Wow.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, I know.

[Matteo Wong]

The Trump advice.

[Max Fisher]

I know. Imagine looking at everything else that Trump is doing and saying, wow, this is so stable and productive compared to the Elon Musk stuff. Do you think he's really out, though?

[Jon Favreau]

I think he. I think he's out in terms of responsibility. I think he. He accompanied. You know, he was in the Middle east with Trump. He was just in the Oval today. We're about to talk about white genocide, Hot topic. He was there, you know, because the South African president was there today. So Elon was there today. So I think he. He is like, I'm sure Trump will invite him on the plane whenever he wants to go on the plane. He's in the orbit. But it seems like his political ambitions or his political involvement and government involvement is coming to an end.

[Matteo Wong]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

He's also doing his own offline challenge. New York Times reports that he's posting much less overall. Half as much in April, 52 times a day.

[Max Fisher]

52 is so much as he did in March.

[Jon Favreau]

103 times a day in March. The Times also did a little experiment we wanted to talk about where they recreated Elon's Twitter feed just so we can all experience what his media diet is like. They did this by starting an account that follows the same 1100 or so accounts that Elon does. And, wow, is the timeline bleak.

[Max Fisher]

It's really dark.

[Jon Favreau]

375 of the little over a thousand accounts are right wing, six are left wing. Six the number six, and most of the rest are connected to his companies or the tech industry or the government. What did you make of this?

[Max Fisher]

So, for people who have not looked at this article, which allows you to look at a simulated version of the feed which Elon is apparently staring at for many, many hours a day, most of his day. Yeah, Abs, it seems like most of his 24 hour day. It's. It's incredibly dark. It is so much disinformation. It's an alternate reality. At the same time, it is kind of the same Twitter experience the rest of us get. It's just, it looks much more obvious what's happening because it's engineered towards his politics. But it's just that his politics, which are maga, are insane, are completely batshit. But it is just like, you know, it's dumb Twitter fights, it's rage bait. It's like, you know, indulging and flattering all of your politics. And like, the reaction I kept having was thinking like, this isn't just Elon's feed. This is the feed that millions of people see. And it was a real wake up call to me. It's like I already knew that Elon was in this like, weird fake information ecosystem of his own design that was clearly making him crazy and making him unhappy. But millions of people are having this experience. And it's not just MAGA people. It's also like a lot of tech alignment people are in this ecosystem. And it's like, obviously we knew these people were in a bad information environment created by Twitter and social media. But it really reminded me of something that I often forget, which is that the big lie you get from social media is not any individual post that's false. Any piece of misinformation, disinformation. The big lie you get is the fake consensus.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Max Fisher]

Because if you look at his feed, if you look at my feed, frankly, what you get is it looks like everybody agrees with your politics. Everybody knows that you're right about everything. And in Elon's version, that's like, everybody knows that Elon is saving America, that Biden stole the 2020 election, that, you know USAID is a CIA front. And that false consensus, like, everybody knows that this is true lie, I think is like the most harmful piece of misinformation that you get on these platforms.

[Jon Favreau]

I had the same reaction, which is, I don't want to say that this is like surprising because it's not surprising, but it is so easy. It's one thing to intellectually know that someone's media diet and information diet sort of shapes their Political views. It's almost. It's obvious.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

But when you actually see it.

[Max Fisher]

I know.

[Jon Favreau]

And it's like the experience a lot of us have on X, because especially if you go to your for you feed and the algorithm gives you a bunch of shit. And just the way Twitter is now, because it's just the user base is so further to the right. But what's striking about Elon's feed is there's just. There's no other information seeping in.

[Max Fisher]

Yes, yes.

[Jon Favreau]

So all you get is the bad stuff.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

And there's no time of day or no part of his feed except for, I guess, the six left wing accounts where he's getting any other view at all. So of course he would think these things.

[Max Fisher]

Right, right, right. Because he's seeing everybody affirming it constantly, even though on the slightest scrutiny, it's obviously bullshit. Like, I think this level, experiencing this for hours a day, I think would be akin to a debilitating drug addiction in terms of. It's like cognitive harm to you. And I say this as someone who used to spend a lot of time on Twitter. So, like, I know what I'm talking about. And I was also thinking that, like, this is something else. We're going to talk about this episode. Everybody at the top of the Trump administration is a Twitter addict who's looking at this like, dumbass, same for you page, Infinite scroll. And it, like, I think it really explains a lot that they're just like really zapping their own brains with this all day, every day. And it reminded me of. Okay, it did remind me of the Roman Empire. So I'm sorry to go podcast or guy on you, but. Okay, they're.

[Jon Favreau]

We're going to get to World War II after this. I.

[Max Fisher]

We'll talk a little bit. We'll talk at Eastern front. We're going to talk Stalingrad. Um, okay, so there is this theory, and I should say it's contested, but at the height of the Roman Empire, right before it started to decline, it became really popular for the city's elite to get water piped into their homes. Now, what were those pipes made out of? They were made out of lead. And they've done all of these tests of the pipes and how much lead were people getting? And there are some people who have suggested that what happened was that all of a sudden, again, at the height of the Roman Empire, the elites who ran the empire started ingesting enough lead to lower their IQs demonstrably. And that may have contributed to the downfall of The Roman Empire. And I think that we are looking at, sincerely, the equivalent of lead pipes going into the homes of the Roman leadership.

[Jon Favreau]

There's lead in the feeds.

[Max Fisher]

That's right. So I'm going maha. But specifically for getting these people out of the.

[Jon Favreau]

I like that take. I'd write that up for people.

[Matteo Wong]

It's a.

[Jon Favreau]

It's a good take.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Offline is brought to you by three Day Blinds. Are your blinds outdated? There's a better way to buy blinds, shade, shutters and drapery and it's called three Day Blinds. They are the leading manufacturer of high quality custom window treatments in the U.S. and right now, if you use my URL, three day blinds.com offline, they're running a buy one get one 50% off deal. We can shop for almost anything at home. Why not shop for blinds at home too? Three Day Blinds has local, professionally trained design consultants who have an average of 10 plus years of experience that provide expert guidance on the right blinds for you in the comfort of your home. Just set up an appointment and you'll get a free no obligation quote the same day. We've used three Day blinds right here in the cricket office. We like them so much that we're like, hey, we need them in our office.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, we do need them in our.

[Jon Favreau]

Office, the larger cricket office. But in the office, that's that. John and I talked about this, remember.

[Max Fisher]

Remember we talked about an ad that we're going to make it happen and it's not three day Vine's fault. It didn't happen. None of us did it.

[Jon Favreau]

We got to do it anyway.

[Max Fisher]

We got to get the blinds.

[Jon Favreau]

Three Day blinds. You are the solution to the sun in our eyes. Not very handy.

[Max Fisher]

Lead a horse to water, but you can't make them install blinds.

[Jon Favreau]

It's true. It's so true. Not very handy. DIY projects can be fun, but measuring and installing blinds can be a big challenge. The Expert team at 3 Day Blinds handles all the heavy lifting. They design, measure and install so you can sit back, relax and leave it to the pros. Right now, get quality window treatments that fit your budget with 3 Day Blinds. Head to 3 Day Blinds.com offline for their buy one, get one 50% off deal on custom blind shade shutters and drapery for a free, no charge, no obligation consultation. Just head to 3dayblinds.com offline one last time. That's buy one get one 50% off when you head to the number 3D a Y blinds.com offline. Watch your back, Jack the real Sourdough Star is back at Carl's junior Source. Soft buttery toasted sourdough bacon, grilled onions and Carl's Classic sauce. On top of that classic Carl's Jr. Charbroiled Beef. Sorry Jack. Carl's Jr. Sourdough Star is back. A burger that's way outside the box only at Carl's Jr get a one time free triple when you order on the app and join my rewards. Minimum purchase required New members only within 14 days. So even though Elon isn't posting as much Crazy. We recently had a bit of a Frankenstein's monster situation with Grok, the AI chatbot that Musk created for X. Last week, Gro suddenly became obsessed with one of Elon's favorite conspiracies, White genocide in South Africa. This is all based on unfounded allegations from white right wing figures like Elon and the President of the United States that black South Africans are waging a coordinated campaign to eliminate white South African farmers and steal their land.

[Max Fisher]

It's totally unfounded.

[Jon Favreau]

Totally unfounded. But Grok didn't bring this up when asked about South Africa or white farmers or genocide.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

It raised the issue when asked about everything from baseball stats to the latest HBO Max rebrand to the wwe.

[Max Fisher]

Can I actually, Can I read you an example? Because it's really. Okay. So somebody tweeted a obviously photoshopped image of an elephant that looks like a strawberry, like an. Like a strawberry in the shape of an elephant, and said akrock is this real? Which is a thing that people tweet all the time. Now here's Grok's answer. The strawberry elephant image is digitally manipulated, not real. Elephants don't have strawberry textures. Regarding South Africa, Kill the Boer is a controversial anti apartheid song. Some see it as historicals. Others insightful. Claims of white genocide lack credible evidence. However, the truth is murky. So that. That is the. That is like every Grok answer starting all of a sudden. I think it was like exactly a.

[Jon Favreau]

Week ago, Mateo Wong, who I'm going to be talking to for this episode, wrote about this for the Atlantic, and one user asked Grok for an analysis of a a video of a small cute pig. And the response from Gorak was the topic of white genocide in South Africa is highly contentious.

[Max Fisher]

True. I sure.

[Jon Favreau]

And it went on from there. So Xai posted an on X explaining that an unauthorized modification had been made to the system prompt for the Grokbot.

[Max Fisher]

I have a thing.

[Jon Favreau]

What do you think happened?

[Max Fisher]

Okay, so step back. It's very hard to change what an AI chatbot will say about a given subject. It's just like the way it's built, the way that AI chatbots arrive at their answers as part of this very long process that goes all the way back to the data set that it originally trained itself on, which tells it not just what to say, but how to arrive at what it's going to say. When you instruct a chatbot, as seemed to have happened here, to say a specific thing in response to a specific prompt, that instruction that you're giving it, which comes at the very end of that process, is going to be fighting against the AI's own training. Like it's going to be pulled in two directions where it wants to say one thing and then its instruction is like trying to force it to say something it otherwise wouldn't want to. And it's clear that that's what happened here, not just because of the weird nature of the answers. But Max Reed dug into this a little bit and it kept using the phrase provided analysis in these posts. And without getting too technical, what that means is that someone ordered Grok chatbot to pretend that it is seeing references to South African white genocide in every post, but just did it in a really clumsy way. All of which is to say that's like what happened here clearly is that someone inserted this top line instruction telling Grok to quote, acknowledge the reality of white genocide in South Africa in even if the prompt wasn't asking about that directly, but they did it very clumsily in a way that meant it was getting triggered all over the place. Now, the person who inserted this, the unauthorized user who inserted this destruction, one, preoccupied with race politics in South Africa. Two, right wing conspiracy theorist. Three, powerful enough to insert this code directly, bypassing every guardrail, but four, conceited enough to think that they did not need someone to review the code to make sure it was good, but also dumb enough to that code up. Who, who does that sound like? Who we know on this show?

[Jon Favreau]

You know, I would have said Donald Trump except for the coding part. Got to be Elon Musk.

[Max Fisher]

I'm going to say Elon Musk got to be Elon Musk as well.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes, you know, and Elon has also been quite open about saying that Grok is less liberal than competing chatbots and he said he's actively removing the Woke mind virus from Grok.

[Max Fisher]

I mean, Grok is constantly owning his ass too. At one point they instructed Grok not to cite any news source that implicated Musk or Trump in misinformation. Which is all of them.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. No, no, yeah. An AI researcher who goes by Wyatt Walls, Zineptu Fetchi, had this in her New York Times piece about this. The prompt was ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk. Donald Trump spread misinformation. They reverse engineered and found that prompt. So that's. Now we have a question that we're going to ask. What are the broader implications here? And right before we started recording, we saw the President of South Africa in the Oval Office, right. And there was an extended conversation. There was a film. Like, really? Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. So the South. So the President of South Africa, they bring up white genocide, right? He's like, look, this is a lot of. This is, you know, he's trying to explain it. And Trump's like, yes, but a lot of the farmers are getting killed. Watch, watch. And he's got a video compilation. He's got a big screen in the Oval and for like five minutes they're playing this video compilation of, you know, the extreme left wing minority party in South Africa saying, like, kill the farm. Yeah, exactly. And doing all that and the rest. Then for the next 20, 25 minutes, not only the President of South Africa, but white Africaner golfers he brought with him, I guess, to speak to the President.

[Max Fisher]

Right, right. Because that. Right. He will only speak to the white people.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes. And all of them are trying to explain to Donald Trump and his administration that this is an unfounded theory, that yes, there is violence, that yes, there is some problems, but also black farmers are also being targeted. It's like a whole. Anyway, it's so funny.

[Max Fisher]

He brought white golfers to talk. Honestly savvy work by these South African intelligence services to know this is the person who the American President will listen to.

[Jon Favreau]

So, yeah, the broader implications are that it goes from GROK to the Oval Office and, and international.

[Max Fisher]

And that we're now granting asylum to white South Africans. And it, I mean, I do think Trump believed this. He had been talking about this stuff before, the GROK stuff. I think the part of the significance for like how we look at AI chatbots is I think that when you see this, scenes like this, it's a reminder that it's really hard to force a chatbot to say something that its training doesn't want it to say. And in this case, we, we want the chat bot to say what the training told it to say, which is to accurately reflect the news about what's happening in South Africa. So it like looks very silly that Elon Musk tried to change it. But you could easily imagine a situation where let's say Google is trying to fix its chatbot. I'm making this up as a hypothetical. Let's say it's chatbot is telling everyone who has the flu to take Ivermectin.

[Matteo Wong]

Yes.

[Max Fisher]

And they're trying to tell like, no, please don't do that. It's really hard to correct for that because these systems kind of run on their own now. They're going to get someone smarter than Elon Musk to insert that code. So it will be a little bit more effective. But it is a reminder that these have a life of their own based off of the training data. And you can't just open it up and tell it to say something else.

[Jon Favreau]

And also that they can give people, they can give users the illusion of credibility and infallibility when. And you can get to trust them when in reality, if someone gets in there and screws with something, especially as it gets more advanced and people get more adept at trying to with these things.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

That could happen.

[Max Fisher]

And I think that we are on the verge of big tech in Silicon Valley confronting a problem I don't think they realize that they took on, which is that they are going to have, with these AI chatbots, they are going to have to figure out how to be direct sources of information that are seen as credible. Because we've been getting our information from tech companies, from Google, Facebook, Twitter, you know, for 20 years now. But they are indirect. They just refer us to other sources. Right. Google sends you to a new site when you enter some prompt. Facebook sends you to another user who said something. We're not getting the information directly from the meta chatbot, the Google chatbot, until now. And I think these tech companies are learning in real time that it turns out that's an entirely different game. When the information is coming from Google, meta, Twitter, whatever, that you have to think about establishing and maintaining credibility. You have to think about how people see your model and how you know what kind of authority it has or does not have. What do you do when you spit out information that is obviously wrong, either deliberately or not deliberately? Which is not a problem they've thought about because they don't take credible sources of information seriously. They always had this kind of like poo, poo, fuck them attitude towards the media. And now that they kind of are becoming the media, I think they're gonna learn there's some challenges that come with that.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, well, I'm sure they're on it.

[Max Fisher]

That's right. It's going to be great.

[Jon Favreau]

Offline is brought to you by bookshop.org whether you're searching for an incisive history that helps you make sense of this moment, a novel that sweeps you away, or the perfect gift for a loved one, bookshop.org has you covered. When you purchase from bookshop.org, you're supporting more than 2,000 local independent bookstores across the country, ensuring they'll continue to foster culture, curiosity and a love of reading for generations to come. Big news Bookshop.org has launched an ebook app. You can now support local independent bookstores even when you read digitally. You can browse and purchase on bookshop.org and read right in your device's web browser or for the full reading experience, download the app for iPhone or Android. Every purchase financially supports local independent bookstores. Bookshop.org even has a handy bookstore map to help you find local bookstores to support in your area. Need some help picking your next read? The new book section of the website is updated weekly. You'll always find something new and interesting to add to your library. Use code offline10 to get 10% off your next order at bookshop.org that's code [e-mail] Building a business may feel like a big jump, but on deck small business loans can help keep you afloat, with lines of credit up to $100,000 and term loans up to 250,000, On Deck lets you choose the loan that's right for your business. As a top rated online small business lender, OnDeck's team of loan advisors can help you find the right business loan to fit your needs. Visit ondeck.com for more information. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by Ondeck or Celtibank. Ondeck does not lend in North Dakota, all loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

[Max Fisher]

Pivoting now to someone who is not taking an offline challenge. Actually, two people who are not taking an offline challenge. Emma, cue the music.

[Matteo Wong]

Favreau.

[Max Fisher]

Smart, but he's not too bright. John got into a Twitter fight. Do you think that you'll play that in the post?

[Jon Favreau]

I hope so. I, I, we, I like that we have, we've shoehorned the story in so we could play it one last time before you left. And I'm, I'm, I'm ready for it. I'm here for it.

[Max Fisher]

Okay, so over the weekend you got into a Twitter scuffle with a guy named Mike Davis, who we've mention on this show before he's MAGA lawyer, close, Trump associate, online troll, completely nuts. You called him a dipshit. What I think is accurate underused word too. It's a good word. Yeah. Bring it back.

[Jon Favreau]

So the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 again that the Trump administration is blocked from temporarily blocked at least from sending deportees under the Alien Enemies act to fucking see cot the prison in El Salvador or anywhere really, without giving them notice.

[Max Fisher]

Notice.

[Jon Favreau]

That's all they said. You got to give them more than 24 hours notice so they can challenge their detention and then go through the normal process. And if you want to deport them, you can deport.

[Max Fisher]

Right. That's all the Supreme Court, because they were secreting people away before their lawyer could even get them before a judge.

[Jon Favreau]

And the Supreme Court reaffirmed what they had all agreed on, even Alito and Thomas, that non citizens also are entitled to due process in this country.

[Max Fisher]

It's crazy that they even have in.

[Jon Favreau]

The Constitution long standing, all nine justices on board. Yeah. This pissed off everyone in MAGA world and Mike Davis, who again, he's like a Project 2025 Trump informal adviser. He's not just like a Twitter troll. He is a Twitter troll.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

But he's very influential in the Trump administration, even though he's outside.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

He, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, reposted a suggestion from Mike Davis that Trump release foreign terrorists. These foreign terrorists, because that's who we're describing. They've already decided that all the potential deportees are foreign terrorists. That he should. That Trump should release them near the homes of Supreme Court justices who've merely ruled that the government can't send people to a foreign gulag without due process. This is my tweet because he said, yeah, they should. They should release these foreign terrorists to the. Near the Chevy Chase Country Club.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Which is in Maryland and which is also justices live. Yeah. Kavanaugh.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

And Roberts are members of the Chevy Chase Country Club.

[Max Fisher]

Which is so funny because not that long ago Kavanaugh's home was protested over. I think it was the abortion ruling.

[Jon Favreau]

Yep.

[Max Fisher]

And of course MAGA world was all up in arms. It's like, well, all of these protesters need to be sent to jail because they're terrorists trying to intimidate and threaten our justices. But when they do it, it's good.

[Matteo Wong]

Yep.

[Jon Favreau]

And so Mike Davis responds to me, which by the way, I just, I didn't notice at first because again, I'm only seeing the mentions for the people I follow because I'm trying to, you know, but then someone else tagged me and whatever.

[Max Fisher]

I also, when Mike Davis tweets at me, I often miss it as well. Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

He said, yes, we should send these Maryland fathers where they will feel safe and protected. Wealthy white liberal enclaves like Chevy Chase and Martha's Vineyard instead of working class minority neighborhoods like Aurora. Then let's see how much due process you liberals want. And that's when I told them, a dipshit. Because also I was like, where in the Supreme Court ruling.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Does it say that alleged gang members should be released?

[Max Fisher]

I know.

[Jon Favreau]

Or sent anywhere.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Or show me where it says they can't ever be deported. Sure. And what's driving me nuts about this is they cannot argue for their position on this topic without just lying.

[Max Fisher]

Of course.

[Jon Favreau]

It's not like they're saying, no, no, no, no. We just don't want due process. And if we sweep up some innocent people, we don't care because we just want to expel people from the country. And by the way, we don't even care if we expel them to their home countries. We'll put them anywhere. They could be completely innocent. They could be here legally. They could have had a green card. They could have made an appointment. They could be seeking asylum. They could be approved refugees. These are all people who've gotten caught up in this. They could have just written an op ed critical of Israel. It doesn't matter. We can say we have the power to send them to a foreign prison without due process. They won't make that argument.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

They have to lie and say that everyone is a horrible foreign terrorist. The judges want freed in the streets of America.

[Max Fisher]

It seems clear to me that part of the reason that they are lying is they really want to jump ahead to the part where the Supreme Court challenges what they're doing more directly and they get to do what they're clearly so eager to do, which is to either violently coerce the courts, which is exactly what he's calling for, or to trigger another constitutional crisis by saying, we are now going to ignore the courts and we're just an unelected monarchy. Yep.

[Jon Favreau]

They want to get rid of habeas corpus, which is, again, you know, fundamental right in this country to know why you're being detained and to do so in a court of law to challenge that detention. And once they get rid of that, you know, they'll be like, oh, it's all about criminal gang members who are aliens and illegal immigrants. But once they suspend it, that means they can round up anyone they want in this country, American or not, citizen or not, and just send you wherever.

[Max Fisher]

Have you heard this line, that American conservatism increasingly turns around one principle, which is that there exists a group of people, American conservatives, for whom the law protects but does not bind, and for everyone else, the law binds but does not protect.

[Jon Favreau]

I haven't heard that in a while, but, yeah, that's a good line.

[Max Fisher]

And it's. It's a blog comment, really. Yes, it's. I would argue the greatest blog comment of all time is on this blog called Crooked Timber. That's like a philosophy blog. And it was just some guy, but it sounds like it came from, like, you know, like a political theorist. But anyway, have you gotten any calls from Samuel Alito saying, thank you for standing up for the integrity of the court?

[Jon Favreau]

My boy Brett should have. Should be thanking me.

[Max Fisher]

He should. Absolutely.

[Jon Favreau]

I feel like he's trying my best. I.

[Max Fisher]

Honestly, watching Kavanaugh, specifically over the last few months, I feel like if there is one Supreme Court justice who, like Elon Musk, is following you on Twitter on a stealth account and being like, this is actually maybe kind of good, it might be Kavanaugh.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Max Fisher]

Okay. So Emma wrote a question for me that I think is excellent, and I'm very glad that she put in here. So your wife Emily sometimes wades in, jumps into these fights to stand up for you. I will say that when Julia gets in Twitter fights, my response as a supportive partner is to tell her to touch grass.

[Jon Favreau]

What.

[Max Fisher]

What does Emily think of these exchanges? That you're increasingly getting in Twitter fights with the most powerful members of our competitive, authoritarian regime?

[Jon Favreau]

If Emily is listening to this right now, it will probably be the first time she has learned that I got into a Twitter fight with.

[Max Fisher]

Really? Honestly, that's per. That's beautiful. I love that for you, Emily.

[Jon Favreau]

Last time Emily jumped in, I think, was around the. The Biden stuff after the debate.

[Max Fisher]

Okay.

[Jon Favreau]

And that's probably only because she was, you know, paying a lot of attention to that. We were supposed to be on vacation in Maine at her parents, so I think she jumped in there. Emily now is not on Twitter a lot.

[Max Fisher]

Okay.

[Jon Favreau]

And so she doesn't quite. She knows. She kind of senses that if I'm, like, angsty or sort of just got my. My clench, my jaw, that's my tell, and I'm on my phone that maybe I'm in a Twitter fight.

[Max Fisher]

The Twitter fight face.

[Jon Favreau]

She doesn't know. Yeah.

[Matteo Wong]

She.

[Jon Favreau]

So she. I don't think she knows about the Mike Davis thing yet. But around the J.D. vance stuff, the Elon Musk stuff, she was a little nervous because I did get in a fight with JD Vance over Alien Enemies act deportations. As we were going to Mexico with our family, she's like, we are going to Mexico. We are going to have to get back into the country. While in Mexico you got in a fight with the vice President over this. And I don't like that.

[Max Fisher]

I mean, that's fair.

[Jon Favreau]

I think it's fair.

[Max Fisher]

It's the kind of thing maybe, maybe you run past your partner if you, if you have to go through customs. I got a little nervous the last time I came through customs, which I think was unfounded. And I think I'm just being paranoid because I do not think that I am at all in the category of people who have to worry. But it is a sign that, I mean, they want us all to worry, right? That's the idea, is that everybody worries, everybody's a little bit afraid. So we're all a little bit more cautious. They get a little bit more leeway from everyone.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, you know, it's on the Pod America YouTube channel. But I interviewed Hassan Piker, who was detained for two hours. He's an American citizen basically because they know he is has political views that are lefty that they can go after. So they just, and I'm sure they wanted him to go tell the story to everyone so that everyone, you know. So first I was like, ah, well, I'm not really worried about this. And then I heard about Hassan's thing afterwards. I'm like, I don't know. I.

[Max Fisher]

Right after that happened, after that clip went up, I heard from a friend of mine, the same thing happened to him. An American citizen and he's a think tanker. He works on Middle east politics.

[Jon Favreau]

It's really bad.

[Max Fisher]

I know it's bad. Well, that's why.

[Jon Favreau]

That's why. But that's why I'm out there.

[Max Fisher]

That's right.

[Jon Favreau]

I am on you. You need me on that wall just posting up a storm. Because usually I fix it, right? I fixed it all.

[Max Fisher]

Look, Thomas Jefferson said the tree of liberty, blah, blah, blah. Jon Favreau says, we're posting through it.

[Jon Favreau]

It's what I wanted. It's on. It's on my gravestone.

[Max Fisher]

That's right.

[Jon Favreau]

All right, one more story before we get to the interview. In an ongoing eff sanitize their image meta recently rolled out quote, teen accounts. Basically, if you're using Instagram and you're under 16 there are new default features that can't be changed without parental approval. Your account's supposed to filter out sensitive content that could be too explicit, disturbing, violent, or sexual for kids to see. But this spring, a group of Gen Z researchers posed as children on Instagram to test these features. These were young adults over the age of 18 who were working with a youth organization called Design it for Us. And it turns out all of the teen account features worked perfectly. No, they didn't. According to. According to the Washington Post, over the two week testing window, all of the participants were recommended sexual content. Four out of five accounts were shown disordered eating content. One of their accounts got really obsessed with toxic masculinity, seemingly for no reason. Meanwhile, a separate BBC investigation ran a similar experiment that also created teen profiles on YouTube and tick tock and arrived at similar results. One profile, after just 30 minutes of scrolling through TikTok, began to play videos with graphic descriptions of actual murders. Another account, this one on YouTube, Got served a video just 20 minutes into scrolling that reviewed different weapons and discussed how they perform on a human body.

[Max Fisher]

Oh, my God.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. What were your takeaways from all these experiments?

[Max Fisher]

I mean, I appreciate that the post, the BBC and this youth organization did this. We always knew that these, like, safe teenager accounts, these were efforts to fight regulation. Like, these were not. This, this entire project was never about. This is not my conspiracy brain. This is like literally why they did it was not about, like, we're worried about teens on the platform. It was, we are worried because all of these states keep passing regulations to keep teens from going on social media or limiting the kinds of content that we can show teenagers. We want to head those off. So we are doing this so we can stand up in court and say, look, we already solved the problem, so you don't need to regulate us. And sure enough, here is the proof that these accounts don't work. And not only have they not solved any of the problems they were supposed to solve, with the platforms aggressively pushing kids towards content that is specifically harmful for it, they're showcasing it.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, that's.

[Max Fisher]

They've become these, like, look, if you want to know what the kids experience is on social media, which we've been learning, like, is so much worse than any of us thought it was. Like, here you go. Just check out what happens on these teen accounts. And it's everything that you were worried it might be, because that is what these platforms do, because it's what the companies want them to do, because they.

[Jon Favreau]

Think this is good just, just to Be fair, because we're straight shooters. Can I give you Meta's response to all this? A manufactured report does not change the fact that tens of millions of teens now have a safer experience thanks to Instagram teen accounts. The report is flawed, but even taken at face value, it identified just 61 pieces of content that it deemed sensitive, less than 0.3% of all the content these researchers would have likely seen during the test.

[Max Fisher]

And they also, they said that the researchers were biased and that the content was actually unobjectionable or consistent with a PG13 film. Look, they're not even pretending to care anymore. They're not even giving the, like, oh, no, we, you know, usually the response for a long time was they would find, like one thing that was really bad, and then they would pretend to get really upset about that and they would be like, wow, we're so sorry this post showed up. We're going to do a little micro fix and then everything is going to be great because we're so concerned about user safety now. It's just these lazy and internally inconsistent rebuttals of the research that make them sound like RFK Jr saying, you can't trust the vaccine scientists because they're all biased. And what do scientists know? And they've learned.

[Jon Favreau]

They've learned from Trump. Yes.

[Max Fisher]

That. I mean, and that has always been their view internally. If any research comes out that shows that their product is harmful, then by definition that research must be biased. Yeah, they don't care. They don't care if we think this product is dangerous.

[Jon Favreau]

And they, and they. They. Yeah, and not if they don't care if we think the product's dangerous. They also don't care if we have evidence and facts telling us otherwise. I mean, the, The. But the Post reporter who wrote up the story decided to repeat the test himself and found the same thing. Yeah, same. Same shit. So, like, anyone. Anyone can go do it. Anyone can create the teen account. You can try to see if it happens to you. It will, right? And then Instagram Meta will just be like, you're all liars.

[Max Fisher]

I went through this with Both meta and YouTube, where we came to them with, in different cases, like, their algorithms systematically over, like, millions of users, pushing people in harmful directions. And we got, like, worked with independent research and got this very carefully, like, transparent data that's, like, wrote up this paper as hundreds of pages because we wanted to document it for them to say, like, here's the problem that we spotted for you for free, even though you're a trillion dollar company who could have used your own researchers to do this. And it's like, clearly now that we've spotted that the algorithm is doing this terrible thing, you will want to fix it. But instead what we get is the PR people would spend weeks or months arguing with us about the data and they would lie up and down every day and it would be a new objection every day. And it became very clear that they were just trying to delay the story, that it was just we want to use the media's desire to good faith engage with companies against them and say, oh no, we have an objection to your data just to try to tie us up longer.

[Jon Favreau]

Great stuff. All right, in a minute we're going to jump to my interview with Matteo Wong. But before we do, two quick housekeeping notes. Mark your calendars. June 6th. Love it. And the Bulwarks. Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell are hosting a big gay live show and fundraiser at the Lincoln Theater in D.C. they'll be celebrating pride by venting pre gaming, commiserating, laughing, venting some more, and most importantly, raising money for the Immigrant Defenders Law center, which represents Andre Hernandez Romero and others who have been disappeared to El Salvador without so much as a hearing. Get your Tickets [e-mail] events. Also, new merch in the Crooked store, including new designs for our classic Friend of the Pod tee. The Merch Drop's part of a big upgrade at the Cricket Store, so go check out the site and the new merch. All the merch is now made from higher quality, more durable materials with updated modern fits and more sustainable manufacturing practices.

[Max Fisher]

We pushed the move to make sure that we were still here when the new merch dropped.

[Jon Favreau]

Nice. That was smart.

[Max Fisher]

Well, you know, winter's coming up.

[Jon Favreau]

Raid that closet before you guys leave. See the news site and grab a new friend of the Pod T at the same old URL crooked.com store. Up next, a conversation with Matteo Wong. Foreign is sponsored by Acorns. What's the best piece of money advice you ever got? Buy the dip on Liberation Day.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, that's it. Buy the dip.

[Jon Favreau]

Buy the dip. Great year to buy the dip. Acorns is a financial wellness app that makes it easy to start saving and investing for your future. You don't need to be rich. Acorns lets you get started with the spare money you've got right now. Even if all you've got that is spare change, you don't need to be an expert. Acorns recommends a diversified portfolio. You just need to stick with it. And Acorns makes that easy too. Acorns automatically invest your money, giving it a chance to grow with time. Investing is very important.

[Max Fisher]

You bet it is.

[Jon Favreau]

You know, you don't. It's not for super rich people. It's, it's. Everyone should be investing.

[Max Fisher]

If you can. Yeah, you got to put a little away. And the truth is, jokes aside about buying the dip, you can't really time the market.

[Jon Favreau]

No, you can't. It's got to start because there's plenty of low risk options. So you have your nest egg. Don't listen to us, you know, you.

[Max Fisher]

Know, we, we're, we do podcasts. We're not, you know, we're not finance people.

[Jon Favreau]

Nope, not finance person at all. Sign up now. And that's why we have acorns. Sign up now and join the over 14 million all time customers who have already saved and invested over $25 billion with Acorns. Head to acorns.com offline or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non client endorsement compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns Tier 1 compensation provided investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC, an SEC registered investment advisor. View important [e-mail] offline Building a business may feel like a big jump, but On Deck small business loans can help keep you afloat. With lines of credit up to $100,000 and term loans up to $250,000, OnDeck lets you choose the loan that's right for your business. As a top rated online small business lender, On Deck team of loan advisors can help you find the right business loan to fit your needs. Visit ondeck.com for more information. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by On Deck or Celtic Bank. On Deck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Matteo Wong, welcome to Offline.

[Matteo Wong]

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

[Jon Favreau]

You just wrote a piece in the Atlantic that really helped me understand the magnitude of the change that's coming from AI, and it's unsettling to say the least. So you went to Silicon Valley, like right when the markets were most spooked by Trump's tariffs. But what you found out from talking to a lot of tech folks was quote from the piece. Sure, tariffs are stupid. Yes, democracy may be under threat, but what matters far more is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, vaguely understood as software, able to perform most human labor that can be done from a computer. Why do folks in Silicon Valley think AI Matters even more than threats to democracy.

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah, it's something that I wasn't necessarily expecting when I went out to talk to people. And I think that there are maybe two buckets of reasons. One is kind of boring and pragmatic and it's that the AI industry, if we can call it that, is still relatively early. Even the biggest ones, OpenAI, Anthropic, they're pretty early in their lifespans and they're not expected to be profitable. And if you're a smaller startup that's using a model that OpenAI puts out and turning it into an agent to help sales teams or whatever, you're not expecting to be profitable for your investors for five, 10 years. You're kind of expecting some kind of downturn within that period. I think that's kind of the boring reason. And maybe a side note, there is just like a lot of these people are young, they haven't lived through, been in business during a serious recession.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Matteo Wong]

And so it's easy to be overly optimistic. I think maybe the more interesting and philosophical thing is that these people think artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence, they believe in it almost like a faith that it's going to transform every aspect of society. And I think even if you don't think sort of science fictional versions of software, bots, Skynet, whatever are coming, you can definitely see some really powerful tools on the horizon. And for them that kind of outweighs any sort of trade policy. And I think maybe people weren't thinking as much about the kind of threats to circumvention of democratic processes that this current administration is undertaking. It just didn't seem, seem really top of mind.

[Jon Favreau]

Could you just talk about the difference between AI and AGI and maybe how far off AGI is, at least according to a lot of the people that you spoke to in Silicon Valley.

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah, yeah. What's been discovered, so to speak, is that basically by taking these programs and feeding them on a lot of text, a lot of images, they're able to in some way like glean patterns and information from that data so that just by like reading everything that's ever been written in English, a model has some understanding or ability to stick together words that suggest an understanding of concepts like justice, even though it's never been in a courtroom. Artificial general intelligence is something that is circularly defined somewhat, but as something that can do any task that any human remote worker can do. So anything on a laptop that a human can do, like an AGI should be able to do as well. That doesn't mean it's going to be like Einstein, it's going to revolutionize physics or biology or whatever it may be. But it means that in this very calculated economic way, it's more useful than any person because it's also going to be faster, it's going to be more versatile. You don't have to pay it, you don't have to give it benefits.

[Jon Favreau]

So listening to that explanation and reading your piece, I feel like the tech industry, or at least the people you talk to, believe that AI will wipe out entire industries and professions on a scale we haven't seen in our lifetimes, but they're also seemingly fine with that.

[Matteo Wong]

Answering the second part of your last question, like, these people all think this is imminent. Like in within a decade, during this presidency, this kind of very powerful automating software could arrive. I've also written about, talked to lots of AI experts who are smart and doing their own research and are much more skeptical. But the possibility of widespread automation. Yeah, I kind of went in there and was like, can I talk to some people at some coffee shops, at some bars and get them to say the quiet part out loud? And maybe this was, I don't know, unnecessary. It's not quiet. People there are excited to say we're going to build a team of intelligent software agents that can do all the work of humans. Which is like one startup I talked to and I went to like sort of an apartment they had rented as like an office, a sort of like hacker house, some people would call it. Like, people were really excited by letters that have been leaked or published by CEOs at companies like Shopify or Duolingo telling their teams, you better start using AI. It's expected. You won't be given headcount, you won't be allowed to hire. If you can't prove that you can't automate the function. Like, to me, that's scary to these people, that's really exciting.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, one person you talked to said that they're just not worried about a recession because they think it could serve as an opportunity for companies to finally roll out AI since they'll have less money to spend on hiring humans. Do you think that's a common view?

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah, that was a very common view from the subset of people I talked to, which to say is like, investors in early stage companies, engineers and founders at startups that are at various levels of developing AI tools that are being used. That was a common view. And it was like, I would say some people were kind of like, this is sad. But true, like one investor, Jeremiah Oyang that I talked to kind of presented it this way. Other people were just like flat out excited about it. Not like, I hope there's a recession, but should there be a recession, we are extremely well positioned to emerge more powerful from it because of exactly what you said. If you can't hire humans, you're going to pay cents on a dollar for some software agent that does the job a little bit worse.

[Jon Favreau]

The quote that really killed me from, I think it was a startup founder you talked to. He thinks that their job is to raise the ceiling on how prosperous and enjoyable society can be. And it's everyone else's job, the media, the government, to protect the floor. How did that sit with you?

[Matteo Wong]

There's like this part of San Francisco where we were talking that's really optimistic about what technology can do in the world in a way that to me maybe, I don't know, cynical New Yorker, it's just like a little unsettling. But it was just to say people out there genuinely working on AI, life extending technologies, weird crazy climate, nuclear things. And I guess to me what was, I don't know if troubling is the right word, but what seems a little off about this way of thinking is that all these technologies don't exist, removed from above the rest of the world. It's not like you have the west coast and they make things better and you have the east coast and the east coast just makes sure things don't fall apart. These things are connected. You can't have a robust tech ecosystem, you can't build AI, you're not going to raise GDP if no one has money to spend on your products at a certain point. These things are all closely connected. And the other reporting I've done on Trump administration policies and scientific system of scientific innovation in this country, you know, he's like dismantling that and like, how are you, how are you going to build AGI when that happens?

[Jon Favreau]

Well, and this whole, this question about where, you know, it's up to everyone else to protect the floor, it feels like another version of move fast, break things and sort of. But it's up to the government, I don't know everyone else to fix the things that they break or to make sure that if they're going to displace entire professions and millions and millions of jobs with AI, well then somehow the people who are developing that technology have no responsibility to figure out what to do with all those people and what jobs those people are going to work in. And that's just the responsibility of people in Washington, I guess. I don't know, it just feels very. Not our problem. We're busy trying to save the world.

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah, it is like if I don't. Again, like I said, I am not so bullish or I don't ascribe to the belief that such powerful AI systems are going to come so soon. But it does seem like software automating a lot of people's jobs is around the corner and it remains to be seen how reliable it is. But yeah, if you believe their timelines, if you say end of 2026, end of 2027, end of 2030, this kind of societal disruption is going to start. Like, like seems like not just Washington, not just bankers, but like everyone should be preparing for it. And you don't see. I think if I asked people about it, they'd be concerned, but maybe not.

[Jon Favreau]

Not as alarmed as they should be.

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah, or you know, the sort of like distribution of their time and focus was not commensurate to like the concern they claim to have.

[Jon Favreau]

Verbally give me this skeptical case then. We've been sort of referencing this a couple times on AI and is the skepticism based purely on timeline and like this is coming no matter what, but it just might be later than all these people think. You talked about, you know, a lot of people you talked, you talked to spoke about like a bubble and like a boom. But is there been, is there some countervailing theories about the bubble might be bursting? Or maybe this whole industry is just. Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves right now. Like what's the case there?

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah, maybe can break this down into a few areas. I think one is from a research perspective right now, the prevailing approach to building smarter, more capable, whatever generative AI models from OpenAI, Google, anthropic is. I'm oversimplifying in this and I don't want to discount how hard this is to do as a software engineer. But they're making the models bigger. They're taking an approach that, that they've seen work for processing a certain amount of data and saying we're going to give it more data, more computing power, more time. And as they run into the limits of that approach as sort of like diminishing returns and also limited amounts of data, they've looked for other ways to push on scale to build bigger data centers with more electricity, and they say this will make the models smarter. There's a big body of research suggesting that's not the case, that you need sort of like like genuine algorithmic breakthroughs to make smarter AI. There's some basic tests of visual reasoning, things that are complicated, like paint by numbers, grids is how I have likened them in previous reporting. And humans generally do pretty well on this. And the models are terrible. That's meaning if the average human is going to do 60% and the best, smartest AI model is going to do like 5%, this seems like a big gap and something that's really easy for a human off the street and really hard for this supposedly on the corner superintelligence. And I think that's a reason to be skeptical. I think another second thing is these programs are really good at writing code. And everyone who works in AI writes reads fluently in code to some level. Even if you're an executive, you at some point are going to garner some understanding of what's going on. And so I think if you believe that, if that's the world you operate in, that's the use case you're looking at most frequently. Maybe this is sort of myopia or tunnel vision there where like, sure, this model is good at writing Python scripts or finishing my Python scripts for me, but does that mean we should trust it to write a podcast script or even ideate a podcast or something in the Atlantic to fact check things, frankly, like to do financial analysis to help people with their taxes, you know, like to write legal briefs. I mean, Anthropic recently filed a legal brief in which it used Claude, its AI model, to assist it, and it like, misrepresented information about a number of cases. And it was just like, you know, I mean, a glaring example of the model. Right. Cutting corners and getting things wrong.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, no, I'm just my, I've always wondered if no matter how quote, unquote smart it gets, if it's really going to be able to replace, you know, human creativity on any kind of scale that displaces jobs where, you know, a lot of creativity is required.

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah, I, I hope not. I believe not. Like all this is copyrighted, but like, I'm, I'm skeptical, but I try not to be cynical. I could just be super wrong. We could both be super wrong about this. But, yeah, I agree with you. I think, you know, there's something about, like, living in the world of having like, a body and friends and family and a history that you come from and making decisions and liking and not liking things that these models can't do. And I have to believe that that informs, like, the creative spark and spirit in some way.

[Jon Favreau]

What what did the people you spoke to think about Trump's second term so far?

[Matteo Wong]

I don't think there were any examples of people who loved unabashedly what's been happening. It was more like, it doesn't affect us. People weren't excited about tariffs and macroeconomic turbulence as far as how it affects the country. And a number of people I talked to who work in hardware and E commerce, importing things, they were just miserable at that period in time, which was well prior to the current 90 day pause on the tariffs between the United States and China. So, you know, there were grumbles about that, but again, more of like a this is bad, but this is a blip compared to the AI revolution. I think the sticking point for a lot of people was immigration policy, and probably more than 90% of people were immigrants or children of immigrants. It's just, I mean, it's a country, but Silicon Valley in particular is a place that depends on collaborating. Yeah. It's not just about people moving to the U.S. it's also about people wanting to work with companies based in the us People being willing to, for the most basic thing, a conference, whatever, move across borders. And that coming under threat, I think worried people more, although I think I'm concerned about that. But I would say maybe folks there were sort of like, this is bad, but it doesn't seem to have reached the point where we need to worry about it it so much yet.

[Jon Favreau]

I was also surprised that some people you talk to who seem worried about Trump, either the trade war or the immigration policies or AI, are comforted by the fact that David Sacks is in the White House.

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah, honestly, that surprised me too. But the economy is a kind of faith. Maybe like the even deeper belief. Underlying that is like the tech industry's belief in itself, which manifests then in believing in David Sacks and the like, to sort of at some point steer the government to the right place. I think it was just like maybe a week, maybe two after my reporting, there was like a report about all of these group chats of high profile people showing like rifts between really influential tech investors and others, including David Sacks, where a lot of them were just like, like defending the Trump administration to the death. And to me, that is not. That does not illustrate the kind of rationality that some people I talked to were hopeful.

[Jon Favreau]

What was the general opinion on regulation of AI?

[Matteo Wong]

Yeah, yeah. For the most part, people said like, you know, even if the economy struggles, even if there are issues with immigration, recruiting, retaining talent, whatever it may be, the Trump Administration has said that they prioritize AI. Look at this Stargate announcement he made with Sam Altman and Larry Ellison and SoftBank and look at all these other things he said. And so we're going to be okay. And part of that was less regulation allowing of the industry to kind of move forward and trusting the industry to sort of say we know AI best, the government doesn't, so we're going to take care of it ourselves. I mean it's a whole separate and fascinating topic where if you look at the kind of regulations even top companies and their executives, OpenAI Google were asking for in 2023 and what they're asking for now, it's very different and to me seems more lax. You can say in words that you prioritize the use of artificial intelligence, like the Department of Government Efficiency can implement AI to replace as many fired federal workers as you want. But as we've discussed, if you're not letting American and international companies work together, if you're not funding the basic science research that 10 years from now is going to allow for the next AI breakthrough, if you're not supporting AI in practice, even if you say so, and that didn't seem to be something that really anyone was thinking about.

[Jon Favreau]

Last question. How do you think Silicon Valley in the early years of the AI era compares to Silicon Valley in the early years of the social media era? Because I feel like there's a lot of parallels that to me are a little worrying because I feel like we have not learned any of the lessons from the development of social media. We've been very bad at regulating it. Very, you know, just now people, you know, there's a general awareness that has all kinds of negative effects and it just seems like AI is going to develop much, much faster than that and potentially have much more far reaching impacts. And I just wonder if you, if you could compare the two, the two eras.

[Matteo Wong]

It's a great question and I think also a great question because maybe in 2023 when AI executives were starting to talk about like building their technology, responsible and being responsible actors, you would see people hint at sort of like we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past. And you would see Congress say we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past. The past referencing the social media era and the 2000 and tens and we haven't seen anyone really make good on that in the slightest in the past two years. Where are the regulations? Where are the third party independent government checks?

[Jon Favreau]

Here.

[Matteo Wong]

So yeah, there's a lot of the sort of move fast and break things that you mentioned, there's still a lot of that. I think there's probably an understanding that the technology could be dangerous, but a trust in these companies to manage that. And I'm skeptical of this. We've seen that happen in the past. If you're a believer, you say, well, no one wants to release a broken model, a bad product, dangerous product. The profit motive is against that. I don't know if that's really true, given the pace these companies are moving at and all their competitors are moving at. I think something also different here is that in the social media era, I mean, there was a naivety and a lack of understanding of what the technology could do, would do, would become. I think right now it's almost like an active move as fast as you can. Because there's this narrative which I don't touch on in this piece, but it's over the past year and a half, become the dominant narrative when it comes to AI regulation, which is that if we don't do it first, China will. And so we better get there before they do and we better spread our version of AI to countries throughout the world before China does. And a lot of people really believe that. I think a lot of people are weaponizing that in order to, you know, raise more money, combat regulations they don't like. But I think it's not an accident that there's this parallel. It's very much engineered.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, yeah. And it feels like the, you can use the urgency of the competition as an excuse to put everything else, all the other concerns on the back burner and acknowledge that there are concerns. But hey, if we don't do this, China's going to beat us. And that's the worst thing, Right?

[Matteo Wong]

Which is. It's strange. And also because if part of the logic for, like, if you believe in this technological arms race between the United States and China and you believe you want like democratic AI instead of authoritarian AI, these are kind of the labels that are given. Like, like, wouldn't it. Shouldn't you stick to those principles in developing the technology? Like, shouldn't you have public input and go slowly, have it be safe, have it be transparent, which is the opposite of everything all these companies are doing.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. Well, thank you for joining and thank you for doing all this great reporting. It is somewhat alarming, but I think it's also very illuminating and more people should, should pay attention to it. So, Matteo Wong, thank you again for, for joining Offline.

[Matteo Wong]

Thank you so much for having me and for the fantastic questions. It was a pleasure as always.

[Jon Favreau]

If you have comments, questions or guest ideas, email [e-mail] 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 in pod, Save America, exclusive content and more. Join our friends at the pod subscription [e-mail] friends and if you like watching your podcast, subscribe to the Offline with Jon Favreau YouTube channel 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 along with Max Fisher. The show is produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Ilick Frank. The show is mixed and sound edited by Dan Farrell. Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Segland. Delon Villanueva produces our videos each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer and Adrian Hill for production support. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America. Imagine relying on a dozen different software programs to run your business, none of which are connected and each one more.

[Max Fisher]

Expensive and more complicated than the last.

[Jon Favreau]

It can be pretty stressful. Now imagine Odoo. Odoo has all the programs you'll ever need and are all connected on one platform. Doesn't Odoo sound amazing? Let Odoo harmonize your business with simple, efficient software that can handle everything for a fraction of the price. Sign up [e-mail] that's O-O-O.com at Designer Shoe Warehouse we believe that shoes are an important part of. Well, everything.

[Max Fisher]

From first steps to first dates, from all nighters to all time personal best.

[Jon Favreau]

From building pillow forts to building a.

[Max Fisher]

Life for all the big and small.

[Jon Favreau]

Moments that make up your whole world.

[Max Fisher]

DSW is there and we've got just the shoes. Find a shoe for every you from.

[Jon Favreau]

Brands you love at bragworthy prices at.

[Max Fisher]

Your DSW store or dsw.com.