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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. Tonight on the Next Level, we are live on substack and YouTube at 9pm Eastern for primary coverage in Michigan and a bunch of other states around the country. So tune in, come hang with us tonight, get a glass of or you can check out the Next level feed either after we wrap up or it'll be ready for you when you wake up in the morning if you're an early to better. So since we're going all politics on TNL tonight for this show, we're going to venture into the tech world. Excited to bring back staff writer at the Atlantic, host of the Galaxy Brain podcast, it's Charlie Warzell.
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A
Hey, man, how you doing?
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B
I'm doing good, I'm doing good. I hear you're kind of deaf in it in Ireland last week.
- [01:56]
A
That's right. That's right. I'm a golfer. Somewhat sadly it's like one of those hobbies that just slowly ruins your life. But yeah, I was over in Ireland. I too am just coming back from vacation. Little jet lag, ready to talk. Elon Musk and Sam Altman, my favorite people in the world.
- [02:12]
B
I can't wait. Part of this was why I wanted to have you is over the course of vacation, AI is just such at the front of people's minds. I bubbled myself from the news but I like it was hard to bubble myself from kind of like just random conversation about AI, people being upset about it, concerned about it, little funny things that happened. I want to say Sam Altman sent a very embarrassing tweet that I want to talk about I feel like I've given a little short shrift on the show lately, so I just kind of want to do open ended on it. You wrote an article, I don't know, a couple of months ago now about how people had the feeling of control slipping away with AI. And so I just kind of want to start big picture. Like what's your grand unifying theory about kind of the AI backlash, discourse, et cetera?
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A
Artificial intelligence people, Silicon Valley people have this term that they're using a lot now, throwing around called high agency, right? If you're a high agency person, you're someone who just gets things done. You can go out and you can marshal these tools to be to 10x your productivity, 100x your productivity. There are agents coding for you all the time while you sleep, making you money, building you websites, doing research, compiling reports, all that stuff. And the right person can harness this and be more than just a person, they can get stuff done. The opposite side of that is this thing that they keep talking about called the permanent underclass, right? Which is the group of people who are going to be left behind because AI is going to automate their jobs or they're not learning how to use Claude skills or code their own stuff. And this is the group of people for whom AI is going to bury them financially and part of their cultural capital and they're never going to recover from, from that. And I've looked at that for a long time, as, you know, really alienating language coming out of Silicon Valley that's going to piss a lot of people off, right? Like if you promise to take away people's jobs or call them part of a permanent underclass, you know, that's going to catch up to you eventually. But what I feel like broadly is happening right now is that, you know, these AI tools are useful, but the real impact, the real effect that we're seeing right now is this crisis of agency. It is people fearing that they don't have agency because these tools are going to come and strip it away. Or they feel that the Internet and every platform and everything that they do is being so flooded with fake, inhuman, synthetic slop. Whether that's Twitter substack, whether that's their Spotify, right? Whether it's these viral marketing firms that are taking bands like the band Geese and sort of artificially inflating their view counts.
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B
Geese is legit.
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A
Geese is legit. I love Geese.
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B
Their fandom is legit. Wired is doing great work, but I have a beef.
- [04:56]
A
But this, but this actually gets to the Point of the agency crisis, right? Which is that Geese is a band that some people love and some people, because of the lead singer's voice, hate. And the people that don't like them are looking for an excuse, right? This is fake. This is AstroTurf. And AI has this. There's this term, the liar's dividend, that with so much fake, fake information that's out there, anyone can cast aspersions on something real by claiming that it's fake. AI has supercharged that. So what you see in the case of something like that, like the little trivial Geese incident, is people saying, no, that's not real. There are millions of accounts astroturfing this thing. And by in so doing, people are pulling one over on you. And you see this everywhere. You see this with insider trading and prediction markets. You see it with, again, the flood of all this slop. And what is happening right now is as the Internet is becoming more inauthentic, more inhuman, everyone is so concerned that what they are seeing either isn't real or is being manipulated or is being changed, and that they don't even have control over what is popular, what is good, what they're actually spending their time looking at and engaging with. It's really messing with people's minds. I think it's causing a lot of ennui and extreme frustration, all of which is being channeled at Silicon Valley because people are like, this is not the future I want. This is not the Internet that I wanted. I don't want to have to run every substack post through Pangram. You know, I don't want literary prizes being won by people who are using ChatGPT. You know, it's called into question, this fundamental question of what is a human for? That's what these tools are asking us all the time, right? Can a human do this job? Can a human do this? You know, should humans, you know, be creating this stuff? Can humans evaluate what is real and what is fake and how? I think that question pisses a lot of people off because it's like, we shouldn't have to ask the question, what is a human for?
- [06:50]
B
Well, because the geese thing is one that pissed me off most. I want to start there. My lesson from that is that it's like, if people don't know, there's just a story. Basically, it was like this band that I like that has become popular very fast. There's a notion that it was fake, that it was like the Internet made AI bots and they did a paid marketing campaign that made them seem more popular than they are. I felt like that was rebutted by the fact that they had multiple very unpopular records before they got popular. So it seems like it was a natural progression to me. But whatever. To me, the lesson from that, and which relates to so many other things of so much greater consequence, is that it's disorienting to people when reality starts to blur for them. There's always been conspiracy theories. There's always been things that people are like, I'm not sure if that's true or not. There are always moon landing truthers. It's not like this is new, this notion that I don't know if anything that I'm saying is real. When everything kind of goes flimsy like that. I think that it has societal consequences. And I think that it's particularly true for older people, but not entirely. And I hear this my life, where it's just like, who knows anymore? People will tell me, since I'm the news person in their life, they'll be like, hey, I saw this. Is that real? And I get that question a lot now. And so if you now live in kind of a society, a democratic society, decided into politics, you need to feel like you need to have control over knowing what is happening to help participate in that society and make decisions for how to improve it. It's not irrational to kind of just give up on that if you can't grasp what is actually happening and what is not.
- [08:36]
A
I think there's 2 responses to this, right? And they're both sadly rational. One is to tune out. And a lot of people had been saying that forever. It's like this apathy that you get as a result of, like, I just don't want to have to sift through this CR and find these people. Or I got duped a couple times and I look like an idiot, right? Because I'm sharing something fake, all right? I opt out. The other, and I think this is
- [08:59]
B
where I1 broke through my bubble. When I was on my bubble, one of my just random gay friends posted Trump falling down going into the car on Instagram. Instagram was my only social media when
- [09:10]
A
I was going classic other genre.
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B
So I had to get on Google and I was like, did he really fall down before? And I was like, no, it was fake. But that guy, it's like people just getting duped all the time.
- [09:18]
A
All the time. I get duped all the time. And I'm like, supposed to be a professional at this stuff, right? The other response, which I think is actually Rational too, even though it has terrible consequences, is to get caught up in conspiracy theorizing, right? Like when everything is potentially fake, that's when you can say, okay, well that's clearly a psyop, right? That's the term that's getting thrown around a lot, this idea that everything has some shady, like, subversive plot by some people who have some authority. You know, that's actually as we've talked about for years, right? Conspiracy theories are a way of trying to make sense of the world. And if you can't tell what is real or fake, those things become actually much more enticing to a lot of people because they can just, they can latch onto that and find their people and it helps them, you know, protect their beliefs from being punctured by whatever thing and they don't have to do this kind of work. So it's this lazy, unfortunately, very rational response to, to the blurring of reality, essentially.
- [10:18]
B
Yeah. That ties to agency to me. Right. Because conspiracy theorizing kind of does give you agency back because people, it makes them feel like they're investigating, they're seeing what's behind the curtain, right? Like they're looking at clues and it's making them feel like they have control over their own perception of what's happening. But also they maybe know something other people do. And so rather than feeling like you're helpless in the face of the algorithms and whatever feeding you stuff, now you feel like you're whatever. The Detective and the True Crime podcast.
- [10:58]
A
We're coming up on the 10 year anniversary of Pizzagate and Edgar Madison Welch, who went into Comet Pizza with a gun, famously he was trying to help. He had seen all this stuff and he was like, had, I mean, clearly disturbed in certain ways, but had had this feeling of like, I'm going there, I'm going there to take the law into my own hands because there are kids being hurt, right? And a lot of the QAnon movement got started by. Not started, but like bolstered by like moms who are on Facebook during the pandemic and reading this stuff and just like, oh, oh my, oh my God, I have to do something about this.
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B
Right?
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A
This is clearly, there's, there's this whole scheme and I'm not to say that they don't have is. We're talking about agency, agency in, you know, doing, doing some homework and actually, you know, not believing the bullshit. But at the same time too, it, it. There is a rational response to, to, to all of this in some ways. And I think it's just going to continue to get worse and worse. The, the, the main feeling I feel is, you know, you said use the word reality going flimsy. That's what I think a lot of people are feeling like everything is just like, you know, you're trying to catch what is happening or even what other people are thinking, what other people's politics are. Right. Like you're trying to capture it in your hands and it's just slipping through. It's like watery.
- [12:11]
B
This is going to be depressing. Like first 25 minutes I'm starting to warn everybody and then we'll kind of
- [12:15]
A
get to like, sorry, this is like my idea.
- [12:17]
B
This engages to political backlash and like what are things that can be done about this? But I've got a list of more parade of horrible. So we got to go through first before we get to that. The other thing I wanted to get from your first answer about the crisis of agency and the Silicon Valley guys talking about high agency individuals. I had Cuban on a couple months ago and this was the thing we fought about. He is savvier than a lot of the Silicon Valley Vulcan guys about the kind of words that he uses. So he would not have said permanent underclass or it's great for high agency individuals. But it's kind of like what he was implying, like the subtext, which is what we argue about where he was talking, giving the positive case for AI. And he basically is saying, look how cool this is. If you are a very entrepreneurial 17 to 20 year old who didn't get to go to a fancy private school. Now you can teach yourself stuff on AI. You can start a business, you can create an app. You have access to knowledge and potential you never would have had before. And this is really awesome and I don't object to that, but that's going to be such a small percentage, I think, of people in that demo. And so what you're doing is kind of exacerbating this problem that everybody already is talking about with income inequality, haves and have nots people that now we're going to move that from not even just being a monetary thing, but to being kind of like being in society. People that understand how to manipulate these tools and everybody else that's being manipulated.
- [13:53]
A
It's funny, I think that one thing that Silicon Valley has always really struggled with, since I've been covering it for about 17 or so years, is they don't really understand how people use their tools. They have the idealized vision of how people use them. Oh, yeah, kids are going to use this stuff to teach themselves, whatever, right? They're going to build their own company. And yes, like some kids will, some people will. A lot of people use AI to interesting or cool ends. But so much of what's happening right now is that it's just pumping out synthetic slop in whatever way you want to describe that, right? People are using it to basically do like clickbait arbitrage on like Facebook to just pump it full of, you know, shrimp Jesus memes and whatever kind of thing in order to make, you know, a couple of bucks here and there, right? It has this like, this like scammy quality to it or build these fake websites or help you to sell Chinese peptides, things like that, right?
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B
I know some people doing okay, creating hot MAGA girls.
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A
Sure.
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B
Social media, totally, totally.
- [14:54]
A
Like that's a thing. And it's not to say that like I'm not clutching my pearls at all this, but there is this feeling too that there's like, oh, this is like, this is the tool that's going to empower you to do whatever, whatever, whatever. A lot of these companies that are token maxing right now, you know, using AI all the time, everywhere, you know, constantly, they're like doing it to make PowerPoint presentations, right. And to like, you know, send emails back and forth that are like, absolutely, you know, heart crushingly soulless. That is like we're looping back on looping back and it's, you know, agents sending emails to agents that are then being summarized by other agents so someone can read them and send them to their boss so their boss can make the same decision they were going to make, probably. Right? And that's all part of this future. But they're only focusing on the stuff that's really useful and helpful to them, right? Which is the idea that this is going to absolutely empower you. And meanwhile, one of the things that I think we have seen throughout Silicon Valley over the course of whatever the web 2.0 through now, time, is that we conduct essentially these real time experiments on humanity, right? Let's connect every single person in the world via these algorithms that mediate things and push the most extreme emotions to the forefront and reward you with attention and time and money, right? And let's have our politics just pour over onto that and see what happens. And bad things do happen, right? But we just kind of keep pushing forward. We don't really address the thing. And I think that we see that now with AI and stuff. I was on a trip this past Week and speaking with a lot of people who have kids who are in high school or college. And I had at least a handful of people just telling me, man, my kid's critical thinking skills suck. They don't know how to write a real paper because they were early to chatgpt. That's what they use, and that's what all their friends use. And all the teachers are just like, yeah, you just. You might as well just do that, right? So you can get into college or do whatever thing. And I see these things as these experiments on humanity. And eventually we're going to probably, like we do with, you know, either screen time or, you know, whatever social media in schools or phones in schools, and say, like, oh, that was a terrible idea. What were we thinking? And what we were thinking is really nothing. We're letting these people dictate the terms and push it forward.
- [17:19]
B
All right, y', all, I don't know if you've heard, but I just got back from France, and people say that the French are kind of rude about us foreigners. Inability to speak French. And maybe it's just my happy face, my geniality that led me to not have that experience. Or maybe it was the time spent with Babel. We were in Marseille, had a little bit of a richer experience, being able to talk to the waiters, talk to some of the boys at the bar, whatever. Just do a little French, a little dabbling. My husband got on board a little late for this trip, but now he's excited about doing Babel. He's upgraded to the highest Babbel level because he's ready. He's digging in for future trips. So take it from me, if you're traveling this summer, a real travel hack is don't wait till you land to start learning the language. Instead, try Babbel right now. Even just 10 minutes a day with Babbel can help you start having real conversations in as little as three weeks. What I like about Babbel is it's built for real life. No vocab lists, no verb conjugations, but real conversation. Practice lessons are quick, practical, and built by more than 200 language experts. They have interactive dialogue, personalized reviews, all designed to get you speaking quickly and competently. If you've got summer travel coming up, now's the time to start so you can actually use what you learn on the trip. Right now, Babel is offering listeners up to 60% off. Go to babbel.com bulwark that's Babbel B A B-B-E-L.com bulwark for up to 60% off rules and restrictions. Bandblock, you transitioned me nicely into one of my notes I want to talk about here, which is are we just old? Are we sure that this complaint is not just the same complaint that every middle aged person has had throughout history about the kids these days and their rock music and you know, their sex and drugs? Here's my younger version of this than the high school kids. I did get a kick out of the there's that the teacher or the professor that put out like he did an in class test and then an at home test and compared the results and it was like every single kid in the class did half as good on the in class test as the at home test except one honorable young man who did horrible on both and but like my daughter met some friends at the hotel we were staying at this last week and they're nine, they're twins and one night like after dinner I get a WhatsApp that I'm just going to pull it up here with a request to do a sleepover. And it says the following. Dear Dads, we know you want to keep us safe and that's the most important thing for us too. That's why we're asking if we can please have one sleepover together. We promise that we will stay where the adults tell us to stay. 10 other bullets then at the end this sleepover would make us so happy because we love spending time together laughing, playing games, making special memories. These are nine year olds. I got this and I was like that is cute though. And then it's good effort. But then I called them out, I was like what'd you do? How'd you do it? And they denied it was strategy and then they said it was chatgpt. But then they said, well we put in the idea. It's like we told it what to, you know, you don't want to overtake this one anecdote but like they felt like they had written it and yeah, I don't know, like at some level I just do wonder if people that are growing up native to it figure out ways to adapt to it and use it that does advance their own learning and thinking. I don't know. When I was nine, I couldn't have created something like that 100%.
- [20:52]
A
I don't think we should totally clutch our pearls with all this. I don't think we should be so reflexively against this and say the kids are toast. Because in some ways this actually, you know, buying into The Silicon Valley narrative, right? That these tools are so powerful that they are going to, you know, like, brainwash us or change, change, whatever. You know, I remember my version in school was like, we had a library class, right, where they taught us how to like, do research, Dewey Decimal System stuff. And this is early days of the, of the Internet, or maybe not even early days, but like, Wikipedia was very new and they were like, you stay off that thing. That thing is just lies, it's fake, it's going to destroy your brain, whatever.
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B
Like, it's like the best thing on the Internet now.
- [21:34]
A
Generational, good for like society and archiving, you know, the humanity. And so, yes, I think there are ways in which we don't know how kids are going to adapt to this or just incorporate it into their lives. I think these tools can be really positive, right? Like I use them to like, fix tech stuff when I don't know how to do something. Like, they're very good technically at like trying to, you know, fix your computer or, you know, I'll plug in a whole bunch of my research and information that I have, you know, notes from, from things like that and you know, have it synthesize different stuff, break it down and then go check it and make sure that it's right, you know. But it saves me a little bit of time sometimes in between, I think these are, these can be useful tools. What I think Silicon Valley misses, what people miss is that like a lot of people are also lazy. A lot of people, when given this technology, aren't using it in the, in the best way, right? They're using it to save time to automate the thing because they don't want to do the hard thing. And I think this is where it gets thorny with the concept of education because find me the kid who likes to write the five page or five paragraph essay.
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B
Writing is hard. Writing sucks.
- [22:47]
A
But it's important, especially when you're a kid. And some of that is what I tell younger people that I'm talking to about this stuff when they're telling me about their own uses. I'm not saying this because I'm a writer. Writing is how you learn to think and make critical arguments. And being able to make critical arguments helps you convince people of the things that you want them to think. Like, it's a useful persuasive skill in life. It's useful for like, making sense of complicated topics. And that's why it's important. It's not important because, like, writing makes you, you know, fancier or you know, you can brag about it or, or gives you sort of like the elite tools. It's really just like, it helps, it helps you being informed person in the world. And that's why, that's why it's helpful. So I think when, when those things start to degrade, we'll catch that, I think civilizationally, like, I don't, I don't believe that like reading and writing are just completely going away, but I think it has to get bad first before we realize, ah, like this was again one of those Silicon Valley social experiments on humanity that now we need to sort of reverse. Right now we need to change how we use ChatGPT in schools because the kids have lost some of these faculties.
- [23:57]
B
I don't know if it's because we're writers and media people are writers and in the industry that we notice it first and it's happening also in other things or if there's something unique about writing. That is why this is drawing the most attention. But it's caught me too, because. Did you watch Pluribus? Have you watched Pluribus?
- [24:13]
A
Yeah, I don't think I finished it, but yeah, okay.
- [24:15]
B
It's boring for people, but I like boring shows. One of my interesting takeaway from it is they had basically an AI hive mind and everybody gets really, really smart and knows lots of things, but then gets really dumb because the hive mind isn't getting new information. Essentially it's kind of like, yeah, you can scrape the Internet once and then once you've done that it's like, okay, what are you building on? And if the people that are adding new material to it are doing worse, less creative writing or using AI to do the writing, then it's going to degrade. Joe Weisenthal, I've had on a couple times, the stalwart is great. He wrote, I used to cynically think AI writing sucks, but it's better than 90% of the people, so it will continue to thrive. But now I'm less sure. I think it's getting worse. So the Recent updates to ChatGPT and Claude just are so larded up with like a isms that I increasingly get unintelligible outputs. What do you think? Is that right? Like do you think or do you think that whatever, like, who knows? These technologies are evolving very fast and it could get very good again soon.
- [25:20]
A
What is so interesting about large language models is the way that, you know, you tweak the weights and whatever and then. And the different, you know, training data that goes into this, which is all extremely opaque. We don't know what these companies are doing here and there. And I guess in some sense that
- [25:35]
B
that is part of this is the important thing. We're going to get to that right next.
- [25:38]
A
But what is weird is like some of these models come out just being, you know, like there was a version of ChatGPT that they didn't try to make it this way, but it was like incredibly obsequious. Right? It was like, oh yes, that you are. How are you so brilliant? How did you. That is the best question. They do weird and different things.
- [25:56]
B
They're all still pretty obsequenced.
- [25:58]
A
They are. But I think some of you know, like Claude initially could write really well and convincingly in ways that ChatGPT felt so much more Wikipedia esque. Right. I think that people are just getting used to these to some degree. I think that is a little bit of the feeling we're starting to develop, as you would with any author, a sense of their voice. And that's when you really can either get tired of it or fall even more in love with it. So I think all that is in flux. I think all that could potentially change.
- [26:33]
B
But what are you just on the broadest question of the Ed Zitron, this stuff is overhyped. It's not as good as you will say versus a range of other people, including the companies themselves are like, oh my God, you guys have no idea how fast these advances are coming. And next year you're going to be astonished by the difference. Where do you fall on that?
- [26:53]
A
I felt kind of frustratingly for myself in the middle because I also think that these things don't. We don't know. I get really, really, really frustrated. I think there's a lot of people who are just who. They're still like burned by crypto and the Metaverse and Web three, right. So they just want to say, you know, this shit's never going to work. It's spicy autocomplete. It doesn't do what you say it's going to do. I don't think that is true. Where I agree with someone like Ed Zitron is I think the business model and the investment structure are somewhat concerning the way that these companies have this strange. I don't know if you've ever seen that. There's this great Bloomberg chart from last fall where it's just circular investments like OpenAI into Microsoft and all these companies, they're just investing in themselves. No one really knows how that money is funneling and where it's going and it seems like everything's really robust and the ecosystem's, you know, doing well. But we all know that, like, it looks like financial chicanery at the same time, right? When you look at the investments into these data centers and when you look at the way that they're working with private credit companies and the way these private credit companies may be underwater, like all of that strikes me, the entire AI industry, the financial part of it, is based on the idea that this is just going to keep going up and up and up and up and up and up and up, right? It is, it is a number go up ethos there. And if this is a bubble in any way, right? If these models can't start producing in this way, if companies that were token maxing decide that, you know, they're no longer getting their bang for their buck, right? If these companies can't find a revenue model that makes sense in the long term, and there's, you know, decent enough evidence to suggest that they really haven't yet outside of, you know, maybe like anthropic. All this money needs to have a return on investment for some of these people, right? All these data centers that are being built. And I think if the bottom falls out of that, it's extremely concerning. Like, it is, it is a, it is a bubble that could make, you know, the global financial crisis look somewhat quaint. And, and that freaks me out because I think Silicon Valley and the venture capital model has just pivoted so much in the last 10, 15 years towards growth at all costs. And hype and FOMO as their engines for pushing all this growth that I think they can't really tell what it is that they're making. I think they're so invested in the story. I think everyone is so excited by the potential of these historic returns that I'm really worried that it could pop.
- [29:36]
B
Altman has said, I don't know the exact quote in front of me, but essentially the AI will figure out how to make money on it.
- [29:43]
A
And that's insane. That's insane.
- [29:45]
B
The AI is going to get so smart that it'll tell us how to make money on it.
- [29:49]
A
He said that that's just cultish behavior. That's like religious fervor, right? Like God will sort it out, right? Just pray to the big man and we'll get it done. And, and I think that these guys are getting away right now because these chatbots are useful or because they are impressive enough that some people are getting AI psychosis by talking to them. And thinking that they're solving math problems or that they're in love with their chatbots, I think that's given them this license to say, okay, the moon is going to be full of data centers in a couple of years and that allows SpaceX to have their valuation and that allows this. And it's like this is fan fiction at the moment. Like the tools right now are useful in myriad ways. I think they are genuinely useful. I think sometimes the models do make these leaps we've seen. So we have to keep in mind that there could be some of these leaps. But the thing that the tech press does really poorly historically is it buys into these narratives and it doesn't evaluate the products based off of what they are doing right now and what they're doing right now. This is an important and powerful invention. Is it data centers on the moon level? Is it AGI? Is it the singularity? I really don't think so at the moment.
- [31:08]
B
August is when it gets real hot in New Orleans. So most people are leaving town. All my friends are gone right when I come back. I like the heat. I like the heat, but you got to be dressed for the heat. You don't want to feel all sweaty and gross. And you might notice watching this, I change clothes a lot. I change clothes during the day. Multiple YouTube videos a day, multiple fits. Our friends at Mack Weldon are helping keep me fresh and stylish and sleek with their Airknit X fabric. It all started with undies designed to wick moisture, fight odor and give you maximum airflow. All very important. Now they're expanding that bestseller to a full line of essentials. Browse the full Airknit x collection@mackweldon.com plus get 20% off your first order at 125 bucks or more with code the Bulwark. The Airnet Polo is a new staple in the rotation. The Airnit X is Mack Weldon's lightest fabric. It's fused with nylon mesh for maximum airflow. Four way stretch means no bunching or sagging. Each piece stays where it should be while you move. Your whole summer rotation is covered. Underwear, undershirts, T shirts, polos and socks. Don't sweat the heat this summer. Feel as effortlessly cool as you look with Mack weldon. Go to mackweldon.com and get 20% off your first order of 125 bucks or more with promo code thebolwerk. That's M A C K W E L-O-N.com code the bulwark one thing the tech press, setting aside the public, I think is a little bit once burned on the tech hype thing and I think is much more skeptical than during the run up of Facebook and Google and some of these other companies. Part of the reason I think is because of that the hype from those companies and what they promised to offer ended up turning out to have a lot more negative consequences than maybe some people had anticipated. Part of it is also I think that these guys are so weird and we have so much access to them now. Altman himself. So you're talking about the power of the people that are training the weights. It is a black box what is happening. There has to be some kind of trust in the people that are. I know that they'll say that it's kind of the algorithm or the AI will figure it out itself because it will come so smart. But at some level humans have to make choices on these sorts of things for how they look like. And the people that, that we're putting these choices in the hands of seem like they're anti human. Here's Sam Altman. This week he posted this of his own volition on x.com cool use case of chatgpt work I heard last night. Connect your family calendars and explain your kids interests every morning for the drive to school. Have it make a podcast that talks about one kid's soccer game that afternoon, one kid's upcoming birthday, some news, et cetera. I mean that is the weirdest fucking thing in the world. That's the use case that he's come up with. He wants the supercomputer to tell his kid a story in the backseat of the car on the way to school. Can you not just talk to your children about their interests? Can you not turn on music, expose them to something, have a conversation? It's pretty alarming that he thinks that's a cool use case, that he wants the computer to entertain the child.
- [34:34]
A
What I find is really funny about this in a lot of these, these types of posts that are in the similar vein is that these, these guys are supposed to have the imaginations beyond anyone else's. Right? They're the ones building God, they're the, they're the innovators. And he's basically like what if there was a Joe Rogan for my kid?
- [34:51]
B
You know, Shady one.
- [34:53]
A
Yeah, like it's just like, like, like the aperture is so small which from which to view this. I think what's really fascinating is the industry has gotten so good at basically since the beginning of Doing the Skynet porn, right? The idea, the paperclip maximizer is going to turn us all into paperclips, take away all the jobs, 100% or 90% unemployment, all the apocalyptic scenarios that highlight how powerful these models could be. What they are just manifestly bad at is outlining a scenario, a future that is specific in that same way, in the other direction of utopia. The only thing they can do is just be like, well, we'll have to pass a universal basic income through our dysfunctional Congress and government because of these jobs. But then you won't have to work, so you'll have time to do stuff. Very vague what that future looks like, right?
- [35:47]
B
Then what will you do? You'll put your interests into our supercomputer.
- [35:51]
A
That's right.
- [35:51]
B
And it will spit out a soulless slop podcast for you to zone out to with your child so you don't have to share kind of love and meaning with them.
- [36:02]
A
Or they'll be like, we're going to solve cancer. Right? And that's part of the religious fervor. And they don't seem to be able to articulate a brilliant vision of what the future looks like because I think their imaginations are really, really small when it comes to this. And I think that they are, as you said, in some ways so disconnected that it has an anti humanity to it, right? Like we're put on this earth to fart around to go, as Kurt Vonnegut said, to go to the post office, right? And just have these dumb little interactions to deal with, like the drudgery and the boredom and all that stuff. It's part of being a human is to. Sometimes you got to grind, right? Sometimes you got to just do stuff you don't want to do. Sometimes you have to entertain your kid when they're just in the back of the car and you don't really have a lot to talk about and then you learn something great and then there's amazing interaction, right? Like that's what it is to be a human. And I think there's this way in which a lot of these guys envision this like autopilot life that is magical because then they get to spend more time coming up with, you know, fictional ideas of how to build a cool thing and not deal with the consequences of that thing. And this all goes into. I think the politics that we're going to get to with this is these guys are really unlikable and really detached. And I think it's worked for a long time in that sort of mystique of the builder, the mystique of the genius. Right. Elon Musk has dined out a lot on this. Oh yeah, robots, humanoid, whatever. We're going to put chips in our brains and I think now that these tools have shown to be reasonably powerful, that these people have shown to be richer than anyone ever imagined people were going to be. We've got sometimes Trillionaire and Elon Musk now. I think people are starting to look and go, oh, oh, as you just said, are these the folks that we're just going to put in charge as the philosopher kings? I don't know about that.
- [38:03]
B
We trust them to control the inputs if this is what they want. I mean, I liked the closed folding robot. A little creepy, but okay, if you can pitch me on that, I get a robot in my house that's going to fold the clothes for me and then I get to spend that time playing with my child and engaging in some whimsy, some fantasy talking. Like we get extra time to go to the park together. That's nice. That's a nice future to build. It's not a nice future to be like, our robot God will tell your child about that soccer match in the morning.
- [38:37]
A
The robot God will entertain your kids for you so that you can spend more time, you know, 10xing your business, right, Getting more done. Like, like I'm subject to inane conversations, as I know you are, every hour on X, the Everything app. But mine tend to be a little more tech focused and like, you know, Silicon Valley pilled than politics these days. And there's been this whole debate about like, you know, rehashing the work from home stuff, whatever you think about that, but just sort of being like, oh yeah, like if, if you work from home, you're not, you're not getting anything done because like, you know you're gonna have to interact with your kids. I don't interact with my kids until 7pm like that's, that's the time I start with my kids and, you know, we spend our hour together and then I go back off, you know, to my office so that I can get shit done. It's like, bro, what are we doing here, guys? What are we doing?
- [39:30]
B
It relates to the backlash. Let's talk about the backlash. It feels to me like the data centers are kind of the stand in for the backlash a little bit. Jasmine's son, she wrote some for the Atlantic. Right? Jasmine?
- [39:42]
A
Yes, contributor.
- [39:44]
B
She wrote about the data center backlash. And one of the things I've been trying to wrestle with is why the data center backlash is so intense. Because I just don't really feel it. Sometimes I read a story about a data center where it's like, the town gave these guys tax break. We used the money that was going to go for the school to build a road out there to the data center, and there's only going to be five jobs there. Actually, every once in a while I read stories like that. I'm like, this is horrible. And then other times, I don't know, we have a data center in rural Louisiana where the economy has been dead for 100 years. Is it that bad? I don't know. So I don't feel the intensity personally that other people do. And so I was trying to understand why this is becoming such a unifying and galvanizing issue. Jasmine, I think, made a good point that was clarifying for me the way that the AI companies are engaging with the communities, forcing NDAs, dangling all these promises, pushing environmental issues far away from AI's wealthy user base. They resemble a classic story about dark money robber barons in politics. Your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations and they're going to screw you over. It's about trust. And in some of the cases, it's specifically about the pollution or specifically about the budget of the town. But a lot of it is this sense that we don't trust these guys. We don't trust that these guys are going to be stewards of the environment or the community. And we don't trust that they're actually going to do the jobs that they create. And they don't actually haven't demonstrated they care. How does, how does that sit with you?
- [41:26]
A
Yeah. I think of data centers right now, as I've been calling them, the national pain sponge. Right. Because it's just like you could direct any grievance that you have at it. And everyone is like, if you're worried about the environment, you've got the potential for that. Right? If you're worried about the cost, like affordability, the cost of electricity and your utilities and your, you know, inflation, you're not making it. You're not making as much as you felt you did. Data centers are driving up some of those prices, Right. If you're upset about the oligarchs and the inequality and some of this, I don't trust these guys. It's that if you don't like artificial intelligence, it is the physical incursion of big tech into your community in whatever way, right. Whether it's the NDAs and the strange real estate deals. A lot of them are done through shell companies.
- [42:13]
B
The one they put in Louisiana, I was like, the big New York Times story on it. They had a shell company called Beignet something. And I was like, that's the most offensive part of the story. Okay, don't fucking. It was like Zuckerberg. It's like Zuckerberg, don't put on fucking Louisiana New Orleans tourist costume in order to make your data center project seem like it's zydeco pilled. Okay, stop.
- [42:38]
A
That's really tough. But also it speaks to the hubris of these guys, right? And so you end up having some of these city council meetings where people are like, hey, what's this huge project from whatever Beignet, right? Like, what is that llc? And then you find out, oh, it's meta. And then like that reveal is so surreptitious and, and, and annoying to people and, you know, worrisome. Another thing that, that you really have with, with these guys is, is just like the data centers, rather like nimbyism, right? Some people just don't want this stuff. Like, they just don't want it to be in their backyard. They don't want it because it's loud.
- [43:15]
B
Maybe that's why I don't feel that intense as a strong yimby. Maybe it's my yimby impulses that are disconnecting me from the outrage.
- [43:23]
A
Listen, they can generate tax revenue, they can generate certain jobs. Some of them, there are hundreds of jobs there. And some of those jobs are good paying and some of them are in communities that are terrible in other ways. They're like, with some of the data centers in Memphis, they're being powered by gas turbines in neighborhoods and making the air quality unlivable there. And those neighborhoods are, you know, historically like black neighborhoods with, you know, lower incomes and things like that. So there's, there's all kinds of problems. But I think this notion of trust is, is correct wherever you are on it, right? They don't trust that they'll be good stewards of the environment. They don't trust whatever. You have to look at all this in the context of the last 10 years of the tech lash, right? These companies come in, Facebook's, whatever, Twitter, you name it, Google. They speak this language of intense, plucky positivity. Change the world, connect the world, whatever that is, organize the world's information and they succeed. But the effects aren't always what we thought they were going to be. And in the case of something like Facebook, you have the 2016 election looms big. These guys get hauled in front of Congress. They say, you know, oh, you know, our platforms aren't that powerful. Then they are so powerful. And you have all these. All these concerns about what happened there and the fallout from these products, and then they just move on to the next thing. Right? They move on to, you know, Facebook pivots to become meta, a company about the metaverse, a thing that they invest billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars in to make pantsless, you know, avatars of whatever, and think we're all going to live inside this world. And then it doesn't. It doesn't pan out. They just leave the wreckage. They write it off, they move on. And so I think the fear that a lot of people have just watching all of this, especially with the physical incursion into their communities, is what happens if there is more wreckage. But it's. I have to walk through it, I have to drive through it. My community has to sweep up that mess. And then these guys just move on. And they pivot. Right. Oh, sorry, we, you know, sorry. We destroyed all that farmable land to put the data centers in, and you can't ever farm on that anymore. We're putting them all on the moon now because we don't have to pay for that land. Sorry. I think that's very real.
- [45:43]
B
Yeah, I do, too. And this is, I don't know if this is, I guess, optimistic, but this is giving, you know, it's giving people agency back. So that's optimism is like, there is actual pushback on this. And I think a lot of the things, the frustration with the tech lash was just like nothing happened. You know, I mean, like, there were some rules that were put in place in Europe and, you know, like, in Australia, it's like, starting to do some things around schools. Like, there was some changes that started to be made, but a lot of times people felt a lot of powerlessness. The data centers give people a chance to push back. Hochul does this moratorium in New York. Justin Pearson. That's one of the stories I said that did upset me about the data center and Memphis you referenced. There's a big Politico story on that I'd recommend people read. And then what he's doing to push back on that. Lauren Egan, my colleague, wrote an article just about all of the Democrats that are using this and running on it this year. Sherrod Brown has a couple ads. Paige Cognetti has been on the pod. An ad about this. Tellarico Did a news conference last week. David Jolly. The Republicans know this is a problem, but can't do anything about it because we're getting so much money from these companies. And so what they've started to do is sticking fake Green Party candidates online. Do you see this online across the country? Yeah. They've been putting green card candidates up in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and they're going to have the Green Party candidates be like anti data center candidates to try to pull from the Democratic votes. That's their skullduggery. But it's like, it's pretty funny that that's like, it's revealing. Maybe not funny that that's like the issue that they're trying to use.
- [47:19]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that they've lost a little bit of control. One thing that's interesting about all of this, too, is the way that it is. It doesn't fall into a clean, right, left issue bucket. Right, right. I was talking to some people who are doing a lot of reporting on this, and an anecdote that I found interesting is like, the person who's most likely to be, like, extremely radicalized against data centers is someone who voted for Obama and then Trump. Right. That voter is extremely easy to radicalize there. I think you're seeing a lot of kind of horseshoe politics around this issue. In one way. I think it is nice that, like, we do need issues, whatever they are, to, you know, for people to find common ground in, even if it's. Even if it's sort of the most politically inscrutable people that we have out there. But I also want to be clear that I think some of these people have become sort of unnecessarily radicalized against it. Like the issues around water or electricity or, or, you know, even the environment, like these data centers are very unique to whatever region. Right. If you were in a region like the Pacific Northwest that isn't dealing, you know, potentially with drought in the same way, or has great access to water via, you know, whatever, the Columbia river or something like that, then you actually don't have to worry about the water usage that much because it's not that much different than like, sometimes building a golf course. But some of these data centers are going into communities that are already struggling with water use and drought and things like that in, like, you know, say, Arizona. And so then that does become an issue. It's the same thing with electricity. It's the same thing with pretty much everything. And yet I worry that some of the political backlash that I'm seeing to it is conspiratorial, is not really driven by the facts, is. I mean, we did a podcast on data centers that was like trying to just talk about all the sides of the issue. And like, the. The reaction emails that I got from it were wild. I was like, oh, wow, this is like. Like people have really, in a very short amount of time already just firmly dug their heels in.
- [49:28]
B
This is what takes me back to the trust, though, again. It's just like people don't trust these guys and that's not a good thing. And it also ties back to the conversation about AI and people not knowing what information is real or not. Right? It's like they have this built in lack of trust. They're like, these guys have. They promised us a lot of stuff and they fucked us over. Like, we saw it in the last wave of tech expansion, but this next wave seems worse. Even though the tech elites and the MAGA elites had a marriage of convenience, MAGA voters never signed up for that. People listening to Bannon's podcast never signed up for that deal. And so there's this broad swath of people that are like, we don't trust you guys. We don't trust you for good reason. And now you want to come into my community and do this stuff. And so if someone else is telling me this piece of information about what you're doing, it's polluting, doing whatever, I'm more likely to believe that. And in many cases that's true. And the pollution that's happening in the Memphis situation, in some cases it's going to be BS or ironically, in some cases it'll be AI slop. And they're like, I'm going to believe this influencer or this whatever. And so I understand that impulse.
- [50:43]
A
What all of it makes me think of you talking about, that is these guys have built these tech barons or, you know, the, whatever Silicon Valley. They've built this world with the tools that they have that has, you know, really destroyed trust in institutions, in neighbors, in other people. They've built these tools that allow you to blur the lines of reality by creating synthetic content or whatever. They've created these algorithms that promote the most sensational version of whatever story to destroy nuance everywhere, right? They've told this story about AI in order to sell it as potentially apocalyptic, like, you know, destroying the world as we know it, we need a new social contract kind of thing. They've done, they've set the table for all this stuff, and now they're like having to live in that world and it's not making it easy for them. And I think they're looking around like, what? What the hell happened?
- [51:37]
B
Dr. Frankenstein element of this.
- [51:39]
A
Yeah.
- [51:39]
B
Or whatever other.
- [51:40]
A
They created the monster.
- [51:42]
B
They created it. And people are going to use these techs and they're going to come for them and pitchforks are coming and it's happening. Two other just really quick related politics tech things I just wanted to get you on. Just wanted to check in on Elon. He's back to spending more money in the midterms again after falling out with Trump. I keep coming back. There's this Mitt Romney clip where he does this interview a couple weeks ago with McKay Coppins. Mitt Romney is the guy that was on the Iowa soapbox being like, corporations are people, my friend. After Citizen United. And that is Mitt Romney, rich private equity guy that wanted unlimited spending. And he's looking at McKay Commons. He's like, the Elon thing's a little too far. He's like this guy who has all these government contracts and he has this unimaginable wealth and it's no sweat off his back at all to spend a couple billion to influence these races. And then he gets better deals. He's like, we got to look into that. Maybe a little bit of a Frankenstein sponsor situation there with Mitt as well. But it sat with me because I was like, if Mitt is concerned about this, I feel like that should be a five alarm fire to everybody about the scale of what we're talking about here. He now will be able to come back in to use this influence at a time where he's become unimaginably wealthy because of the SpaceX IPO, which has happened since 2024. And you wrote about that and the myth of SpaceX and how much he's enriching himself based on a lot of hype. And I just kind of wanted to hear you cook on that for a sec.
- [53:17]
A
It's crazy. Yeah. When you've lost Mitt Romney. Right? So there was a moment after the SpaceX IPO where everything just shot up and then things came back down to earth a little bit. And Elon Musk lost in one trading day more than Bill Gates entire net worth. And I found that moment to be, in the context of all of what we're talking about politically here, genuinely terrifying. We don't actually have. We can say trillionaire and we go, wow, that's a lot of money. But when you actually do the math, it puts him above the law and he's always Kind of operated as if he's above the law. But it is a type of power and influence that we actually don't have a historical parallel to. So we don't know how to constrain it, deal with it, what is even possible, right. In that world. He's able to use that money to purchase a social network like Twitter and then turn Twitter into, you know, an algorithmically charged political weapon right before the 2024 election. And we don't really even know what the impact of all that was. Right. He's also donating to these campaigns, but then he's using Twitter to. As a financial instrument with his AI company, Xai. He rolls those two things together into an AI company that is like strange provenance and then uses that to roll into SpaceX, to turn SpaceX into an AI company, even though it's not an AI company, to get the AI valuation to then, you know, go public and then become a trillionaire. Like, there's this way in which he's able to use his money to generate more money, to generate more power, to generate more whatever. And there's no way to check it at the moment. There's no way. I mean, especially given the way that the, you know, the government is organized at the moment. And I, I think he's the most powerful unelected person in the world. And whether you love him or hate him, I think it's terrifying. He controls a big part of the satellite infrastructure and now the Internet infrastructure. I live in a remote area and I report relatively antagonistically against Elon Musk. And one of the options, the only good options to have connection is Starlink. And I'm like, what can he see? Right? Like, we just have to ask ourselves these questions, like what? Like, what potentially could he do with that information? I think it's extremely, extremely concerning because this guy is also. This is not just like, oh, I have political differences with this guy. This guy was talking about on Twitter how universal suffrage is a mistake, and he's now awake to that fact. This is a person who, who is an extremist.
- [56:21]
B
The South African wants to deny people suffrage. That's surprising.
- [56:24]
A
I almost don't think this story can be covered enough because we don't really even understand the contours of what's possible.
- [56:35]
B
Here is why the democracy fight is so important. And not checking out and fighting back against them is that. But I do think backlash against him in particular, but just the class is coming and could be successful if we're able to overcome their efforts to put their thumb on the scale, whether that be financially, through legal means, or whether it be like you're saying stuff behind the scenes with the algorithm, in part because they've gotten themselves so out of touch. I do think that Trump, for all of his flaws, he was a rich guy in a bubble. But I don't know, Trump had some kind of lizard instinct about what regular people liked. And he had this call and response at rallies where he started to learn what real people liked. And a lot of these tech guys just don't. Did you see the Troy Jackson ad he put out in the U.S. senate? He's the guy that replaced Platner.
- [57:37]
A
Hey, everyone, it's Troy Jackson. Look, apparently Elon Musk has gotten off Twitter long enough to realize that he's got a real problem here in Maine. And the problem is me and you working to try and get a government that we should have, that we deserve. So now he's going to spend $100 million across a number of states, but including Maine, to make sure that Susan gets back in being the rubber stamp that he's had for quite a while now to get all his billions. And here's why he's spending $100 million across these states, because he wants to have people that are totally beholden to him and Donald Trump making sure that we're getting tax cuts for billionaires on the back of our health care system, on the back of our hospitals. That's what Elon Musk wants. He doesn't care about us, really doesn't care about Susan. He cares about him. So I would say, and to you, Elon, Maine, and really the whole United States doesn't want your dirty money in our politics. You know, you. You don't get to buy the government that you want. This is about all of us coming together and fighting for the government that we deserve, and you're not in it.
- [58:41]
B
I mean, that's a good ad, and I think it's going to be an effective one. And I do think that these guys are high on their own supply. If the Democrats are able to kind of channel back a connection to regular people, using data centers as an issue, using the oligarchs insane influence over our lives as an issue, using backlash over AI. I don't want to give Hopium about that, but you can see a path towards writing the scales a bit. Is that too much for you?
- [59:18]
A
No, I don't think it's too much. I think that a very powerful way to frame this politically is that these guys have lied to you like Elon Musk, he, He's. He's lied to you about the free speech part of all this, right? He bought Twitter to restore free speech. People still to this day on, on that site love him because he's, he's brought this back. He is more in control of, of your means to express yourself than anyone has been on any social network ever. I mean, the X algorithm discriminates based off of what Elon Musk and like the algorithm that he's helped program thinks is interesting, right? You go viral on X at the pleasure of Elon Musk. You are now able to connect to the Internet at the pleasure of Elon Musk. I think that these, these guys are really walking a fine line here because they have amassed so much power and they are more out of touch than they've ever been. And they don't know what it is that people want. And they are, they are more cocky than they've ever been about that because they are sort of, you know, their political ideology is ascendant that I, I think there's a huge opening to say these are not the people who get to dictate what you say. The Internet now these social media platforms are such an economic engine for people. They are sort of, in a weird way, this, this opportunity engine, right? If you can go viral, you can quit your job, you can, you know, be an influencer, you can do this, or you can start a small business and it can go viral. And you can, you know, now you have customers lining up around for your, you know, know, your cronuts or whatever the, whatever that version of that is. These platforms are your access to opportunity, and these guys are the gatekeepers of that. And they're telling people that they've destroyed all the gatekeepers, but they've replaced the gatekeepers with themselves. And they are, I think, going a little bit insane. And there's a really powerful opening there, like a populist opening to just say, no, these are not the guys help us stop them.
- [61:36]
B
I do too. Some of them are going insane.
- [61:39]
A
Like Elon, the Odyssey thing, that's like the clothes.
- [61:43]
B
We're so aligned. We're so aligned. Some of them are going insane. Some of them, like Sam Altman, I just think are anti human and kind of like Vulcan. That Bill Gates thing is really going to stick with me. I didn't know that little anecdote. But the best example of their out of touch recently was Elon's campaign against the Odyssey and how he wanted, instead. Let me get this right. He wanted grok to create a full length movie. The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer. Historically accurate. There's a cyclops in the Odyssey. The historical accuracy part, I'm not sure exactly, you know what the Odyssey is. I don't know know. Anyway, there's a little preview of what you know, kind of how it's going with Grock. And I want to play for you just a little bit. The sea took my ships, my men nine days adrift now here I am
- [62:46]
A
stranded.
- [62:49]
B
Why do you earplugs in?
- [62:51]
A
He looks like Charles Charlton Heston. She never ages.
- [62:54]
B
It's been her.
- [62:55]
A
Neither do I here and still I dream of home.
- [63:02]
B
Gods, let me go Send him home.
- [63:09]
A
Some good costuming.
- [63:10]
B
What is the angel? What is this? What is that? I mean that is hor. That is horrible.
- [63:19]
A
What's really striking is how it looks like it was made in 1970. That's the actual lighting.
- [63:24]
B
It looked like Ben Hur even earlier. When was Ben Hur? That's what it looks like.
- [63:30]
A
These guys always do this.
- [63:32]
B
1959.
- [63:33]
A
Wow, that's really old. So I went and saw the Odyssey, I think on opening day in imax. It was great. Go see it if you're the one person who hasn't. But afterwards we got done and I'm in the car with my wife and I was just like, I can't believe that so many people were so are gonna not watch this because they were so pissed off, so angry about this dumb casting decision. And she's like, wait, what? Blissfully not aware of this. And as I tried to explain it to her, the look on her face just as I was trying to explain Internet drama from right wing edgelords. Like I could tell her being like a little bit disgusted with me like for knowing about this. And this has happened multiple times to people about this, this movie where I'm like, oh man, you should see this thing with Elon Musk or whatever. And these people who aren't aware are like, what's wrong with you that you even have access to this terrible opinion? It just shows you in a way. It was really illustrative to me even before the success of this movie, which we knew was going to be very successful. The most classic story of all time by the biggest director we've had, you know, since like Steven Spielberg. Yeah, it illustrates just, just how like how far afield these guys are. Right. It should make you feel great. Whatever battle they think that they are fighting right now, they have lost that battle already. And they are weird like, they are weird. The one point that I, that I also wanted to make about this, that I think is actually somewhat worrying is if you go on X, there has been really now a four or five week conversation that just picks up steam every single week about this. Like, it is one of the main topics of conversation on the entire platform. And Twitter is a niche platform, but it's still very big. It's still very influential. You can see the media writing about this and like us talking about it and like chasing this idea. But ultimately that's because this guy is in control of this platform. He is sending the signals of what is important and he's fixated on this issue that is not a real issue.
- [65:46]
B
God, it's such a good point. It's like when Hannity was mad at the Keurig or whatever. It's like nobody talked about that anymore. You know what I mean? Because it's like nobody cares. It's a big TV show, but it's kind of like, okay, he didn't. Who cares, right? It's like the stuff gets lost, but he can keep it in.
- [66:00]
A
It shows how he monopolizes this. Like, how like his taste, which is, for lack of a better word, like fucked. Like it dominates our discourse. Like we are all sort of always responding to him and his whims and his desires. And I think that, that this is a good cultural example of that, whereas a lot of times we're seeing it in a political way. And so I really resent it, I think, is the feeling I've gotten from all this. Like, I don't think that there's a lot to be gained by, you know, arguing for or against. I think it's good to mock, you know, these guys when they are, when they are so woefully out of touch and butthurt about something like this. But I think more than anything, I really resent having to even spend brain space on this crap because it's such a non issue. Like, it's a sick movie and everyone thinks that it's pretty sick. And so many people are now stuck
- [67:00]
B
in this, like, good sick, sick in a good way.
- [67:02]
A
Yes, yes, sick in a good way. Sorry.
- [67:05]
B
Because Elon is the other kind of sick.
- [67:07]
A
I just think it shows you a little bit of the information ecosystem that a lot of people are trapped in right now.
- [67:15]
B
That's Charlie Warslow's podcast is Galaxy Brain. He writes at the Atlantic. Human writing. He does it himself with his fingers.
- [67:22]
A
Swear to God, it's all real, dude.
- [67:23]
B
Keyboards. All right, man. We'll check in with you soon. Appreciate it. Everybody else tonight, remember, if you want politics, TNL live at 9 in the east. Or you can check out the TNL feed when you wake up tomorrow. We'll see everybody else on tomorrow's show. Bye. The Borg Podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.