Charlie Warzel: The Tech Overlords’ Anti-Humanity Is Catching Up to Them

Hello, welcome to the Bull Work Daily.

I'm your host Tim Miller tonight.

“On the next level, we are live on Substeck 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 rosé, 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 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 Warzel. Hey, man. How you doing?

I'm doing good. I'm doing good.

You're kind of deaf in it in Ireland last week.

That's right. That's right. I'm a golfer somewhat sadly. It's like one of those hobbies that is slowly runes your life, but yeah, it was over in Ireland. I too am just coming back from vacation, a little jet lag, ready to talk, Elon Musk

and say I'm all in my favorite people in the world. I can't wait. It's part of this was, well, I wanted to have you as over the course of vacation. I just, AI is just such at the front of people's minds. I bubbled myself from the news, but I was hard to bubble myself from kind of just random

conversation about AI. I feel being upset about it and certain about it. A little funny things have 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 tripped 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 want to start a big picture like what's your grand unifying theory about kind of the AI backlash, discourse, et cetera.

Artificial intelligence people, Silicon Valley people, have this term that they're using a lot now throwing around high agency, right? If you're a high agency person, you're someone who just gets things done, you know, can go out and you can use, you can marshal these tools to be, you know, to 10 extra productivity, 100 extra productivity.

There are agents coding for you all the time, you know, while you sleep, making you money, building you websites, doing research, you know, 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, you know, use cloud skills or code their own stuff. And this is the group of people for whom AI is going to bury them, you know, financially

and, you know, part of their cultural capital and they're never going to recover 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, 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 the internet and every platform and everything that they do is being so flooded with fake inhuman synthetic slopp, whether that's Twitter, sub-stack, whether that's, you know, they're Spotify, right, whether it's these viral marketing firms, they're taking bands like the band Geese and, you know, sort of artificially inflating

that was fake. You counts. Geese is legit. Geese is legit. It was fake.

I love geese. They're fandom is legit. Why are just doing great work? But I, I have a beef.

“But this, but this actually gets to the point of the agency crisis, right?”

Which is that Geese is a band that, you know, some people love and some people because of, you know, 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 a astroctor.

And AI has this, you know, there's this term, the Liars dividend, right, that with so much fake information that's out there, anyone can, you know, cast dispersions on something real by claiming that it's fake. AI has supercharge that. So what you see in the case is something like that, but the little, you know, trivial

geese incident is people saying, no, that's not real. There are millions of accounts, astro-chirping this thing, and by, in so doing, you know, people are pulling one over on you. And you see this, everywhere. You see this with incinerating and prediction markets.

You see it with, again, the flood of all the slopp, 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

You know, what is good, what they're actually, you know, spending their time looking at

and engaging with. It's really messing with people's minds. Like I think it's causing a lot of on-way 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 sub-stack post through, through pan-grab. 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 human be creating this stuff? Can humans evaluate what is real and what is fake? And I think the question pisses a lot of people off, because it's like we shouldn't

have to ask the question, what is a human for?

Well, out there, because the key thing is when the piss me off, I'm going to start

there. Because it's like, I feel I don't know, there's just a story basically, it was like this band that I like that has become popular very fast. There was like a notion that it was fake that it was like the internet made, you know, AI bots and, you know, they had a paid marketing campaign that made them see more popular

than they are. I felt like that was rebutted by the fact that they had like multiple, very unpopular records of what they got popular itself. It's like it seems like it was a natural progression to me, but whatever. To me, the lesson from that is, like, is, in which it relates to so many other things

of so much greater consequence, is that it's disorienting to people like when reality starts to board 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, but we're always moon landing truthers, right? So it's not like this is new, like this notion that like, I don't know if anything that I'm saying is real, right? 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, you know,

who, and I hear this, my life, which is like, I don't even, who knows anymore. People will tell me, like, since I'm the news person, right, in their life, it'll be like, hey, I saw this, like, is that real? And like, I get that question a lot now, right? And so if you now live in kind of a society, a democratic society, decide into politics,

like, 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. Like, if you can't grasp what is actually happening and what it's not.

“I think there's, there's two responses to this, right?”

And they're both sadly rational, one is two, two now, right? 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 crap and find these people. Or I got duped a couple times and I look like an idiot, right? Cause I'm sharing something fake, all right, I opt out the other.

And I think, you know, this is why I, one broke through my bubble. When I was on my boat, was one of I just random gay friends, like, posted Trump falling down, going into the car, going Instagram Instagram was my only social media when I was going on. I had to get on Google.

And I was like, did he really fall down before it was like, no, it was fake. But that guy, no, it's like people just getting duped all the time. All the time, I get, 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, that's clearly a siop, 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.

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 latch onto that and find their people and it helps them 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 the blurring of reality, essentially. Yeah, that ties to agency to me, right, because conspiracy theorizing kind of does get give you agency back, right, 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 like they maybe know something other people do, right, and so rather than feeling like you're helpless in the face of the algorithms or whatever feeding you stuff now, like you feel like you're whatever, the detective and the true crime podcast. Sure, we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of pizza gate, and Edgar Madison Welch,

He had seen all this stuff, and he was like, 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, or not started, but like bolstered by like moms who are on Facebook during the pandemic and reading this stuff, and just like, oh my god, I have to do something about

this, right, this is clearly there's this whole scheme, and I'm not to say that they don't have, as we're talking about agency agency in doing some homework and actually, you know, not believing the bullshit, but at the same time too, there is a rational response to all of this in some ways, and I think it's just going to continue to get worse and worse, 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, trying to catch what is happening, or even what other people are thinking, what other people's politics are, right, like, you try to capture it in your hands and just slipping through, it's like watery.

This is going to be depressing, like, first 25 minutes, I'm starting to warn everybody,

and then I'm going to get to like, sorry, this is like, I'm trying to engage as to political backlash and like, what, what are things that can be done about this, but I've got a list of more whole parade of horrible, so we've got to start go through first, before we get to that. Now the 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 of months ago now,

and this is the thing we thought about. He is savvier than a lot of the, you know, Silicon Valley Vulcan guys about kind of words to the uses, so he, I don't, 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 where he was talking, giving the positive case for AI. And he basically saying, look how cool this is. If you are, you know, a very entrepreneurial, you know, 17 to 20

year old who didn't get to go to a private fancy private school, like now you can teach yourself stuff on AI, you can start a business, you can create an app, like you can have, you have like

access to knowledge and, you know, potential, like you never would have had before, and this is

really awesome. And, and I don't object to that, but like, that's like going to be such a small

“percentage, I think, of people in that demo, right? And so what you're doing is kind of exacerbating”

this problem that everybody already is talking about with, you know, income inequality, has it have not, it's people that, like, now we're going to move that from not even just being a monetary thing, but to being kind of like being in society, like people that understand kind of manipulate these tools and, like, everybody else that's being manipulated. It's funny. I think that one thing that Silicon Valley has always really struggled with since I'm 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 it. Oh, yeah, because they're 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 slopp in whatever way you want to describe that, right?

People are using it to basically do, like, click bait, you know, 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 know, sell Chinese peptides, things like that, right?”

I know some people doing okay creating hot mega girls. Sure. Um, social media. Totally, totally. Like that, 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, 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 crushing, very 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 that 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? Like,

and that's all part of this future, but, 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, and meanwhile, right, one of the things that I think we have seen throughout Silicon Valley, over the course of whatever the web 2.0 through, 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

and reward you with attention and time and money, right? And, and let's, you know, let's have our politics just port 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, I, I was on the trip this past week and speaking, like, with a lot of people who, you know, have kids who are like in high school or college. And I had at least, you know,

a handful of people just tell me, like, man, my, my kids critical thinking skills suck. Like,

“they, they don't know how to write a real paper because they were early to chat GPT. That's what”

they use and that's what other 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 it, 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. Oh, yeah, I don't know if you've heard, but I just got back from France. And they people say

that the friends are kind of rude about us foreigners, inability to speak French. And I mean,

it's just my happy face, my genealogy that led me to not have that experience or maybe it was

“the time spent with Babel. We're in Marseille, a little bit of a richer experience, you know,”

being able to talk to the waiter, talk to some of the boys at the bar, whatever, just do a little French, a little dabling. 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 Babel level because he's ready. He's digging in for future trips to take it for 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 Babel right now. Even

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use what you learn on the trip. Right now, Babel is offering listeners up to 60% off. Go to Babel.com/bowlwork. That's Babel. B-A-B-B-E-L dot com/bowlwork from up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions. You transition me nice 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, which about the kids these days and their rock music and their sex

and drugs? We have to. Here's my younger version of this, the high school kids. I didn't get a kick out of 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 bulls. But like my daughter met some friends, I thought tell her staying at this last week and they're nine

in their twins. And one night, like after dinner, like I get a whatsapp that's gonna pull it up 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 sleep”

over together. We promise that we will stay where the adult stars display 10 other bullets that at the end of 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. That is good effort. But then I called them out. I was like what did you how did you do it? And they denied it. That was strategy. And then they said it was strategy BT. But

then they said, well, we put in the ideas, like we told it, you know, you don't know over, take 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 like, you know, people that are growing up native to it, like figure out ways to adapt to it and use it. That does advance their own learning and thinking, I don't know, like when I was nine, I couldn't have created something like that. 100%. 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 like that, you know, the kids are toast. Because in some ways, it's actually, you know,

buying into the Silicon Valley narrative, right? That these tools are so powerful that they are

in school was like, we had a library class, right, where they taught us how to like do research,

do we death small system stuff? And this is early days 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. It's like the best thing”

on the internet now, which is really, really genuinely good for like society and the archive, 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 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 of my research and information that I have, you know, notes from things like that and, you know, have it synthesized, 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, you know, this is where it gets thorny with the concept of education because find me the kid who likes to write the five page, you know, or five paragraph, you know, essay, writing is hard, writing sucks, but it's important when you're kid and some of that is like,

what I tell like younger people and I'm talking to about this stuff when they're telling me about their, their own uses. I'm like, I'm not saying this because I'm a writer, like 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, a fancier or, or you know, you can brag about it or it gives you sort of like the elite tools. It's really just like 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 Jackie between schools because the kids have, you know, lost some of these faculties.

I don't know that's because like we're writers and media people are writers and industry that we

notice it first and tapping also on other things or if there's something unique about writing

that is why this is drawn the most attention, but it's caught me too because like, I did you watch Pluribus? Do you watch Pluribus? Yeah, I don't think I finished it, but yeah. Okay, because it's boring for people, but I like Pluribus. And one of my interesting takeaway from it is that basically an AI hive mind and like everybody gets really, really smart and knows lots of things within, gets really dumb because like the hive mind doesn't, isn't getting new

information essentially, right? Like you can, it's kind of like, yeah, you scrape the internet once and then once you've done that, it's like okay, you know, what, what are you building on and if the people that are adding new material to it are, you know, doing worse, less creative writing, or using AI to do the writing, then it's going to degrade. Joe, why is it though I've had on a couple of times the solid is great? He wrote, I used to cynically think AI writing sucks with better

“than 90% of the people, so it will continue to thrive. Now, I'm less sure. I think it's getting worse,”

because of the recent updates to Chatchy Beauty and Claude. I'm just, are so loaded up with like AI isms that I'm increasing to get an 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? 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 that is part of the important thing. We're going to get to that right now. But what is weird is like, some of these models come out just being, you know, like there was a version of of Chatchy Beauty that they didn't try to make it this way, but it was like incredibly obsequious, right? It was like, oh, yes, that you, you are,

how are you so brilliant? How did you add that? That is a thousand questions, right? They do weird and different things. They're all still pretty obsequious. They are, but I think some, you know, like the Claude initially could write really well and convincingly in ways that Chatchy BTA felt, you know, so much more, you know, Wikipedia S, correct? I think that people are just getting used to these

as you would with any author, like a sense of their voice and that's when you really can either

“get tired of it or fall, you know, even more in love with it. So I think all that is influx. I think”

all that could potentially change. But what are you just on the broadest, like question of like the Ed Zitron, like this stuff is overhyped. Like it's not as good as you will say versus a range of other people, including the companies themselves or 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. Like where do you fall on that? I fall kind of frustratingly for myself in the middle, because I also think that these things

don't, like 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, auto-complete. 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, right? The way that these companies have this strange, I don't know if they ever seem to, there's this great like Bloomberg chart from like last fall, where it's just like circular investments, like open AI and a Microsoft and you know, 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 in the ecosystem's, you know, doing well, but we all know that like it looks like financial should canary 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, in the way that these private credit companies may be underwater, like all of that strikes me.

And 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, right? And it is, it is a number of 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 phomo as their engines for pushing all this, 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, you know, these historic returns that I'm really worried that it could pop. Altman has said, I don't know the exact one in front of me, but essentially like the AI I'll figure out how to make it all. And that's insane. That's insane. Like there they are, I was going to get so smart that I'll tell us how to make money on it. I mean, that she said that one of it. That's just cultish behavior.

That's like religious forever, 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, you know, getting like AI psychosis by talking to them and thinking that they're, you know, solving math problems or that they're in love with their chatbots. I think that's given them this license, Teter to say, okay, you know, the moon is going to be full of data centers in a couple of years, right? And that allows space access 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're 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, you know,

AGI? Is it is it the singularity? I really don't think so at the moment. August is when it gets real hot at New Orleans. So most people even turn on my friends are going right when I come back. I like the heat. I like the heat. But you got to be dressed for the heat.

clothes a lot. I changed clothes during the day. Multiple YouTube videos a day. Multiple fits.

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“One thing the tech press setting aside the public. I think is a little bit”

you know once burned on the tech hype thing and I think is much more skeptical than you know during

the run-up of Facebook and Google and some of these other companies. Part of the reason I think is because of that like the hype from those companies and what they promised offered you know ended up turning out to have a lot more negative consequences and maybe some people had anticipated. Part of this also is like I think that these guys are so weird and we have so much access to them now. You know, Altman himself so you're talking about like the power of the people that are like training

the weights like it is a black box like what has happened? Like we there has to be some kind of trust and the people that are I know that they'll say that it's like kind of the algorithm or the and the AI will figure it out itself right because it will come so smart but like at some level humans have to make choices you know on these sorts of things probably look like and the people that were putting these choices in the hands of seem like they're anti-human here is here's Sam Altman

this week he posted this of his own volition on on x.com cool use case of chat gbt 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 soccer game that afternoon one kids up coming birthday some news etc. I mean that is the weirdest fucking thing in the world like that's the use case that he's come up with he wants the super computer 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 that turn on music expose them to something about conversation like it's pretty alarming anything that's a cool use case that he wants the computer to entertain the child what I find it's really funny about this and 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 is right there

the one building god they're the they're the innovators and he's basically like what if there was a Joe Rogan for my kid you know a shady one yeah like it's just 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 you know of doing like the sky net porn right the idea the the paperclip maximizer is going to turn us all into paperclips the you know take away

all the jobs you know a hundred percent or ninety percent unemployment all the apocalyptic scenarios

that highlight how powerful these models could be right 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 like utopia right like the only thing they can do is just be like whoa we'll have to pass”

a universal basic income through our dysfunctional you know congress and government because of these jobs but then you won't have to work so you'll have time to time to do stuff very vague with that with that future looks like right then what will you do you will put your interests into our supercomputer and it will spit out a solace slump podcast for you to zone out to with your child so you don't have to share kind of love and meaning with them or the or

they'll be like we're gonna solve cancer right and and that's part of the of the of the religious forever 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 I

to it right like we're put on the surface to to to fart around to go as Corvana gets said to go to the post office right and just have these done 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 a 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 there's an 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 of how to build a cool thing and not deal with the consequences of that thing and you know 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 I think it's worked for a long time in that sort of mystique of the builder and mystique of the genius right

Elon Musk is dined out a lot on this this like oh yeah robots you know 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

got you know sometimes trillionaire and Elon Musk now I think people are starting to looking at oh oh as you just said are these are these the folks that were just going to you know put in charge

“is the you know philosopher kings I don't know about that we trust them to control the inputs”

of this what they want I mean I like the clothes folding robot a little creepy but okay if you can pitch me on that I get a robot in my house it's going to fold the clothes for me and then I get to spend that time playing with my child and engaging in some 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 it's soccer match in the morning

the robot God will entertain your kids for you so that you can spend more time you know 10

xing your business right getting more done like like right subject to in main 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 piled and then politics these days and there's about 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 you if you work from home you're not you're not

getting anything done because like you know you're going to have to interact with your kids I don't interact with my kids and call seven p.m. 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 why what are we doing here guys what are we doing it relates to the backlash let's talk about the backlash it feels like the data centers are kind

of the stand-in for the backlash a little bit jasmine sun sure it's not for the Atlantic right you know yeah yeah yeah sure she wrote about the data center backlash and what are things that I've been trying to like wrestle with is like why the data center backlash is so intense because like I just don't really feel it like I don't you know there's sometimes a read a story about a data center you know where it's like the town gave these guys tax break we use 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 you know like some like everyone's like every story is like that I'm like this is horrible another time sorry you know like I don't know you know like we have a data center bro Louisiana with the where the economy's been dead for a hundred years it's that bad I don't know so I don't feel the intensity personally that other people do and I saw

us trying to like try to understand like why this is suddenly coming such a unifying and galvanizing

“issue just but I think made a good point that was clarifying for me the way that the AI companies”

are engaging with the communities forcing in DAs dangling all these promises pushing environmental issues far away from AI's wealthy user base they resemble like a classic story about dark money robber barons and politics your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations and they're going to screw you over like it's about trust you know right and like in some of the cases it's like specifically about the pollution or specifically about

you know the budget of the town but a lot of this is the sense that like we don't trust these guys like we don't trust that these guys are going to be stewards of the environment of the community and we don't trust that they're actually going to do the jobs that they create

yeah I think of data centers right now as uh I've been calling the the national pain sponge

“right because it's just like you could direct any grievance that you have added 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 you're you know inflation you're not making it you're not making as much as as you felt you did data centers are driving up some of those prices right if you're upset about the all the garks and they you know the the the inequality and some of this like 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 the one they put

in Louisiana that's like the big New York Times story on it they had a shell company called Ben Yae 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 it's like it's like we don't put them but I'm like fucking Louisiana New Orleans tourist costume in order to make your your like data center project seem like it's like a cycle filled okay like that's that's that's that's really tough but also

it speaks to the humor of these guys right and so at you end up having some of the city council meetings where people are like hey what's this huge project from whatever Ben Yae right like what is that LLC and then you find out oh it's meta and then like that reveal is so sort of titious and and annoying to people and you know worry some another thing that they you really have with with these guys is is just the data center's rather like maybe is 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 maybe that's why I don't feel that intense as a as a strong Yambi maybe”

it's my Yambi impulses that are disconnecting me from the hours they can generate tax revenue they can you know generate certain jobs some of them 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 the data centers in Memphis they're being powered by you know gas turbines in neighborhoods and you know making the 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 all kinds of problems but I think this notion of trust is is correct wherever you are on it right they don't trust it 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 clash right these companies come in Facebook's whatever Twitter you know you name it

Google they speak this language of like intense plucky positivity right change the world connect the world whatever that is organized the world information in these succeed but the effects aren't

always what we thought they were going to be and in the case of like something like Facebook you know

you have like the 2016 election looms big these guys get hold 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 fall out 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 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 in 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 formable land to put the data centers in and you can't ever farm on that anymore we're putting them all in the moon now because you know we don't have to pay for that land sorry

I think that's very real here to two 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 I think a lot of the thing with frustration with the tech lash was just like nothing happened you know I mean like there are some rules open place in Europe and you know like in Australia it's like starting to do some things around schools there was some changes

it started to be made but like a lot of trying people felt a lot of powerlessness the data centers give people a chance to pushback like Hockel does this moratorium in New York just in Pearson that's one of the stories I said but did upset me about the data center and Memphis you referenced

on that you know Lauren Egan my colleague wrote an article just about all of the democrats that are

like using this and running on it this year shared brown as a couple ads page content he's been on the pod as an ad about this tell we go to the news conference last week they've actually the Republicans like know this is a problem but can't do anything about it so we're doing 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 to cross country that yeah they've been putting green

party 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 skull dogry 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 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 it's talking to some people who who are you're 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 you know easy to radicalize there I think you're seeing a lot of kind of you know 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 sort of the show politically inscrutable people that we have out there but I hate 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 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 you know great access to water via you know whatever the Columbia River or 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

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 like 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 reaction even so that I got from it were wild I was like oh wow this is like people have really in a very short amount of time already just firmly dug their heels in. This is what takes me back to the trust though again it's just like people don't trust these guys you know and yeah that's not good and it also ties back to the conversation about AI 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 like 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 like even though like the tech elites in the

maga elites like had a marriage of convenience the maga voters never signed up for that people

listening to band and spotcast never signed up for that deal and so like there's this broad swath of people they're like we don't trust you guys we don't trust you for good reason yeah and now you want to come into my community and like do this stuff and so if someone else is telling you this piece of information about what you're doing it's polluting it's doing whatever I'm more likely to believe that and in many cases that's true right in 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 Slub and they're like I'm I'm going to believe this influencer or this whatever and so you know I understand that impulse what all of it makes me think of you talking about that is these guys have built these tech fairings or you know whatever silky belly they've built this world with the tools that they have that has you know really destroyed trust in institutions

in neighbors and other people they've built these tools that allow you to blur the lines of reality by creating synthetic content 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 you know

and now they're like having to live in that world yeah and it's not making it easy for them

“and I think they're looking around like what what the hell has it stuck in Frankenstein element of”

this yeah whatever other they created the monster they created it and people are going to use these texts and they're going to come for them and pitchforks are coming and tapping okay two other just really quick like unrelated politics tech things as one to get you on it's going to check you on Elon he's back to spending more money in the midterms again you know after falling out with trump keep keep coming back there's this midromb knee clip where he does this interview a couple weeks

ago the cake happens like midromb knee is the guy that was on the iOS soapbox being like corporations

or people my friends after citizen united i'm that has been romney rich you know private equity

guy that wanted on limited spending and he's going to make eight companies like the Elon things little too far it's like this guy who has all these government contracts and he is this on a

“management wealth and it's like no sweat on 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 you know maybe a little bit of a frankinside sponsor situation there with met as well but like it's sat with me because i was like if mid is concerned about this i feel like that should be a five alarm fire to everybody about like the scale of what we're talking about here and you know i mean he's he now like we'll be able to come back in to use this influence at a time where he's become unimaginably

wealthy because of the space x I feel like it was just happened since since 2024 and you wrote about that in the myth of space x and and how how much he's enriching himself based on a lot of hype and let's come up under here you cook on that for a second it's crazy i mean yeah when you've lost mid Romney right uh so there was a moment after the space x IPO where you know 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 is entire net worth and i found that moment to be in the context of of all of all of what we're talking about politically here the genuinely terrifying like like we don't actually have like we can say truly an error and we go wow that's a lot of money

but when you actually do the math it it puts him above the law and he's always kind of

operated as if he's above the law but it has it's is a type of power in 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 xa 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 trillion air 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 think he's the most powerful unelected person in the world and and whether you love”

them or hate him I think it's terrifying you know 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 you know one of the options the only good options to have connection is Starlink and I'm like what can he see right like we're just have to ask ourselves these questions like what like what potentially could he do with 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 like this is a person who is an extremist the South African wants to deny people suffrage that's and that's surprising I almost don't think this story can be covered enough because we don't

and you know not checking out and fighting back against him is that I do think you know 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 and you know whether that'd be financially through the legal means or whether it be like you're saying stuff behind the scenes the algorithm and part because they've like gotten himself so out of touch you know I do think that Trump for all of his flaws like he's a rich guy in a bubble but you know I don't know like Trump

had some kind of lizard instinct about what regular people liked and he like had this call in response that rallies where he started to learn what real people liked and a lot of these tech guys just don't do you see the truly Jackson ad he put out in the US Senate he's got a replace platter I have one destroyed 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 mean you working and trying

to get a government that we should have that we deserve so now he's going to spend a hundred million dollars across the 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 spent a hundred million dollars 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 in to Elon Maine and really the whole United States doesn't want your dirty money in our politics you know 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 I mean that's a good ad and I think it's going to be an effective one and I like I do think that that like these guys are high on their

and supply you know if the Democrats are able to kind of channel back you know a connection to regular people like using data centers is an issue using the oligarchs I can say an influence over our lives is an issue using backlash over AI I don't want to give hopey on about that but you can see a path towards writing the scales a bit is that too much for you? No I don't 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's he's he's lied to you about the free speech it 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 your means to express yourself then anyone has been on any social network ever and the ex 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 guys are really walking a a fine line here because they have a mast 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 pulled you know

“their political ideology is ascendant but I think there's a huge opening to say these are not the”

people who get to dictate you know 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 your cronots or whatever the 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

I did some of them are going insane like Elon the Odyssey thing that's like the most out of the

“clothes were so aligned we're so aligned some of them are going insane some of them like”

Sam Altman I just like our anti human and like kind of like Vulcan that bill Gates thing is really going to stick with me that's to I did I didn't know that well I knocked out but the best example of their out of touch recently was Elon's campaign to 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 I can't there's a Cyclops the Odyssey

there's Oracle accuracy part that I'm not sure exactly I'm just he know what the Odyssey is I don't know anyway there's a little preview of what yeah kind of how it's going with Grok and I want to play for you just a little bit let's see two my ships my men nine days of drift now here I am stranded

let's see if your tongue says it looks like Charlton has to she never ages it's been her neither do

why yeah and still I dream of home god so good costuming what is that I mean that is more that is horrible it's really striking is how it looks like it was made in 1970 like that's the actual like the lighting even earlier when it's been her it's like these guys always always do this 1950 no wow that's really old so I I went I went and saw the Odyssey I think on an opening day in I'm acts it was just great go see if you're the one person who hasn't but

afterwards we get we got done and I in the car with my my wife and I was just like I can't believe this so many people were so like like are gonna not watch this because they were so pissed off it's like so angry about like the dumb casting decision and she's like wait what she blissfully not aware of this and as I tried to explain it to her to look on her face it just as I was trying to explain like internet drama from like right wing as alerts like I could tell her being like a

little bit disgusted with me like for knowing about this and this has happened multiple times

“two people about this this movie where I'm like oh man you should see this thing but he all must”

go 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 between new is gonna be pretty very successful it's the most classic story of all time by the bass director we've had you know since like Steven Spielberg illustrates just just how like how far I feel 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 but 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 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 it's such a good point it's like when sanity was mad at the korea whatever it's like nobody talked about that anymore you know it's like nobody care it's a big TV show but it's kind of like okay he did a who cares right it's like the stuff gets lost but that he can keep it in shows on human novelizes this like how like his taste which is

for lack of the word like fucked like it dominates our discourse like we are all sort of

“always responding to to 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 is the feeling I've gotten from all this like I don't think that

guys when they are when they are so woefully out of touch and and but heard 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 in this like good sick sick and a good one yes yes sick and a good

“way sorry and and I I just I can see line is the other kind of thing I just think it's it's it's”

it shows you a little bit of the information ecosystem that a lot of people are trapped in right now

that's Charlie Warzel it's podcast's galaxy brain he writes at the Atlantic human writing he does it himself as fingers swear to god it's all real hard

“all right man we'll check you with you soon appreciate it everybody else tonight remember”

if you want politics TNL live at nine in the east or you can check out the TNL feed when you wake up tomorrow we'll see everybody else on tomorrow show bye the more podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper associate producer Anthony Skipper and with video editing by Katie Loots and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown