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- [00:00]
Jon Favreau
Offline is brought to you by Helen Keller International. It's easy to feel like the world's problems are too big for any one person to solve. But Helen Keller believed that progress happens when people come together. She famously said, the welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all. That's the idea behind Helen Keller International, a nonprofit celebrating their namesake's 146th birthday this week in 20 countries around the world. They work with local partners and governments to improve nutrition, protect sight and fight disease using cost effective evidence based solutions. To celebrate Helen's birthday, every gift from now through June 30th will be matched, doubling the impact supporters can have. A gift of $146 when matched, can provide medication to prevent and treat neglected tropical diseases for more than 200 people. Or it can provide vitamin A, a nutrient essential for protecting health in sight for 146 children. If you're looking for a meaningful way to honor Helen's Legacy, visit Helen KellerIntl.org offline before June 30th to make a matched gift. That's Helen Keller Intl.org offline before Legally
- [01:04]
Commercial Announcer
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- [01:35]
Charlie Warzel
Este cuatro de julio and loves Ahoras
- [01:38]
Jon Favreau
ta cuarrentay cinco porciento en electro domestico Selectos ademas ahora ocenta dola parria gas selecta char broil performance series ahora dosientos noventa nueve dolares no estra mejor selection esta qui en lowes los nosotros ayugamos tu ahoras.
- [02:05]
Charlie Warzel
Aiden Walker wrote this or actually it was on a tick tock but has has this theory. It's called like the cuck theory of the Internet.
- [02:12]
Jon Favreau
So funny.
- [02:13]
Charlie Warzel
Which is just that like when you're watching TikTok or an Instagram reel of like, you know, an AI cute animal or whatever or just something that's like generated in that way. Like what you are actually doing is you are sitting in the in in the cuck chair and on the bed is an algorithm that is trained off of all of this artificial intelligence data at the same time and your data and everything. And this thing also knows what I like because it's fed off of everything that I've ever done. And I'm just going to sit here and, you know, let a little drool come out of the corner of my mouth as I, as I, you know, enjoy whatever this is. It's a fleeting pleasure.
- [02:57]
Jon Favreau
I'm Jon Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest, Charlie Warzel, host of the Atlantic's Galaxy Brain podcast. Charlie's been a frequent guest on the show. I think last time we talked about Moltbook, the AI only social network. We've also had quite a few conversations about Elon Musk. I invited Charlie back this week, partly because there's more Elon news to discuss. His IPO of SpaceX just briefly made him the first trillionaire the world has ever seen, but also because Charlie just wrote an incredible piece of about what AI is doing to us, which is slowly but surely robbing us of agency. Charlie and I talked about how AI is reshaping what it means to be human already. How a recent writing prize went to a piece that seems to have been written by AI, how AI strips our agency from us and the growing movement to decouple technology from algorithms. Charlie also watched me through how Elon SpaceX IPO has been mostly built upon the value of Elon's ability to capture attention and tell a story. How financial markets are detaching themselves from reality. We'll get to that conversation in a moment, but before we do, if you're a friend of the pod, thank you. If you're not, please consider this your midterm reminder. Here's what you get when you subscribe. You get ad free episodes of all your favorite pods. You get access to our excellent substack newsletters, including open tabs. You get Dan Pfeiffer's Polar Coaster podcast, our extra episode of Pod Save America called Pod Save America Only Friends. And you get to support Proudly Pro Democracy independent Media, which is always great. So head over to crooked.com friends to learn more and subscribe today. All right, here's Charlie Warzel. Charlie, welcome back to Offline.
- [04:35]
Charlie Warzel
Thank you for having me.
- [04:36]
Jon Favreau
You wrote an Atlantic piece last month. I've been thinking about the feeling of control slipping away, where you argue that the flood of AI is creating what you call a crisis of agency. That whether or not we personally use these tools, all of us are sliding into a more passive, reactive role. We're sort of sitting back while the machines do the writing, the searching, the deciding. I want to talk about all that. But first, how have you noticed this in your own life? Where has it felt like control is slipping for you?
- [05:10]
Charlie Warzel
Well, I see a lot of people, I mean, I'm a writer by trade and I see a lot of people talking about the fact that, like, I mean, there's a big conversation on Twitter right now that is like roiling about, like, yeah, there's not gonna be any writers going forward. Like, you know, everyone is going to eventually just give up their writing abilities to these LLMs. Or like writing is gonna be like vinyls, right? It's gonna be this outmoded thing that like a couple of hobbyists have, or like an elite mode of communication that just, you know, these princely people in mahogany rooms with leather bound books, you know, talk about writing. So there's a little of that where people are just like, give up on your stated profession. The only marketable skill that I actually have. So there's a little bit of that happening. But I think broadly speaking, this idea of agency and the kernel of it, where it came from, where was actually this scandal, or not scandal, but this viral marketing fiasco where this company was accused of planting all these audio clips on TikTok for the band Geese, this sort of polarizing indie rock band that has gotten very famous over the last couple years. And the idea behind all of this was that Geese was, was a psyop, right? Nobody actually likes this band and they're hugely popular because of the fact that these marketers have schemed and basically astroturfed social media with all these fake accounts or seeding it with all this audio to make their music seem like it was more popular to the algorithm so that the algorithm would promote more stuff from the band. And it reminded me a lot of the Cambridge Analytica stuff, how everyone, when that happened, everyone self included, a little bit, was like, oh, is this mind control? Right? Are people using these platforms in such a way to hit us at the exact right moment and make us think things that we wouldn't have normally thought? But that Geese Psyops story to me was just a bigger story about the. The worries, how we're all just like shadowboxing this idea that the fix is in on everything. We're being manipulated in every way. Nothing on the Internet is real. Anything that you like is, you know, an industry plant or some kind of bit of propaganda. Everything you don't like is out there in the world just because of the fact that other People are trying to make it so. And I felt like that was the kernel of this feeling when so many people feel that everything they see is fake or suspect, that we're losing not just our ability to distinguish reality. We're losing this ability of control. We don't know what is popular or what is not popular. And I think when you pair that with the idea that Generative AI is essentially a scale machine, it is an ability to generate as much of whatever thing you want. And now they have these agents that are starting to work on our behalfs and do things. It was like, oh, we actually are in this crisis of agency. Whether it's real or not. We are all feeling this sensation of, you know, we don't have control over anything.
- [08:38]
Jon Favreau
I know what you're saying. And even you telling that story about geese, I'm thinking I was like, so is the accusation that they did it? Is it an influencer firm that did it? Is it? And what is the. How do you even go about doing that? And isn't it possible to just, like, music or not? Like. I know what you're saying. Like, I have also on Spotify, for. They had some AI generated songs that, like, made it into, you know, pop songs of the week or rising, whatever. And I was, like, listening to it. Cause it just, like, came on and I'm like, oh, this is an interesting song. And then there was something about it that made me think. I was like, is this real? And then it. And it took me, like, 10 seconds of searching to realize that it was, in fact an AI generated song that had just become such a hit and went viral that it, like, made it onto Spotify. And I was like, this is not good at all.
- [09:33]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, well, you know, the reason why the geese thing, you know, hit me in a certain place is that, like, I really enjoy the band. And I understand, though, exactly why people wouldn't enjoy the band, right? Like, the singer has this really weird kind of style. It can be a little bit atonal to certain people. It's music that. The first time I listened to it, I was kind of like, I don't know if I like this. And it deepened over the course of my listening. But there's this feeling that. I think the more fascinating part of this to me is this notion that people are being confronted with something they don't understand. And the broader architecture of the Internet right now, and this ability to generate synthetic stuff or this ability to plaster social media algorithms with stuff at this inhuman scale, to astroturf them, it's Allowed people. It's kind of like the idea of the liar's dividend with misinformation, right? If there's so much bullshit out there, you can just claim that anything isn't real by citing that, even if it is real, that's exactly what's happening now. But with culture, not just with politics and things like that, just with anything, with art, with media, is this written by an AI bot, right? And then you have all of this real stuff happening, like the, you know, this possibly AI generated short story stuff winning prestigious prizes, where it's giving credence to that, that idea. And it's really brain scrambling, I think. Like your experience with the stuff on Spotify. Everyone is having that experience, right? And I think you see it especially with jazz, right? Most of the. If you're listening to ambient music in a coffee shop, there's a really good chance you're listening to something that some guy in a click farm is just hitting a button and popping out so that it gets put on these playlists because it's fine and generates a whole bunch of money for them. Meanwhile, you have the people who are actually playing in these coffee shops scraping together a living and we're all just like, what are we doing here?
- [11:36]
Jon Favreau
Well, and that's the problem is of course, that most entertainment and culture is just fine, including very popular entertainment and culture. So it becomes even harder to detect. I do want to talk about that, the literary scandal you referenced and you referenced in the piece as well. So this year's Commonwealth Short Story Prize went to a story called the Serpent in the Grove by an unknown writer named Jamir Nazir, published by a well regarded British literary magazine. And almost immediately readers started flagging it as AI written because of lines like, she had the kind of walking that made benches become men and the girls smiled like sunrise over a sink. Then two more of the prize winners got swept up in the same suspicion. And now the AI boosters celebrated this as a triumph because it's proof that the models are that good. And the skeptics called it a slop tipping point. Which do you think it is?
- [12:37]
Charlie Warzel
I mean, I think it's essentially. I think it's both.
- [12:39]
Commercial Announcer
Right.
- [12:40]
Charlie Warzel
When I was looking into all this, the, the. When I am thinking about the literary scandal that that sort of put into focus this major question, I was like, what is all this agita about? Right? And I think it's around. It centers around this, this one question in the AI age, which is kind of wild that we're actually sitting here asking Ourselves, this. And it's, what is a human for? Yeah, if people who are supposed to be very literary in their own rights, such that they can be the judges of prestigious literary competitions and they are falling for this stuff or they just like this AI written prose, right? Like, I think the benches become men is a really shit line. I don't think it's good at all. As a writer myself, I don't understand.
- [13:30]
Jon Favreau
I tried to understand it. I don't understand it.
- [13:33]
Charlie Warzel
Right? But if they like that, it's not just a question of, oh, you were duped or you weren't duped or whatever. It's actually like if that writing is appealing to you on a human level and you can't see the difference between that because you like it, because you're blinded by that, then it brings into this question, what, what is the human for there then? Like, if we can't distinguish between these things, if we like these things, if it's good enough that it is, you know, that it is outpacing some of this stuff, whether it's on the literary prize level or the, you know, the jazz music on Spotify thing, then it calls into question, like, then what is, what is, what are we doing with art? What are we doing with judging the merits of this? These are like these massive existential questions that all of us just scrolling social media or trying to find a song to play, like, are now being confronted with in these really minute ways all the time. Right? Well, what does it mean if I like this and it's not real? Should I care? I don't know. And I think that is, that's really brain scrambling. That's like, you know, the stare into the middle distance for a long time stuff.
- [14:44]
Jon Favreau
What's your answer to the question, what
- [14:47]
Charlie Warzel
is he human for? Yeah, well, I mean, I.
- [14:52]
Jon Favreau
You must have turned it around in your head after, after writing it.
- [14:56]
Charlie Warzel
Well, I think, you know, in some way I'm, I'm just like, I'm really resentful of having to like think about that question on any level. Like, I think life is actually pretty difficult for most people on a day to day basis without having to sort of consider the usefulness of the species. Right? It's, it's a little bothersome, right? There's so many problems we have to figure out on the human level. On the, like, how do, how do we exist? How do we, how do we, you know, lift up the people that need help? How do we, you know, how do we figure out our government? How do we reopen the Strait of Hormuz, whatever the hell it is, right? It's like you have all of that, and then you have this. This bigger existential thing. So what is a human for? You know, I think that when it comes to the art, with the writing, et cetera, I think it's. I'm compelled by the notion that, you know, when you read something that's written by another human being, it's extremely powerful technology. It is my words, your words, whoever's words, rattling around in your brain. It's like this very intimate, unbelievable way to, like, fuse two people together or two people's ideas. I think when you think about art in other ways, like AI Art or something like that, real art, photography, whatever it is, it is a way of someone taking something that has either moved them or that they think is moving in some way, elicits some kind of response, and again, going into somebody else's mind and basically interjecting that thought into there. So it is a connection between two groups of people. And I think that's what all of this is. I think this is why we loved the Internet in the first place, is like, there's this crackling static of like, oh, my gosh, I typed something in and a whole bunch of people had a reaction to it. Right. Whether it's good or it's bad, it's authentic, it's real. It's communication. Like, we're put on this Earth to interact with other humans in other ways, whether it's good or bad or ugly. And now we have this third thing, this extra dimension to the whole conversation that scrambles that. And I think it undercuts the premise of not just the Internet, but also art and, you know, like, fundamentally what we're supposed to be doing with this one precious life we have.
- [17:21]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, it made me think, because I think humanity is one of the. One of the things that makes it special is our individuality. And I, you know, as someone on the. On the left side of the spectrum, I think a lot about, you know, collective action and why we need each other and why sort of social interaction is sort of the core of the human experience. And I very much believe all that. But when you have now AI, which is generating its intelligence from the sum of all human intelligence together, and it's like the ultimate hive mind. I mean, this is Pluribus. I don't know if anyone here has seen Pluribus, but it is like the. It is a show about AI, I think, even though that has not been extended explicit in the show yet, where it is just this, okay, we're going to take all the different knowledge in the world and we're going to try to figure out sort of the best summation to spit out back to the person. But you're never going to get individuality from an AI and you are going to get that from someone who is a writer, an artist and entertainer. Ideally, if it's good, it's going to be something that only can come from that person and can never come from anyone else. So I do wonder if that's the thing that's going to save us, but I don't know.
- [18:42]
Charlie Warzel
The New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka had a column recently about how Claude designed the program that. The Claude code program that allows you to design websites and things like that with kind of like the click of a button and a prompt. He had this piece about how the design is very similar.
- [19:04]
Commercial Announcer
Right.
- [19:04]
Charlie Warzel
There's just like across every Claude Code design website, you have all these ticks, visual ticks, right. I think you also see a lot of this with AI art, that there's a lot of similar ticks. The writer Max Reed wrote about bootlegged NBA Finals, like Knicks gear and how it used to be this kind of really janky, Photoshopped strangeness that was unpredictable. In a sense, even if it was bad, it was still kind of good because it was one of one. And some sicko graphic design is my passion. Person is giving you this thing. And that AI art has kind of homogenized that because it has raised the floor, but lowered the ceiling such that you don't get. You get this like very, you know, mid. Not even in the sense of whether it's good or bad. It's just like, it's not gonna be offensive. It's also not gonna be super weird. It's just gonna kind of be. And I think that that in a sense it's a really interesting. I just keep citing different people here, but there was this conversation on Twitter the other day about that Claude code thing, and the person basically said, this is my argument for why there isn't artificial general intelligence in these models right now. Because a generally intelligent, like a human type thing wouldn't have those type of ticks overall. Right. It wouldn't just default to this sort of safe, mean in the middle. It would be completely unique in these really surprising ways. Like it would design a website that you've just never seen before. That's just. Whoa. And I think that it speaks to the fact that these models are trained of the entire corpus of Whatever. And there's a lot like, as you said about art earlier, there's a lot of just like, okay, very fine, very middle of the road safe stuff. And when you look at websites, everyone uses Squarespace or wix or whatever it is right. To design these things in these templates. So then the templates become over indexed in the training data. So then it just feeds you this stuff that is like exactly what you're supposed to see, that's safe, et cetera. And so I do think that is a saving grace, at least right now with these models is they do create this really mid safe thing because they're not humans. Because there's no, you know, the model isn't like, like watch this, I'm gonna, I'm gonna blow their goddamn minds. Right? Instead it's like, ah, like I gotta, you know, I gotta get this done on deadline.
- [21:44]
Jon Favreau
I had this experience where I started out using ChatGPT and then found it so sycophantic. I was like, I can't. And I thought it was ChatGPT being sycophantic that really got me more than the ticks. Because then I used Claude and I was like, oh, Claude is not as sycophantic. Claude is much better. I found this is the LLM I want to use. But then the more I use Claude it's like, it's not as sycophantic but it has like Chat GPT has a different set of ticks and now. And I use it for research but now when I ask questions and it comes back and it's the same, it's just like it drives me, it's starting to drive me insane. Like Claude is starting to drive me insane. Just because it's saying the same fucking thing over and over every time I ask it to find something and it's like this is the, this is the load bearing, you know, sentence for your. That you want here and the fact that you were looking for. And I'm like, how many times you going to say load bearing here? It was just. It's a weird thing that it's like it becomes. I wonder how you improve upon that. Like everyone, the answer is, oh well, you know, it's get. They're getting faster and better and smarter all the time. But at some point you can't get smarter than all of the human intelligence that currently exists. Right? Like it can't go beyond that. So it's always going to hit this limit. I feel like. I don't know.
- [23:07]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, I mean it's really this is what actually interests me about artificial intelligence is the way that these things iterate, the way that they get better. Not in just we're throwing a bunch of more compute at this and there you go. But the ideas of what can make these models create emergent properties, right? Like I was listening to the psychologist Alison Gopnik who writes and talks and thinks a lot about and studies like intelligence and especially like childlike intelligence and how we learn and stuff. And there's this whole possible understanding that maybe we're training the models or the way that we train the models now, the way that we design them is actually very much along the lines of how a college student learns or something like that, right? Like you have someone who has this basis and then you just like throw the books at them or you throw all these things. But like children learn, especially in these really early years, in a completely different way, right? Like how they become their unique, they're, you know, potentially born with a unique personality. But like the way that they go through the world and experience the world informs so much of how you know you, you become who you are, how you, how you reason, how you think, what you feel. And that is such a tactile process. It's something that a, these models can't go do. They can't go out and have the physical experience of being alive. But maybe there are ways down the road to simulate that in some way that then changes completely what a model will be able to do and think like. But right now we're in this paradigm where I think you're right, it is very static. It's like we can make these incremental improvements, but because we're trained off of all of this stuff and there's so much of it in that, you know, middle ground of being very safe and predictable and boring, that it ends up being inhuman in how it feels.
- [25:16]
Jon Favreau
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- [29:15]
Charlie Warzel
The thing that I like about this artificial intelligence moment, even though I resent having to think about what I'm actually useful for as a living, breathing hunk of meat walking through the world, is forcing humans to ask a lot of questions about how we work, right? I think that that's cool. I really genuinely think that it is cool that there are neuroscientists and people out there who are like, you know what? We actually. There's so much we don't know about consciousness. There's so much we don't know about intelligence. There's so much we don't know about, you know, why our brains do this thing. Like, when some people were arguing very early on, these LLMs are just fancy autocomplete. And then there were other people countering with, like, well, aren't humans fancy autocomplete? Right? Like, I know the next thing to say in my head to make you or the audience think that I'm smart or hopefully, right? And so that my brain is going to launch those words down there. It's a predictive text thing based off of my training data, which is being alive and reading crap and all that stuff. And so I think those parts are very interesting when it does, like, you say, hold up this Mirror or make us ask these questions that aren't as existential but are a little bit more like, why do we write like that? Why do we evaluate that? Why does that make sense to us? You know, like, I think, I think it's funny that, you know, the house style of AI text in a lot of ways that people really hate, especially like across social media, is what a bunch of us at Buzzfeed back in, like the 2010s used to call Broetry on LinkedIn, which is just like these like single sentence, you know, like tone poems about efficiency in the workplace or whatnot and roi. And that there's so much of that out there that this has been trained on that now it's become like this house style and we hate it. And it's like, right, well, you know, AI didn't come up with that. A bunch of jabronis did.
- [31:26]
Jon Favreau
Well, it's now like it's gone so far in the other direction that like anyone who uses an EM dash, people are like, this is clearly AI wrote this. And it's like, I don't know, a lot of people are using EM dashes long before there was ChatGPT, but it
- [31:40]
Charlie Warzel
gets off my block, man.
- [31:41]
Jon Favreau
Well, it gets back to your point too though, about how it's all so confusing and you do feel this loss of control because you're like, am I reading? Did the person who posted this write this? Did they get an LLM to write this? If I can't tell the difference, does it make a difference? Yeah, like it really fucks you up.
- [32:00]
Charlie Warzel
I did a podcast a couple months ago with Max Spiro, who is the co founder of Pangram, which is the sort of preeminent AI detection software that is by their standards and by a lot of people testing it really, really, really good. There's obviously false positives, some false negatives that do come out there, but it is good at detecting AI writing. What has happened though, is they've built these tools, including these Chrome browser plugins that allow you to basically, anytime you're on a social media platform or someplace, it just automatically scans it and gives its, its diagnosis in your browser as you're doing it. And the thing that I was trying to pose to him, and I don't know that he addressed it that well in my eyes, is Archu creating this weird arms race of people who are basically trying to throw errors into their AI stuff to make it look more human, but also this contributing to this feeling. Like you've seen a lot of people using Pangram to detect Hunter Biden's posts
- [33:13]
Jon Favreau
on X. I was thinking about his right, when I just asked that.
- [33:17]
Charlie Warzel
And people just being like, well, this is 100% AI generated. Talk about inauthentic, et cetera, et cetera. And that is potentially an easy target and a believable one potentially, for some people. But there's been a number of instances of, you know, text from the Pope's social media account. And the Pope is, you know, very prominently against, you know, the inhumanity of these artificial intelligence tools. And they're coming up in Pangram as 100% AI generated. And now you're seeing people be like, are we sure that this is right? Because to them, that would be this big betrayal. And I'm not here to speak on whether or not the Pope's social media team is using Claude to write anything, but it's part of this, right? Because it's easy if you dislike a person to say, yeah, see, like, that's fake. But if it's someone who you respect, who's, you know, whose views on all of this, on the humanity, are really core and important to your own understanding of, you know, of if they anchor you to the world in some way and then that is a betrayal, then it just becomes, you know, what. What are we going to do here?
- [34:34]
Jon Favreau
But it's also, I mean, as someone who used to work in politics, there is in every profession and industry a style of writing, especially professional writing, that's going to be public, that seems a little more bland and reminiscent of other types of writing that you've seen that's different than, like, your own personal writing. Right? Like, if you're writing something yourself, you feel like it's going to show your character and your own ticks and whatever else, but like, you know, you're writing a statement for a politician that could come, like, that could come out of the mouths of a whole, a host of politicians, any one statement. And so you'd think that maybe whoever's writing. Maybe the Pope's not writing his tweets, whoever's writing his tweets is writing tweets. Like they would put out a press release from the Vatican and then that's getting picked up as. As AI and not to. And maybe it's not. Maybe the Pope's just churning out AI written tweets. Who knows? I don't know either. But it goes back to this. Like, maybe it's exposing rather than fueling the style of writing and communication that is a little too hive mind anyway.
- [35:44]
Charlie Warzel
But also, you can Complicate that. I think that's potentially true. Right. But you can complicate this in another way, too, which is, what if there's a problem with one of the. I'm not accusing this of being the case, but what if there were to be, hypothetically, a problem with one of the new model updates because Pangram is an artificial intelligence program itself. What if there's just a problem and they fix it in, like, three days, but in that period of three days, there's just such a higher rate of false positives or whatnot that people are just branded a certain way. Right. So we are, in a sense. What's funny about this is when I was talking to Max, the founder of Pangram, he's really worried about all this AI stuff and the slop and the inhumanity of the Internet. He is also building an artificial intelligence tool himself, right? So he is, in a way, also subject to all of the same issues in terms of the training data, in terms of the hallucinations, in terms of all of these. These concerns. And so it's a very. Like, if you think too hard about it for a while, you just kind of spin out. And the easiest thing to do whenever reality gets blurred in such a way is to. Is to retreat, is to say, okay, you know what? Taking a pause. Everything's fake, everything's real. I don't care. You know, I can go on vacation. See you later.
- [37:09]
Jon Favreau
Well, just to talk about the work aspect of it, there's two phrases you pull in the piece from Silicon Valley. One is the permanent underclass, which they admit AI might create. And the other is the only way to avoid becoming part of the permanent underclass, which is by being what they call high agency. Can you talk a little more about those two terms, the permanent underclass and high agency individuals?
- [37:35]
Charlie Warzel
Part of why I feel like we're in an agency crisis is because a lot of the people who are building these tools are obsessed with the idea of agency. Being high agency is sort of the, you know, the top of the food chain in terms of, like, the new world that we live in, right. High agency people can, quote, just do things now, you know, that often is just a side for, like, I'm good at raising money, or I have a lot of money, or, you know, I'm eminently employable because I started these two companies and the other ones can fail and whatever. But the idea of it is, there's so much at your disposal right now. Just go make something. Go do something. Like, you know, don't listen to authorities, don't play by the rules if you can't, if you don't have to. And they are talking about, you need to be especially adept at harnessing these machines and these tools. These Claude code will help you by working while you sleep. Be extremely high agency, which will then allow you to have more power, more stuff. And you need to go get it now, because if you don't do it now, in this little period before artificial general intelligence takes over and we have no agency, then you're going to be part of what is called the permanent underclass. The permanent underclass is just this phrase that I think they thought was fun that now is coming back to bite them in the ass. Because there's all these people who are like, protesting data centers and just extremely mad and just hate artificial intelligence in every way. It polls lower than Donald Trump. And everyone in Silicon Valley is curious why. And it's because they've been saying things like, you're going to be part of the permanent underclass. Like, that conjures a picture in the brain of, like, being chained up and working in a salt mine, right? Like, it's not a great image, you know, like, Steve Jobs wasn't like, if you don't buy this phone, you're going to be a surf forever. Like, it was like.
- [39:44]
Jon Favreau
And even if you do buy it, you still may be a surf forever, right?
- [39:47]
Charlie Warzel
Well, yeah, that's a whole other ball of wax. But. But it's like, it's such a wild brand of marketing, but it is this idea, again, like, Silicon Valley at some point pivoted very hard. I don't actually know when it was, because in the 2010s, at least the early 2010s, you know, the Web 2.0 heyday, it was very like, this is democratizing technology. Everyone gets a say. This is going to help. You know, this is cool, this is fun. Here's a bunch of gadgets, here's some apps. At some point there was this pivot, I think, you know, like, crypto was one that was very big on this, where it became like FOMO became the way that you market these things get people to be very scared that they are about to miss out. And I mean, it's kind of like we adapted this from, like, pyramid schemes almost, right? Like, if you don't get in now, brother. And so I, you know, I think that one of the reasons why people dislike this technology is because of that, but it's also part of, like, the paranoia, right? If you talk about these tools to Try to get people to think that they're so powerful by saying they're going to destroy humanity, they're going to take away your job. They're going, you know, they can reliably automate all human processes. There's a company, I believe it's called Superhuman, that talks about basically creating bot farms out of thin air, right? To market anything you want to do. And the tagline of the company is never pay a human again. When you say things like that, people will eventually listen.
- [41:24]
Jon Favreau
It's not really gonna land well, or it does land.
- [41:27]
Charlie Warzel
And I think that's what's happening is it's landed. And people are like, oh crap. And they're thinking, what is a human for next year? Why am I paying to send my kid to college? Does my kid know how to read? Does that matter? You know, all these big things and the idea that, that people could be left behind, it feels really salient now, in part because so many people have been left behind already, right? Like the path of predictable progress, to quote the economist Kyla Scanlon for Gen Z doesn't feel real anymore. And so all these fears are magnified.
- [42:02]
Jon Favreau
There's a software engineer, Fernando Baretti, who just wrote one of the bleakest pieces I've read about AI replacing us, where he argues that, quote, if there is a permanent underclass, you won't escape it by owning property or shares in anthropic or open AI or guns or anything else. And neither will the billionaires. You, me, Sam Altman, Dario. Everyone who is made of flesh and blood will be disempowered and replaced by machines. Basically, his idea is, in a world where AI does all work at human level or better, the permanent overclass of rich people won't just be useless to the functioning of the economy in the state, they could be an obstacle to the state getting what it wants. For example, if the state goes to war, it will need rich people's planes and factories or whatnot. And then it will just take them. And then eventually there will be people running the state, but there will be so many AI machines that the states that have more AI will be advantaged over states that are still using people in the humans in the loop, as you mentioned in the piece. And eventually humans will just be like, either the machines will let us hang around or they just have no use for us and we'll just be like basically pets. How far fetched do you think that idea is at this point?
- [43:18]
Charlie Warzel
I think it is a little far fetched. You know, it's tough to say, I think so much. I think it's better to think about power dynamics in all of this. Something that I really appreciate. Talked to Cory Doctorow on my podcast a couple weeks ago. He's got a new book about how AI is.
- [43:38]
Jon Favreau
We talked about it. Yeah, he's great.
- [43:40]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah. And, but, you know, he uses this term by this writer, Dan Davies, called accountability sinks, which is basically when some like. It has a lot to do with the idea of that human in the loop. Right. If you put the human in the loop, if you fire a lot of people, but then you put the human in the loop. And there's kind of one human who's in charge of overseeing what these models are doing, but they're doing it on this scale where there's so much stuff happening that it's very difficult for a human to wrap their head around every single thing and evaluate it. When something goes wrong, the AI doesn't get blamed. Right. When the software decides to target civilians in a battlefield, a human gets blamed for that. The person who was hired, arguably for less than they were before because the AI is doing so much of this, they're the accountability sink. They're the person who has to deal with this. And so it becomes this way to offload the responsibility and the blame and the power in terms of the, the dystopian part of, you know, all the job loss and, and, and what is going to happen. I, I do think the part of that that I agree with is the idea that this is going to come for the bosses, for the, the, you know, like Silicon Valley is, is sort of first on the chopping block in terms of a lot of these jobs. They have found that, like, oh, man, like, this isn't, you know, automating the bus drivers yet. This is actually automating the guys, us, like people who make the code. Right. Things like that. And so I think the same thing could be true of a lot of bosses, a lot of. Or a lot of, you know, C suite level type people. Right. I mean, what is a CEO when you, when you think about it, it is somebody who evaluates a ton of information and makes a big decision. Right. They're not actually like doing the nuts and bolts stuff. They're. They're supposed to process everything and react based off of all the amount of data they can ingest. That's really what a lot of these tools do actually really well, is they evaluate a ton of information and say, this is what you should do. So the CEO is actually, you could imagine that person being on the chopping block, right. So I think that I'm not sure where this is all going to play out with the job loss stuff. I think that we may be getting ahead of ourselves in worrying about a lot of this, in part because there are so many people with power inside of organizations who are so excited about efficiency gains and replacing workers and also telling people that they've replaced workers because that's really helpful for your stock prices and things like that. But I think we're still in the first inning of all of this, and to predict where it's going, I think all we can say is that it's probably going to be unpredictable.
- [46:48]
Jon Favreau
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- [47:59]
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Charlie Warzel
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Jon Favreau
Where's that dang paperboy? I need my news outdated and rolled up like a burrito. Finally, now I can read all about
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Charlie Warzel
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- [49:03]
Jon Favreau
Speaking of dystopia and bosses who unfortunately may not get replaced, want to check in with your friend and mine, Elon Musk, History's first trillionaire Briefly, I don't know if he's back now, but he did lose some of his value, so he slipped out of trillionaire status this week. Your June piece The myth of SpaceX landed right around the IPO, and your argument is that SpaceX is insane valuation. Launching its IPO at a valuation of 1.7 trillion despite only 18 billion in revenue last year is, quote, built on a story that descends reality. How so?
- [49:41]
Charlie Warzel
SpaceX is a lot of things. SpaceX is a real company that launches rockets, that is impressive, that employs human beings, that, you know, provides a lot of satellites that are geopolitically valuable, and also gives Internet to remote places and airplanes and all this stuff. So it's a very legitimate company. SpaceX is also a meme, right? It is part of what the authors Quinn Slobedian and Ben Tarnoff in their book Muskism call financial fabulism, which is Musk's ability to sell this story about what he is going to do about the potential of SpaceX, about asteroid farming, about interstellar space travel, us being on Mars permanently, all of this stuff that has not happened, that really has no predictable pathway to happen. But it is this meme of expected value, of expected genius, of expected innovation. And SpaceX is also a financial instrument, right? SpaceX is a vehicle that Musk used to take his AI company and roll it into SpaceX in order to produce a massive valuation evaluation that has very little to do with the rockets, the things that SpaceX actually builds and produces. Instead, it's basically valued as an AI company because that's what's hot right now. That's what can get you that type of valuation. So SpaceX is all of these things, but when you put them together, it's basically the end stage. And I don't mean that saying it's over, but it is the teleological endpoint of Musk's project, his whole thing, everything that he has been working towards and as such the market has valued it in an unprecedented way, given him this unprecedented wealth, right? When he is losing and gaining more than the net worth of Bill Gates in a given trading day.
- [51:42]
Jon Favreau
So crazy.
- [51:43]
Charlie Warzel
And you think about what he's already done with that money, funneling it into the Trump campaign, using it to buy a social media platform that he can then basically change the algorithms of and use to promote his own values or have the news behave, you know, according to the, you know, the physics of, of Musk's own ideology. When you put all that together, it's, it's all without precedent. It is this chaos agent lodged in the entire global economy, but also our politics, also our culture. And I was comparing it to the old Matt Taibi line of Goldman Sachs as the giant vampire squid, right? Is this predatory instrument that basically takes and takes and takes and, and fixes the game in its own, in its own right. He wrote this famously after the financial crisis. And I reread that article on the day of the SpaceX IPO and I was like, man, vampire squid is quaint for what Elon Musk is. Because Elon Musk, if you look at what's happened during this before the SpaceX IPO, SpaceX was like essentially, you know, bullying is probably too strong a word, but making the like NASDAQ 100 like list this in its, on its terms, right? It allowed for, for this like for retail investors to go in, kind of stripping down some of the usual protections that are, that are offered there. You know, they, they set all the terms of the IPO on their terms usually like the big banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs actually, you know, dictate, dictate the terms of what they're going to sell there. But not in the case of Space X, not in the case of Musk because of all of that power. And so I basically said, I was like, I think Elon Musk has either won capitalism or just broken it. Like, you know, used the game genie cheat code and just sort of like fried the gaming console on capitalism. And he's like the seven headed hydraulic that sits at the end of finance, you know, the final boss.
- [53:46]
Jon Favreau
And I think you said like he is too big to fail now.
- [53:51]
Charlie Warzel
You know, it feels that way since I wrote that article.
- [53:56]
Jon Favreau
It's so embedded in government and I mean it is, I think you could unwind him from everything. But it's, you know, I think his goal is to make that impossible.
- [54:06]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah. Since I wrote that article, it's not just that SpaceX's valuation has dropped, that he's not a trillionaire anymore, he's still so wealthy, that that power is huge. But, but something that has happened with him in the last couple of days has been these claims from places like the Journal, the Lancet, that Musk is responsible for upwards of millions of deaths of people in Africa and other places as a result of putting US aid into the wood chipper. And Musk has been just vehemently on X, defending this kind of streisanding, fighting
- [54:44]
Jon Favreau
with Ro Khanna, threatening to sue Ro Khanna over this.
- [54:47]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, yeah. And to me, the fact that he, you know, he just, he's dismissed this before, but the fact that this is like a real sticking point for him right now, that he is really concerned about this, it strikes me as a person who may be realizing either subconsciously or not, that the tides could change politically, not just with the midterms, but potentially in 2028, and the stakes may be real. One thing that Musk has been able to do throughout his entire career is play all the different sides. Whoever's in power, he's been able to cozy up to the government, get lucrative contracts, get lucrative investment, which he then funnels into the businesses and keeps all the spoils. But he's been able to do that. That has been the project of Elon Musk. It's been how he's been part of how he's been so successful. And I think what he's looking at right now is seeing that one of those pipelines could be cut off from an, from an entire party. Right. I mean, it's not only that like Trump could and has gotten bored with him from time to time, but it's this idea that like there could be, you know, like a truth reconciliation style, you know, like commission on like what happened here. Like what, what really happened when you guys, you know, walked into the federal government and had, you know, 20 year olds accessing all this government data and cutting all these, these programs that saved lives. And it's not just that he may face consequences for that. You know, maybe, maybe he will, maybe he won't, but it's that like he becomes radioactive to one of the, you know, the two parties in power. That's a real vulnerability for him that actually genuinely affects his status in the world.
- [56:37]
Jon Favreau
It is also, I mean, your argument in the piece is that so much of the value of SpaceX is built on perception and a story that Elon Musk is adept at selling. The flip side of that is if that perception turns negative and the story unravels in the mind of the public, then there are real risks to the actual business.
- [57:04]
Charlie Warzel
I think so. I mean, you've seen it already during the Doge era with Tesla, right? The sales flagging, and also with people having to put stickers on their cars. It was like, I bought this before I knew about Elon or whatever. But it could go so, so much further than that. Right. I think there's a lot of people who are able to either support him because Trump is still the President, is still ascendant, is still, you know, has a lot of power, and therefore there's a lot of people in the Republican Party who are willing to just go along with this. But, I mean, if the idea of what Trumpism is just gets resoundedly defeated over the next two and a half years and everyone has to, you know, the Republican Party do that process of being like, I wasn't talking about, huh? What if that happens? I think you could easily see some of those people who've just completely sold themselves to Trump turn completely on this guy. Right? Like, we were all kind of under the spell of this dude. We didn't have a choice. And then, yeah, this unelected man born in South Africa came in and destroyed our government, and we had nothing to do with it. That makes him genuinely radioactive, you know, And I don't think there's enough Musk fanboys on X to, you know, keep Tesla or SpaceX or whatever afloat. If that's the case.
- [58:35]
Jon Favreau
One Elon detail from this week that connects back to our conversation on Agency. He sat down for podcast with Peter Diamandis and argued that pretty soon money itself won't really matter because AI and robots will generate so much abundance that human work and maybe wealth itself becomes beside the point. Do you think he believes that? Is it a sales pitch? And if it is a sales pitch, what is that actually doing for him?
- [59:02]
Charlie Warzel
I was thinking about this the other day, and the person that came to mind was Alex Jones, because I've been writing and reporting on Alex Jones for, like, a decade, and obviously the huge question is, like, what does he really believe? Does he believe all this stuff that he says? And I think that the answer that I've gotten to is, A, it sort of doesn't matter, but B, it's like a hybrid of all of this. Like. Like, he believes certain parts of it and other parts of it are just completely useful. Right? And I think that like what Musk? What Alex Jones? What Donald Trump? What they all have in common is this. Like their superpower is their shamelessness, right? They can take the things that they believe and use them to create the myth, but also take things that they absolutely do not believe and force them down people's throats in the same way because it's convenient for them. And so I don't know what he believes. His project has always been, in a way that I think he's a genuine believer that man and machine need to be fused in some way, but only certain men. Because he is really interested in protecting a certain demographic of people on the earth and advancing the light of their consciousness into the stars. But what I think about that is it's just, again, it's a bad sales pitch. It sounds to him like it's cool, but it's like what he's really doing is just talking about the people in the chairs from Wall E who are slack jawed and roaming around nowhere, right? Getting fed through tubes and it's like, I don't know, man. That's like not really empowering. Again, agency crisis wasn't really the point of that movie.
- [60:48]
Jon Favreau
Last thing. We always joke about how you never come on for the, for the happy and hopeful conversations, but you do actually point to something hopeful in the piece about agency. You, you know that the backlash to AI is showing up in the physical world. People going to town halls, packing city council meetings to fight data centers in their own backyards. Is there a version of the next few years where we genuinely claw some of this agency back? Like, one thing I've wondered, and I've experienced this myself too, is that our feeds become filled with more AI slop. It might be. It's like breaking my addiction a little bit on the scrolling because I'm like, it used to at least be the illusion of connection with other human beings and you'd see their reaction. And now especially Instagram. I noticed this too. If it's just, I'm like, is this a real. This isn't even a real picture. This isn't a real news thing. Like, why do I. This just, this isn't enjoyable at all. And I do wonder if it is going to. Maybe, maybe an upside here is it's going to push a lot of people offline back into the physical world. But maybe that's just too Pollyannish. But what do you think my big
- [61:53]
Charlie Warzel
prediction for this year, which hasn't come true yet, is. But maybe it is in some ways that I can't really see is that. And some of it is the AI slop driven stuff, but some of it too, is just the. It's the maturity of the Internet in this way. This researcher, Aidan Walker, wrote this, or actually it was on a TikTok, but has this theory, it's called the cuck theory of the Internet.
- [62:26]
Jon Favreau
So funny.
- [62:26]
Charlie Warzel
Which is just that when you're watching TikTok or an Instagram reel of like, you know, an AI cute animal or whatever, or just something that's like, generated in that way, like, what you are actually doing is you are sitting in the. In the cuck chair and on the bed is an algorithm that is trained off of all of this artificial intelligence data at the same time and your data and everything. And this AI program which is. Understands intuitively the algorithm. And they are, you know, doing whatever they're doing. And you're just this, like, consenting observer. You know, you're just kind of like, oh, that's neat. Like, the algorithm showed that to me because it knows what I like. And this thing also knows what I like because it's fed off of everything that I've ever done. And I'm just gonna sit here and let a little drool come out of the corner of my mouth as I, you know, enjoy whatever this is, is a fleeting pleasure. And I think that, you know, that's a funny way to describe it, but I think there is a feeling that a lot of people are getting, whether it's fakery or not, or whether it's just, man, this thing is just so absolutely attuned to. To me, it is like. Like to feel constantly like you are being played like a fiddle all the time, you know, that I. I think it is. It's. It's a bit soul crushing. And I think that when you take that and then you also, you know, add into, like, the element of surveillance and our phones and. And this. This feeling that I think a lot of young people have of, like, it's stressful to go out in the world and, like, take risks and take chances and go on dates without being filmed by, you know, Project Veritas or whatever. You know, it's like there's all these. All these feelings that it's. It's tough to go out and exist in this way. Artists are feeling this way. Like, I don't want everyone filming my concert a million different ways and sort of like, I can't connect with anyone in the audience because they're capturing something for later. So you have bars that are starting to be like, let's check the phones at the door. Concerts that are like, please, like, like Phoebe Bridgers just said, for, for this tour, hey, I'm not going to let people film. Sorry. Like, enjoy it, be present. If you don't want to, you can stay home. And there's some backlash to that, but I think that it is this feeling in the world. My prediction was that like the phones are going to become really uncool or, or this avatar of like, of this being cucked by technology. And I do think that AI could hasten that. Right. And this feeling, people going out in their communities and protesting data centers. There's a lot of weird reasons that people protest data centers from all over the political spectrum. Some of them are kind of strange, some of them are really real and great. But what people have noticed is there's been a lot of data center projects that have been canceled in the last year. And that is actual political activism that has, you know, that has results. And it's being in your community with other people standing up for something. And I think that that is a real balm. You know, we talked last time, I think about like the ice protests in Minneapolis and the way that that is, like that is taking something that people see through their screens and then dropping the screens and then being in community with people and it got results well. And I think if we continue to see people of any political persuasion of any way, seeing that being in the world gets a result in a way that a like or retweet or a post or whatever just can't give you, I think, I think that that's powerful. That's like the kind of reinforcement that actually builds societal change.
- [66:09]
Jon Favreau
That's a great place to end. Making sure that we don't allow technology to put humanity in the cuck chair. I think that's great. Charlie, thank you as always for joining Offline. This was fun. Take care. Offline with Jon Favreau is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Emma Ilik Frank and Anisha Banerjee. Our team includes Delon Villanueva, Mia Kelman, Charlotte Landis, Eric Schutt, Rachel Gajewski and Will Jones. With support from Adrian hill and Matt DeGrow. Our staff is proud of proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.
- [66:46]
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